The Tragic Tale Of Skyhooks’ First Lead Singer

It’s a great trivia question: Who was the first lead singer of Skyhooks?

Before Shirl there was Steve.

Steve Hill would become the bloke who made one of the worst decisions in Australian rock – leaving Skyhooks just a few months before they became the biggest band we’d ever seen.

But 20 years ago this week, the original Skyhooks line-up – Steve, bass player Greg Macainsh, drummer Freddie Strauks, and guitarists Peter Starkie and Peter Inglis – gathered in Sydney to play a reunion gig at the Annandale.

Skyhooks archivist Peter Green has just posted footage of the gig.

Greg told the crowd how he and Steve would jam on Captain Beefheart songs. “And when I had the idea for a kind of camp, glam, boogie, whatever band, he was the vocalist I thought of.”

Greg met Steve when the pre-Skyhooks band, Frame – featuring Graeme “Shirley” Strachan and Strauks – was playing at Mt Buller, where Steve was the restaurant’s dishwasher. They were impressed by his Louis Armstrong-like voice.

When Shirl quit the band to go surfing, Frame broke up. Greg and Fred started a new band, Skyhooks, and asked Steve to be the singer. He organised their very first gig – at St Jude’s Church Hall in Carlton on April 16, 1973.

“We couldn’t get a gig anywhere else,” Steve recalled. “It had never been used for a rock show. I stuck up all the posters – I was an ex-commie, I was very heavily involved with the anti-Vietnam thing, so I was good at pasting posters.”

Steve was “a student radical”. He later clarified, “That was an accurate description, except I wasn’t a student. I spent most of my time selling dope in the [uni] café. I was one of those people the conservatives said was on a wage from Moscow, stirring the possum. 

“I saw myself as a quasi-intellectual. I was young, running around in bare feet, with the anarchist flag on my shoulder.”

Steve grew up in country NSW, near Young, moving to Sydney at the age of 16 to work at an advertising agency. He hated it. He befriended the staff at the Third World Bookshop, “a nest of young Trotskyites”, and moved to Melbourne in 1968, to help run their Melbourne shop. 

He lived in Drummond Street, Carlton, with a bunch of anarchists. “I lived there on the couch,” Steve recalled. “Those were the good old days when it was fun to be poor.”

Steve split his time between selling dope, working at the bookshop, and volunteering for the SDS – the Students for a Democratic Society, an organisation based in the US that included Tom Hayden, who later married Jane Fonda. 

“Hayden was the leader of the most moderate faction,” Steve explained. “There were also the Maoists, and the Weathermen, who were bomb-throwing anarchists.”

Where did Steve fit in?

“I was definitely halfway between the Weathermen and Hayden’s group. I was the Weathermen minus the militancy. I saw no value in throwing bombs unless a revolution situation presented itself.”

Steve and his mate Red Symons, who played in a group called Scumbag, were also part of the activities at the Pram Factory in Carlton. Now the site of a supermarket, in the ’70s the Pram Factory was home to the Australian Performing Group, a collective that believed alternative theatre was a step towards an alternative society. 

Leading members included David Williamson, Helen Garner, Graeme Blundell and Max Gillies.

Steve introduced Red to Greg, and they jammed in a warehouse in Bell Street, Fitzroy, a few doors from Red’s house.

Greg took Steve to a Gary Glitter gig, to explain the Skyhooks concept. Steve remembers: “The initial concept was to be theatrical and musical, a double whammy. The trouble was the populists didn’t realise Skyhooks was satirical – nor the Skyhooks themselves, I might add. 

“Jane Clifton, and artistic people with a brain in their heads, saw it, but not many others did. We were sending up the absurdity of glam rock – Gary Glitter and Marc Bolan and T. Rex, all that posturing.”

Michael Gudinski persuaded Skyhooks to join his booking agency, and on Australia Day 1974, he got them their biggest gig – the Sunbury Festival. But it was not a success. The band had a mid-afternoon slot, following The Dingoes and Matt Taylor, and their make-up ran in the hot sun. 

As the crowd called them “poofters”, the singer exchanged angry words with a heckler. “Steve was just too drastic and full-on,” Gudinski remembered. “They really stirred things up at Sunbury. They nearly got stoned, they were just so different.”

The festival was filmed and shown the next day on Channel O in Melbourne. Steve watched the show and decided to quit the band.

“Sunbury was just fucking woeful,” he noted 20 years later. “An unmitigated disaster. I was as paranoid as all hell. I remember walking out and thinking, ‘Fuck, this is a huge audience.’

“You weren’t able to hide away, like you were at some school dance. And we played badly. It was incredibly hot, even the bass was going out of tune.

“I watched it on TV and thought, ‘That’s it.’”

Steve rang Greg and told him he was leaving the band. Only guitarist Bob “Bongo” Starkie encouraged him to stay. Bongo would later reflect: “With Steve, he used to dibble and dabble in drugs and stuff, maybe it was one of those things. 

“Maybe he was on a downer because he was doing some nasty. Who knows? It’s almost like, why do people commit suicide?”

“Yeah, I was suffering a personal identity crisis,” Steve admitted. “I was not feeling comfortable about myself. I was feeling that I was being judged by feminist friends and my peer group, who mattered to me. Their attitude towards the band would have been mine – if I wasn’t in the band.”

“It’s been said that I had a drug problem, and I guess I was shovelling far too much acid down my throat,” Steve continued. “But I don’t think I had a drug problem. Basically, Skyhooks was a pop band heading in the direction of a bopper band, which disappointed me. 

“Simply, I didn’t believe that the band was much chop, and I didn’t believe in myself. I got no positive feedback from the other guys, particularly Greg and Red. Not a word. I was a bit bitter about that.”

The Annandale footage shows Steve singing two Skyhooks songs – Hey What’s The Matter (which was featured on the band’s debut album, Living In The 70’s) and Love On The Radio (from 1975’s Ego Is Not A Dirty Word).

Those songs also appeared on the Mushroom albums The Highlights Of Sunbury 1974, Parts I and II, released in July 1974.

After leaving Skyhooks, Steve headed west, teaming up with Joe Camilleri and former Scumbag member Andrew Bell in a band backing a stripper. He was stuck in Perth when the tour went belly-up after just three shows. 

Skyhooks’ soundman was sick when the band hit town for some shows in September 1974. Steve filled in, and Gudinski asked if he’d like to start a booking agency in Perth. Steve said yes. 

But two weeks before he arrived in Perth, Steve had his first shot of heroin, and he was struck down by hepatitis. “It was just my luck – I must have caught hepatitis from my first hit.” 

By the time he’d recovered, Gudinski had found someone else to run his Perth operation.

Steve moved back to Melbourne, becoming the tour manager for Jeff Duff’s band, Kush. Then he joined forces with former elevator driver and Masters Apprentices roadie Neil McCabe to run Spirit Management. 

“We did a bloody good job, too. Gudinski’s agency monopolised the scene. He and Bill Joseph ran the town. But we ended up running about 15 acts.”

Steve booked gigs for bands including Little River Band. “I got them their first gig at the St Albans Hotel. They had bottles thrown at them. It was funny because Skyhooks were really huge in St Albans.”

Steve also tour managed some international acts for Gudinski, including Flo & Eddie, and he became the manager of Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons. For two years he worked on turning Joe Camilleri’s band into one of the biggest live acts in Melbourne.

“I was earning $700 a week, but a lot was going into my arm,” Steve admitted. “I was organised as far as the band went, but I wasn’t organised in my own life. The band had been successful live, but not really successful selling records. And they were blaming me; I think unfairly.” 

Joe sacked Steve.

“I’ll never forget it – I just threw my keys to the office on the roof next door, and I hitched off. I guess I fucked my reputation in the industry.”

Steve moved to Sydney. “I wasn’t bitter about the Skyhooks; I dealt myself out of that game. But the Falcons hurt me. With the Skyhooks, I wasn’t hurt because it was my decision. I had no one to blame but myself.

“I’ve always been an impetuous bugger. I’ll make a big decision at the click of a finger. Some work out, some don’t. I guess this was one decision that really didn’t work out well.”

Steve longed to be a serious actor. He made one movie in Melbourne, the “underground classic” Pure Shit. Produced by Bob Weis, the film followed one night in the life of four junkies. Steve played the head of the drug squad, “which was pretty funny because I was smashed out of my head the whole time”.

Gudinski admitted he would have signed Skyhooks with Steve Hill out front. “They wouldn’t have had the same success, but I definitely would have signed them.”

Nine months after Steve exited, Skyhooks released what would become the biggest-selling local album Australia had ever seen.

“Yes, I did live to regret it,” Steve told me about his decision to quit the band.

“I missed the cash as much as anything. And if I stayed, it would have been good for my career.” He laughed. “Fuck, I would have spat that word out in the early days. But if I’d stayed in the Skyhooks, it would have opened a lot of doors.”

The band’s multi-platinum success surprised Steve. “Sherbet was the big act at the time and I thought that no one was going to come close to them. I figured that Skyhooks would become something like Richard Clapton, an act with a certain amount of intellectual credibility, but unable to get past that.”

Steve believed that Shirl was a better singer. “He was a neater, cleaner singer, whereas I’m more of a shouter. But I reckon he fucked up a number of the songs, like All My Friends Are Getting Married. I felt my Armstrong/Captain Beefheart old jazzy feel much better suited that tune.

“He [Shirl] was like that English guy who looked like a clown. Yeah, Leo Sayer. I reckon he fucked it up. 

“Shirley Strachan was not aggro enough as a singer. That was not surprising because those tunes were written for and by me.”

[Steve had one co-writing credit – Love On The Radio on Skyhooks’ second album.]

“Macainsh would come in with a skeletal riff and he’d hand me the lyrics and say, ‘Sing this.’ My phrasing was important to the band. I think it was something that I was good at. But in the end, my peer group was more important to me than punching Greg Macainsh’s timeclock.”

The 1973 demo recording of All My Friends Are Getting Married turned up on the Demos And Dialogue disc on the Skyhooks box set. When the singer looked into the crowd, the “old familiar face” asked, “How are you doin', Steve, my boy?” instead of Shirl.

In the early ’80s, Steve managed a ski lodge with his girlfriend. Then he ran a hotel in the Himalayas. “The work was hard, but you’d walk out the back door and the marijuana was knee-high – and it was all free!”

When he returned to Australia, his main income came from driving taxis. “Driving cabs is the cement that holds the bricks of my life together,” he told me.

At the start of the ’90s, Steve went to university for the first time, to study industrial relations. “But the experience just left me very disappointed. The union movement had moved heavily to the right. I am very disappointed with the whole Labor movement, I think they have sold the working class out.” 

Just like in the Skyhooks, Steve was out of time and out of place. He left before the first semester finished.

In 1994, Steve said: “I would like the opportunity to get back into the scene. Regain some credibility.”

Sadly, he never did. But when his former bandmates heard he had liver cancer, they flew to Sydney to do a benefit gig. At the Annandale, the original Skyhooks did 10 songs: Hey What’s The Matter, Love On The Radio, Good Golly Miss Molly, Blue Jeans, Whatever Happened To The Revolution, All My Friends Are Getting Married, Motorcycle Bitch, Broken Gin Bottle Baby, Carlton and Toorak Cowboy.

Before he went on stage, Steve had a quiet moment of reflection with Peter Green. The 55-year-old singer smiled and said, “I was just thinking about all of this and how lucky I was to even be in this band.”

After the show, Steve was ecstatic. He hugged Greg Macainsh. “Mate, we could have done it,” he beamed, his mind rushing back to 1974. “We could have done it!”

Steve Hill died six weeks later.