Friday on My Mind - the Easybeats
- unclestylus
- Oct 28
- 5 min read
I confess that I had never heard of Snowy Fleet (real name Gordon Henry Fleet) until he died on February 17th of this year. He was drummer for the Australian band the Easybeats which had one huge hit in the UK and the US in 1966, and pretty much nothing else in either country. But what a hit: "Friday on My Mind" is one of those anthemic songs that sums up a state of mind recognised by ordinary people that is universal. As much as any other rock song of the sixties, it's driven by a frantic energy and ideology that anticipates punk by a decade. To me, lead singer Steve Wright always sounded like the first man to clock off from the Ford Dagenham car factory at 5 pm, Friday, angry yet full of pent-up joy and excitement having made it to another weekend. It was a surprise when, maybe ten years later, I learnt that they were Australian.
Not that I had anything against Australians: in 1966 my best friend was an Australian, and had been since we'd met, both aged five, 5 years earlier. Amongst a large ex-pat community in Bahrain, Simon's Aussie accent didn't stand out, and was much less interesting than his inability to pronounce the letter "c" (like Monty Python's Mr Smoke-Too-Much, only Simon replaced "c" with a "t" whereas Eric Idle did it with a "b"). Simon used to say thinks like, "let's play at being towboys" and "I'm gonna burn down the whole stool". We were inseparable despite the fact that his dad, Kelly Lean, used to wind my father up like a music box. For him, Australia was always better than England. On weekends Dad often had to collect
me from Simon's place, and would feel obliged to accept the proffered bottle of cold lager from Kelly, always dressed in his classic string vest with the de rigueur desert rat shorts. "You had your hair cut in Harrods? what's that Roger?,....... the biggest department store you've ever seen?.....Ah we got six or seven of them in Sydney....arts? we've loads of art in Sydney, we're gonna to build the biggest concert hall in the world right in the middle of the harbour..." and so on. My Dad would rise to the bate every time, turning pink with suppressed rage.
From a grown-up perspective, I can now see that Kelly was artfully sending up my father's prejudices toward Australians in general, attitudes that persisted in the UK well into the 90's despite the media presence in England of Antipodean intellectuals such as Germaine Greer and Clive James, and the rebirth of the Australian film industry aka the "Australian New Wave", subsidised by the Australian government, presenting entertaining, consumable movies with an arthouse sensibility. Indeed, one of these films if anything propagated the image of the hard drinking, happy-go-lucky, feckless young Aussie male abroad, namely the first feature of director Bruce Beresford, "The Adventures of Barry McKenzie" written by actor / comedian Barry Humphries, who also co-starred. In it the eponymous hero rang true seeming to be merely a comic exaggeration of an existing stereotype well-known to 1970's Londoners, congregating in the pubs of the Earl's Court area, and consuming vast amounts of lager, termed the "amber nectar". Direct personal experience of this included annual cricket games against an all-Australian cricket team ("The Kensington Arms XI") who used to turn up to the games on Shooter's Hill half drunk, half an hour late, having "accommodated closing time", mark out the boundary with empty beer cans, and then merrily outplay us, swigging lager all the while, while my team members muttered things about "how to behave", "bad sportsmanship" and how it was "just not cricket".
Needless to say, Australians objected to the way they were depicted in the Barry McKenzie films (there was a 1974 sequel "Barry McKenzie Hold his Own"!), thinking that these added weight to the popular English joke about the difference between Australia and a pot of yoghurt being that if you left it alone long enough the yoghurt would develop a culture.
By the 1990's however, the carousing "year-out" Aussie's were beginning to be supplanted by a new breed, the serious very sensible, upwardly mobile accountant model, the real Australian New Wave, so sensible and straight that many an English cast the odd wistful look back in time at their predecessors.
And efforts to project a more sophisticated cultural national image were being made back home too: Kelly's aforementioned concert hall, "Sydney Opera House", opened in 1973, the same year as Aussie author Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for literature, and fifty-six years ago today, on the 28th October 1969, artists Christo and Jean-Claude completed the largest artwork in history at that time, wrapping the coastline of Sydney suburb Little Bay in over 90,000 square metres of plastic fabric.
Although, effectively one hit wonders in the UK, in Australia the Easybeats were much more successful, scoring 12 Top 30 hits, including two number ones. However, the superiority of "Friday" in their oeuvre was recognised by the Australian Recording Rights Association for whom a panel of 100 music industry professionals voted it "Best Australian Song" of all time in 2001. "Friday on my Mind" was written by Easybeats' bandmembers Harry Varda and George Young, who later went on to produce the first six albums of AC/DC, Australia's most successful rock band ever.
"Friday on My Mind" sums up so many things about the Australian psyche: bloody mindedness in the face of a sense of ingrained injustice; a sophisticated yet driving piece of music that celebrates the joy of life; and the band, though without exception dedicated Aussies, were all born in Europe, in the UK or the Netherlands, both Varda and Young emigrating with their parents aged sixteen, while bass guitarist Diamonde was only 4. It's probable that lead singer developed some of his irresistible vocal swagger in his first nine years growing up in Leeds, while Gordon "Snowy" Fleet definitely brought with him first hand experience of the city that gave birth to modern rock, having often shared the stage with the early Beatles in his native Liverpool while drumming in various Merseybeat bands, including the precursors of the Mojos, before heading for the southern hemisphere in 1963 aged 24.
A mishmash of exploded myths, pride, exuberance, attitude and great music. That's Friday night, not only Australian style, but the world over. Roll on the Ashes.
"....Do the five day grind once more.
I know of nothing else that bugs me
more than working for the rich man -
hey! I'll change that scene one day.
Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad
'cause I'll have Friday on my mind
Gonna have fun in the city,
be with my girl, she's so pretty.
She looks fine tonight.
She is out of sight to me.
Tonight I'll spend my bread,
tonight I'll lose my head,
tonight I've got to get to night.
Monday I'll have Friday on my mind."