COLOURED BALLS – Rock Your Arse Off!
Live at Festival Hall 10 Nov. 72
Side 1
1. God
Side 2
1. Johnny B. Goode
2. Liberate Rock
Out now on San Francisco-based Just Add Water Records (LP) Coloured Balls - Rock Your Arse Off! Live at Festival Hall 10 Nov. 72 (JAW-045).
“Stunning quality live recording documenting COLOURED BALLS tearing the roof off Melbourne's venerable Festival Hall - available on vinyl for the first time! This gig was recorded by Armstrong's Studio and engineered by John Sayers, who also did their "Ball Power" LP. This album has the entire 3-song, 30 minute set they played that night, including the only known recording of "GOD." with vocals!!!”
(It seemed a great idea to use a previously proposed but never utilised album title.)
Thanks to Jason Duncan at Just Add Water
https://justaddwaterrecords.bigcartel.com/products
And Aztec Records
Here are my liner notes for this album of live goodies!
Rock Your Arse Off!
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 established an identity as a phenomenal live experience. Rock Your Arse Off! documents the band’s blazing performance from Melbourne’s Festival Hall on 10 November 1972. In some ways it’s difficult to impart just how influential the band really was, suffice to say that this recording goes a long way in proving their importance in the pantheon of tough Aussie rock.
The Balls were never bound by genre restrictions. Although a hard-hitting blues rock band with progressive overtones in the live situation, when they hit the recording studio 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.
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.
When overseas writers try to explain the importance of an Australian band such as AC/DC, for example, there’s often been a tendency to open with a statement along the lines of “Before AC/DC emerged to ignite the Aussie rock scene there was nothing happening Down Under”. It’s a writer’s conceit employed to home in on the exception that proves the rule, without checking the facts, and it’s simply a myth. We all know how important AC/DC is in the worldwide history of rock, so there’s no need to try and put their emergence in a false context.
What you really need to know is that the Australian underground rock scene of the 1970s was an incredibly vibrant, fertile and varied milieu. Coloured Balls were merely one of hundreds of bands that played regularly to appreciative crowds across the land. Bands could play seven nights a week, often fitting in three gigs in three different locations on a Friday or Saturday. All of which is why local bands were so tight and well drilled. Coloured Balls were no exception but by their intrinsic nature they delivered music that has endured, sounding fresh and vital to this day.
Initially billed as Lobby Loyde & the Coloured Balls, the band comprised Loyde (guitar, vocals), Andrew Fordham (guitar, vocals), Janis ‘John’ Miglans (bass, vocals) and Trevor Young (drums, vocals) who had replaced ‘Big’ Jeff Lowe. They spent 1972 honing their craft, playing all the usual Melbourne haunts of the day from Sebastians and the Roundhouse to the Q Club and Garrison, as well as touring Sydney twice. Over the years they went on to share 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, Pirana, Healing Force, Bakery, Band of Light, Buster Brown, AC/DC and Skyhooks.
The Balls’ first major appearance took place at the Mulwala ‘Rock Isle’ Festival, held over the Easter weekend, 1-3 April. Originally billed as a Wild Cherries appearance, it was the ideal opportunity for Loyde to launch his new band. While not held in such high esteem as the Sunbury festivals, Mulwala was a successful event attended by up to 30,000 rock fans.
A couple of other high profile Balls gigs during the year included support slots to the Aztecs at Melbourne’s Festival Hall for the Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll concert (13 April), alongside Fraternity, Blackfeather, Carson, Ticket and compere Gerry Humphrys, and their Farewell concert in November (just prior to the Aztecs leaving for the UK), alongside Carson, Madder Lake and Friends.
Armstrong Studios, on behalf of radio station 3XY, recorded the entire Aztecs Farewell Festival Hall concert for live-to-air broadcast. Radio DJ Trevor Smith was the MC for the night (in fact he MCed every 3XY concert of the day). Remarkably the tapes were preserved, unheard for over 45 years. Renowned audio engineer, and head of reissues specialist label Aztec Records, Gil Matthews has transferred and remastered the material and it sounds so good sonically it’s as if you’re right there on the night it was recorded. This is the first time the Ball’s half hour, three song set has been issued on vinyl.
The tracks represent a significant historical statement and document a band at the peak of its live powers. You get two sides of the Balls: their progressive tendencies mixed with their rock ’n’ roll roots, the crushing guitar riffs coming at you like a relentless wrecking ball, the rhythm section like a runaway locomotive, the whole thing a potent mass of energy. It’s raw, it’s primal, it’s unhinged (like all good rock ’n’ roll should be).
Loyde introduces the first song as “the first movement of an electronic symphony, this is called the first movement of ‘God’. This may not be your thing but you can’t win ’em all”. The 14 minute version of ‘God’ is comparable to the legendary Sunbury 1973 Summer Jam version but with an additional mid-section during which Loyde barks out a set of declamatory lyrics. It’s difficult to determine what he’s actually saying and it sounds ad-hoc, as if he’s making them up in the heat of the moment.
‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Liberate Rock’ maintain the fever pitch and with so much energy expended something had to give – the concert ends with amps blown and minds well and truly fried. They may be standard 12-bar rockers but all up it’s a riveting and astonishing performance with loud guitars being the order of the day. Loyde introduces ‘Liberate Rock’ by saying they have to curtail their set due to Festival Hall time restrictions so it seems they went on after the Aztecs to bring the concert to a close.
Coloured Balls continued to play live on a regular basis, issuing four albums (one posthumously) and seven singles along the way. Eventually they fell prey to the vagaries of the corporate rock machine, disbanding in mid-1975. They remain a much respected and loved band to this day.