When it comes to being the ‘King of Pop’ many are called, but few are chosen. By 1978 the title belonged to John Paul Young. JPY had a terrific run of hits that were penned by Harry Vanda and George Young. Vanda & Young first hit the big time with the Easybeats. When their own pop dreams soured they decided to keep writing hits for other people. John Paul Young had a swag of them with I Hate The Music, Yesterday’s Hero, Keep On Smiling and Love Is In The Air. Vanda and Young also had success with Stevie Wright, Ted Mulry, Grace Jones and their own Flash and the Pan. Now JPY is back on the road with the famed Allstar Band to perform and to talk about Harry and George’s song craft and enduring legacy. Sean Sennett caught up with JPY.

Your first Vanda and Young hit was ‘Pasadena’. There’s something very emotional about that song. It pulls the heart strings. Do you feel that when you sing it?

Yes, I do. George [Young] and Harry [Vanda], they’re just such good writers. I suppose the reason why it pulls the heartstrings is because I’m singing exactly on top of George Young. That’s actually a duet you’re listening to.

He’s right under you on the track?

He’s under me all the way because that track is actually the demo they sent from London, and every time they tried to rerecord it, they lost the magic. Simon Napier-Bell was the one who said you’re chasing something you’ve already got. So he said we’ll grab another voice and put it on top, and so that was my mission in life, to take that thing home, and copy George exactly, so that he couldn’t be heard, really. But at the end, the last chorus, I didn’t sing it. George is there singing it on his own.

“I Hate the Music”  is a rock song, but it also has an emotional push and pull in the lyrics. 

Yes, I mean there’s always that with them. The story goes with “I Hate The Music,” my keyboard player “Pig” Morgan, when we walked into the studio one day and George said, “How’s the music going?” “Pig” said, “We hate the music.” He’s grabbed that little title and wove a whole story around it. That’s the talent of the guy, well, both of them. They just know.

I sang the vocal part in the studio and all I could hear in the cans was a banjo line (laughs). I was on tour when the cassette arrived and they’d put the fanfare at the front … I heard it and fell off my chair.

You were obviously signed on the strength of “Pasadena.” When the songs were floating around the studio at Alberts in King Street, were you ever thinking I’d like to get my hands on that one, and it went somewhere else?

No, not really. It was never like that because George and Harry weren’t even around when I did “Pasadena.” They were still in London, and I really didn’t have a career before “Pasadena.” I was a singer in a band and that was it.

Were you doing Superstar around that time?

It all happened at the same time. I just started in a musical called Jesus Christ Revolution, which failed, and it lasted six weeks. I was back in Sydney in January. “Pasadena” hadn’t got any air play by that stage. It was released in December. I was back in Sydney in the January, and I got a telegram to audition for Superstar in very late January. I joined the cast in February. I think “Pasadena” started getting airplay early March. Everything happened at once.

Combustion. With George and Harry — were you a fan of the Easybeats when you were a kid?

Absolutely, yeah. I was a big Beatles fan, but they were like my own personal Beatles in Australia.

Did you feel intimidated when you first started working with George and Harry?

I don’t know about intimidated, but certainly I was in awe of them. The most marvellous thing is they are just two regular blokes. We all came from the same background. We’re all immigrant kids that spent time in migrant hostels and stuff.

Did you see the Easybeats play live?

No, I never did, but I’ve seen them perform live on television.  That gives you a very good insight into what kind of outfit they were. They were just so close-knit. They were a band. They were basically sitting on top of each other. You rarely ever saw that band spread out. They were always on top of each other.

What was the studio like in King Street? It’s obviously long gone now.

Have you ever been to a disco in the ’70s? They were kind of like just black carpet everywhere. It was a kind of homemade professional sort of an outfit. I don’t think everybody knew exactly what they were doing in those days as far as sound went. It was a bit of experimentation. If someone was walking around with a can of beer no one minded.

John Brewster [The Angels] told me a while ago that George called him into a room one day and said, “Listen to this rhythm track we’ve just recorded,” and it’ was “Love Is In The Air.” He said they had all these tape recorders all joined up together so they could keep that long going. It sounded very experimental.

[Yeah]  when George and Harry were living in London, and basically scratching hard after the Easybeats broke up, they used to go around to EMI and into the rubbish bins and pull bits of tape out. They would just use bits of tape. They were the first guys I ever knew that actually invented the drum loop. They used to get pieces of tape, put them together, and loop them in a continuous loop on a tape recorder. They had this constant beat there that they didn’t have to worry about, because they couldn’t afford to get a drummer in to sit there and play. The whole concept of MIDI, George and Harry almost invented that, when you listen to things like “I Hate The Music,” of all these instruments playing exactly the same thing, right on top of each other, except they did it the hard way.

So when you cut something like “Love Is In The Air,” it’s obviously a remarkable song. It still resonates today. At the time, did it feel like a ‘moment’?

Yeah, it felt different to me. It was just something special. I mean, there’s no way you could’ve predicted what it’s done. There’s no way we could’ve predicted that, but it did feel special to me. But then again, on the other hand, my taste in music is so wide and varied, there’s not much I don’t like. I’ve been wrong many times, but this one really did feel like something special.

I remember I took it back to my mum and dad’s place in Fairfield, and they were there with their friends who were of the same age. I suppose they would’ve been in their mid-fifties. And as soon as I put it on, my mother and her friend got up and started dancing. To me, that was like — they just said, “This is good. This is good.” It transcended the age, straightaway.

JPY & The Allstar Band’s Vanda & Young Songbook Tour starts in Brisbane on March 24 and travels around the country. Tour dates are here: http://www.teamworkproductions.com.au