Ross Wilson is on a roll. The singer/songwriter is staking a claim for being the
hardest working man in Australian showbiz. His current ’50 Years of Hits’ tour
will see him clock up an astonishing seventy plus shows around the country,
many of them ‘sold out’.

Wilson’s enduring popularity is no real surprise. It’s all there on his CV: he
fronted Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock, produced Skyhooks and has made a
slew of acclaimed solo records. His musical origin story is fascinating.

“Next year is sixty years since my school band the Pink Finks started,” Wilson
begins on the line from Melbourne. “When you start out in teenage bands, it
all happens pretty quick. In the Pink Finks we played covers of blues songs
and R&B songs, just like the Stones did because that’s the era we were in.
It didn’t take long for Wilson to start writing his own songs, many are part of
our cultural DNA. Try these for size, ‘Eagle Rock’, ‘Come Back Again’, ‘Hi
Honey Ho’, ‘Cool World’, ‘A Touch of Paradise’. The list goes on.

“After the Pink Finks, I started writing songs for my other band, the Part
Machine” he continues. “Some of the songs were terrible and some were not
bad. It didn’t take long to go from1965 to 1970 when Daddy Cool formed. I’d
advanced to the stage where I wrote ‘Eagle Rock’ and ‘Come Back Again’
and stuff like that. It happened quite quickly, but when you’re young it feels
like a long time. Now, the older I get, the faster it goes … which is
unfortunate.”

In the 1970’s Wilson was a huge influence on other emerging Australian
artists. “Daddy Who?”, Daddy Cool’s debut, became the highest selling
album, ever, by an Australian artist. Wilson also impacted on Elton John who
sang his praises continually and bought an arm full of records to take home
for friends in England. At one point, John tried to talk Ringo Starr into
covering ‘Come Back Again’. More recently, on Joe Cocker’s final record,
Cocker recorded a song Wilson wrote with the Angels Rick Brewster, ‘I Come
In Peace’.

“That was pretty good,” admits Wilson now of the Cocker cover. “Sometimes
people call up and say someone has recorded your song, which doesn’t
happen all that often. Some of them get recorded frequently because they’re
like old, classic sort of ones. But other ones, like Joe Cocker and ‘I Come in
Peace,’ well that song was only ever on my solo album. At that stage, Joe
was the first person other than me to bring it out.

“He started opening his concerts with it. There’s a good YouTube clip of him
doing it on a German awards show. They’ve all got black tie and everything in
the audience, and he comes out and sings one of his classics, and then he
went ‘This is my new song,’ and they gave him a lifetime achievement award.
That was pretty cool.”

Always pushing forward, Wilson recently released an EP of new material,
“She’s Stuck On Facebook All The Time”. His bio calls the collection a
‘modern day tragicomedy in the blues genre’. Once Wilson landed on the title,
he knew he had a song in the making.

“I was driving around in my car and I started thinking about the song,” he
explains of the writing process. “Driving in the car by yourself is a great place
to come up with ideas. When I got to the gig I was going to, I just wrote the
words down. But, It’s already out of date because I sing, in the second verse,
“she starts today on twitter/moves to instagram.” So when I sing it live I’ve
changed it to TikTok… I can’t sing “X” (laughs). That’s how fast things
change.”

Sean Sennett

This story first appeared in InReview and used under creative commons.

Ross Wilson’s tour with his band the Peaceniks, includes material from
Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock to now. Tickets are currently on sale  for his State Theatre Show (Sydney) on September 28, 2024.