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Glenn A. Baker Liner Notes:

We all have ears; comes as standard equipment. But Peter Dawkins, over a spectacular twenty year span of accomplishment from the end of sixties, had ears like Ian Thorpe has feet or Sophia Loren had ........ well, you get the point. Ears - it’s an old record business word of ultimate praise, bestowed sparingly upon those figures on the other side of the glass with an unerring ability to hear the acts and hear the songs that will deliver, that will touch a nerve - hear them before anybody else, hear them instinctively, hear them and do something about it.

And when those ears did their job, there was rarely any agonising on the part of their owner. Tales of his incisive and decisive action abound. Like the time he caught a set by Little Heroes at a Battle of The Bands, walked over to the manager, scribbled his name and number on a piece of paper and handed it over, saying “I don’t have a card with me but I’d like to sign the band”. And he did, just as he had signed, following similar rooted-to-the-spot moments in the Civic Hotel and the Recovery Wine Bar in Camperdown, Matt Finish and Mi-Sex (in the former) and Dragon (in the latter). “You don’t do it that often in a career” he reasons, “ but sometimes you just have to. Like with Dragon I heard one song after another, every one a potential hit.”

Potentiality was rarely in better hands than Peter Dawkins’. What he sensed could become a hit almost invariably was. Cliches abound about iconic hits and soundtracks of our lives but when it comes to a body of work that came and stayed, that defined a mood, a time and a place, it would be hard to identify one as broad, as enduring and as impressive as Peter’s. He was the conduit, the means by which genius reached its audience. He didn’t write them, he didn’t perform them but he brought them to life with his stellar skills and instincts.

And he defended them when even those who created them thought he’d backed the wrong horse. I’m not sure if there’s an entry in the Record Producing 101 Handbook about standing your ground but there should be – as penned by Peter. He recalls Russell Morris playing him four new works in 1972 and reacting with an almost scathing, “Why that one!?” when Peter declared Wings Of An Eagle to be his favourite and the one he’d like to work on. Ross Ryan, or more emphatically his manager, despaired over the very idea of releasing I Am Pegasus as a single, declaring loudly in offices above Peter’s in that EMI building that “There’s no way in the world that is going to be a hit.” They were moments, he explains, when “you have to go in boots and all.”

By the time Peter had crossed the Tasman in 1972 he knew a thing or two about hits and how they happened. He’d produced, on the trot, seven New Zealand number ones. One of them, Nature by he Fourmyula, was recently decreed in a members poll by the NZ arm of the Australasian Performing Rights Association to be the premier Kiwi song of the past 75 years (to give you an idea of the importance of the selection - the equivalent award in Australia went to Friday On My Mind by the Easybeats).

The genesis of all this came about, the owners of the “ears” believes, in the South Island town of Temucka around 1963 when, as a 16 year old fledgling drummer interested in music, he stayed on his feet long enough to take out a Twisting Marathon (honest!). For five days and five nights, for 108 hours and 55 minutes, he was exposed to music and the impact was indelible. With his hundred pounds prize he bought a “really good drum kit” and began to make a name for himself around his home town of Timaru; which, as is usually the case in tales such as these, couldn’t hold him for long. In fact New Zealand didn’t hold him for that long.

There had been The Strangers and then Mee & the Others, a fiery little trio who decided to try their luck in England around 1966, becoming The New Nadir by the following year. Sharing an interesting distinction with The Beatles (they were also turned down by Decca’s infamous A&R manager Dick Rowe), the New Nadir commanded quite a following in Germany, Switzerland and France but never managed to make it onto disc (though Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti chased them for a bit). While the name actually means sinking to new depths, “everyone thought it was Indian so we made the most of it by cooking up a jazz rock sound with Indian sounds – thinks like Tobacco Road with a raga in the middle of it!” Brushes with fame were not only plentiful but intensely memorable. They played celebrated London clubs like the Speakeasy and the Marquee alongside the likes of Ten Years After, the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart, and then Rod’s next ensemble, The Faces. But the highlight was having a hirsute black American guitarist, new in town, politely asking if he could sit in with them one night at the Speakeasy. Jimi Hendrix borrowed a right-handed guitar and played it upside down and even played it with his teeth, flooring the Kiwi three. No career nadir there!

As the end of the decade approached, guitarist Ed Carter had gone to California to play for the Beach Boys, bassist Gary Thain had hooked up with the Keef Hartley Band on his way to a long haul stint with technically brilliant metal merchants Uriah Heep, and drummer Peter Dawkins decided to go home and try his luck as a record producer. “I wrote to every record company I knew, I had all the confidence in the world,” he says of his homecoming. This was a path that had appealed since he’d become aware of Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ and had, like the rest of us, luxuriated in George Martin’s remarkable Beatles sound. “I had a natural affinity for it; I never doubted I could do it,” he says simply.

Taken on by HMV (EMI) New Zealand as a producer, Peter got down to work and, like all house producers, was expected to handle anything that came through his door, with equal skill and enthusiasm - be it jazz, folk, nursery rhymes, Highland Pipe bands, comedy or (in the case of the excellent Hamilton County Bluegrass Band) bluegrass. But his heart was in pop and his second pop single became his first number one. The artist was called (well at least for the purposes of a record label) Shane and the song was an American non-hit penned by Grand Funk Railroad creator/manager Terry Knight that cashed in on the bizarre supposition that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1968 and been secretly replaced by a Scotsman called William Campbell. The lush and intriguing St. Paul stormed up the Kiwi charts, staying at the summit for six weeks, and in its wake came another half dozen chart toppers – the aforementioned Nature, Star Crossed Lovers by Craig Scott, Brandy by Bunny Walters, Pretty Girl and Aunty Alice Brought Us To This by Hogsnort Rupert and Dancing All Around The World by Blerta.

At the inaugural Loxene Golden Disc Awards, a dozen of the 14 nominations were for his releases or acts and it was very much like that in each subsequent year. Over three dizzying years Peter could claim three of his productions in the top twenty at pretty much any one time. It wasn’t long before he felt he was going around in circles (a situation even more pronounced than it can be in Australia) and so, in 1972, he transferred over to EMI Australia, in Sydney. Once again he was a general dogsbody, cutting an album with quasi-Santana band Pirana and the Testimonial live set for Spectrum/Indelible Murtceps. But it was his pop skills, his ear for the right song for the right singer that soon had him in the familiar terrain of the top forty.

Johnny Farnham had had solid hit runs with producers David McKay and Howard Gable but had not been in the top ten for two years when Peter took over in the studio. He went with a meaty cover of the David Cassidy hit Rock Me Baby that eclipsed the original and lodged itself well into the top ten. Into 1973 the Farnham/Dawkins hit string continued with Don’t You Know It’s Magic? and Everything Is Out Of Season. “He was a real treasure to work with” says Peter of ‘The Voice’, “and those hits really established me in Australia.” Interestingly, none made it as high on the national charts, as a glossy remake of the old Lesley Gore hit You Don’t Own Me by Osmonds-type Sydney sibling act The Ormsby Brothers, which peaked at #5. Peter now looks back on that single, engineered by former Beatles studio assistant and later Sherbet producer Richard Lush, as the best of his early Australian productions. “It really stood up.”

Since his days as leader of Somebody’s Image Russell Morris had also enjoyed the services of noted Australian producers – McKay, Gable and most memorably, Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum. Peter took him on near the end of his EMI contract and, having established just what song it was that stood the best chance of getting him into the top ten. Indeed, he was so committed to Wings Of An Eagle that, failing to get the drum sound he wanted at the session in Melbourne, he took the rare step of taking the tape up to a Sydney studio to finish, adding such musicians as Tim Gaze and Jimmy Doyle. It truly did soar, becoming established as one of Russell’s best-loved songs.

It was the era of the thoughtful, introspective singer-songwriter and there was one on every corner. Peter signed West Australian Ross Ryan after hearing what he recalls as a “great tape.” Ross was supporting Roy Orbison on a national tour and drawing raves in his own right. All the promise was distilled into the sturdy A Poem You Can Keep debut album, which charted better than any single lifted from it. With pop radio then the ultimate starmaker, Peter Dawkins set about doing what Peter Dawkins unquestionably did best. After asserting himself as required as to the song choice, he gave Ross, and himself, a number one with the stirring, compelling, impossible-to-ignore I Am Pegasus. The gold record plaque was presented to Ross by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and the hit is now seen as one of the premier Australian music moments in that patchy half decade before the arrival of the wham, glam, thank you ma’am Countdown era. An era in which Peter was destined to play a significant role.

An accomplished professional in the studio, Peter could – no doubt as a result of his HMV New Zealand training – craft a glossy, appealing sound as a matter of course, no matter what the nature of the act. He’d displayed that early in 1973, in between Morris and Ryan, when he’d been assigned the venerable Slim Dusty and effected a mighty change in the man’s recorded sound and chart fortunes. If you take Pub With No Beer to be a novelty track then Slim’s cut of Joy McKean’s fine original The Lights On The Hill was his first proper country hit. Encouraged to record it by the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band, it exposed him to a wider audience and helped overcome some of his own apprehensions. “I didn’t think it was my sort of song at all,” Slim once admitted, “it had too many words in it. I was a bush balladeer. Now it is so much a part of me that it closes almost every show.” And did so until his untimely passing.

Change was also effected in a major career when Peter took his leave of EMI and moved over to the independent Festival Records in 1975. Promises made were not kept so it was a brief stint, the highlight being the Million Dollar Bill album for Billy Thorpe. Since the end of the 60s Billy had been dishing out thunder with pony-tail flying, decibels soaring and crowds chanting Suck More Piss!! from the campfire-studded hills of rock festivals. Billy felt it was time for a change and radio certainly did, so a track as breezy, textured and engaging as It’s Almost Summer arrived at just the right time; in some ways providing a musical bridge to his three American ‘space rock’ albums which began rolling out at the end of the decade. Though only really a hit in Sydney, this sumptuous track still commands enormous affection. And deservedly so.

While at Festival Peter established a friendship with one Peter Karpin, another industry A&R figure known for his great ears (he would discover Men At Work, among others). He was going off to CBS Records (now Sony BMG) and Peter went along as well. Before leaving, he produced And When Morning Comes, the first album by emerging country singer-songwriter Graeme Connors – an interesting pointer to impressive things to come. There was a national Top 100 hit with the track Dakota, which can be said to have got his ball rolling.

Being a musician himself, Peter had an affinity with players and formed a bond with a number of them. He’d encountered fellow Kiwi Mike Rudd during the Spectrum/Murtceps project for EMI and before moving from there to Festival had signed and produced Ariel, enjoying a moderate 1973 hit with Jamaican Farewell and the album A Strange Fantastic Dream. “I used to send everything I did overseas, to see if anybody wanted to pick it up for foreign release,” he relates. “The first time I ever got a response was with Ariel. They were so keen at EMI that they invited us over to Abbey Road Studios to record the band’s second album Rock & Roll Scars. It was a great adventure but the record died a death, which was a real shame.”

Now CBS was keen, desperate even, to get a domestic artist roster happening and Peter recalls it being a case of “spend whatever you like” to achieve same. So one of his first signings was old mates Ariel and by 1976 they had their first Top 40 album, with Goodnight Fiona. Unfortunately, as far as hits went, it suffered the same fate as it predecessor. Similarly disappointing was singles and an album by the soulful, reggae-tinged Billy T, a magnificently musical outfit led by Ross Hannaford and Joe Creighton; and those by Rabbit, a band fronted by original AC/DC vocalist Dave Evans. Wildfire might have been the name of the Rabbit debut single but it did not describe the reception to it.

It was at Mike Rudd’s urging that Peter found himself at the Recovery Wine Bar that day in 1976, hearing those dazzling Paul Hewson originals, one after the other. Dragon came on board after a wee bit of subterfuge to get them out of their Polygram contract and, with Peter behind the sound desk, the hits flowed thick and fast.

The late 70s era of Australian contemporary music was dominated by Dragon’s fire and ice. They arrived after the mega-platinum pop burst of Sherbet, Skyhooks, TMG and Ol’55 and reigned almost supreme until the rise of deliberately working class bands like Cold Chisel, Australian Crawl and Men At Work. They were a union blessed with charisma, arrogant energy and an incisive yet disdainful rock vision. Their deftly structured music teetered between sweet lyricism and thinly veiled near-satanic sexuality, often projected from a chilling confrontational stance. They employed no gimmicks and made no promises. How one found them on a given night was basically how they felt that day. Thankfully, each performance was imbued with its own rare ingredients of mood and motivation, and there was rarely a truly poor one. Though with a brace of songs such as This Time, Get That Jive, April Sun In Cuba, Are You Old Enough, O Zambezi, Sunshine and Still In Love With You how could they miss?

Perhaps it was a shared heritage of sorts but Peter controlled and focused the tempestuous outfit in the studio, though when it came to getting them away internationally he couldn’t get on top of their self-destructive streak. He tells a story about how he went to a CBS International conference with high hopes of placing his other 1976 sensation – soft rock trio Air Supply (who he’d sent into the top ten with Love And Other Bruises) – only to see them stumble and fall when it came to presenting themselves to the roomful of jaded execs. Instead they said “We’ll take Dragon, and we’ll take you,” and Peter found himself an A&R Director for CBS’ new Portrait label, based in California, essentially to oversee the grand breakout of the band in the American market.

As to which band eventually stormed the world, I’ll leave it to your own recall, but after a year Peter was back in Sydney, working up a new roster of acts. Fellow local producer Charles Fisher (another in the very, very select “ears’ club) had fulfilled the promise that Peter had uncovered with Love And Other Bruises with a track called Lost In Love that had landed Air Supply a deal with Arista.

It was a classic Dawkins bounce-back and, once again, it had a New Zealand connection; something that had proven so effective for him so many times before. With Mi-Sex at the Civic it had been a case of “You guys have a deal, call me tomorrow.” Peter remembered Steve Gilpin as a solo star back home and, once again, most importantly, he heard songs that he could do things with, Big things as it happened. But You Don’t Care, Computer Games, People, Falling In And Out – about a dozen in total. Around the same time he gave Sharon O’Neill (another Tasman-crosser) her first substantial Australian hit, with How Do You Talk To Boys?; and Finch/Contraband (with AC/DC bassist Mark Evans) chartings with the hit Nothing To Hide and a self-titled album.

Just as George Martin had formed his own Air label, Peter established Giant Records in 1980, encouraged by Sony Music head Paul Russell. “Mushroom were doing so well and there was an increasing number of artists who wouldn’t be seen dead signing direct to a multi-national record company, even if that’s where they were in the end” Peter relates. “One of those was Matt Moffatt who had a band called Matt Finish”. A fragile soul not always easy to deal with, Moffatt was a pleasure to record but a nightmare to promote. With more commitment, he could have been much bigger but, even so, the superb Short Note album (from which, at one point, 2SM was playing 7 tracks) made top twenty and the title track single almost top twenty. There was a second Matt Finish album, Fade Away, on Giant before 1981 was over.

Notwithstanding Sony’s support in establishing the Giant label, Peter was back at his old stamping ground, EMI, in 1980, as A&R Director. “It was great having my own label” he explains, “but I just didn’t have the money or the support to keep it going.” One of the reasons for the re-affiliation with EMI was that he was moving in the orbit of its biggest local act. “I was approached by Australian Crawl, who were about to do their second album, Sirocco. They’d been tortured to death by David Briggs, or at least by his studio style, and needed a change. We got along incredibly well, it was all so comfortable. They played me twenty new songs, I gave them a list of the eleven I liked and we just said let’s go.”

Sirocco was the Crawl’s first national number one album – a multi-platinum long player so stuffed with quality songs and so appealing in its relaxed, enveloping sound that it could hardly have been anything else. Things Don’t Seem, Errol/Easy On You and Oh No Not You Again/Lakeside were the hits but for those who bought and loved it every track was a classic. Around the same time he signed Little Heroes, another impressive ‘song band’, and shot them into the top ten with the beguiling One Perfect Day and onto the national charts with an eponymous album. The eighties were looking very good indeed for the ambitious former drummer with a head full of sound.

Peter moved from A&R Director to the role of General Manager at EMI but corporate mind cogs can spin in strange ways and when their GM produced the top five hit Listening for Melbourne ‘hairdresser band’ Pseudo Echo at the end of 1983, even though it was for them, EMI boffins were not happy chappies at all. His management job there lasted just two years and, as a parting gift, he signed an act that had impressed him on a tape forwarded from a friend at Capitol Records in the U.S. Again there was a Kiwi connection. The name on the tape box was The Mullanes but by the time their debut album was released it would be Crowded House.

For a half a year in 1985 Peter pursued various independent projects and undertook a lecture tour of New Zealand for the NZ Phonographic Federation. He was, as he admits now, at somewhat of a loose end. Then in 1986 he formed an association with industry pioneer Ted Albert that enabled him to revive his Giant label (though the only act that appeared on it was DeMont who made it to just #98 on both the single and album charts, with Close To The Edge and Body Language respectively). Appointed General Manager of J. Albert & Son music publishers, Peter was with the Alberts group for just 18 months, a year of it running a London office, “It all came crashing down” he relates, “with the terrible, unexpected death of Ted Albert.”

That wasn’t the only thing that came crashing down in Peter Dawkins’ life. Back in Australia in 1990, he opened the Giant recording studio in the Sydney suburb of Balmain the following year. He signed Matt Finish for a new album but events overtook him and he became too ill to follow through. Before taking up the Alberts posting in England he had become aware of having acquired a disease that was not hereditary and of which he knew little. Incrementally, Parkinson’s began to take over Peter’s life - professional and personal. “In 1989 I was 42 years old, with so much I wanted to do and was able to do, and this thing stopped me in mid-air. For sixteen years I was unable to work at what I knew and what I loved.”

Far from inactive, Peter joined Parkinson’s NSW as its CEO and chaired the Golden Turkey Roast fundraising programme for eight very successful years. As the illness advanced Peter had to lay even that aside, being unable to continue after 2002. Three years later, with the situation more than dire, the generosity of industry members – notably SonyBMG CEO Denis Handlin – enabled Peter to undergo a new form of treatment, a largely untried operation that, in his case, had a remarkable efficacy.

But without funds or assets, the Dawkins family is unable to meet those and ongoing medical costs – both extensive. That is where the unique For Pete’s Sake album, made possible with the co-operation of a range of record companies, music publishers and artists, and your support, comes in. Few of your CD purchases will be for a cause as deserving and as important as this one.

More than a decade and a half on from that shocking diagnosis, Peter Dawkins has still got those ears. “It’s all back – the sense of smell, of taste, of hearing” he says, with undisguised relief. Listen to the concluding track - the only one recorded specifically for For Pete’s Sake – where Glenn Shorrock, one of his Golden Turkey Roast subjects and one of the few Oz Rock icons with whom he had not previously worked, shows us how effectively the man has picked up where he left off. His story is remarkable, as those who have seen it on ABC TV’s Australian Story will attest.

As to the rest of the package, well it’s just a sampling of what he’s done, with an emphasis on the recordings that have endured in our hearts and heads. Had there been more room there could have been a great deal more. Personally, I would have liked the luminous The Cicada That Ate Five Dock by Outline. I’ll certainly be arguing for it when volume two rolls around. And perhaps some of his lesser-known studio efforts, from artists who haven’t managed a mention in the notes so far. Let’s see, there’s Kerrie Biddell (oh that version of Jimmy Webb’s Parenthesis!) .NZ’s Headband, The Tom Thumb, Lutha and Pink Flamingos, MEO-245, Ves-8, Debra Byrne, Crossfire, Mark Holden, Avion, Waves, Star Suite, Finger Guns, Margaret Moir, Denise Drysdale, Images, Nu Genes, Four Kinsmen, Vicki O’Keefe. And did I mention .........

GLENN A. BAKER
Sydney, January 2005

For Pete's Sake Dinner - The Pictures!

Below are some photos of the For Pete's Sake industry dinner held at Star City, Sydney in 2006. Photos courtesy (and copyright) Bob King. More to come!

ABOVE - Ariel - of sorts!

ABOVE - From left - Todd Hunter, Paul Dawkins, David Arguis, Alex Dawkins - performing the Matt Finish song "Short Note"

ABOVE - Peter Dawkins in front of the blue poster, in case people don't know where they are...

ABOVE - Ross Ryan, performing "I Am Pegasus"

ABOVE - The Idea Of North, performing "Love and Other Bruises" by Air Supply.

ABOVE - Dragon Mark 2 - with Mark Williams.

Stay tuned for more photos...

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