Carnival of Soul

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By Daniel Keane for RetroFocus

Before there was triple j, and before there was Countdown, there was Six O’Clock Rock.

The show was ABC TV’s first youth-oriented music program, and the first to broadcast rock ‘n’ roll music on Australian television screens.

During its heyday, it had a reputation for being risqué and edgy.

Its star and major host was Australian rock legend Johnny O’Keefe, and it helped launch the careers of many other musicians.

“All the kids watched Six O’Clock Rock. It was iconic,” recalled Frank Arnold who, as a 22-year-old, worked on the show as a stage hand.

“It was live and it was full of energy.

“Rock ‘n’ roll was very much a part of our lives as young people, we were just doing what was hip at the time.”

The hour-long show was first broadcast 60 years ago today, at 6:00pm on February 28, 1959.

Its impact was immediate — other networks had “more sedate” programs with more traditional styles of music but Six O’Clock Rock was, as its name suggested, mostly about rock (as well as folk and jazz).

To teenagers, it presented a refreshing alternative to the schmaltzy crooners and big band music favoured by their parents.

“That was the music our mums and dads listened to — their music was Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra,” Mr Arnold said.

“It was exciting, the rock ‘n’ roll period. The energy and excitement and music were wonderful.”

Ciggies, socks and the ‘wild one’

Six O’Clock Rock was an unusually progressive program even if, by today’s standards, it might seem quaint.

Artists appearing on the show had names like The Delltones, The Allen Brothers, Col Joye and the Joy Boys, Digger Revell, Johnny Devlin and Lonnie Lee.

In 1959, Australian society was very conservative — Robert Menzies had been prime minister since 1949, and the White Australia policy remained firmly in place.

“The naughtiest thing you could do was smoke a cigarette,” Mr Arnold joked.

But Six O’Clock Rock featured many female performers, as well as a smaller number of musicians from non-European backgrounds such as Indigenous guitarist Jimmy Little.

Sexual liberation was just around the corner — sometimes literally so.

Mr Arnold said “hanky panky” involving performers backstage was not unheard of, even when the show was live.

“The guys performing used to put a pair of folded up socks down their underpants to give a bit of a bulge,” Mr Arnold said.

But working on the show was also great fun, with the live broadcast creating an electric atmosphere.

There was often so much noise — from the musicians, and from the screaming young fans who turned out to watch them at the ABC’s Gore Hill studios in Sydney — one floor manager resorted to unusual lengths to protect his hearing.

“Because of the incredible noise of the bands in the studio and the kids carrying on, he used to wear headphones that were from a bomber pilot,” Mr Arnold said.

“Very often things went wrong, mainly because the studio was packed to the rafters by kids wanting to come and watch the show be put to air.”

Mr Arnold said Johnny O’Keefe’s moniker “the wild one” was not ill-deserved, with the boyish frontman often unleashing his cheeky wit.

“He was very naughty, he was very risqué. He would do and say things that you would never do or say in company,” he said.

“Johnny O’Keefe was not what you would call ‘ABC fodder’.

“The ABC was discovering how to entertain people in the early days of television. They were trying things that had never been done before in this country.”

From rock ‘n’ roll to Beatlemania

Billy Connolly once joked that, in the first half of the 1950s, “the world was beige and the music was crap”. Then rock ‘n’ roll came along “and saved us all”.

Six O’Clock Rock occurred during a transitional time in popular music, coming after the birth of rock but before Beatlemania took music in new directions.

Change was in the air — the drabness of the 1950s was ending, but the swinging sixties had not yet properly begun.

For three years, until late 1961, Six O’Clock Rock was the best option for young people looking to see their pin-ups performing.

But eventually it waned.

After a serious car accident, Johnny O’Keefe defected to Channel 7 to host a show bearing his own name.

Rock ‘n’ roll went out of fashion, succumbing to the new Merseybeat sound associated with The Beatles, who would triumphantly tour Australia in 1964.

The last episode of Six O’Clock Rock went to air on December 23, 1961.

But its legacy lives on. Frank Arnold went on to forge a distinguished career as a drama director, working on dozens of productions.

Now aged 81, he looks back on Six O’Clock Rock with nostalgia and fondness.

“I was having a conversation with a colleague over a beer one night, years and years and years later,” he said.

“Here’s me having directed all these shows, all these dramas, and he was more impressed that I had worked on Six O’Clock Rock than anything else.”

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, music, music-industry, pop, popular-culture, community-and-society, television, broadcasting, television-broadcasting, abc, adelaide-5000, sa, sydney-2000, nsw, australia, gore-hill-2065