40 Years Of '50 Years': The Amazing True Story Of Uncanny X-Men’s Aussie Classic

When Hugh Jackman’s Hollywood agent asked if he was interested in doing an X-Men movie, the actor thought:

“What, they’re making a movie about the Uncanny X-Men and they want me to play Brian Mannix?”

If they did make a Brian Mannix biopic, it would be a rollicking tale of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, like an Aussie version of The Dirt.

“I collect adventures,” Mannix wrote in the foreword of his autobiography. “I’ve sung at a Grand Final, and played gigs to just a handful of people, had sex at the MCG and on a pile of rubbish behind the Eureka Hotel. I’ve been shot at, arrested, overpaid, underpaid, ripped off, respected and ridiculed.”

Years ago, Mannix told me he was planning to write a book about the ’80s music scene called “People Never Fail To Disappoint Me”. Then the working title became “Pop Stars, Roadies And …” The proposed opening paragraph was:

Benny always said there were three types of people in the music industry – pop stars, roadies and arseholes. Pop stars got the chicks, roadies got the drugs, and arseholes got the money.

Amidst the debauchery, the centrepiece of the soundtrack to a Mannix movie would be a big ballad called 50 Years, which entered the Top 40 this week in 1985.

For X-Men fans – commonly referred to as “X-Maniacs” – the song was a revelation. After the party anthems Everybody Wants To Work and Party, 50 Years was a surprising left turn.

“It does not have the naughty and vulgar charm of the other songs,” notes Red Symons, who produced the song. “It is thoughtful and self-reflective.”

Mannix says the song is “essentially about embracing the moment and living in the now.

“In 50 years, all of us, or at least some of us, will be dead. Enjoy our time together and don’t wreck the moment by overthinking.”

Red Symons was credited as “Red Pinko Sims” on the X-Men record.

When Mannix first encountered the Skyhooks guitarist at a party, he was dismissive of the young upstarts. But Mannix made the grumpy rocker smile when he shot back, “Yeah, but at least we’re not old.”

“He was the Skyhook most likely to insult or belittle you. But it turned out he was pretty easygoing and very funny. He definitely got the band’s quirky humour.”

“What struck me about the Uncanny X-Men was that they represented the unacknowledged working class of Australia,” Symons told The Music. “They were not ‘fashionable’. Like Tommy Steele or Lonnie Donegan, popular in ’60s England, they were out and loud.”

Before hearing their material, Symons got the band to write down the song titles. “The one that stood out was ‘(I’m the) Best Looking Guy (in the Factory)’. To them, it was a minor discard in their repertoire. To me, despite having never heard the song, it was a statement, strong and clear, so we recorded it.”

The X-Men had a massive live following in Melbourne when they signed to Mushroom Records in 1982. But it wasn’t a big record deal.

“When Michael Gudinski signed us, he hedged his bets,” Mannix reveals. “Our deal was for one live mini-album. If that did well, we would then be offered the standard Mushroom record contract. If it didn’t, we were fucked.”

When ’SaliveOne! (“It’s a live one”, geddit?) was released, Mannix would tell gig-goers: “My mum needs an eye operation or she might die. The only way we can afford the operation is if you buy the record. So if you don’t buy it, you’ll be killing my mother!”

The record hit the Top 40 nationally, and the X-Men – Mannix, guitarists Chuck Hargreaves and Ron Thiessen, bass player John Kirk, and drummer Craig “Max” Waugh – got the go-ahead to make an album. But Mannix says Mushroom had “no faith in us as songwriters”. For their first proper single, the band recorded How Do You Get Your Kicks, a song written by Skyhooks’ Greg Macainsh and LRB’s David Briggs.

The clip that Countdown made for the song paid tribute to Skyhooks’ classic Luna Park clip for Horror Movie.

Mannix ended up becoming one of Countdown’s biggest stars of the ’80s, hosting the show eight times.

When Mushroom heard 50 Years in 1985, they knew they had the band’s next single. Everyone agreed – apart from Mannix. He wanted to release Party – a song more representative of the band. “Then, when people thought they had us sussed, we’d release 50 Years and pull the rug out from under them.”

Mannix met with Gudinski to plead his case. “He preferred 50 Years, but he understood my logic.”

Party became the band’s first Top 20 hit.

After Red Symons produced the bulk of the record, including 50 Years, Party, and Everybody Wants To Work, the X-Men finished the album in Sydney with Dragon’s keyboard player Alan Mansfield, who had a different approach to recording.

“Red would make me do take after take when recording my vocals – he’d make me slave over a particular line for ages. With Alan, I was just rocking out. I sang the whole song twice without stopping. Then I had another scotch, another line and went and sang it twice more. That was it. Alan was happy that he could chop the four takes into a great performance.”

Mannix remembers Symons going “through the lyrics with a fine-tooth comb”.

“I really liked a lot of those Rolling Stones ballads like If You Really Want To Be My Friend and Wild Horses, so [with 50 Years] I was trying to write something like that,” the singer explains. “The lyrics pretty much wrote themselves. The line ‘It don’t mean nothin’’ was just words I had when I was putting the chords together.”

Mannix was moved when he did a concert for Vietnam War veterans. “Some vets told me they really liked the song because of that line. They told me that in Vietnam, when one of their mates got killed or something like that, they’d say, ‘It don’t mean nothin’.’”

“It means, don’t worry about it,” Red Symons points out. “What’s done is done.”

The song’s introduction – the sound of church bells – was a nod to John Lennon’s Mother, highlighting Mannix’s love of The Beatles. And Symons added the tolling bells at the fade. “I had been reading about George Martin, the Beatles producer, whose earlier work included spoken word and radio plays.”

Mannix says the song’s arrangement was pretty much perfect when they entered the studio. “The only thing Red changed was to add an extra chorus at the end.

“When we were fucking around soloing parts in the mix, Red turned the band off to listen to what I was singing more closely on one line in the final chorus. It made a dramatic statement, so we kept it.”

Mannix still loves the guitar solo. “Chuck and Red worked for ages crafting it.

“A good guitar solo is a song within a song,” Mannix believes. “It takes over from the vocals. It should be almost a standalone piece within the structures of the song.”

Inspired by Duran Duran’s extravagant film clips, the X-Men headed to the Gold Coast’s Mermaid Beach to make the 50 Years video, with the theme being “man dwarfed by nature”.

The clip also included funeral scenes, shot at Melbourne’s Fawkner Cemetery, which showed a darker side to the band. “After the drag race, parties, pools and beaches of our earlier clips, nobody would expect to see the X-Men at a funeral.”

When Countdown premiered the clip, it was a “number one prediction”.

The song didn’t quite reach number one on the official ARIA charts—it peaked at four—but Mannix says, “I reckon they can suck it!”

He prefers to highlight the various radio and state charts around the nation that showed that 50 Years knocked off We Are The World to take top spot. “I’m going with the charts that were most flattering to us.

“What a great vibe it was to kick all of those fantastic superstars off the top of the perch with my little band and the pissy little song I wrote in my bedroom on an acoustic guitar with a broken string!”

The band performed 50 Years at Oz for Africa, the Australian leg of Live Aid.

Uncanny X-Men’s debut album, ’Cos Life Hurts, was also a Top 5 hit, going double platinum. Mannix claims the record cost just $36,000 to make when “most albums at the time were costing 150 grand … Real Life spent 120 grand on four songs … I’m told the Models spent 50 grand on catering while they recorded an album in London.”

The singer was furious when Michael Gudinski revealed he had spent $73,000 on a video for Kids In The Kitchen’s Shine.

“We always seemed to be the bargain-basement band,” Mannix believes. “We never got the kind of money to record that every other band got. Yet we had to compete against them. It was like driving a Kingswood in a Formula 1 race.”

Rod Stewart’s management wanted to look after the X-Men internationally. But the band declined the deal. “Not signing with Rod Stewart’s management was a mistake,” Mannix now admits.

After falling out with Mushroom, the X-Men signed to CBS. Following one more Top 20 single, I Am, and the second album, What You Give Is What You Get, which they made with Kevin Beamish, who produced REO Speedwagon’s Keep On Loving You, the band broke up.

In 2006, the X-Men turned up on an episode of Channel Seven’s Where Are They Now?

Strangely, 50 Years was not part of the Mushroom 50 concert in 2023 (Mannix took to X and called the show “insulting bullshit,” urging people to “Do yourself a favour and give it a miss”).

Nor was the song featured when the ABC celebrated 50 years of Countdown last year.

But the Uncanny X-Men did perform 50 Years on the Spicks And Specks finale when the show initially bowed out in 2011 (with Mannix updating the line “Don’t tell me now, you can write me a letter” to “Won’t you send me an email, baby.”

50 Years was also a highlight of the X-Men’s one-off reunion show at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel last month.

As Mannix notes, the song is like Auld Lang Syne – “it was supposed to be happy and sad all at once”.

Forty years after it was released, 50 Years is undeniably an Aussie classic. You just have to scan the YouTube comments to see how much the song has meant to people:

“My brother has end-stage brain cancer. Dr told him today there is nothing anyone can do … I am planning to play this song at the end of his memorial service, such a fitting song.”

“High school formal 1985 … brings back memories, I remember us all singing along to this on the dancefloor. Where will we be in 50 years seemed an eternity back then. Now it’s just around the corner.”

“Can’t say I was ever an Uncanny X-Men fan, but I remember I was blindsided by this song’s haunting nature back then, and it can still send chills up the spine today. The clip is a masterpiece, and the music is an underrated Australian classic. 2035 will be here before we know it and this song will have the day in the sun it always deserved.”

Red Symons believes 50 Years “is a song whose time has come again”.

“It was one of those flukes that struck a chord with a lot of people,” reflects Brian Mannix, who ended up calling his 2015 autobiography 50 Years. “I’m pretty proud of this one. 

“Though, in hindsight, I wish I’d recorded it in G rather than C – it’s a bit too high for me.”