The Love Story That Saved A Man From Destruction

Sunnyboys’ frontman Jeremy Oxley’s spectacular fall from grace and ultimate redemption — aided by the frankly incredible altruism of the woman who would eventually become his wife, Mary Oxley Griffiths — is one of the great love stories of our time, soundtracked by some of Australia’s greatest ever rock’n’roll. 

In the early-‘80s young Sydney tearaways the Sunnyboys had carved themselves a promising career with their timeless and catchy music, but their early success exacted a hefty toll — primarily on the band’s creative core and youngest member. The tale of how the great songwriter and frontman’s life was derailed by mental health issues — Oxley was only diagnosed with schizophrenia years after his music career had dwindled away, largely due to his erratic behavior — before Mary arrived out of the blue and saved him from almost certain oblivion has been told many times, but hearing it in their own voices hasn’t been possible until now with the release of their new co-authored book, Here Comes The Sun.

"His creativity is quite incredible, and I wanted to make sure that his story is told in a way that’s still quite private and still quite sensitive."

“On a personal level I thought it was a good idea that Mary write a book about it, because she had it in her,” Jeremy explains. “I thought it would be good for someone to grasp the condition that I live in, and it gives an insight into what actually happens in my everyday life. It’s a bit of a battle at times and I have to fight the odds a lot of the time, and she’s given access to that insight through this book.” 

“We wanted to write it so that it’s sensitively done, and didn’t take anything away from Jeremy,” Mary continues. “His creativity is quite incredible, and I wanted to make sure that his story is told in a way that’s still quite private and still quite sensitive. I’m not going to describe in detail all sorts of things that happened because I don’t think that’s fair — everyone has their good times and bad times. It’s a very private and personal thing — health issues are like that.”

The pair’s private life had been scrutinised in the public eye once already via Kaye Harrison’s 2013 documentary The Sunnyboy, and this experience directly influenced the pair’s decision to pen Here Comes The Sun themselves.

“What happened was that when the film The Sunnyboy came out Allen & Unwin sent some delegates to see the film at the launch, and they approached us afterwards to see if we were interested in writing a bio,” Mary explains. “I’ve always been a bit of a writer and there was obviously quite a story to tell, but after doing the film you become very personally involved with people that you work with closely and doing the film with Kaye we were working really closely with her for a couple of years and it was just quite exhausting. We thought, ‘Well, we don’t really want to do that again and have someone else write it’. Having someone else listen to our stories and know our secrets and things had no appeal, so I thought, ‘No, I’d really like to write it for ourselves’. I’d already started to diarise a lot of the things that had happened, so when Allen & Unwin said, ‘Can you send us a sample of your writing?’ it all just fell out really easily, and it only took about eight or nine months to write and the rest of the process has been editing it and getting it ready, which took about 12 months.”

Here Comes The Sun recalls the pair’s entire lives for context — including Jeremy’s beachside childhood in northern NSW and Mary’s more urban upbringing in Brisbane — and the section where a teenage Jeremy is thrown almost overnight from his laidback family idyll in Kingscliff into the maelstrom of the inner-city Sydney music scene proves particularly insightful (and occasionally harrowing).

“I loved the beach and I surfed a lot,” he remembers fondly. “I just did my own thing, but at eighteen or nineteen that’s when things started becoming a little blurry with the Sunnyboys and everything. Things just became really topsy turvy really, and I just wasn’t relating in the way that I wanted to be relating. I’ve got it back now — with Mary’s help I’m back to square one again. But I went on a long plane of development, a different path than a lot of other people. I couldn’t do it and it broke my arse basically.”

“He’s much too sensitive to be thrown into that sort of thing,” Mary empathises. “I’m not really surprised that he felt like a fish out of water and didn’t cope down there, because knowing him now he finds that sort of situation really difficult. And for young guys to be thrown into that music industry with no one looking out for them, it’s really no surprise that they got into trouble.”

Mary too had been plagued by misfortune during her life, including a personal tragedy when the nurse’s husband passed away suddenly from a brain tumour, leaving her to raise their young twin boys on her own. It was at the boys' behest that she looked up Jeremy online — he’d long been one of her idols from during the Sunnyboys’ halcyon Countdown days in the ‘80s – and it was then that she discovered that he not only was battling illness but also living in the region, and it was then that her rampant altruistic side took over.

“It started off as something to humour [the boys] — they wanted their mum to have a partner in her life, they’d say, ‘Well everyone else has got a mum and a dad’, and they were feeling a little bit different,” Mary smiles. “But they could also see that I wasn’t fulfilling my life — I was just trying to be a good mum and give them a good life knowing that their dad had passed away, so what started as something to humour them turned serious once [Jeremy and I] met. I said to the boys after I’d read everything that had happened to Jeremy that we had two choices — we could either read about it and not do anything and just pass it up, or we could act on it. And when I explained to the boys what schizophrenia was and that he was quite unwell in his mind they were just sort of horrified and said, ‘Well you’ve got to do something! You can’t just leave him there.’ 

“And I guess after thinking about it, it didn’t really surprise me, because their dad was an ambo and I’m a nurse, so they were brought up in a household where people were nurturers and had a profession of looking after people. So when they suggested [going to meet Jeremy] I guess that’s just what they’d grown up thinking was a humane thing to do. They weren’t deterred at all — they were just wondering how we could help him — and then when they met they were just naturally drawn to him. They weren’t scared of him at all, they were very accepting that he was unwell and that we could make a difference to make him better. They’re pretty incredible boys.”

"Mary just introduced the boys and I said, ‘Lemonade, that’s what they need! Lemonade!’"

Once Mary decided to take the plunge and contact Jeremy — who was living a fairly squalid existence down in Pottsville — she ultimately organised to drive down and meet him, little knowing that the decision would change everyone’s life forever. Jeremy recalls the first meeting at his little flat quite well.

“Yeah,” he smiles, “Mary just introduced the boys and I said, ‘Lemonade, that’s what they need! Lemonade!’ I was boiling some apples at the time.”

“What we didn’t put in the book was that when Jeremy came to the door he had a big knife in his hand!” Mary laughs. “It was really funny and I just thought, ‘Oh shit!’, and he put it down straight away and explained as we went in that he was actually cooking apples. We were really lucky — it was like it was meant to happen. The way that it all happened was actually initially so out of character for me to go and do that sort of thing, but having said that when we did meet it all just happened really naturally. We just got on and really hit something there — we just connected.”

“And now she tells me what to do,” the singer interjects cheekily.

“We were really lucky, right from the first day we just had a connection,” Mary continues. “You look into those eyes and you can just sort of see his soul. You could tell when he was unwell though because he would disappear from those eyes — those eyes would change — and he’d take on a different persona.”

Ultimately the pair fell in love, and Mary took on the invidious task of helping Jeremy sort his life out and get back on track.

Incredibly she managed this feat so well — due to a combination of love, affection and nursing skills — that the unthinkable happened; the original line-up of the Sunnyboys — including Jeremy’s brother Peter on bass, who’d been semi-estranged from his sibling since he went off the rails — reunited for their first show in over two decades. It all took place at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre in April 2012, as part of the Hoodoo Gurus-curated Dig It Up! festival. Billed as Kids In Dust (a name they’d used occasionally back in the day to test out new material) to take pressure off the frontman, the return of the Sunnyboys prompted an incredible outpouring of love and emotion from all in attendance, with barely a dry eye in the house at the conclusion of their awesome comeback.

"Nothing for twenty-one years and then three rehearsals, and they were spot on."

“It was special,” Jeremy remembers fondly. “I was very nervous — we’d only had three rehearsals — but in all the tumultuousness I was really excited to be playing with my brother again. I hadn’t played with him for years. I just knew that it was on the cards that we would go to go okay.”

“I was terrified,” Mary admits. “I was on the side of stage and I squeezed the boys too hard and I was pulling their hair just because of nerves. It was an incredible experience though, and the thing that was amazing that was that they had three rehearsals before that show — nothing for twenty-one years — and then three rehearsals, and they were spot on.”

“It was pretty rough though, I must admit,” says Jeremy self-deprecatingly. 

“Compared to now it was a bit rough, but now it’s a well-oiled machine again,” Mary smiles. “It was pretty incredible.”

Does Jeremy believe that there’s something special that happens when the four Sunnyboys get together?

“I’d like to say yes, but I’m not sure,” he ponders.

“There is something special, they’re incredibly supportive of Jeremy,” Mary continues. “They’re lovely and have this intuition.”
And of course that wasn’t the end of the Sunnyboys return: they’ve since enjoyed numerous tours, and also re-released the three albums from their original tenure together — Sunnyboys (1981), Individuals (1982) and Get Some Fun (1984) — in expanded form with extensive re-mastering.

“I’m loving it these days,” Jeremy beams. “I’m finding it a lot more fun than I did when I was young. It was always a battle, and always a competition. It was always stressful back then, but I’m finding it a lot of fun these days.”

But even so the pair have had to closely monitor Jeremy’s health and balance his life needs with the demands of being in a high profile rock’n’roll band. One of the things that badly affected him first time around where the rigorous demands of life on the road, and they’re determined not to make the same mistake a second time.

“It was pretty hard fighting them when they came instinctively back,” Jeremy concedes. “Peter and Bil [Bilson — drums] and Richard [Burgman — guitar], they were all knocking on the door saying, ‘We’ve got to play more gigs, more gigs, more gigs’. It was like that again! But Mary was there to say, ‘We’re not going to do gig after gig after gig — we’re doing this many and that’s it’. A few shows at a time.”

"We’re not going to do gig after gig after gig — we’re doing this many and that’s it."

“Otherwise it’s too demanding for him — physically as well as mentally,” Mary interjects. “He really had to psych up to do it, and he’s come this far and there’s no way that I’m going to let him get exhausted or slide backwards mentally. There’s got to be somebody to put the restrictions on, and the guys all understand that because they’re all family men themselves now — they’ve all kids around the same age. And a few shows is enough for everyone anyway — they all need time to recover once there’s been a few shows in a row, especially Bil as the drummer — so it’s great for everyone to go back to their lives for a bit.”

“It’s like a marathon, not a sprint,” Jeremy offers sagely.

If only they’d been afforded this leeway from the rigours of life on the road the first time around. The ‘80s was a much different time than now for bands — live music still ruled Australia’s leisure time and the pub circuit was extensive and demanding, so a successful up-and-coming band would be expected to play literally hundreds of shows a year all over the country if they were serious about hitting the big time. And this was well before the days of budget airlines and cheap airfares — flying wasn’t even an option for all but the biggest acts.

“It was terrible,” Jeremy remembers forlornly. “Mary couldn’t have described it better in the book — that’s exactly what happened. I’d say, ‘I need a holiday, I’ve done my bikkie’, and they just said, ‘One more show, one more show’. It was like talking to a monster.”

“And the thing is that even doing that many shows they weren’t making any money,” Mary continues. “Back in those days you didn’t get flown around by management and put up in accommodation; after a show the roadies would load the car and then they had to drive to the next gig — sometimes it was an all night drive, and they’d grab a couple of hours sleep and then set up again.”

“It’s not an enviable lifestyle,” Jeremy concedes. “I wasn’t very happy.” 

“And you’re still paying rent back home, and still paying for petrol and hotels so they didn’t actually make any money,” Mary says. “I don’t know how any bands made money back then doing that, unless you’re AC/DC and you sell a trillion records. All of our other friends who were in bands around that same era said the same thing — they worked so hard and actually never came out of it with any money.”

Here Comes The Sun also gives Jeremy the opportunity to talk firsthand about the disappointment surrounding the original release of second album Individuals in 1982. Then Sunnyboys manager Lobby Loyde (himself something of an Oz rock luminary) disappeared to America to mix the album — which the band had recorded in New Zealand — but when he returned the band were dismayed at the muddy mixes, but had no money left to do anything but release the album in its substandard form (only last year with the reissue of a version of Individuals using since discovered rough mixes was the problem adequately addressed).

“It was horrible — when I heard Individuals for the first time I was just heartbroken,” Jeremy recalls, the dismay and devastation still clear in his voice. “It didn’t sound good, and it wasn’t the way that I’d envisaged it at all. Those [new] mixes are how I’d heard it actually — they’re pretty good. The new versions are much better than the album that came out. We’ve always looked after our fans — we’ve always looked out for them — and when we get over a certain obstacle we have to let our fans know it, and that production on Individuals was such an obstacle at the time. It was just like, ‘Oh God, who’s going to promote this record? It’s rubbish!’ It wasn’t until these new mixes came to the surface that it renewed all of the other fellas’ expectations. 

"It should have been foolproof; all he had to do was normal mixing and do a decent job and it would have sounded great."

“I was really mad at [Lobby]. He said to me that I was going to come along [to help mix in the States], but that was just a lie. I told him that I’d really like to have a hand in the production and he said, ‘Sure’, but when it came time to go over the do the record he just pissed off and snorted his barbiturates and did a pathetic job. I told him that he wasn’t going to get any more money, and that our association was over. I told him that he was no longer our manager and that’s when we moved to Michael Chugg. I told him that it wasn’t good enough — I don’t know what he was doing. I told him, ‘I don’t know what you were on!’ 

“He must have been snorting speed or something at the time. He spent a lot of time over there and a monstrous amount of money tipping Americans and all this crazy shit. We did the job [recording] in New Zealand, and there were so many tracks for him — at least 20 tracks on each take — and it should have been foolproof; all he had to do was normal mixing and do a decent job and it would have sounded great. And that’s what he’s done on these rough mixes, but the first mixes that came out were pathetic — they really were bad. I just lost interest and just put my sights on [third album] Get Some Fun after that. But it hindered my development as a songwriter — I didn’t know which way to turn there for a while. It just seemed that the Sunnyboys started at the top and the more they played they just worked their way to the bottom.” 

Now, however, it’s redemption time. Excitingly for fans, there’s the prospect of some new Sunnyboys music on the horizon now that Jeremy’s wellbeing is tracking so nicely, although this time around the songwriting load will be shared more evenly.

“Yeah, I’ve written some more music,” he reveals. I’ve just heard that we’re doing some more gigs in 2016, but I haven’t heard anything more about the recording.”

“I think when all of the book stuff dies down that there’s talk of [the other Sunnyboys] coming up and putting all the ideas on the table and jamming, and just seeing if all of the ideas that everybody’s come up with gel together,” Mary tells. “Because everyone’s writing songs now — not just Jeremy, the others are all writing songs too — so it will be interesting to see what everybody brings together. It will be a completely different sound now, because they’re not nineteen anymore. The songs that we’ve heard from the others so far are a bit more mellow, but the fans are grown up now too — they’ll either love it or they hate it, we’ll have to wait and see.”

“I’m really excited about the newer stuff that I’m going to get together with Peter and the boys,” the singer enthuses. “I’m sure it will work out.”

In the meantime there are plenty of other creative pursuits on the cards to keep the pair busy.

“I’d like to do another book,” Mary admits. “I’m still working as a nurse a couple of times a week, and I use the time apart from those couple of days to focus on Jeremy and what he wants to do and support him with that. I’d like to take a few months to get some paintings together to do a show — we both paint so I’d really like that to be a project. If we could do an exhibition between us that would be wonderful. There’s lot of different opportunities at the moment for everything that we’re doing creatively.” 

“I enjoy painting, because you watch it flower and you watch it develop and evolve into something,” Jeremy says happily. “The music hasn’t done that previously — it was always me telling them what to do, whereas these days we’re going to just bring parts of songs to the rehearsal and see if we can evolve the music rather than me telling them what to do. It’s more collaborative, and that’s the way music should be. They’re all playing really well, and they’re all singing really well too.”

But, all that aside, the lovebirds are really just looking forward to spending more time in each others’ company and planning the rest of their lives together.

“We’re really lucky,” Mary says with an adoring look at her husband. “You don’t get too many people who really get that second chance that actually really works.”

“Mary’s helped me so much — what it says on the book [cover] is true; ‘the love story that saved a man from destruction’,” Oxley responds in kind. “She’s saved me from my beer drinking ways, and she certainly steps in there and kicks my butt when I drink. We’ve been together for eight years now — that’s the longest relationship that I’ve had. I’m over the moon. I’m really happy with my little princess.”

WHAT: Here Comes The Sun (Allen & Unwin)