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A couple of years ago I received an impassioned letter from a Mr. Dean Anderson in Tullamarine, Victoria, who heard me interview Kerryn Tolhurst on radio and felt that it was my duty to convince the members of the Dingoes to reunite and tour.

Anderson’s logic was that there had been so many reunions, not all of them worthy, that surely the remaining Dingoes should reap the acclaim – and more importantly – the financial benefits that they so rightly deserved. He made a compelling case that I am sure many others had made to the members of the band over the years.

While it was flattering to be assigned this task by someone I had never spoken to or met I felt it was more in the realms of Mission Impossible. Normally I would be inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. The papers are full of news of reunions and comebacks. Sometimes you wonder if anyone ever goes away. Occasionally, these revivals are excellent (Leonard Cohen, Daddy Cool) but often they can be embarrassing or, worse, excruciating (no names, no pack drill).

But the Dingoes are a different case. Like Daddy Cool, most of the remaining members are still working musicians. Not only that the music they made in the mid-to-late ‘70s was pretty much timeless. There were the hit singles like ‘Way Out West’ and ‘Boy On The Run’ that have been revived by others but there were a brace of songs that are still being discovered: songs bursting with musical ideas and lyrics that spoke of Australia before it was fashionable to do so in popular music. With only one album re-released in 30 years and one ‘best of’ disc out, the record company had hardly mined the rich vein.

When I was in Tucson, Arizona, last year I quizzed Tolhurst over a few glasses of wine at the Hacienda Del Sol in the foothills. His response to my query had moved from the definite negative to the ‘who knows what will happen.’ Of course, in politics denial is proof and it could be the case in music too. Hunters & Collectors got back together for a gig a year after Mark Seymour told me, ‘It’s never going to happen. Keith Urban went into rehab the day after he told Marty Jones he was feeling great.

On 27 August 2009, The Dingoes were finally inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall Of Fame by Richard Clapton, sharing the stage with Kev Carmody, Little Pattie, Mental As Anything and John Paul Young. It was long overdue recognition. It was to be a crucial event.

 

Reunited for the evening the remaining members of the Dingoes performed several of their classic songs in a brief set that was said to have reduced nostalgic middle-aged men to tears. It was a stunning reminder of the influence of a band that had been almost criminally neglected as one of the greats in the Pantheon of Australian rock music.

A few months later, we received the news that Broderick Smith, Chris Stockley and John Bois were heading to Tucson to record a new album over Christmas and the New Year and that a tour would be in the offing. Miracles do happen!

More than three decades after The Dingoes broke up I am sitting in The Local in St Kilda talking to Tolhurst and fellow Dingo Chris Stockley. Both have aged pretty well for old rock ‘n’ rollers past the age of sixty.

They had just completed a photo shoot for Rhythms, minus other members. I had suggested the famed Station Hotel in Prahran but these days it is a little too moderne, sitting as it does in a Greville Street that would now not be recognized by anyone who frequented the pub in its halcyon days of the ‘70s when it helped give birth to pub rock.

Over the years I had been in contact with both musicians. Stockley came in on my radio show to play some tracks the band had recorded at Atlantic Studios long before some of them were finally released on a compilation. Similarly, Tolhurst had dropped in and I visited him in Tucson last year.

We had talked about the legend of the Dingoes and various stories had gone to air but now there was an entirely different reason for a talk.

 

Of course, by the time the Dingoes were formed by guitarist/songwriter Kerryn Tolhurst in 1973 all of the band members were practically veterans of the Australian music scene.

“There was no alcohol in the clubs,” recalls Tolhurst of his apprenticeship in the ‘60s. “You played at Berties or Sebastians and it was dry but everybody stayed up to two or three in the morning, we don’t know how but people were sort of resourceful in those days and managed but that was the main difference between now and then.”

“There wasn’t too much checking of bags for flasks of whiskey going into these places, no security,” adds Stockley, “and there were also interesting places to go afterwards like the International Club which somehow sold those big cans of beer and you could get a hamburger at two or three in the morning although I think it was highly illegal.”

By 1964 Tolhurst was in the Adderley Smith Blues Band, where he first met Broderick Smith.

“I was in the band originally and we were looking for a new lead singer,” he recalls, “and Broderick came along one night and turned up at the Queensbury Hotel and sat in and that was it, he was the singer from then on.”

In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, they were both conscripted into the Army to do their National Service and ended up together doing basic training. “I couldn’t get away from the bastard,” laughs Tolhurst.

Two years later, Tolhurst joined Sundown (with Keith Glass) and later was a key member of Greg Quilll’s Country Radio (co-writing the hits ‘Gypsy Queen’ and ‘Winter Song’). For a little while he also played with Mississippi.

 

“We had a bit of a history,” notes Stockley, “and the reason for The Dingoes coming into being was that I’d known Kerryn and Broderick from the blues band days at a club in North Melbourne diagonally opposite the Queensbury Hotel, which was handy because there was no license at this place and we had the love of blues. That’s where we met and it wasn’t until years later that we actually got together and joined up with our common interests which was mainly blues and soul and fast becoming country music.”

Singer/harmonica player Smith, who joined Sundown briefly, went on to make his reputation in the hard-rocking blues boogie band Carson (and played the song ‘Dingo’ at the second Sunbury Pop Festival). He also starred as ‘Mr Walker’ in the local production of Tommy, which played to 30,000 people at the Myer Music Bowl on March 31, 1973, and a day later in Sydney, with Keith Moon as special guest playing Uncle Ernie.

Over the years, Smith has gained a reputation for eccentricity to match any of the characters in the rock opera.

“He was developing the act,” says Tolhurst when I mention Smith’s apparent contrariness and ask him what he was like back in the day.

“Definitely,” laughs Stockley. “He was always eccentric but now he’s just mad. He’s insane.”

Guitarist Chris Stockley had been in Cam-Pact and enjoyed commercial success in Axiom with hits such as ‘Arkansas Grass’ and ‘A Little Ray Of Sunshine.’ The band even made a futile visit to the UK.

“I had a fairly good experience of the high life with Axiom,” he says. “We went to England and did what everyone did and went there for a year and went stir crazy and broke up and came home.

“The turning point was right there and then and had we been smart Axiom should have gone to America – we were doing a lot a country influence stuff and it would have gone a lot better. England didn’t know what to do with us. We got signed to Warners over there but they could only market us a pure pop band and overlooked the avenues for bluegrass and country and the stuff we were doing. We worshipped The Band, as did The Dingoes and they were our heroes. Sadly England didn’t get that.”

By April 1973 The Dingoes had been formed and by this stage included bass player John Strangio who had been with St James Infirmary and Middle Earth (his replacement John Bois had played with Tolhurst in Country Radio) and drummer John Lee had been with Blackfeather.

“I’d done country radio with Greg Quill and I got into writing songs with Greg,” recalls Tolhurst. “So that was part of the importance of me wanting to do my own band and put together a band where I had something to do with the foundation. I wanted to take the Country Radio idea into more of a rock ‘n’ rock feel, utilising the stuff I’d learnt in that field into this other band and [make it] more edgy and more rock ‘n’ roll. I met Chris and Broderick at that fortuitous moment. Broderick was finished up with Carson and Chris was at a bit of a loose end after Axiom. We had common interests at that point we had gotten into singer songwriters big time. This is beyond the blues. Anyone from John Stewart to John Prine, all great American songwriters - the whole thing that was happening then.”

“Of course Dylan,” chimes in Stockley, “and even people like James Taylor and Carol King and that whole West Coast American thing was an influence -  David Lindley, Jackson Brown - we all loved that as well.”

The Dingoes were an early signing to the fledgling Mushroom Records label. Their first single ‘Way Out West,’ was released in November and was an immediate hit but a week before its release Stockley was shot in the back outside a party by Melbourne drug dealer Dennis Allen.

“Well, John Lee and I used to hang out a lot and do a lot of partying,” recalls Stockley, “and we just did our usual thing. We played the Croxton Park that night and we’re on our way home in John’s car and this car pulled up and someone said, ‘We want to drink, give us your booze’ and I said, ‘There’s no booze, party’s over go away.’

‘I had my back to them, walking up the street and everyone else hit the deck. I hear these two pops and I felt this thump in the back. It was all like that slow motion. It took me a long time to get right but they sent me home from hospital after two weeks because I was such a pain in the arse. The band was on the road with Leon Russell in Sydney and I would have died to do that gig but here I was stuck on my back. I got very depressed but it wasn’t too long before I was back on the road.”

While he spent two months recuperating his replacement was keyboard player Mal Logan (who will be joining the reunion tour this month). Subsequent singles - ‘Boy on the Run,’ ‘Smooth Sailing’ and ‘Into the Night’ – were not quite as successful.

The band appeared at Sunbury 1974 and a few months later their eponymous debut album – produced by the band and John French - was unleashed. It was Federation of Australian Broadcasters' ‘Album of the Year’ for 1974.

Listening back to a vinyl copy of the album 36 years after its release one cannot help but be impressed with not only the quality of the songs – largely written by Tolhurst and Stockley - but also with the fabulous sound.

“I agree with that,” says Stockley when I mention how impressed I remain with the production. “I’m not saying that to boost my own ego and whatever but I’ve heard ‘Smooth Sailing’ on the radio and it just pumped - it was incredible. Then also ‘Boy On The Run’ - it was so luscious it sounded a mile wide. I didn’t realise it was so good. At the time you think ‘It’s just a record’.”

“The first album was always going to be the easiest,” says Tolhurst. “It’s the second one that’s the hard one but for that first one we had a bunch of stuff ready to go.”

In his so far unpublished memoir of the time, The Dingoes’ Lament, bassist John Bois says that one of the problems that the Dingoes encountered was that no one person was prepared to step forward to take leadership of the band. It was a democracy but a dysfunctional one.

“It doesn’t work,” says Stockley of when I ask about the democratic nature of the band. “You get nothing done. We all got on with each other but we’d always defer to each other and management and that stuff.

“Kerryn was probably more equal then others simply by the fact he wrote the most songs. So there was a bit direction in that regard. I was still a rockabilly nut and I used to sing Eddie Crocker or something else, stuff like that we use to do all sort of stuff. It was fairly democratic but I think it was Kerryn just by virtue of the songwriting.

John Lee left in May 1974 to join Ariel and was replaced on drums by Ray Arnott, (ex-Cam-Pact with Stockley, Spectrum, Mighty Kong).

By this time The Dingoes had established themselves playing a residency at the soon to be legendary Station Hotel in Prahran, run by Mark Barnes.

“The Station Hotel was one of the first to put legitimate rock bands in,” says Stockley, “and it basically opened up this whole new world of pubs putting on rock bands and people playing original music.

“We made the [first] record pretty early in the career because Michael Gudinski had signed us along with Madder Lake and Buster Brown and all these bands at the time. So we would have made that record fairly early. I remember doing it live at The Station. I couldn’t give you an exact date but I think we would have played there before we actually recorded.

“The Station became a home. It was fantastic. A lot the good bands played there. If I wasn’t playing there I used to watch the other bands play there - Mighty Kong or Richard Clapton - and the excitement there was just palpable, it was just incredible. It was the best gig in the world at the time, I think.”

During 1974 The Dingoes toured nationally with various artists including Bad Company, Leo Sayer, Bo Diddley and Freddy Fender. (They also won 'Best Australian Group Album' at the Australian Music Awards and 'Best Group Vocal Album' at the ARIA awards). One of the strangest supports was for the Osibisa tour which is where I must have first seen them when they played at Melbourne’s Festival Hall.

“I couldn’t quite get the connection between us and Osibisa and how we got that gig,” laughs Stockley.

“Michael Gudinski was promoting that gig and at the time,” recalls Tolhurst. “He was our agent, our publisher - he had it all and covered every aspect. He called me up one afternoon and said, ‘I’ve got this gig for you supporting Osibisa at Festival Hall.’ I said, ‘That’s great Michael, how much is it worth?’ He said, ‘One hundred and fifty bucks,’ and I said, ‘Michael, we don’t work for less than two fifty.’ He said, ‘It’ll be good for you, a lot of people, good gig to do.’ So I said, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ I rang back and said, ‘Hi, this is Kerryn Tolhurst from The Dingoes. Can I speak to our manager? Some guy just called and said he wants us to play this gig at Festival Hall. Can you call him back and tell him we don’t work for less then $250.”

They got their massive fee and Stockley adds, “We played hardball, Brian.”

While the debut album was successful it was not a massive hit as some people later believed.

“We’ve got the statements to prove it,” replies Tolhurst when I put this to him. The band became established on the local scene making music that very few other bands were doing at the time. But they had something a little extra and you can hear it on the brand new album – rock ‘n’ roll.

“We had a rock ‘n roll edge,” says Stockley. “We had a Stonesy/Faces type edge as well as a country thing. It was that nice loose but hard rock thing and we did that well. Radio favoured the way it was on ‘Boy On The Run’ but that was only one facet. I always preferred ‘Come On Down,’ ‘Sydney Ladies’ and that real driving stuff - that’s what we played in the pubs, that’s what got the people going. We kind of got recognised more as an acoustic band almost when we were a dirty rock band.”

Early in 1975, after appearing at the fourth Sunbury Pop Festival, The Dingoes  were on tour in Western Australia and received a phone call from the USA at their motel. The receptionist told them that Paul McCartney had called from the Rolling Stones head office in New York. Pandemonium broke out but the caller turned out to be ex-pat Australian roadie Billy McCartney, who had seen them when visiting from the United States and who apparently had been tour manager for Elvis Presley and Rod Stewart. Back in the USA McCartney had been playing The Dingoes album on the PA at various concerts and had recommended the band to Peter Rudge, then tour manager for The Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Stockley was elected by the band to return the call and soon discovered the real McCartney, who promised that contracts would be in the mail.

“It was an absolute nightmare,” says Stockley of what followed. The band employed a solicitor not au fait with the music industry who suggested they should hold out for a better deal. The problem was that, being inexperienced, the band didn’t actually know what a better deal was and how much they should be demanding. Things stalled.

“I tell you what,” says Stockley. “I think our career would have been better had we kept recording when we were here. Had we known we were going to be stuck for that long we would have gone on to make other records which would have kept the momentum up here which would have been fantastic. Sadly, that didn’t happen. I would count that as a negative.”

They did a series of farewell gigs and provided two tracks – ‘Marijuana Hell’ and a cover of Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ to the Live at the Station album released in 1976. But they were in recording limbo.

After more than six months, and trusting their instincts, they finally became the first Australian band ever signed directly to an American label when they inked with A&M. A year after that fateful call they boarded the plane to North America. Ray Arnott had left the band and John Lee returned.

First they spent some time in Canada for rehearsals while arrangements were made for them to get Green Cards and record and tour in the USA.

“I think the people in management resolved that they’d send us out in the country in a Woodstock type environment,” says Stockley. “But it wasn’t Woodstock it was Broadmeadows - bloody horrible. We were going stir crazy out there.”

Perhaps their greatest claim to fame from this episode is the fact that they recommended the El Mocambo to Peter Rudge who was looking for a venue for a Stones’ gig when part of a Keith Richards drug bust sentence was to perform a charity show. The Stones appeared but the posters billed them as The Dingoes! In return, they didn’t even get an invite to the show!

They were in Canada for a few weeks but according to Tolhurst, “it seemed like an eternity, it was purgatory.”

“We got some good work done,” says Stockley. “We had this bloody basement that was stinking hot in summer and freezing cold in winter but we worked our arses off. We put in a solid day everyday and I tell you what, living with blokes, it was filthy and disgusting.”

“I don’t recommend it,” adds Tolhurst.

“I remember when we used to buy cases of beer and you got money back on your bottles,” notes Stockley, “and when it got up to the phone we knew it was time to get the trolley go down to the bottle shop and trade them in and get some more.”

They then escaped to the US, where they set up base in Mill Valley, Northern California, at the start of 1977, and recorded tracks for their A&M album, Five Times the Sun, in San Francisco during January and February. The producer was Elliot Mazer, who had worked with Janis Joplin and Neil Young) and the band were ensconced in His Masters Wheels studio. The rich, warm sound of the album is credited to the fact that Mazer was using vintage gear and you can hear that same sound on those early Neil Young recordings. Session musos for the album included keyboardists Nicky Hopkins and Garth Hudson from The Band (who also featured on Smith’s latest solo album). Hudson was in town for The Last Waltz concert for which Mazer was engineer.

 The liner notes were by author Emmett Grogan

“There were a lot of musicians there,” recalls Stockley of Mill Valley. “It’s a fantastic place, beautiful.”

“It was exciting,” agrees Tolhurst. “There we were in San Francisco in a studio with a producer who we heard of.”

Five Times the Sun hit No.25 on the Australian albums chart in August of 1977. The album included re-recorded versions of tracks from their first album. ‘Way Out West’/ ‘Smooth Sailing’ was released in September, as a double A-side single in Australia.

The band members were granted green cards that allowed them to live and tour in the US, so they hit the road.

“We went out after that album was done and did road work for about 6 months to a year,” says Tolhurst. “We toured all over the country everywhere supporting all types of people, the most memorable being Tom Petty for a week at The Bottom Line. We got that gig because we were playing in Philadelphia one night in a club and somebody had screwed up the publicity and put the wrong date and nobody showed up. So we played anyway, played really well and halfway through the second set some guys came in and sat down at the back of the room and bought some beers and started clapping. At the end of the night we came off stage and they came up and said, ‘Hey guys, we loved the set. We’re Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. We’d love for you to support us in New York in a couple of weeks, would you like to do it?’ So that’s how we got the gig.”

“Which was amazing,” adds Stockley, “because I worship those guys, they are a true rock ‘n roll band. I think they are one of my favourite rock bands of all time.”

Things were looking good for The Dingoes and they were set to undertake some more serious touring when tragedy struck. On October 20 a plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd (also managed by Peter Rudge) crashed in Mississippi killing Ronnie Van Zandt and Steve Gaines and seriously injuring other band members. The management team was thrown into chaos and dropped the ball with The Dingoes.

“We’d been getting reviews and radio play,” says Tolhurst.

“One of my memories that confirmed the fact that we made inroads,” agrees Stockley, “was when we played at a university in Florida. It was a lunchtime concert and we played ‘Shine A Light’ and people were singing the chorus because that was the track they had chosen to play on radio. That blew me away. I remember my greatest feeling was to hear of your songs and people knowing the words.”

“We were in Austin, Texas at the time,” says Tolhurst of the Skynyrd crash. “It was part of our swing down the South but then we got a call saying there’d been an accident, that Skynyrd’s plane had gone down and hold everything because everything has now changed, the world as you know it is now different. All the plans that we had are now put on the shelf and so that lasted for about a year, we just got shelved and sent back to California and at that point I think our band just disintegrated.”

“It was very difficult,” says Stockley. “We had such minimal money and by this stage our wives, girlfriends had joined us as well and there was a lot of pressure from that side and it wasn’t easy. I think everybody was saying, ‘How can we make this work now? What can we do?’ Anyway that happened.”

“We had no work lined up in the foreseeable future,” says Tolhurst. “There was no plan for us to go on the road again. It was just stressful.”

“Well, things are just fragmented by that point,” says Tolhurst. “We were left lurch with nothing to do and everyone was just looking for stuff to do. I guess we didn’t have that solidarity that we had before.”

The group the group moved east and settled near Woodstock, in upstate New York. They recorded some tracks at Atlantic with Jimmy Douglas (who had worked with The Stones) as engineer but the record company wanted to find a name producer.

“It was fantastic,” says Tolhurst of recording at the famous studios. “It’s a historic place and all our favourite records have been made there.”

“The tracks we did just with Jimmy turned out really well,” says Tolhurst. “ But they reneged at the last moment and got cold feet and said, ‘No, you need a producer’.”

“They didn’t trust us not using a producer,” says Stockley, “which I think is really silly because I think that is some of the best stuff we’ve ever recorded in actual fact.

“We were rocking. You can imagine what it was like playing 4 or 5 nights a week and you had to deliver. We were hot and we could have produced it - with someone like Jimmy Douglas we could have produced that record.”

The combination of being put on hold while the record company sought a producer and other pressures eventually led to the band’s fragmentation.

A dispirited Stockley left the band, moved to Canada to work with and ‘freeze my arse off’ with Greg Quill for a while and then returned to Australia in early 1978, later to found Stockley, See & Mason.

“I was asked to leave the band,” explains Stockley. “I got told by a democratic vote, democracy by the way of Robert Mugabe.”

Back in New York in mid-1978, now without Stockley, the band eventually recorded Orphans of The Storm at The Hit Factory with producer John Anthony, who had produced Ace and Queen but who was soon to leave A&M.

“He wasn’t like Elliot, he was a different kettle of fish all together,” says Tolhurst, “and he wasn’t really right for the band, I don’t think. We did that album and by the time it came to an end the band had broken up. We had decided to call it quits. It was pretty much mutual decision. I guess there was a bit of acrimony but being frustrated by the circumstances brings out acrimony. I think when you’re frustrated things come out that wouldn’t normally come out when things are going smoothly.”

“You’re in a foreign country and there are little family issues going on,” he continues. Plus we’ve just been left in the lurch to fend for ourselves. So there didn’t seem like there was much support or was going to be, so by the end of the album it was pretty much over and I think the album showed that to us.”

“I think you shouldn’t undersell that,” says Stockley. “I’ve got a pretty subjective view but it does sound good -  it’s pretty damn good. It’s not what it could have been perhaps but it’s not a bad record by any stretch.”

Orphans Of The Storm was released in February 1979, along with a final single, ‘Into the Night’ but Smith had returned to Australia, while Tolhurst, Bois and Lee stayed in the USA.

Smith end up fronting his own bands including Broderick Smith's Big Combo and pursuing  solo career and even doing some acting on TV. Recently he has played harmonica with The Backsliders, alternating with Ian Collard (Collard, Greens and Gravy) as a replacement for founding member Jim Conway.

Bois became a teacher, he lived and worked near Washington DC.  Lee joined the cult band, Root Boy Slim & His Sex Change Band, moved from Washington DC to Nashville, Tennessee and returned to Australia in the late 1990s. He died in July 1999.

“I was playing a lot and then I just hit a wall,” says Stockley, who went on to play in Jimmy Barnes’ band. “I did the dumbest thing in the world I started Scarecrow which is a cover band and I’ve got to tell you it’s soul destroying. The upside of that was that Scarecrow made good money which we put into Hard Road which was an original band.

“I played with Jimmy Barnes too for a couple of years, played on the first album or so and that was a fantastic experience in power rock. The Dingoes weren’t exactly leaping jumping Bon Jovis or anything like that, we were pretty cool and all of a sudden thrust into this spotlight.”

Tolhurst lived and worked in New York for many years, and continued his career as a songwriter, performer and producer, both in Australia and in the USA. He has worked with Paul Kelly, The Pigram Brothers, Cyndi Boste and Shane Howard (their latest collaboration is Goanna Dreaming). He also recorded the album So Rudely Interrupted with Greg Quill. A collection of his work has just been released as Taking The Blame: The Kerryn Tolhurst Collection.

Now more than three decades after The Dingoes ‘fizzled out,’ the band has just released a new studio album and on their first Australian tour together since 1976.

“I always saw it as fun and not as a money making thing,” says Stockley of the reunion. “Just to see how we developed and could we still cut it and that sort of thing. That’s the way I looked at it but the Hall Of Fame thing was out of the blue and nobody expected that. Then we got the offer to perform and when we performed and rehearsed it was like we had been there yesterday. I can’t tell you it was just incredible, thirty years on and we all played exactly like we’ve always played, probably with a bit more finesse but it was just fantastic.

“Actually, people came up on the night and would say, ‘You guys should make another record.’ I said, ‘Yeah, come back tomorrow when you’re sober and we’ll see if you’re real’ - and they did!”

“Also the band had a bit of a revelation in the fact that we actually sounded ok after all that time and it went well,” adds Tolhurst. “It sounded really cohesive and it sounded like it had legs for something else and I think that provided the impetus for doing something else.”

“It was easy, I just wrote up a plan that said how we can do it,” explains Tolhurst about how he got the band together in Tucson. “Everybody said, ‘Let’s do it.’ It was the only way we could do it. It wasn’t going to work if we came back here and booked a studio, we couldn’t do it anyway and we had to do it on the cheap and so that was the cheapest most effective way.”

What resulted from the session is an album that is surprisingly energetic – muscular even - vibrant. This is definitely not the sound of a band just reprising old glories. It is almost as the band have taken up exactly where they left off.

There are five songs from Tolhurst, three from Smith (including a reworking of his ‘Snowblind Moon’ a co-write) and one each from Bois and Stockley. The obvious ‘single’ is the lead off track ‘Right To Your Door’ but ‘No Rain No River’ is probably the closest there is to the sort ballad the band did in its heyday.

Apart from the strength of the songs and the playing, the impressive aspect of the new Dingoes’ album Tracks is the revitalisation of Broderick Smith’s voice and his fabulous harmonica playing. It is an instantly recognisable sound. He sings more freely than he has for years – almost as if he is a man with nothing to lose. Tolhurst’s production puts the vocals right up front. If there was ever any doubt that Smith is one our best ever singers then this album will remove that doubt.

“Broderick has got a great voice,” agrees Stockley. “He does have a wonderfully mature voice. It’s fantastic. He’s one of those guys that could actually read something and it would sound good, he’s just got that beautiful richness in his throat and I wish I had it.”

The title Tracks might be a little heavy-handed but it evokes the fact that the Dingoes always sang unselfconsciously about Australia and used local images.

“I think one of the important things about that was that we wrote about Australia but we didn’t go the way of actually naming place names apart from Ceduna,” agrees Stockley. “We stayed right away from that. ‘Way Out West’ could have been way out west of anywhere: it could be the West Texas oil fields or the West Australian oil fields or whatever. I think you’ll find that was a big difference: we wrote about Australia but we made it universal, we didn’t talk about Balwyn or Carlton it was much more universal than that.”

The touring band includes Ashley Davies on drums, Chris Copping (ex-Procol Harum) on keyboards and Kevin Bennett (who co-wrote ‘Driving Home’ with Smith) from The Flood on rhythm guitar.

There are a series of low-key dates and, if all goes well, the group plan to come back for the festival season starting late this year.

“We’re not the big band that people sometimes imagine that we were,” says Tolhurst humbly. “I think we have sort of an underground following but that’s not necessarily that mainstream. So to take on really big shows could have been really foolish at first not knowing what the record is going to do and not knowing how it’s going to be received yet at this stage it would have been a bit of a gamble. So we’d rather play smaller venues, have them packed and sell them out, that looks far better.”

I respectfully disagree with him, pointing out that ‘Way Out West’ has been a hit several times over and along with ‘Boy On The Run’ is part of the Australian rock lexicon. Unlike a lot of their contemporaries the music they made – like the great Byrds, Gram Parsons or even Jackson Browne album  albums - has not really gone out of fashion.

“I also think we may have been ahead of our time at that time with the music that we were playing,” adds Stockley, “and people called up and said this is pretty good. I’m boasting again but that’s not what I’m trying to say. I think we were a little bit ahead of our time in Australia.”

THE DINGOES DISCOGRAPHY

1974             The Dingoes

1977             Five Times the Sun

1979             Orphans of the Storm

1992             Way Out West - The Best Of The Dingoes

1995             Five Times the Sun ... and Other Delicacies

 Photos by Brian Wise.