The Easybeats - The Best of -320kbps {FP}

The Easybeats, are one of Australia's greatest pop bands of the 60's. Formed in Sydney in 1964, they were the first Australian rock n roll act to have an international hit with 'Friday On My Mind'. With the formation of the Easybeats, Australia's music landscape was changed forever.
It was 1964, no single instance of Beatlemania anywhere on the globe ever came close to the intensity of the upheaval that accompanied their Australian visit. Young Australians reacted to the Beatles with such fervour because they were crying out for their own access to an enticing new world. The Fab Four had the power to link us, a colonial backwater, to a big wide world of fads, fashions, uninhibited excitement and sounds that would soon be mastered by musicians closer to home.

It was the Monday morning after the departure of the Beatles, with the electricity still in the air, that intuitive young music publisher Ted Albert made a momentous decision - that his company should become an ‘Exporter of Musical Copyrights’. He opened an A&R Department and by August had Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs on the charts. By years’ end they had four hits and Ted saw the future open up before him.

In a tiny Sydney radio theatrette he gave a hearing to a fairly ragged but unmistakably determined beat band that had formed in the austere Villawood Migrant Hostel earlier in the year, comprising, Englishmen Stevie Wright and Gordon 'Snowy' Fleet, Scotsman George Young and Dutchmen Harry Vanda and Dick Diamonde. By the beginning of 1965 The Easybeats would have a manager, regular work in Sydney beat clubs and a publishing and recording contact with the venerable J. Albert & Son.

"There was a desire to write our own songs and that was what set us apart" Harry Vanda reflects now. "Up until that time, songs you heard on the radio came from somewhere mysterious. So we gave it a crack and started doing it ourselves." Well at least, to begin with, Wright and Young did.

They became amazingly prolific writers, Stevie having a knack for succinct rock lyrics and George with his exceptional capacity for ingenious melodies and intense musical structures.

The Easybeats stormed to number one in May 1965 with She's So Fine and the ferocious phenomenon of 'Easyfever' spiralled. Airports, TV stations, theatres and hire cars were reduced to rubble, fans were hospitalised and general mayhem reigned. With their vital, urgent sound

The Easybeats gave Australian music a new identity and confidence. They were not only refreshingly original; they radiated an aura of raw, rebellious excitement that proved irresistible to an isolated generation intoxicated by its own youth.