2015's Best Music Doco Explores The People Behind AC/DC's Rise To Global Fame

In the title of Blood & Thunder — Paul Clarke’s two-part documentary about the rise of the Alberts music empire in Australia from the ‘60s and beyond — the term ‘blood’ refers to the familial bonds (both literal and figurative) between the people in the organisation, and the term ‘thunder’ relates to the primal rock’n’roll that they produced en masse for decades. Ted Albert may have been born into a musical dynasty, but as popular culture morphed and Australia suddenly found itself bereft of its own musical voice, it was his vision and determination which paved the way for bands such as The Easybeats, AC/DC, Rose Tattoo and The Angels to not only forge a national sound but also drag it kicking and screaming to the world at large.

Ted Albert joined the longstanding family business J Albert & son — which would eventually become Albert music — back in the ‘50s, and as rock’n’roll grew in global popularity and began becoming ubiquitous he spied an opportunity in the hitherto reactive Australian market to actually grow our own brand of Aussie rock’n’roll. At his behest Albert Productions was established in 1964 to sign and develop Australian talent — with Ted as their first Managing Director — and their first signing was a little band called Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, showing an affinity for the larrikin streak prevalent in Aussie rock’n’roll from the get-go. This was confirmed in time by Albert Productions’ ongoing association with bands such as The Easybeats, AC/DC, Rose Tattoo and The Angels (although they did also have a lot of success in the more commercial realms with acts like John Paul Young and Ted Mulry). Albert also nurtured the indubitable talents of legendary songwriting and production team Harry Vanda and George Young (who cut their teeth in The Easybeats), giving his business the complete package to tackle the nation’s industry head on.

“He was a visionary, but I think the beauty of the man was that he was so understated."

“He was a visionary, but I think the beauty of the man was that he was so understated, and he was always behind the scenes,” explains Fifa Riccobono, who started at Alberts in her teens as a secretary and eventually became one of the first female label CEOs in history. “He never went to business lunches and didn’t socialise really, but he was really dedicated when he was in the office with everyone that worked there with him and all of the artists that were signed to him. He was always approachable but in a very, very honest and sincere way — there were never any airs about the man at all.”

Blood & Thunder portrays Albert as a suit who loved music much more than money.

“I think if he’d loved money we wouldn’t have ended up with the company that we had,” Riccobono laughs, “but he loved music so we ended up fabulous music and money so it was more than a win/win situation.”

It must have been an incredible experience for Riccobono, starting out at Alberts as a teenager and working up the corporate ladder during the halcyon days until she was actually running the massively successful business herself.

“It was so unexpected and it was certainly not calculated — I hadn’t walked in and said, ‘I want to make this my career’ or ‘This is what I think I want to do’, I went in as a secretary and just couldn’t believe that I was in a company that played music and had music playing all the time,” she recalls. “The chap that I worked for was a Professional Manager [named Henry Adler] and he played music all day because he transcribed all the songs and did the sheet music and the song folios and wrote orchestrations, and I used to go home and think, ‘I work for a man who gets paid to play music!’ And he loved it! He loved being there, so the atmosphere was always a very positive and lively one. That was in the very straight formal side of the publishing company, and then when we started the label — when Ted really went full bore into the label with George and Harry — to be there right from the outset without realising what we were venturing into was incredible. There was no manual or anything to tell us what to do, we were flying by the seat of out pants most of the time, but we knew we had good music so once you’ve got that you just make other things happen. But there were no rulebooks and no manuals and no budgets and no ‘This is what I think you should achieve’, you just went out there and tried to achieve as much as you possibly could. It’s a very different formula to what’s out there used today.

“There was a definite family atmosphere amongst the Alberts, but Ted treated everybody else within the company as family. When the Youngs came along — well there were three of them so they were family already — but because Ted, George, Harry and myself all started in the early days you get to be very close and protective of each other. You almost have to say things — you know what each other is thinking — and everyone’s really attuned to each other. I guess one of the beauties of an independent is that because everyone was so busy looking forward, nobody ever had to watch their back because we were all pushing in the same direction. We were all trying to push forward. Whereas with a lot of the majors people were more concerned about whether they still have a job or not or whether someone’s trying to get their job. We were just so in-tune with each other that nobody ever thought anything except making everything work, so from that aspect we were very much a family.”

"There was no manual or anything to tell us what to do, we were flying by the seat of out pants most of the time, but we knew we had good music."

Although that’s not to say that Ted Albert gifted any free rides, you still had to be on top of your game to be afforded such freedoms.

“I suppose if you weren’t doing your job you would be moved on — there’s no question about that,” Riccobono smiles. “Ted wasn’t a pushover — he was a very gentle man but he wasn’t a pushover. If you weren’t doing your job you wouldn’t have been there, he wouldn’t have had second thoughts about saying it was over, but because we all worked so well together it was never a thought. I have to say that it was Ted — and George and Harry — who encouraged me along all the way, from doing what I was doing in PR and then being A&R manager and label manager; they were the ones who pushed and made me take on more responsibility because they felt I could do it. I was always reluctant because I didn’t want to let anybody down, but it was their encouragement that made it work for me.”

Female company heads remain unfathomably rare in this day and age, so naturally during Riccobono’s ascent she was pretty much traversing uncharted waters in the music industry.

“I was actually quite surprised to find out that I was the first female CEO — that really surprised me — but within my company, within Alberts, I never had this issue because there wasn’t that glass ceiling that people refer to in other companies,” she offers. “When I had to go out and fight for what we wanted, I could do it so well because I knew firstly that we had something fantastic to sell, and secondly that I had Ted’s backing one-hundred percent. I think that that’s what’s missing a lot — there are a lot of women out there who are great workers and have some really good ideas and who are very creative, and they’re probably getting somewhere but it’s always been a very male-dominated industry and I think that glass ceiling does exist in a lot of those companies. Luckily that didn’t exist in my company so I was able to receive a lot of the opportunities that I did.”

And Riccobono certainly grasped those opportunities with both hands, getting to experience virtually every facet of the music industry as she worked her way up the ranks, and also experiencing the career arcs of individual artists at very close range.

“Starting out from the very first artist who ever walked into my office, which was Ted Mulry, and he walked in looking like he was straight off a bulldozer or a back-hoe,” she remembers. “He came in with his carrot-red hair and he had a sheepskin vest on, and he had a sheet of music under his arm and said he wanted to see the A&R manager, and when you look at it from that perspective you’re right — I was there from the very first inkling of something. He came in with a piece of sheet music, the A&R guy at the time was Tony Geary and he went to Ted [Albert], they thought it was a great song — Ted [Mulry] had never intended to record his own song, he’d written the song but they encouraged him to record it and it went really well. So I worked with Ted Mulry from the very start — I went to his very first gig when he had three people in the room, I did all the artwork for the first single and then took it to radio and was involved in pushing it. So yes, right from the beginning from when he walked in the door to the song being recorded to the sheet music being done and then going to gigs — I was right across all aspects of it. And that was the same with nearly all of the artists.

“One of the things that seemed rewarding to me, was that we started out in ‘cockroach castles’ — whenever we went away anywhere we’d always stay in two-star hotels with no locks on doors and stuff like that — and as the bands got more successful we all sort of went up the ladder together, so when they got to five-stars so did I. Travelling with the bands was great — I travelled with all of the bands on tour quite a lot, and that was mainly just making sure that all the boxes were crossed to get the promotions done properly, because the worst thing you can do is invest in a tour and not have it properly promoted. If no people turn up people think it’s a failure, but it’s not a failure because someone’s let the band down in some way or another. I used to always do my utmost to make sure that all of the necessary support that surrounded a release was there, and we were very good at it.”

"I have a real affection for all of the songs that the guys have written over the years."

At the risk of playing favourites, was there a particular act who Riccobono enjoyed the rise of especially or had the most fun working with?

“It would be hard to say that,” she ponders diplomatically. “I probably had the longest stretch with AC/DC — I loved working with the boys in the early days, and we did a lot of travelling together. There were some really hard yards that they did. As they got bigger and into the ‘80s, with the success of Back In Black so many doors opened and it was huge for them, so I probably experienced more with AC/DC. There were some real highs and lows — losing Bon [Scott] obviously was the worst — but then going over to Rock In Rio and performing to so many people, and then doing the Moscow gig which was them playing to a million people on the tarmac in Moscow, that was amazing. There were some real gems, but I enjoyed all of the performances whenever I’d go to see any of the bands, whether it be Rose Tattoo or The Angels, as long as they were giving it their all onstage. You could always tell. They could read the audiences really well, and I think that George and Harry were great teachers — they never made themselves out to be teachers, but they taught the other bands a lot in terms of structure, everything from songs to their stage shows. They gave them a wealth of experience, and it was their own experience from The Easybeats days. And because they were primarily musicians they understood musicians very well — they were great writers so they understood songwriting really well, they’d performed so they understood what was required in a performance, and they also had great production credentials from being in the UK for three or four years at the height of the ‘swinging Sixties’ and early-‘70s. They came back with a wealth of knowledge which they very generously shared with all of the artists that they signed.”

Given that Riccobono worked so intimately with so many artists at the peak of their careers, it must have been inspiring being there during the creative process and seeing all of those great songs take root and come to fruition?

“Any time of those songs comes on the radio it takes me back to whenever it was — it might be ’76, it might be ’78, it might be ’81 — and I have a real affection for all of the songs that the guys have written over the years, some of them more so than others,” she admits. “Only because they all mean different things — all the songs mean something different. One might remind me of Bon a little bit more, one might remind me of Brian [Johnson] a little bit more or Malcolm and some of his amazing guitar work, or Angus’s amazing showmanship on some of the songs and how he performs them — they’ve all got different merits. It’s almost like recalling times — when I hear a song I’ll be, like, ‘Oh god, I remember where we were when he wrote that, it was here in my office!’ or something like that. The songs are very personal.”

Watching Blood & Thunder and seeing how all of these creative people came together and eventually enjoyed such great collective success, it still seems remarkable that such a small clique of people made such an important impact on the then-fledgling Australian music scene.

“I think we just had an incredible team,” Riccobono muses. “George and Harry were head and shoulders above so many of the others because they really were perfectionists, and they were very critical of their work — they never settled for anything less than the best. I think because Ted had such knowledge of the music himself — and also confidence in the people that he put around him, confidence to let them do what he felt they did best without any interference unless guidance was wanted — he would never interrupt what you were doing, he’d let you get on with what you were doing. At the end of it you could talk about it, but he always let the people who worked there get on with the job at hand. 

“George and Harry were given the freedom to do what they did best, and that was write songs and produce them. I don’t know that there were a lot of people who were experiencing this latitude at the time — the fact that they learnt a hell of a lot from the days in The Easybeats, good and bad things, meant that they didn’t want to fall into the same traps again. They came out of The Easybeats basically owing money, so there were a lot of things that they were able to pass onto the new artists in terms of what to do and what not to do, and I think that that held them all in really good stead as they continued on in production and started climbing up that ladder. I think a line that everyone uses but they seemed to live their lives by was ‘don’t read your own biographies and don’t believe in them’, and the other one was ‘treat success with the same contempt that you would treat failure’. Once you start reading newspapers and taking onboard someone’s opinion of what you do, you start losing track of what you’re really good at in what you do. One of their strengths was that when they were onstage they could always tell what the audience wanted, and that’s one of the gems that they passed on — the ability to read the audience and to give the audience what they want.”

"If you ask them what they do, they’re a rock’n’roll band and that’s all they do — they play rock’n’roll.”

It’s such a simple lesson but also such an important one.

“That’s the only thing,” Riccobono asserts. “AC/DC would always put their audiences and their punters first, and they knew that they had a working class audience so they always tried to talk to them — they never talked at them or down to them or tried to out-price themselves, they always kept their ticketing prices down compared to other cats their stature and with production their size. They were always cheaper and that’s because they wanted their working class fans to be able to afford it.”

And one of the other fascinating aspects of Blood & Thunder was how AC/DC took lessons from The Easybeats and trusted their own sound once they relocated to London in the ‘70s — it was at the height of the punk insurgence, and the Aussies were scornfully referred to as “wallaby rockers” — instead of trying to pander to the nebulous whims of the masses.

“I think George and Harry were very good at impressing on them to be true to themselves and just do what they do best, and not to be guided by trends,” Riccobono says. “The Easybeats sort of lost their way because they started to experiment and change and do lots of different things, and I think audiences got confused and then they got confused themselves so changed their sound quite a lot. Whereas AC/DC knew that there were a good rock’n’roll band and George and Harry knew that Malcolm and Angus were great guitarists and could really rock onstage, so they wanted them to expand on what they already did well — and that was the rock’n’roll aspect — so when trends did change they didn’t follow them, they stayed true to what they did best. And they always say if you ask them what they do, they’re a rock’n’roll band and that’s all they do — they play rock’n’roll.”

WHAT: Blood & Thunder starts on ABC 25 Jun