Easybeats rock legend Harry Vanda makes solo debut aged 79

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Sixty years ago this week, Harry Vanda was in a world gone mad. As the Easybeats promoted their 1965 debut album Easy and its breakthrough hit She’s So Fine, hordes of girls were staking out their homes. Fans were climbing on taxis ferrying the band from stage to hotels.

Late Australian rock pioneer Lobby Loyde had a story about Vanda and his pint-sized bandmate George Young rescuing him from a knife-wielding Queenslander affronted by the length of his hair. Young headbutted the guy. Vanda leaned over him and said, “Don’t get up”.

Easybeats legend Harry Vanda is releasing his first solo single aged 79.

Sitting peacefully in the producer’s chair in his Sydney recording studio, the 79-year-old pop maestro smiles. “Oh, the Easybeats,” he says. “I find it difficult to think about the Easybeats. I mean, I’m the last one left. They’re all dead! It’s not good.”

Nor has the world grown less mad. This week, the co-writer of Friday On My Mind, Love Is In The Air and a trove of other Australian pop classics releases the first single under his own name, a song about global dysfunction titled Devil Loose.

With fuzzed-up stormtrooper guitar riff by the Divinyls’ Mark McEntee, the song rails against “financial gurus on the run” and “pious fools” committing murder “in God’s name”, a reflection of complete “social breakdown”.

“Just experience,” Vanda replies when asked about specific inspiration. “I get pissed off when I see all the stuff going on in the world. It makes no sense whatsoever. Everybody is sort of going nuts … so I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll get my two bob in’.”

The B-side – naturally there’s an old-school 7″ single pressing – is cut from similar cloth. With Vanda’s own guitar work and stomping chorus chant, Free and Easy is addressed to some “rotten to the core” grifter taking losers for a ride.

The Easybeats at a press conference at the Sheraton Hotel, Sydney in 1967.
At back (left) Harry Vanda and Stevie Wright and (front, left to right) George Young, Gordon ‘Snowy’ Fleet and Dick Diamonde.

The two sides offer a masterclass in the kind of classic songcraft that made Vanda and Young a backroom industry unto themselves after the Easybeats’ 1969 demise.

“Old fashioned?” Vanda says with a laugh. “You can either like it or hate it,” he shrugs. He’s been making records for too long and seen too many suits and hairstyles come and go to care much for anybody’s opinion. Any mention of “record companies” comes with a roll of his eyes.

Stevie Wright, John Paul Young, Rose Tattoo, the Angels, Cheetah, Ted Mulry and more owe early hits, if not their entire careers, to the Vanda-Young touch – none more so than Young’s little brothers, Malcolm and Angus, who took the Easybeats’ hard-won wisdom and studio expertise to the pinnacle of world conquest with AC/DC.

“They were fearless,” is Vanda’s takeaway from that story. “That’s the only way to describe it. They had such self-confidence, you know? And I suppose you could say it worked out all right. You’ve got to keep it simple, you know, so people can follow.”

That said, many a fine rock’n’roll band has discovered that Friday On My Mind is not a tune to be taken on lightly. “It is very complicated,” the guitarist concedes, “but it comes across simple.”

He recalls with amusement the last time he performed it, for the 2001 APRA Awards at Sydney Town Hall with You Am I. “They stuffed it up,” he laughs, “but it doesn’t matter.”

Of the song’s countless covers, he considers David Bowie’s a good effort but “the Easybeats … that was the best one”.

Nor is there any question which of their hundreds of songs has served him best financially: “Love Is In the Air, without a doubt”. Apart from innumerable covers from Shirley Bassey, Cher, Tom Jones and Jive Bunny to Yo La Tengo, the film and commercial “syncs” have “sort of kept me alive,” he says.

As recording artists, Vanda and Young enjoyed a second life as Flash and the Pan from 1976, charting with six albums at various points on the globe until 1992. It was so enjoyable, Vanda says “because we did not try to be commercial with any of it … and we had two bloody No.1s!”

Young’s passing in 2017 hit him hard. “To tell you the truth, I was devastated because I was so used to working with him. And we did well. We really got on well with each other. Never any problems. And then he dies on me.”

He says he still hears his old partner’s voice, “sometimes”, as he tinkers away at Hercules Studios. But these days it’s his son, Daniel Vandenberg, who “keeps an eye on everything, so we don’t stuff it up; makes sure it all sounds good”.

Whether that results in an album to follow Devil Loose remains to be seen, but that will be his call and no one else’s. “I do the odd thing when I feel good enough,” he says. “We’ve done a few things so far that have come out all right. So let’s see what happens.”

Devil Loose is out now. A three-part podcast, The Life and Music of Harry Vanda, is streaming.