Ahead of a rare live appearance, Richard Lockwood from seminal Sydney act Tully speaks to DOUG WALLEN about their landmark Chapter reissue, their approach to improv and what they did to keep the cast of ‘Hair’ on their toes.

Themed around Captain Cook’s goal of observing Venus’ transit 200 years before, ‘Love 200’ was a revolutionary 1970 concert piece fusing classical music and free-form rock. For the unique project, composer Peter Sculthorpe enlisted conductor John Hopkins; singer Jeannie Lewis; the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; and the improvisational rock band Tully, who at the time consisted of singer Terri Wilson, organist Michael Carlos, drummer Robert Taylor, reeds player Richard Lockwood and bassist Ken Firth. Tully had already achieved legendary status in Sydney as the house band of the Darlinghurst venue Adam’s Apple. On the other end of the spectrum, Tully had spent six months as the backing band for the Sydney run of the musical Hair.

‘Love 200’ was a bold move even by the adventurous standards of 1970. It’s a crazed yet elegant piece of music, with colliding instruments and tastes all driving towards a hard-earned climax. Like any concert piece worth a damn, it’s very much an artefact of its time, embracing the possibilities of improvised psychedelic and prog music without neglecting the powers of classical. Thankfully it’s been preserved and newly re-released by the Melbourne label Chapter Music along with Tully’s 32-minute set for Sydney’s Sight & Sounds Of 1969 festival the previous year. Tully went on to record several albums and splinter into various directions, but Chapter’s Live At Sydney Town Hall 1969-70 captures the band in mind-blowing form before all of that.

How much did you improvise outside the written score for ‘Love 200’?
A lot. That was why Peter wanted us for it, because we were capable of doing that.

And he encouraged some of the orchestral players to improvise as well?
He did. He had a little bit of difficulty there at first, I think. [Laughs] Because it just wasn’t a common thing then. At least not with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Do you have any specific memories of the ‘Love 200’ rehearsals?
Well, it was a long time ago. I did jog my memory when I was writing the liner notes. We had a lot of trouble with the orchestra because they said we were too loud. Peter got a lot of flak from them. On the other hand, they did recognise our musicality.

Did Peter assume the role of mediator at times?
Well, I don’t know about that. He was just in the role of being a composer. Obviously he was there to answer questions. Yeah, a mediator … I guess you could say he did mediate. He was very pally with the conductor, John Hopkins, and the conductor was very sympathetic with the whole idea.

This might be a strange question, but did the fact that you played clarinet and flute in Tully make it any easier to pull off this fusion of classical music and rock?
I was classically trained, at least on flute and clarinet. On saxophone I didn’t have any classical training in the same sense. We were recognised as musicians capable of reading music and being able to do that piece. Essentially, in Sydney at the time we were the only band capable of doing it, I think. Who else was going to do it, as far as popular music goes? There were jazz musicians who of course read music, but in the pop world I don’t think … except perhaps for Max Merritt & The Meteors. They were all very well trained musicians, but their style of music didn’t fit the piece. And because we were improvising and that’s what Peter wanted to do.

“It was extraordinary that we achieved such a meteoric rise, because nobody could dance to the music or anything. Tully was a complete child of the times.”

And you improvised a bit as the backing bad for Hair.
The only improvising we did [for that] was for a piece that called for a traditional rock‘n’roll blow-out. And we used to mess with the score. But we used to get in trouble for doing that. We used to play little musical jokes on the cast. I remember I played a piccolo introduction for this march. From where we were seated, you could see the cast behind the curtain. They would start marching on stage to the beat of the piccolo. I sometimes would just drop half a beat so they’d all get messed up. [Laughs] They’d come on stage stumbling. I don’t think that went down very well with the cast. But it was just to ease the monotony, I suppose, of doing the same thing night in night out … It was extraordinary that we achieved such a meteoric rise, because nobody could dance to the music or anything. Tully was a complete child of the times. [Laughs]

How indicative is the Sight & Sounds Of 69 set of Tully’s live show at the time?
That’s a very good example of a Tully concert, or at least half-an-hour of it. We only got half-an-hour because of the reel-to-reel tape. We didn’t record it. That was Kevin Kearney, who produced Sight & Sounds Of 69 and booked us. He recorded it and preserved it for 40 years, thank god. But yes, it is very much like a Tully concert, except it lacks the songs. I think what happened was the singer, Terry Wilson, got so disillusioned with waiting to sing that he left the stage and the auditorium. So he wasn’t there when we started to play the introduction to the first song. So we just had to turn that into something else. It doesn’t feature my electric clarinet playing, because that came a bit later. That was another dimension when I started playing that. That was electrified and went through a modified bass amplifier.

How much influence did Indian religion and music have on the band?
Well, we were interested in all forms of music, except medieval. The reason I say that is that somebody said to me some time ago that she wished she could hear that lovely medieval music Tully used to play. And my only reply was: “Well, that’s great, but we never played medieval music.” [Laughs] Tully played an impression of whatever came into our heads. So we played an impression of jazz music, an impression of classical music. So really I would say Tully was, as far as art goes, impressionistic.

I read that Tully was the first Aussie band to use a Moog.
That’s right. That was due to Michael [Carlos]’s obsession with that kind of electronic keyboard and computers. We now heads up a division of Fairlight Music. He started working for them way back then and still works for them.

I also read that you had your own six-episode ABC series.
Yes, that was called Fusions. It was our show and we had guests on. We’d play four pieces or something and have guests we’d then accompany. Only one of those shows survived because the ABC threw out and destroyed all that stuff, unbelievably. But I do have a copy of that [remaining] show and hope to release it soon through Chapter Music. Wendy Saddington was the guest artist for that show.

Is it right that you used to play woodwinds while sitting in a big wooden chair live?
[Laughs] Yeah, well, y’know, we all had our fads. I used to like to have a big chair on stage. And I never wore shoes at the time. I mean on stage; I wore shoes in the street. [Laughs] We had those influences of the time. In the late ’60s and even from the mid-’60s, the attention of the youth turned towards India, much to the consternation of our parents. They were gobsmacked. Of course, there was a reason for it: we were all seeking something more to life than what our parents were trudging along doing.

Going back to ‘Love 200’, it seems like Jeannie Lewis was just getting started with her singing career when she did that.
I don’t know about that…

Well, on her website it’s the first thing she has listed in the timeline of her career.
I will say this about Jeannie’s performance on ‘Love 200’: The song she sings in the middle is the highlight of the track for me. It’s beautiful.

Just finally, did you learn certain things from doing ‘Love 200’ that you could apply later in your career?
No, I would say not. Speaking personally, by the time we were doing those concerts, except for developing the electric clarinet I had pretty well mastered what I was doing. Definitely as a saxophonist I had mastered what I wanted to do. I think it’s quite evident on the Sights & Sounds recording. I don’t know if you’ve looked at the Tully website but I wrote the site, so on the index page I put a magpie’s warbling. It starts playing as the page opens. I put it there because I think it really illustrates what we were trying to do: Get beyond melody as such at the time and just play sounds. I definitely mastered what I was doing on the saxophone by that time.

I was just curious whether it had been a learning experience.
No, I had learned what I had to learn by then.

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Richard Lockwood will perform live as part of “Always Moving” at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne tomorrow (July 14). For more information click here.