It’s a powerful presence and always has been; a commanding and compelling one that places him in a fairly elite corps in Australian rock. A vocalist, songwriter, musician, conceptualist and formidable frontman, Doc Neeson is a performer of prowess whose influence has been felt well beyond these shores.
The tensile tunes which the Angels purveyed over more than a quarter of a century of operation are interwoven in the very fabric of not just Australian music but Australian life. An incandescent Angels gig has been an essential rite-of-passage for sequential generations. The critic who described their sound as "an adrenalin charged blend of punk, boogie and heavy metal" hit the mark well. The Rottweillers of Oz Rock, the Angels sank their teeth into receptive flesh at a time when the dubious charms of glitter and glam were fading.
What had begun in Adelaide in 1970 as the Moonshine Jug & String Band and had evolved into the Keystone Angels (backing band for a 1974 Chuck Berry national tour, with three encores at Sunbury ’75) coalesced into a juggernaut by 1978, when, having been recommended to Albert Productions and producers Harry Vanda & George Young by tourmates AC/DC, The Angels swiftly swept to gold with the Face To Face album and landed a support stint with David Bowie. By 1979 they were commanding $10,000 a show and were considered the hottest live act in Australia, able to command an audience of 100,000 for a New Year's Even bash on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. The multi-platinum No Exit album was in the national top ten. They had surged into '79 as the newest torch-bearers of the Great Oz Pub Rock Boogie (pioneered by Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs, Buster Brown, AC/DC, Rose Tattoo) and their impact was astonishing.
They brought thousands of young punters into the pubs, elbowing the older liggers for dancing room at sardine-packed gigs, and generated a new interest in live rock performance with what Rolling Stone magazine once described as "melodrama and vignettes from the darker side of life." The sense of drama, the frantic pace, and the incredible charisma of Doc Neeson, a Belfast-born ten quid migrant, certainly helped create the sort of climate that allowed fellow Adelaide outfit Cold Chisel find a foothold (to say nothing of Midnight Oil).
"It was a case of: I've got these huge hands, what do I do with them?" Doc recalls of the days when his remarkable stage persona began to take sharply defined form. No neanderthal thunder rocker, Neeson – a distant cousin of actor Liam Neeson and, as research is uncovering, a relative of Ned Kelly - adored John Lennon and was into such psychic subjects as psychology, the philosophies of Jung, Japanese Haiku poetry, Russian cinema and Mephistophean promises. He had studied German expressionism at university, had a double honours degree in drama and was training to be a film writer/director, and when mentors Vanda & Young gave him the sage advice: "Find something in yourself and bring it out", that which came tumbling amazed even the man himself.
"I thought that audiences were smarter than they were being treated - there wasn't much there for them to contemplate" he once explained. "I thought they could handle a wider range of emotions than they were being given. It was a definite shift, a move away from party rock. We knew we were going out on a limb with audiences; especially Australian audiences who can just as easily see all that as a wank, but we used to try to take them away on a trip somewhere. I know the word gets used a lot but I don't think it was all that theatrical - it was more intense. The point is to exaggerate things, enlarge your movements. And to strip back pretence, have a look at the inner self, the darker side of our souls and imaginations - Jungian philosophy is to accept the dark side to become complete.
"For me singing was more than getting the notes out, it was getting emotions out. I wanted to emotionally touch people, have them connect with the intensity. It was like each night I had to go through this purgatory, go down a passage, and I wasn't always sure where I'd come out. It was never superficial. I'd come off stage physically and emotionally exhausted. In the beginning it unsettled the other guys a bit. I'd cop it in the dressing room afterwards: 'When you're going off keep away from me will you? Last night you knocked your mic into my guitar!' I was once called a Shaman which is sort of on the right track. Actually I'm a lapsed Catholic and I think a lot of that symbolism has crept into what I do."
It was these emerging levels and layers that set the band apart from other thunder rockers, who would probably have nominated Jung as a brand of mid-western beer. Indeed what was not always evident to the homeground following during the band’s long absences overseas was the degree of respect which the Angels commanded, indeed still command, from the world's hard rock elite. In fact it sometimes bowled the band over as well. During a1990 showcase gig at the Whisky in Los Angeles, Axl, Duff and Slash from Guns 'n Roses jumped up on stage, told the audience "these guys inspired us to join a band!" and launched into Marseilles. The tales of Cheap Trick's Angels affection is well known and perhaps even the fact that Motley Crue have covered Take A Long Line and Great White have tackled Face The Day and Can't Shake It but, as Doc once observed with honest amazement, "Aerosmith thought we were one of the top bands they'd ever listened to and Keith Richards has apparently said that the Angeles were his 'favourite rock band'. "
An intuitive writer with acute antenna, Doc drew his song subjects and inspirations from his ability to observe. Asked about his lyrics to 1980’s No Secrets, the band’s biggest national hit, he once revealed “I gave a lift to a girl, an art student, hitchhiking in the rain and she said all these things to me. When I dropped her off after about fifteen minutes I sat in the car and wrote down everything I could remember. She laid her life out to me, what she wanted from it. I extrapolated from it what goes on between lovers. As an Irishman I've always felt like an outsider looking it – first looking in to Australia, then later looking into the U.S. [a process that resulted in Eat City]”
Through the eighties and into the nineties there seemed to be always a molten Angels hit pounding out of the radio – Into The Heat, Stand Up, Nature Of The Beast, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, Let The Night Roll On, Dogs Are Talking, Back Street Pick Up, Tear Me Apart and an outrageous live rendering of their concert staple Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again? among the run. As Doc has put it: “ Musically, there's never been an Angels formula. We tried things, we made mistakes, and we evolved." Throughout, they maintained a clear focus of what they wanted to be and what they wanted to achieve. What resulted, the Divinyls' Chrissie Amphlett once memorably declared, "Grabs you by the collar, relentlessly striving against the odds."
“We invested in ourselves overseas, we built from market to market” Doc once commented about the band that was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1998. “The things that eventually stopped us were always beyond our control, such as management and record company problems.” And what stopped Doc was most certainly beyond his control.
In December 1999, a particularly ebullient Doc Neeson had flown back to Sydney to Melbourne where he been rehearsing with John Farnham for the ‘Tour Of Duty’ East Timor troop support concert that he was organising. He picked up his car at the airport and was heading to his home in the Blue Mountains when he slowed at a tollway gate. The truck behind him did not and he was massively rear ended.
“I seemed o.k.” he recalls, “but it wasn’t long before the shock wore of and the pain set in. We were two weeks out from the concert in Dili and there was no way I wouldn’t have done that show, even though my coccyx was cracked in three places and my shoulder blade, internally, was almost torn off.” With a hefty dose of steroids, pain killers and anti-inflammatory shots the soldier’s son somehow got through it - though it was hot, humid and hard – delivering a stirring performance televised to three and a half million viewers. He came home to some sobering words from a spine specialist, one of the top five in his field, who also happened to be a long-time Angels fan. “He said to me ‘Doc, I know your performance and how you go for it but if you keep doing what you’re doing you’re going to be paralysed for life. I’m sorry to tell you this but consider yourself retired’. So I entered 2000 as a retired rock’n’roller and it just seemed to go from bad to worse. I was pretty well laid out – I could hardly walk and there were some days when I couldn’t walk. Just getting up and down the hallway was huge effort. I can imagine now what happens when some people get paralysed – because your brain’s still buzzing away, responding to stimuli, but you can’t do much about it.
“I had to pull out of everything, including the Angels, though they held on to some hope of me rejoining them. Finally we had a meeting and it was agreed that they would continue performing as The Original Angels Band and I would take on, if and when I could perform, the name Doc Neeson’s Angels. But it would be five years, five very trying years, before he would return to studio and stage, though during the bleakest moments he still wrote songs, even if he had to be on his back when doing so.
When he did return to some prominence, in 2005, it was not as Doc Neeson’s Angels but as the entity Red Phoenix, with an album recorded in the Bahamas at Compass Point studios where his old mates AC/DC had put down Back In Black twenty five years before. Working with producer Terry Manning, an American who had produced the Angels, Jimmy Barnes and Diesel (and who was able to persuade island resident Sean Connery to make a guest appearance on the album) he came up with what X-Press magazine termed “a more thoughtful, introspective album than Neeson's long-time followers may be used to. That's not to say that he's has forgotten how to rock out with the best of them, but there are several tracks that have a bit more of a tender feel, the result of his extended period of convalescence.” As he told the journalist then: “I certainly didn't want to do a ‘Son of The Angels' and this album represents quite a few of the influences I've had, musical and lyrical, so it was a chance to step out and try a few new things. Obviously with The Angels' style, there's some pretty definite borders as to what you can do within an Angels song, and I've liked the Beatles, I've liked the blues, and what I've tried to do is take those influences and put them with 21st century technology. We've put loops in there and sample sounds, so songs like Running Like A Cat, it's a blues song but it's also got some pretty grungy guitar that we wouldn't have done in the Angels."
Working with Angels’ bassist Jim Hilbun and guitarist David Lowy, Doc breathed real fire into Red Phoneix. There was airplay, there were strong international reviews, there were some powerful, well-received shows and there was wide relief and rejoicing that he was back doing what he did so uniquely, but, as he concede now, “It didn’t really happen. Among other reasons, I wasn’t as active or as able as I thought I would be.”
But that was then and this is definitely now. Coming on for six and a half years since his terrible accident, Doc Neeson has regained his health, re- girded his loins, refocused his creative capacities and fully resumed his career.
Again with Hilbun and Lowy by his side, Doc has used selected shows over the past year, often for charitable causes, to tighten and prepare Doc Neeson’s Angels for a return to the rock arena. In fact his return will be multi-pronged. During August/September he will be an integral part of Countdown Spectacular 2 across Australia, followed by his own extensive touring activities. There will also be an acoustic album for the Liberation Blue label. “That’s going to be very interesting – drawing a line between making interesting acoustic versions of songs people know so well without letting the spirit out of them.
“They say when you’re thrown off a horse you should get back on and, even though it’s taken me longer than I thought it would, that’s what I’ve done. I’m a fiercely determined as ever, with a ‘bring it on’ attitude. The difference now is that there’s very good management.
“I’m very fortunate to have had a life in music and I don’t intend to return to the performance side of it as a laidback or watered down version of what I was. It will never be the same; some people who liked the Angels have maybe moved on. I may have to rebuild an audience. But I know how to present a show, I’ve known that since I ran venues and managed bands in Adelaide in the sixties, and I get an enormous satisfaction when I’m involved in performance. But, at the same time, I was struck, when I saw Roger Waters recently, by how effective it can also be to let the songs do the work.”
What Doc has now, to power this new phase of activity, what makes it worthwhile for him than just a singer returning to a stage, is a great store of songs, both ones known and ones that will be known. “I came to Red Phoenix with plenty of songs and now there’s even more. Songs I believe in and am excited by. Having them heard, along with keeping the others alive and out there, is what this is all about.”
Doc Neeson has covered a lot of ground in his life. He has trodden the boards alongside fellow Irishman Chris Bailey (of the Saints) in Bad Boy Johnny & the Prophets of Doom, he has sung Beatle songs out front of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, he has startled Kinks leader Ray Davies sufficiently to have the Angels booted off a tour, he has soldiered in New Guinea as a sergeant (in his pre rock’n’roll days), he has been presented with an Australian Services Medal by Lt. General Peter Cosgrove, he holds the honorary title of roving South Australian Ambassador for the Arts, and he has been initiated in the first degree of the Usui System of Natural Healing. And there’s a lot more ground to be covered. Watch this space.
) enough to jump up and get it (on my 12th attempt).
