COLOURED BALLS Liberate Rock Singles and More 1972-1975
Side 1
1. Liberate Rock (Single A-side 1972)
2. Slowest Guitar On Earth (Single B-side 1972)
3. Mr. Mean Mouth (Single A-side 1973)
4. Love Me Girl (Single B-side 1973)
5. Mess Of The Blues (Single A-side 1973)
6. Devil’s Disciple (Single B-side 1973)
Side 2: Live at Sunbury ’73
1. God
2. Johnny B. Goode
Side 3
1. Flash (Single A-side 1973)
2. Dave The Rave (Single B-side 1973)
3. Love You Babe (Single A-side 1974)
4. Shake Me Babe (Single B-side 1974)
5. Bama Lama Baby (Single A-side 1974)
Side 4
1. Be Your Lover (Single A-side 1974)
2. Flying (Previously unreleased on LP, cancelled single A-side 1975)
3. Around And Around (Previously unreleased on LP, cancelled single B-side 1975)
Out now on San Francisco-based Just Add Water Records (Double LP) Coloured Balls - Liberate Rock Singles and More 1972-195 (JAW-044).
“COLOURED BALLS by the barrel-full, a double album with 16 tracks clocking in at 77 minutes. This collects all six of their singles released on the Havoc and EMI labels between '72 and '74, two live tracks recorded at their legendary Sunbury '73 festival appearance, and a canceled single from their final recording session in early '75, shortly before the group split.”
Thanks to Jason Duncan at Just Add Water
https://justaddwaterrecords.bigcartel.com/products
And Aztec Records
Here are my liner notes for this double album treasure chest of goodies!
LIBERATE ROCK!
By Ian McFarlane © 2020
Guitarist Lobby Loyde (born John Baslington Lyde in 1941) formed Coloured Balls in March 1972. The redoubtable Loyde (who died in 2007) was already a 12-year veteran of the Australian music scene, having worked his way through rock ’n’ roll bands The Devil’s Disciples and The Dominoes, Shadows-styled instrumental combo The Stilettos, pioneering R&B legends The Purple Hearts, psychedelic heroes The Wild Cherries and onto the bluesy Aztecs (with Billy Thorpe). He remains one of the true legends of Australian rock ’n’ roll and has often been cited as the “godfather of Australian heavy rock”.
The full story of the Balls’ career has been told elsewhere, so it’s not my purpose here to restate the legend. The band lasted a mere three years but created an enduring legacy of four albums and seven singles. As this compilation is entitled Liberate Rock: Singles and More 1972-1975, I’ll focus on those seven singles and some live material for good measure.
The Balls were essentially an album oriented band but because the Australian music industry was driven by commercial considerations, they were also obliged to produce singles. The singles, specifically the A-sides, were lively and accessible but the band was never bound by genre restrictions. Although a hard-hitting blues rock band with progressive overtones in the live situation, they were able to traverse expansive, guitar heavy psych, proto-punk rave-ups and rocked up vintage rock ’n’ roll on to stomping glam rock and chiming guitar pop with ease. All of which has kept their music sounding fresh and vital to this day.
They also tapped into the same kind of vital and direct energy that fired the punk onslaught four years later. Less a case of being ahead of their time, they were merely a symptom of it. Like Radio Birdman and The Saints soon after, the Balls remained at odds with the musical establishment yet in a perfect world they would be recognised as one of Australia’s supreme bands.
Originally billed as Lobby Loyde & the Coloured Balls, they were most commonly known as Coloured Balls. In 1974 Loyde decided to lop the letter ‘u’ out of the name, perhaps as some kind of nod to American spelling conventions or just another of his whims. So, for our purposes the names Lobby Loyde & the Coloured Balls, Coloured Balls and Colored Balls are interchangeable and refer to the same entity.
LOBBY LOYDE & THE COLOURED BALLS
Credited to Lobby Loyde & The Coloured Balls, ‘Liberate Rock’ / ‘Slowest Guitar On Earth’ came out on the Havoc label (H.1015) in August 1972. At the time of the recording session in January, Loyde’s band (the three-piece, second version of) The Wild Cherries was in the process of breaking up but he was keen to lay down new material. Also, as he had yet to formulate the Coloured Balls who better to call on than his old muckers The Aztecs – Billy Thorpe (guitar), Paul ‘Sheepdog’ Wheeler (bass), Warren Morgan (piano) and Gil ‘Rats’ Matthews (drums).
Recorded during a break in the same session that produced The Aztecs’ hit single ‘Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy’, ‘Liberate Rock’ became something of a mission statement for the veteran guitar master. “Liberate rock and let it be / Liberate rock and set it free” was a clarion call if ever there was one. The Aztecs’ sound is all over this laconic 12-bar rocker but Loyde leads the charge with his blazing guitar tone and relaxed vocal delivery... “Holy smoke!” he quips at the end, as if to say “it’s all just a bit of a lark, isn’t it”. The flip side is a quick fire studio jam with Loyde and Thorpe trading lead guitar licks.
As ‘Liberate Rock’ hit the charts (#20 in both hometown Melbourne and Sydney), the Coloured Balls line-up of Loyde, Andrew Fordham (guitar, vocals), Janis ‘John’ Miglans (bass, vocals) and Trevor Young (drums, having replaced original drummer ‘Big’ Jeff Lowe) was in Armstrong studios cutting an album with engineer John Sayers. At the end of 1972 the band’s record label manager, Rod De Gruchy, announced the album was due for release on Havoc as Rock Your Arse Off.
Havoc issued ‘Mr. Mean Mouth’ / ‘Love Me Girl’ (H.1018) as the lead-off single in March 1973. The A-side is a hard rocking country hoedown, like Hank Williams welded to gutsy rock ’n’ roll riffs and all-in-the-gang vocals. Lyrically it’s a hoot, Loyde playing around with a twisted character study. Running to 3:52 it’s an edit of the full album cut of 5:43, ‘Mean Mouth Lives’. The single cut features a different vocal take from the LP version and a dry mix. Changes were made and phasing added when Graham Owen did a remix in 1975 for the LP release
Fordham takes lead vocals on ‘Love Me Girl’, a genuine slice of chiming guitar pop with sweet harmonies and layered guitar riffs. It’s far removed from the Balls’ usual rabble rousing hard rock sound but a great example of their sheer diversity. As with ‘Mr. Mean Mouth’, ‘Love Me Girl’ differs from the LP version, ‘Love Me Girl Because’, via a different vocal take and a dry mix.
Aside from their studio sessions, Coloured Balls were a phenomenal live band. They played regularly to appreciative crowds, the Australian underground rock scene of the day being an incredibly vibrant, fertile and varied milieu. The Balls shared club, pub, concert and outdoor stages across the land with all the other big name bands, including Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Fraternity, Carson, La De Das, Chain, Company Caine, Tamam Shud, Healing Force, Bakery, Band of Light etc. Swiftly reaching the peak of their live powers, the band’s music was raw, primal and unhinged – like all good rock ’n’ roll should be – with the whole presentation a potent mass of energy.
By the beginning of 1973, the band’s standing was such that they’d put in an astonishing performance at the second annual Sunbury Festival, held over the Australia Day weekend in late January. It was here that they also took part in a jam session which yielded the live album Summer Jam, released in November 1973. Recorded at 3am on a balmy, summer’s night one side of the album featured Loyde’s searing cosmic heavy metal epic ‘God’, their 16-minute, faster-louder showpiece which surely stands as one of the greatest performances ever recorded by an Australian band of the era.
There’s not much of a ‘song’ here, simply an ascending guitar progression that continues to evolve and peak with blinding intensity. At about the 12-minute mark, the towering riffs and pulverizing drums give over to five minutes of scorching guitar feedback and sonic white noise so concentrated it’s a wonder that audience members hadn’t collapsed with ears bleeding profusely. Sonic Youth and Neil Young: eat your hearts out! The Balls were entirely in their element in the live situation and this track bears testimony to their greatness.
“Man, that was awesome stuff,” Loyde recalled with much enthusiasm. “I called it ‘God’ – Guitar Over Dose – because that to me was the ultimate send-up of the guitar hero. It was based on a piece of Beethoven classical music using minor chords against one note, using the rising fifths against the E note. It’s a sequence of suspensions, you’re ascending and descending against open strings in a cyclical way. You can’t really hear the finger picking but it works because it’s based on the circular fifths that keep peaking. That feedback at the end was five minutes of hard work! It was singing like bloody hell.
“When I played that with the Balls we’d get on top of that fantastic, building, climactic churning, continually adding dynamics. With everybody playing well and firing, that piece of music came to life and it could turn into a 20 minute jam. If we’re merely just going through the motions, it was the most tedious piece of music to play because nobody’s on the case and it would last for a couple of minutes. I could only play ‘God’ properly with Trevor, Janis and Andy and then Bobsie. Those guys were intense.”
The buzz-saw rendition of Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ also comes from their Sunbury ’73 performance. The musicians were all fans of vintage rock ’n’ roll, having grown up on Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley etc. As well as ‘Johnny B. Goode’, they covered the likes of ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’’, ‘(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care’ and ‘So Glad You’re Mine’. With their simple 12-bar structure they could just rip into them and drive them hard.
COLOURED BALLS
In April 1973, De Gruchy resigned from Havoc to set up his own management company. He took the Balls with him and Havoc subsequently folded. In July, he negotiated a new recording deal for the Balls with EMI Records. EMI passed on releasing Rock Your Arse Off – deeming it “uncommercial garbage” in Loyde’s words – and sent the band into the studio to record a single. The album was shelved until 1976 when it was released as The First Supper Last, or Scenes We Didn’t Get to See on Rainbird Records.
With guitarist Ian ‘Bobsie’ Millar having replaced Fordham in March, the Balls were prepared to go the commercial route, for now, in order to get their name in the charts. De Gruchy even decked them out in matching denim and satin space suits with a flash across the front, in order the push the commercial angle. In the long run, however, the Balls deemed such trappings as unnecessary to their function as an energetic rock band.
They picked the Pomus/Schuman song ‘Mess Of The Blues’ as the A-side (EMI-10297). Originally made famous by Elvis Presley, as ‘A Mess Of Blues’, the Balls’ snappy and accessible rendition gets the full treatment with rocking guitar, pumping piano and lots of “ooo-doo-wah” female backing vocals. Trevor Young takes lead vocals this time and does a creditable job. The single was a hometown hit at #7 and #39 nationally in August.
For the B-side, ‘Devil’s Disciple’, the Balls were able to kick around the antithesis of commercial intent, unleashing a raucous mix of savage, hard rocking riffs and aggressive bravado far more indicative of their potent, hard-edged style. It’s got an arrogant disposition with two fingers raised to the establishment, the Balls at their most primal.
“I loved ‘Devil’s Disciple’,” enthused Loyde. “That song was a send-up of all the negative media attention we started getting. ‘They call me the devil’s disciple / They say I’ve got the occult ways… All the crap you’re saying is just / The mud from the flood of the life I’ve lived and left behind’. Those lyrics were very sarcastic. It was a great song. I didn’t like the recorded version so much because live it was a killer. We used to play it a lot faster and with a lot more energy on stage.”
Millar says, “I guess some of those more commercial things where to satisfy the record company, they wanted us to do more pop songs. Things like ‘Mess of the Blues’ and ‘Love You Babe’, audiences loved them. Then, to please ourselves, on the B-sides of the singles we’d have these heavy songs like ‘Shake Me Babe’ and ‘Devil’s Disciple’, that was the whole juxtaposition of what we did.”
With the Balls having completed new album Ball Power, EMI released ‘Flash’ / ‘Dave The Rave’ (EMI-10344) as the lead-off single in November. Sung by Miglans, ‘Flash’ combined a commercial touch with a radical rock ’n’ roll edge. Essentially built up from a studio jam ‘Flash’ was a memorable song, all slashing guitar chords and layered vocal hooks sort of like a supercharged Rolling Stones on speed. The band rocks hard and steady, very much in the manner of the MC5 and The Pink Fairies.
“Sometimes you’d get those magic moments in the studio with a really good song and ‘Flash’ was one of those,” says Millar. “It was amazing how it came together. Lob was the main creative person behind the songs but the whole thing would come together with the band’s input. John the bass player sang that. Lyrically, I think it was about a flash from a girl. So I guess it’s a love song!”
‘Dave The Rave’ is another of Loyde’s jocular character songs, about a bunch of guys hitting the highway in a “high class, fancy Ford” with a stash of home grown goodies. Once again, the all-in-the-gang vocals push the chorus to greater heights. “Dave the Rave and Holy Joe spread the word wherever they go / Dave the Rave and Holy Joe the word they spread is all they know / You’re gonna find they’re in your mind / Talking, talking, talking to your mind”.
‘Flash’ failed to chart, however, so the EMI suits insisted that the guys get back into the studio and come up with a “hit single”. ‘Love You Babe’ / ‘Shake Me Babe’ (EMI-10440) hit the shops in March 1974. Loyde and Millar wrote ‘Love You Babe’ to order so it emerged as a quite respectable slice of stomping glam-infused pop, reaching #14 in Melbourne and #38 nationally. It was enough to make the Coloured Balls the bona fide pop stars EMI had always wanted them to be.
True to form, ‘Shake Me Babe’ pushes the Balls’ subversive tendencies, being another aggressive hard rocking tune fuelled by hellish riffs and Loyde’s torturous vocals. Maybe in these times of ‘political correctness’ the lyrics are a step too far – “Shake for me babe, rocking is my disease / I’ll take you up I’ll take you down / Shake me babe I love you down on your knees” – but in the day it seemed par for the course.
COLORED BALLS
The non-album single ‘Bama Lama Baby’ / ‘Be Your Lover’ (EMI-10570) came out in September 1974. It was something of a stop gap measure before EMI released the Balls’ second album Heavy Metal Kid. Written by the Loyde/Millar team, ‘Bama Lama Baby’ was just as commercial as ‘Mess Of The Blues’ and ‘Love You Babe’, with its Leiber / Stoller influenced rock ’n’ roll vigour and hand clapping hook, but it sank without a trace. The flip side is perhaps a riff looking for a song but it’s got that proven full-throated Balls backing. The single label announced the title as ‘By Your Lover’ but because Loyde sings “I wanna be your lover / I wanna be your man” we’ll opt for ‘Be Your Lover’ as the correct title.
EMI issued Heavy Metal Kid in October 1974 but by that stage had such little faith in the band they refused to lift a track for singles release, and barely promoted it. For their part, the Balls still made a decent living on the Melbourne suburban dance circuit but by the end of the year the Australian music scene was undergoing an enormous change. New, more commercially minded and teen-oriented bands such as Skyhooks, Sherbet, Hush, Ted Mulry Gang and AC/DC were emerging and laying claim to the rock crown once owned outright by the likes of Coloured Balls and The Aztecs. Combined with the added pressure of coming under the glare of the national media who were blaming the Balls for the rise of violence at their gigs, something had to give. It was the end of an era and the end of one of Australia’s all-time classic bands.
“The feeling in the band around the time of Heavy Metal Kid was pretty good,” says Millar, “but by the end of 1974 things started to implode around all that negative skinhead publicity stuff that came out in certain newspapers. Lob and I wanted to keep the band together at all costs but it was basically in demise. We weren’t getting anywhere with the record company, the management was going through different hands and there was no continuity. There was a bit of, dare I say it, almost sabotage from different people. I’ll leave it at that. In the end I was quite glad to get away from it all.”
The band limped on into 1975 but there was actually one more Balls single lined up for release. It would appear that two tracks were the very last recordings undertaken by the band, for a proposed live-in-the-studio album called Eight Dollar Deal which never eventuated. The master tapes for the full album have never surfaced but a 10-inch, 15ips singles master (dated March 1975) containing ‘Flying’ and ‘Around and Around’ was discovered in a dusty vault and added to the 2006 CD reissue of Heavy Metal Kid on the Aztec label.
No doubt due to EMI’s lack of interest, the single was cancelled. Conceptually the songs offered little new to the listener, yet melodically they found the Balls at their most tuneful, the guitars sounding almost unconsciously sweet at times. The seven and a half minute ‘Flying’ demonstrates their more progressive rock tendencies with several distinct yet inter-related segments. Following a gentle start it builds up a head of rock steam as the twin guitars lock in unison riffing and Loyde lays on a sequence of his patented lead breaks.
The six and a half minute ‘Around and Around’ conveniently appropriates the melody of ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’. Lobby plays around with his new found toy, the talk box effects unit (as utilised by the likes of Peter Frampton, Joe Walsh, Jeff Beck, Joe Perry etc) but oddly the track never seems to get out of second gear. Nevertheless, the songs provide the perfect note on which to end the whole Coloured Balls saga.
By mid-1975 Loyde was assembling his new group, Southern Electric, which included ex-Balls members Janis Miglans and Andy Fordham, and a new chapter in his career unfolded. And that is another story...
