Vale Peter Dawkins 1946-2014

Peter Dawkins has passed away on Friday 4 July, aged 68, after sustaining fatal injuries in a fall at his home in the NSW Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Dawkins was one of the most commercially successful record producers and Artist & Repertoire (A&R) men to work in the Australian music industry through its “golden years” of the 1970s through 1990s. He chalked up some 20 #1 hit singles, among them Dragon's Are You Old Enough, Air Supply's The One That You Love and Mi-Sex's Computer Games, as well as producing over 50 albums.

“Peter Dawkins was very important to us,” bass player Todd Hunter recalled the year Dragon were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. “He completely helped us get that whole pop thing. He was very draconian in his authority, but he needed to be to control a bunch of wild idiots like us.”

Perhaps it was the fact that not only was Dawkins, like the guys from Dragon, an expat New Zealander, but had also started out as a musician himself, that allowed him to wield that sort of “authority” over what admittedly was a band that had pretty much lost their way, surviving on the bones of their collective arses and taking way too many drugs. The bottom line for Dawkins, however, was that he knew a great song when he heard one, and had the ability to get a band to deliver the kind of performance in the studio that almost guaranteed the song would be a hit. He did it for Air Supply, Ariel, Matt Finish, Mi-Sex, Australian Crawl and a stack of other bands besides Dragon over a career that was only curtailed by his being struck down by Parkinson's disease in 1989. Even then, he battled through, only relinquishing the recording studio in the mid-'90s before undergoing groundbreaking surgery that surely extended his life at least another decade.

Born in Timaru in NZ's South Island in 1946, Dawkins had started out in music as a drummer, touring quite successfully in a band called The Strangers, which featured the late Gary Thain. Changing their name to Me & The Others, in June 1966 they headed off to London, Dawkins and Thain later forming The New Nadir. Session work in the UK got him interested in engineering, which led to a gig as an assistant producer with Polydor in London. The inevitable problem of work permits saw him return to New Zealand in December 1968, but he decided to stay on the other side of the recording console, joining HMV, an EMI imprint, in Wellington. His success as a producer there eventually prompted EMI Australia to bring him over as an in-house producer in 1972.

Initially basing himself in Melbourne, as well as producing a few singles for a young singer named Johnny Farnham, Dawkins began working with progressive rockers Spectrum, themselves fronted by another expat New Zealander, Mike Rudd, and helped the band's core duo of Rudd and the late Bill Putt transition into their next incarnation, as Ariel.

“Mike Rudd from Ariel suggested he come down to see us,” Todd Hunter remembers. “So he brought down all these [American] guys from CBS Records, De Kastner and Yetnikoff, who'd just arrived in the country to go to a conference. We were playing in the Recovery Wine Bar in Camperdown, about the size of the toilet in an old office block, tiny, and all our gear had been stolen so Paul [Hewson, keyboards] just had a clavinet on chairs! But there was some sort of spark there that they liked and they said, 'Yes, sign 'em.'”

“We did the first demos at Trafalgar,” is how Dawkins remembered it, “and there were good songs there but nothing spectacular until This Time, which they presented to me sometime afterwards, and that song I thought needed riffs and things so I worked those out with [guitarist] Robert Taylor, and we got that sound. The harmonies really make it too – that was really Marc [Hunter, singer] and Todd, but Paul and Robert also sang harmonies and really widened the sound tremendously, creating a great big choral that put so much around them. It was a sound I really loved.

“Todd and Kerry would be there pumping away and probably taught me more about understanding rhythm than any other band. I started recording Dragon with four-track just getting the rhythm section together.”

By 1975, Dawkins had relocated to Sydney and moved to CBS Records, now Sony Music, to head their A&R department and work as a producer for them; he produced albums and singles for Australian Crawl [their four-times platinum #1 hit 1981 album, Sirocco], Billy Thorpe, Pseudo Echo and even Slim Dusty, and signed Mi-Sex and Matt Finish among other acts.

Not that Dawkins necessarily always got it right. He was very interested in Models and went down to Melbourne to check them out.

“The Models seemed to be this springboard for success for all these other people that supported us,” keyboards player Andrew Duffield remembers. “We were playing at Macy's in South Yarra and Sean for some reason or other decided to do a Pete Townsend and he demolished a guitar and we had to stop playing – it was a reasonably small stage and we had to get out of his way. Needless to say we didn't get the offer from CBS, but they did like the support band, which was Men At Work!”

On signing Matt Finish in 1980, Dawkins decided to set up his own label, Giant Recording Label, and took the band with him.

Over the next decade, as well as recording and producing, he worked variously as general manager at EMI Australia, general manager at J Albert & Son, set up his own recording facility Giant Studios in Sydney's Balmain and started up another record label, Nova, but as his Parkinson's became more aggressive he was forced to close both his studio and his label. Australia's music industry rallied round him, and through extensive fundraising he was able to successfully (at least for a time) undergo a new treatment, deep brain stimulation, in 2005, the ongoing fundraising also seeing the production of a compilation, For Pete's Sake, released the following year, featuring tracks from many of the acts he'd produced.

Despite becoming increasingly frail in recent years, a problem that prompted his relocation with his wife from their Rushcutters Bay apartment to the Blue Mountains, Dawkins continued to work as best he could, publishing an autobiography The Icecream Boy, becoming the CEO of Parkinson's NSW, as well as being chairman of the fundraising program Golden Turkey Roast.

Compiled with original quotes from interviews conducted over the past couple of decades.