Skyhooks' Bob “Bongo” Starkie Passes Away, Aged 73

He was in the biggest band Australia had ever seen. He befriended the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. And he ran one of Melbourne’s most prominent music venues.

No one led a life quite like Bob “Bongo” Starkie, who has died of leukemia at the age of 73.

Bongo died this morning, listening to his favourite artist, Chuck Berry.

“For the past year, he has fought the brave fight against leukemia, hoping to get back on the road to perform more shows,” Skyhooks archivist Peter Green said.

“Music was in his blood till the very end.” 

Bongo was the youngest member of Skyhooks, the legendary Australian band who revolutionised the local industry when they released their debut album, Living In The 70’s, in October 1974.

Until Living In The 70’s came along, Australia’s highest-selling album had been Daddy Cool’s Daddy Who? Daddy Cool, which sold 60,000 copies. The Skyhooks album – featuring songs such as Horror Movie, Balwyn Calling, You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed and the title-track – sold 250,000 copies, making Skyhooks the biggest band in the land and ensuring the future of Mushroom Records.

They were a hit creatively and commercially. The critics gushed, and the young girls screamed.

Young Bob had gone to high school with Mushroom boss Michael Gudinski.

“I guess we were two people who stood out a bit,” he said. “Gudinski was really out of place. He was the total dag. 

“Melbourne High was a pretty strange school. The masters wore boaters and capes. It was like a hangover of a British public school. They treated us like we were lucky to be there.”

Bongo met Skyhooks’ Greg Macainsh when his band did a gig at Eltham High, supporting Bon Scott’s band, Fraternity.

“I was playing in a band called Mary Jane Union, and we weren’t a bad band,” recalled Bongo, who replaced his older brother Peter in Skyhooks in 1973. At the audition, he sealed the deal by playing Chuck Berry’s Let It Rock.

The Bongo/Red Symons guitar combination ignited the Hooks.

“Red has a real mathematical mind,” Bongo explained. “I’ve got a practical approach; I don’t need a slide rule to be creative. 

“The argument would always be, ‘Come on, Red, if it sounds right, it’s okay.’ I was non-scientific about it; he was very scientific.”

It was Red who dubbed Bob “Bongo”.

“That was a joke that was largely lost on most people,” Red recalls, “because nobody could remember that Ringo Starr was Richard Starkie – hence Bob Starkie is Bongo Starr.”

When Bongo met Little Richard, the Architect of Rock and Roll asked, “And what’s your name?”

“My name’s Bongo Starr.”

Little Richard smiled. “Bongo, Bongo Starr. I like that. I like that a lot.”

Skyhooks’ first live review in Rolling Stone said Bongo “provides spunk licks in glitter and tight white pants”.

Bongo remained a key part of the Hooks during their rise to fame and their reunions. 

On the band’s fifth and final studio album, 1980’s Hot For The Orient, he assumed lead vocal duties on the single Keep The Junk In America.

In 1990, when the Hooks returned to number one with Jukebox In Siberia, Bongo said: “To have that hit record, man … it was just beautiful.

“It’s like going back and fucking your first girlfriend. You know you love her, and it’s really nice to go back … kind of rebirth stuff.”

After Skyhooks split in 1980, Bongo owned and ran The Club in Collingwood, one of Melbourne’s major live venues. He also had a little studio set up at his place in Canterbury Road, Middle Park, where James Reyne first recorded Reckless.

“I was doing some demos there,” James says. “Bob asked if I had any other songs, and I played him Reckless, saying, ‘It’s probably a B-side.’ But Bob said, ‘We should do that.’”

After selling The Club, Bongo set a date “to start a new life” – the Rio Carnival in 1989.

In Rio, he met the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs.

“I went to Brazil to find God,” Bongo told me. “I found Ronnie Biggs.”

They became great friends. “He’s like a second dad. He has an amazing sense of freedom. A will to live. You wouldn’t be able to keep up with the things we do.”

Aside from his guitar-playing skills, Bongo will live on in Australian rock folklore for the “axe incident”.

In December 1979, believing that Skyhooks’ booking agent, the legendary boss of Premier Artists Frank Stivala, had not been totally honest with the band, Bongo took matters into his own hands.

“I was going to cut his desk in half,” Bongo said.

“So I went up to my old man’s farm to get his chainsaw. But this is typical of my old man; it wouldn’t start.”

So Bongo went to the Skyhooks office and got an axe out of the woodpile.

“But the fucking thing was blunt, so there I was sitting in the car park near Mushroom sharpening this fucking thing.” 

The guitarist walked through the Mushroom building with the axe slung over his shoulder.

“People were saying, ‘G’day Bongo, how’s it going?’ They must have been thinking, ‘Fuck, what’s going on here?’”

Bongo walked into Stivala’s office to find the agent on the phone.

“He tried to ignore me.”

As Stivala kept talking on the phone, Bongo leapt onto his desk and proceeded to carve the word ‘CUNT’ into his desk.

Remarkably, Stivala remained calm and stayed talking on the phone.

“I couldn’t fucking believe it,” Bongo recalled. “He was acting so cool, but he must have been shitting himself. He probably thought I’d start on him once I finished the desk.”

With one final swing of the axe, Bongo hit both phones off the desk and then walked out.

That night, he was at home, thinking: “Fuck, maybe I went a bit far.”

“But in a funny way, I think Stivala respected me for it. Next day, it was business as usual.”

The escapade ended up on the front page of the Truth newspaper:

Berserk! Skyhooks Star Runs Amok With Axe

The guitarist and the agent remained good friends. And the axe is still in Peter Green’s Skyhooks archive.

Bongo kept the Skyhooks legacy alive, touring with his Skyhooks show.

“The music always came first, and touring and playing onstage was his absolute joy,” Peter Green said. 

Bongo’s daughter, Indiana, organised a GoFundMe page for her dad earlier this year, to help pay his medical bills and to get him back doing what he loved – “being onstage playing his guitar for all of you”.

The page raised more than $35,000.

Bongo organised a run of shows in October this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Skyhooks’ second album, Ego Is Not A Dirty Word. Sadly, he was forced to cancel the shows when his health deteriorated.

But he was buoyed by the fans’ never-ending support. “He has felt the love till the very end,” Indiana said.

Looking back on his time with the Skyhooks, Bongo said, “We’re just a bunch of guys who got together at that time and a bit of magic happened.”

And Bob “Bongo” Starkie was a key ingredient in that magic.

Bongo is survived by his daughters, Indiana and Arabella, grandchildren, Phoenix and Lucia, and partner Chrissy.