Memories on Mondays.

G'Day,
I hope this fine weekend finds you well and enjoying the short time off before the new week starts.
Here is my entry into this week's Memories on Monday prompt. You can see the rest on my side bar link of the same name. have a read and join in the write up if you feel like it.
Since my last post was about the fun I had at a concert last week I thought I would write about earlier concerts I have attended over the years. Really thee have not been that many, I am pretty quiet.
Anyway....
My first memory of a concert was when I was probably 8 years old. It was at the Darwin Botanical gardens and our small school, Larrakeyah primary, all attended a display of ballet and a show with Rolf Harris. I know I had probably gone to shows with my parents earlier, being an army brat, but this one is the first I remember. I remember that the ballet company got a few of the older, bigger boys up on the stage and they had to catch the ballerinas as they jumped into their arms. I thought it was amazing that they didn't fall in a heap and of course, them being bigger boys they were all very proud of themselves too, coming into close contact with such pretty gals at their pre-teen stage of life. There was much applause and patting of backs afterward.
Apart from school concerts the next one of note that I remember would have been when we were living in Sydney. My Dad had just returned from Vietnam and it was the very early 1970's. The opera house was new and just opened and my Dad got tickets to a show there. It was a mixed type performance with some classical and pop music. The artist I remember was a funny little bloke who had a few songs on the radio at the time. His stage name was William Shakespeare. I remember that concert because it had audience participation that I enjoyed. William Shakespeare had a sing along thingy going on with the audience and then told us all "Now you can say that you have sung in the Sydney Opera house and people will think you are famous". I was probably 11 or 12 yrs old at the time. Funny what your memory holds on to and lets go of isn't it? So yep! I have sung in the Sydney Opera house when it was brand new. I have been inside there quite a few times for tours and shows and I still marvel at it's architecture.
We went over to Singapore and lived there for a bit over a year after that. When we came home to Australia there was so much good fun music around and as I was living in Sydney there were lots of concerts to go to. You of course wouldn't have heard of the bands but boy they were fun times. We even had a few good bands in the school hall.
The boys school and the girls school were across the oval from one another and a few times a year we would be allowed to go into the Randwick boys school hall and have an afternoon dance. We sat and looked at the boys from across the hall and longed to dance, to meet a boy, and talk to him, to have a boy like us. But most of us were too shy. Anyway if you knew any of the bands around Sydney in those days, we had the La De Dah's play there for us. Some of its members went on to other bands and became well known. That was fun.
I guess you would have had to be around in those days and know the Aussie bands, to know whom I am talking about.
While I went to school there I found an earlier friend who now lived on the western side of Sydney at Doonside. I think it was at the Bankstown or Blacktown showgrounds that I attended my next concert with her. May German was a girl that I had befriended in year 7 at high school when she was living in the migrant hostel at East hills, after she had migrated here from England.. We went to this concert with some of her friends. I was probably 14 at the time. I remember seeing fun pop bands that were around and just starting out in those days. Sherbet, Skyhooks, ACDC, Daddy Cool, Brain Cadd were there, and this woman who vamped it up called Madam Lash who ran half naked around the stage with a whip. Ha ha, I wonder what she looks like now.There were others as well whom I can't remember.
But Skyhooks. wow, I loved them...instantly! They were my favorite band from then on. And I loved ACDC too, they became world famous. Still going strong except without their original front man Bon Scott. What a cheeky little bugger he was, ha ha, sad to lose him though as he joined the list of stars who succumbed to fame and the rock and roll lifestyle.
That was great fun, but I got sooooo sunburned that I blistered, there was no shade and in those days sun screen creams were very limited and the ones that were available gave me a rash so I wouldn't use them. Of course I hated hats too and it was too hot to cover up.
When we came back to Sydney after being in Singapore we eventually ended up back at our old address in Waverly which was a great spot for teenagers (just a few minutes walk from the eastern suburbs beaches) to be and went back to the same school. I made a new lot of friends, one of whom, Anna O'Hanion was my best school friend with whom I attended a few other fun concerts. We went to the Hordern Pavillion together and saw Skyhooks several times. One night we even talked to boys. Oh no....hahaha. Anna's father would have never let us go anywhere again of he knew.
I remember one concert we had gone to there, the support act for Skyhooks was a young red headed girl who was probably only 18 or 19 at the time. I still like her and have an album of her music on my ipod that I listen to at work. At the Skyhooks concert she got up to do her act, and as a group of buoyed, over enthusiastic young teenagers, we all kept shouting out "Skyhooks, Skyhooks" and she tried to sing her songs but gave up and left the stage in tears. Poor girl. Her name? Renee Geyer.
At another Skyhooks concert we attended together one of the support acts , I can't remember who they were, sang this song. Hahah. The punch line of it was "Little pink spiders in my brain and I wish I was sane like you" hahaha, at the end of the song they threw rubber spiders out the the crowd. I got one of them as it landed near me and slipped it into my bag. When I took it out in the light to look at it later it was painted with bright pink oil based paint, that was still wet and I got it all over me. Yeah real funny guys. A bit of fore thought might have been nice, but we laughed anyway. Also at that concert Skyhooks had some stage props that were pretty amusing. They used to have a song called Smut, I won't tell you what it was about. But up on the stage they had 2 giant phallus made of Styrofoam or something and during the song they exploded showering everyone with twisties. Funny. Twisties are a sort of cheese flavored pastry snack food, in the same vein as potato crisps. Hahaha. So when mixed on the floor with pink oil painted spiders. Hmmm. Poor cleaners.
We soon moved back to Wagga and when I started school there I tried to talk to the kids there about the music and bands that I had loved, and being a country town , all I got for my attempts were blank stares and nobody knew who they were...yet.
Music started filtering out to the country areas and concerts started happening with some of the bands I knew in Sydney. Anyway in the mid 70's many bands were making their names and went to the country areas to play and become better known. In Wagga one night I went to a concert in the picture theater with a band called "The Little River Band" They later became international as did INXs . I also got to see another band that went global called "Crowded House".
After I was married my husbands favorite performer was , and still is , Bob Dylan. We went to Melbourne to see him, that was many years ago and he has been to Australia several times since then. I also went to see Natalie Cole in Sydney, at the Capitol theater. She was good but I was a bit disappointed because she was so perfect in her performance that the whole show might have been pre-recorded and mimed. It sounded exactly as you would expect to hear from a recording. I still listen to her music and sing along. She is a beautiful singer.
Then not so long ago, last year Pete and I went down to Sydney and saw James Taylor and Carole King. They are so good, still.
That is about it until last Sunday when we went to "a day on the green" in Bowral. I wrote about that in my last post.
Good Night.
Love Linda.