The Easybeats – Friday On My Mind

Australia’s best song of all time was written by a Scot and a Dutchman who met in a migrant hostel, and recorded in London by an American.

In May 2001, a panel of 100 music-industry figures assembled by the Australasian Performing Right Association for its 75th anniversary named Friday on My Mind the best Australian song ever written. Neither of its writers was born in Australia. Harry Vanda came from The Hague and George Young from Glasgow, and the record the panel was honoring had been cut in a London studio, with an American producer, in September 1966. Australia’s favorite song is an immigrant’s song, and that turns out to be the most Australian thing about it.

Keep watching: AC/DC – Let There Be Rock · explore more →

The immigration was literal. The Young family flew from Scotland to Sydney in June 1963 and started out in Nissen huts at the Villawood Migrant Hostel in the city’s western suburbs, and Vanda’s family arrived from the Netherlands around the same time. The two met at the hostel, where Young later remembered passing the time in the recreation hall with table tennis and guitars. The band they formed in 1964, with singer Stevie Wright, bassist Dick Diamonde and drummer Gordon “Snowy” Fleet, drew every member from somewhere else: two from England, two from the Netherlands, one from Scotland.

Within two years the Easybeats had Australia. Crowds screamed at them hard enough that the local press coined the term Easyfever, and the hits came from Young writing with Wright. Conquering one country was not the plan, though, and in 1966 the band relocated to London. United Artists paired them with Shel Talmy, the producer behind the Kinks’ You Really Got Me and the Who’s My Generation. What they needed was a song that could compete in that city. What they had, as it turned out, was a joke.

Stuck for something new, Young and Vanda went to the cinema and saw a film featuring the Swingle Singers, the French vocal group famous for singing Bach as rapid wordless scat. Young later credited some of that scatting with finding its way into the idea. Vanda remembered the band laughing at it and imitating it on the train home from a gig, until the imitation started to sound good. Moved from voices to guitar, it became the stuttering figure that opens the record. On September 8, 1966, the Easybeats cut it at IBC Studios in London with Talmy producing.

A song about the week, not the class

The verses work through the week one day at a time in a minor key, each day dragging, before a slowly rising build tips into a major-key chorus about the weekend in the city. That shape is why the song has spent decades being filed as a working-class statement. Young disagreed. He told the writer Debbie Kruger the song had more to do with the band’s outlook on the world than with class. For five musicians who had started out in hostel huts, outlook and circumstance were hard to pull apart, but the distinction mattered to the man who wrote it.

United Artists released the single in Britain on October 14, 1966. The UK chart picked it up at No.48 and lifted it to No.6 by late December. Parlophone issued it in Australia on November 17, and the Australian chart put it at No.1 over the summer of 1966–67. In the Netherlands, where Vanda had been born, it shared a No.1 chart listing with a cover by the Dutch band the Dukes. West Germany took it to No.10, and the band played it on Beat-Club, the Radio Bremen pop show broadcast nationally on West German television. America came last. Billboard’s Hot 100 picked the single up in March 1967 and peaked it at No.16 in May, the only time the Easybeats reached the American Top 20.

The partnership it started

The Easybeats never matched it, and the band split at the end of 1969. The songwriting partnership outlasted them. Back in Sydney, Vanda and Young became the production team behind AC/DC, the band formed by George’s younger brothers Malcolm and Angus, and they wrote Love Is in the Air for John Paul Young, no relation. David Bowie covered Friday on My Mind on Pin Ups in 1973, and Vanda said it was the only cover of the song he ever liked. George Young died in Singapore on October 22, 2017, and Malcolm followed weeks later. The APRA panel was right that the song belongs to Australia. It belongs to the Australia of Villawood, a country assembled from people who arrived from somewhere else, which is the only version of the country that could have made it.