What would make Harry Vanda - the last surviving Easybeat, the man who co-wrote Friday on My Mind, the original architect of what we came to know as Oz rock - come out of retirement at the age of 79 to release his first solo single?
To any Australian music enthusiast, the very thought is unlikely enough. But here comes Devil Loose: three minutes of stomping, sneering garage rock that could have been released in 1966.
Vanda's familiar grin beams back at me from his studio on our Zoom call. He's not one to waste words. "Actually, the state of the world gave me a bit of a shock. It was so bloody awful. The place is going to rack and ruin! So, I couldn't help myself! I had to make a comment!"
And who is this devil we're talking about? "Just the devil," he answers. Does that devil happen to be in the White House? "I don't get involved in politics," he says, still grinning. "Too dangerous!"
Vanda looks well, which is a relief. Snowy Fleet, the Easybeats' drummer, died earlier this year. Singer Stevie Wright died in 2015, having lived longer than anyone expected. George Young - Vanda's songwriting and production partner - followed a couple of years later.
In 2007, Australian Musician magazine nominated the meeting of Harry Vanda and George Young at Villawood Migrant Hostel in 1964 as the single most significant event in Australian music history. The rest of the Easybeats were there, too.
Now it's a detention centre, a place of untold misery - but Vanda quickly reminds me it was no bed of roses in 1964, either. "It really wasn't the sort of place where you want to live, you know? It was a roof out of the rain."
It was bass player Dick Diamonde (who died in 2024) who introduced Vanda to George Young, older brother of Malcolm and Angus. Later, George's strident rhythm guitar playing would provide the blueprint for Malcolm's colossal stop-start riffs in AC/DC.
George also provided the tricky bridge in Friday on My Mind, a global hit in 1967, which was voted Australia's best song of all time by an industry panel in 2001. But Vanda isn't interested in the song's cultural standing. Instead, he reduces it to a simple musical equation: "It was bloody almost impossible to get back to the chorus," he says; it was George's choppy chord progression that brought the song back into the key of A.
The song became immortal, covered by David Bowie on his album Pin Ups among many other artists, but the Easybeats fizzled within a few years. Wright went solo, scoring a huge hit with the Vanda & Young-penned epic Evie in 1973.
As house producers for Albert Productions, Vanda & Young were unstoppable, writing and producing almost the entire career of John Paul Young (no relation) and producing all the early recordings by AC/DC, as well as the Angels, Rose Tattoo, and too many more to mention.
They also formed a studio project called Flash and the Pan - Vanda was Flash - who recorded six albums somewhere between disco and new wave. One song, Walking in the Rain, ended up as the lead track on Grace Jones’s legendary album Nightclubbing.
There have been hundreds of other covers: Suzi Quatro shredded Evie; Rod Stewart tackled Stevie Wright’s Hard Road; the Bay City Rollers did John Paul Young’s Yesterday’s Hero. But Vanda’s favourite, he says, is Good Times by Jimmy Barnes and Keith Urban—not, to my surprise, the earlier cover by Barnsey and INXS.
He becomes more animated talking about AC/DC. Years ago, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Vanda declared It’s a Long Way to the Top as his favourite Australian song, but he’s not a fan of the group’s current iteration, led by Angus Young and new boy Brian Johnson, who replaced Bon Scott in 1980. “When Malcolm was with them, they were unbelievably good. When Malcolm died, it got very difficult; they had to get other people in and just lost it. They really lost their togetherness.”
Mark McEntee, lead guitarist of Divinyls, calls Vanda the father of Australian music. He recorded Devil Loose with Vanda (the two have known each other for decades). Divinyls once covered another Easybeats hit, I’ll Make You Happy.
“I loved that song, that sound,” McEntee tells the Guardian. “I loved everything about the inventiveness of it. They were a great rock band, the Easybeats. There ain’t many that come in that calibre. You can count ’em on two hands.”
Will there be more new material? “I’ve got quite a few tunes, but I have not been beavering away, no,” Vanda says. “They either come or they don’t. And they generally haven’t for a while.”
Still, who knows? “There’s no shortage of material ... maybe, with Mark. He’s got some good ideas that fit my type of thinking. I’m just looking for exciting songs.”