By Madonna King
Highly Strung, which includes the writer’s husband, David Fagan (at far right), rehearses in a Brisbane garage. Band member Kenn McCall (second from right) says it’s like joining a sporting team.Credit:Paul Harris
Detective Inspector Jon Rouse spends each weekday tracking down online paedophiles. It’s dirty work, painstaking and heartbreaking. He has to piece together thousands of clues in his quest to rescue children who are locked into lives of sexual abuse. “But then come Saturday night, I’m into ‘gig’ mode,” explains the 58-year-old manager of covert operations at the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE). “I’m thinking about the performance, the sets, how we’re going to play, what will work with the crowd. It completely compartmentalises my job and I don’t think about my work then.”
The transition is both physical and mental, as Rouse and his bandmates don wigs and costumes, pick up their music gear and play to packed crowds. Music wipes away the dirt and grime of the ACCCE, and gifts him an ability to live in the moment, to forget the awfulness of the job he’s done for more than 25 years. Rouse plays in two bands, the key tar (a lightweight synthesiser supported by a neck strap) in The Electric 80s Show, and the keyboard in corporate-gig outfit Hot Sauce. “It’s the saviour of my sanity. It’s just the polar opposite of what I do at work. I guess some people paint. Some people run marathons. I can’t imagine a world where I didn’t have music.”
He’s not alone. With The Who’s My Generation and its chorus cry of hope I die before I get old on loop, there has been a boom in the number of 50- and 60-something career bigwigs stepping out of grand offices at the end of each week to become musos, tuning guitars, rolling out drum kits and joining bandmates in garages and pubs and on stages. COVID-19 has tried to drown them out, but these ageing rockers – whose employers span ASX-listed companies, universities and the nation’s property markets – are refusing to listen.
Fleetwood Mac, with an average member age of over 70, is still touring. Bruce Springsteen, too, works guitar magic into his 70s. And The Rolling Stones’s drummer Charlie Watts, who died this year aged 80, showed how music need not age, even if the musicians do. “It’s better than bowls, I’ve got to tell you,” says Kenn McCall, a 68-year-old who has been manager of the Commonwealth Bank in three states, and headed up a big division of Suncorp in Queensland. Semi-retired, McCall says being part of a band is akin to joining a sporting team later in life, where like-minded people you might never have met otherwise play together for their own enjoyment, as well as for others. It reminds him of playing football in his youth. “When you’re on the footy field, you’re a team and everyone has a part to play. And when it really comes off, it’s just the best thing.”
Perth-based couple Sam and Karen Simmonds own Rock Scholars, a business providing a program in which people of all talent levels can learn, practise and end up performing in their own band. They were approached a few years ago by the parents of some of their students – they wanted to play, too.
“We were hesitant at first, and now it’s going gangbusters,” says Sam Simmonds.
“We have people who think nothing of dropping $5000 on a guitar because they’ve decided that’s their hobby.”
“We put the bands together. When you get to a certain age and maybe have not had contact with musicians the way you did when you were younger, it helps to find similar people.” After lessons and rehearsals, each group gets to perform in a public forum, and in the past 18 months, Rock Scholars has seen 50 people, including IT and legal luminaries, change out of their work suits and take to the stage. Simmonds, who is 56 and last year gave up a senior bank job, says his older students beam on the first day they perform in front of family, friends and strangers. “You can stand in your driveway and shoot hoops, but sometimes you want to get on the court and actually play basketball,” he says.
Rock Scholars provides equipment such as drum kits, amplifiers and microphones – but it seems everyone wants to bring their own guitar. Simmonds has played the instrument for 40 years, spending as much as $2000 on them. The members of this group, he says, have big work gigs, often with incomes to match, and being part of a band is like taking back some of the time stolen from them through their busy careers (“It’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled,” Led Zeppelin belted out in Rock and Roll). “We have people who think nothing of dropping $5000 on a guitar because they’ve decided that’s their hobby,” Simmonds says.
Sam Simmonds (front, centre) of Perth’s Rock Scholars. Credit: Courtesy of Sam Simmonds
Lewis Mallia, owner of the Guitar Factory in Sydney’s Parramatta, says retired doctors and lawyers, real-estate agents and builders make up a big chunk of his customer base. “Some will just say, ‘I’m retired. This is what I want to do. Just give me your best guitar,’ ” he says. Martins and Taylors, Gibsons and Fenders walk out the door. And while the music prowess of some
owners might be “average at best”, those high-disposal incomes and a shortage of time means they don’t want to muck about. COVID has amplified that. “In fact, they’ve been keeping my business going.”
Jon Rouse has always been a musician on the side. In the 1980s, he worked backstage on a number of gigs; in 2003, he met the band Duran Duran after their show at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre. A synthesiser keyboard, similar to the one used by the group’s Nick Rhodes, now sits in his home as a museum piece.
“I couldn’t afford a good synth back then,” he says. “I got by with a Yamaha DX9 and a Roland Juno-106 and a Korg monologue. I’ve got 16 synths now. It’s a bit like a guitar; I’ve got them all.”
Kenn McCall plays in a couple of outfits; one is called Highly Strung, a reflection on both the members and the number of guitars they own. “Somebody made a comment after hearing us play. He said, ‘Well, you’re not the best band, but you’ve got the best gear.’ We’ve got more gear than The Rolling Stones! It’s great because you can have quality instruments that you never would have been able to afford when you were younger.”
Highly Strung is typical of the ageing dad-bands being set up in suburbs across the nation. It joins together a group of 50- and 60-something fathers,
including my husband, former Brisbane newspaper editor David Fagan, who was recruited while looking after our children at a school fete. Some members had big job titles, some were highly paid consultants, others were eschewing the “next phase” of bowling and holiday cruises. Many still had young children, but almost all had a guitar. We soon had a couple more (plus a mandolin and a case of harmonicas) hanging in our home as he joined a Treasury official, a couple of former high-flying bankers and consultants in hired studios to belt out tunes in the hope of snaring a gig, and re-snaring his youth.
“We’ve got more gear than The Rolling Stones! It’s great, because you can have quality instruments that you never would have been able to afford when you were younger.”
Like others recapturing their glory days, their musical interests are promiscuous. My husband now meets a second group of dads regularly for a brewery gig, Highly Strung’s vocalist Mark Smith also fronts an AC/DC tribute band, bassist Allan Clark plays in a rockabilly band, and lead guitarist Roger Maloney plays country and blues most weekends. They’ll play with anyone, anywhere, and when COVID lockdowns in Brisbane limited practice to homes, our garage became a Sunday afternoon jam session, with neighbours bringing along their own milk crates. The smiles, under cheap disposable masks, were broad.
So what is the fascination? “The joy of art, pure and simple,” says former University of Melbourne vice- chancellor Glyn Davis, now a distinguished professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. Davis has played, on and off, in bands across Queensland, NSW and Victoria while climbing a stellar professional ladder. “Working with others to create something interesting and unexpected, the fascination of words fusing with music, the invitation to be in the moment, thinking of nothing but the song …”
The return to a passion held in their youth is also undeniably a driver for this group, a passion locked away as families and heavy mortgages and career climbs swallowed time. Davis, like Rouse, tried to keep music part of his work-life balance since learning the classical guitar, clarinet and guitar as a child. As a student, he played pub gigs in Sydney’s southern suburbs. “The two hours on stage playing cover songs was fun,” he says.
“Dragging amplifiers up and down stairs, not so much. Sometimes, the bouncers would appear at the end of the set to say the publican had decided not to pay, which was confronting.” For Davis, considered one of the nation’s top intellectuals, music has helped focus his work plans. It was on a Friday night, in a singles bar in Miranda in late 1980, for example, with the owner urging his band to play Delilah one more time, that Davis decided to undertake an honours year of extra study.
But a move to Brisbane’s Griffith University and, later, postdoctoral fellowships in the United States, marriage and children, saw him drift away from performing live, like almost all of this cohort. Then, in his early 40s, Davis joined a circle of part-time Brisbane rock and folk musicians, led by another educator, professor Allan Luke.
Known as the Nobbs, Davis played bass alongside pianist (and professor of arts education) Susan Wright and lead guitarist (and associate professor at Deakin University) Rod Neilsen. Davis’s day job was as director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, the most senior public servant in Queensland – and he admits to being somewhat disconcerted when he learnt the band had been booked to play at a government Christmas party.
Later, as vice-chancellor of Griffith University, he found like-minded musicians again – former pop star John Kane, once a member of New World, best known for the 1970s hit Tom-Tom Turnaround, and later a professor of political theory. Known as the Chancellors of Vice, Davis and Kane were joined by bassist (and computer scientist) John Campbell, with political scientist Patrick Bishop on drums and senior Queensland journalist Andrew Fraser on keyboards, playing country blues and original songs. Davis didn’t miss the opportunity to sneak a little of their recorded work into his 2010 Boyer Lectures series, with extracts from an a cappella song about life on campus. Later, as vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, Davis would unwind on Sunday afternoons in a Carlton studio by playing original jazz and folk-rock songs.
Deakin associate professor Rod Neilsen and former University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis on stage.Credit:Peter Casamento
Australia’s best pop song, The Easybeats’ Friday on My Mind, has been a soundtrack to the lives of these raging ockers. Now it’s real for them. COVID, however, has been a game-changer, and the weekend practices and performances of many of these bands have been dealt a serious blow. “COVID has been the death knell of the live-music industry,” Rouse says. “It’s absolutely tragic. And it’s been gut-wrenching because I’m lucky I’ve got a job, but a lot of my friends who are in the music industry will rely on that for their income and that’s gone completely.”
On this night, the 20th time his band Hot Sauce has played at a school celebration, the closed Queensland border meant they had to find a fill-in drummer. Rouse’s usual 35 annual gigs, which have included playing to audiences of 5000, have been reduced to a handful. Davis and his bandmates had developed a repertoire of original songs and offbeat 1960s covers, with a fondness for eccentric time signatures and occasional excursions into Berlin cabaret. “Sunday afternoons remain a time to play music, sometimes with just the band and sometimes with an audience,” Davis says.
But COVID has provided an impetus for others to return to music. While stores selling band equipment capitalised on a boom, particularly in guitar sales, lockdown challenged the managing director of workplace mediation company iHR Australia, Stephen Bell, to focus on what was important to him – and he began writing, recording and distributing his tunes. It’s not a full-time gig, but part of a planned exit from a tough job the 59-year-old has been doing for decades. The bottom-floor rooms of his home in Mount Martha on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula have been turned into a place local artists can stay and work with him on songs when required. It isn’t a total professional pivot, but an opportunity to pursue a dream, by reaching back in history to old infatuations.
“Life happens, you have your children,” he says. “I ran the company, I became commercial and then that all stopped. So lockdown actually presented an opportunity for me to grow again. I remember Father’s Day in 2020 so vividly.” His wife was pregnant and they were restricted to their five-kilometre radius, unable to see his children from his first marriage. His business was on pause. “I remember it was just a little too much and the tears flowed. That’s when I penned the lyrics to my song, Lonely View. Thank god for emotions.”
The sense of escape from the weight of heavy day jobs is real. But so too, perhaps, is the lure of reliving an uncomplicated youth, where music was front and centre. Rouse remembers the Yamaha organ his parents bought while he was in primary school. “I just tooled around on that. And then in around year 10, I started learning classical.” That led to playing at school church services, and with The Knack’s My Sharona stealing the charts, the idea formed of creating a band to play at school events.
In the 1980s, Rouse toured as part of a support act to bands like the Eurogliders, Pseudo Echo and Goanna. Playing at police blue-light discos followed. Hot Sauce was created in 1996, and The Electric 80s Show, driven by a love of ’80s music, was born in 2010. Both those bands have female singers. And Rouse tries to bring forensic, investigative skills to every performance. “That’s the perfectionist part – I really want to nail it.”
Jon Rouse (at right) in The Electric ’80s Show.
The chance to be anonymous, and not be the “decision-maker”, appeals, too. Davis’s band would sometimes change its name in Melbourne when it performed, a way to maintain welcome anonymity. Rouse likes being the key tar player, not the top cop.
For semi-retired McCall and others, there’s a touch of unfulfilled ambition behind this ageing and raging rock phenomenon, too. At the Commonwealth Bank, he had a team of about 3000; day and night, his focus was people management. “Now, there’s a bit of reliving your youth and just having a good time,” he says. McCall plays guitar in both Highly Strung and a second band, the Jam Factory. “It’s also about learning something new and getting better at something – that’s quite appealing post full-time work.” It’s a chance to recapture the teen thrills portrayed so well by Bruce Springsteen in Thunder Road, almost 50 years ago (I got this guitar and I learnt how to make it talk).
Technology helps, too. Sound effects that once required a box full of distortion pedals can now be managed from a smartphone. The labour of working out riffs, solos or unusual chord progressions is eased by the generous tutors of YouTube.
“A lot of people have, for the sake of their profession, lost part of themselves along the way, and this is more about finding themselves … and especially elements such as creativity, which is extraordinarily important to your life balance.”
Stephen Bell nominates creativity, which is often lost in the small print of big jobs, as behind much of the boom, too, noting how many amateur artists are now publishing on platforms like Spotify. The “paradigm of responsibility” which often takes over in a worker’s 30s and 40s makes it “hard to retain that thing that isn’t the big money-earner, but is your go-to”, he explains.
“A lot of people have, for the sake of their profession, lost part of themselves along the way, and this is more about finding themselves … and especially elements such as creativity, which is extraordinarily important to your life balance. Yes, you lose that. And you’ve got it. It’s innate to you. You then yearn for it. That’s what people are rediscovering – who they really are.”
Bell trains leadership teams, particularly in relation to discrimination, harassment, or bullying. Frequently, he sees senior executives struggling because they can’t find their happy spot. How many of them turn to music after he works with them? “Probably 15 to 20 per cent.”
Irrespective of whether it’s a search for creativity or work-life balance, because of unfulfilled ambition or the need to make noise, finding anonymity or stepping out of the boss’s office, middle-aged rock bands are filling garages and suburban stages and, in some cases, headlining events each weekend when COVID restrictions allow. For these (mostly) blokes, it’s more enticing than the promise of a big fish, or the perfect bowl, the rose garden that draws commentary or the long-haul training a marathon requires as employment commitments wind down. “I’m at a point in my career where I work three days a week running the company,” Bell says.
“I don’t want to be a pop star, but I do want to put my stuff out there. I want to see if I can find an audience for my creative energies.”
And with the likes of The Stones and Fleetwood Mac in mind, all of them see music like a good red wine; getting better as the years pass. Got to keep rockin’ while I still can, Steve Earle told us in Guitar Town.
So when will it be time to close the curtain on noisy, physical three-hour performances under hot lights? “I carry 140 kilograms of equipment into a performance. So, you know when you’re not gig-fit,” Jon Rouse says. “After the last performance, I had to give myself a Radox bath. Things are starting to hurt!” But that doesn’t mean he sees an end in sight; he just needs to be more in shape. Ken McCall’s the same. “As long as I can stand. My guitar is a very heavy guitar, but as long as I can stand up …”
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