The Age newspaper,
August 8th 1998

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Bource lost his left leg in a shark attack near a seal colony between Port Fairy and Warrnambool. "Nearly spoiled my day, it did," he says. "I was back on air about three weeks later. Johnny Chester welcomed me back. The band used to stand on a raised platform. The camera panned over to this Henri with one leg and all the band pulled one leg up. So there were five guys standing on one leg."

A largely instrumental group, the Thunderbirds were overtaken by musical change. Trained jazz and classical players, they had already crossed one musical divide, to rock. Frith remembers that others of their era grew their hair and changed style. "We either didn't or couldn't," he says. "And that was the finish of us. So the English beat mowed us down."

But the Thunderbirds never really went away. Though one joined the air force, another went to work on Bass Strait oil rigs, and yet another went on the road for a firm selling materials used by design engineers, each man kept at his music and remained in the industry, one as musical arranger, another as guitar maker. They've been around in one band or another, from the Stranglers to Right on the Night, in which some play on occasions.

Historians may quibble, but 29 August 1957 should be noted as a milestone in Australian rock 'n' roll. On that Saturday night, the Thunderbirds made their debut at Ascot Vale West Progress Hall and, they insist, "rock exploded in Melbourne".

Guitarist Laurie Bell, 58, was an apprentice fitter and turner at the time. He remembers preparations for the big night. He'd lugged his tub and brushes around the inner suburbs and was drenched in glue from slapping up hand bills on poles when a police car pulled up.

"And this copper got out and came over to us and said ,'Do you realise that what you are doing is illegal?' He said, 'You better hurry up and put the rest of them up and get out of here before we book you'."

The youngsters billed themselves "Kings of Rock'n'Roll". Frith laughs out loud at his presumption in writing this at the time. "There wasn't anyone else. You know, go for broke".

General merriment follows in St Kilda's Esplanade Hotel where the five, who were either in the original lineup (Frith and Bell) or recruited within a year, have met to record a live album and reminisce about the days when they turned from jazz riffs and classical arpeggios to raucus rock 'n' roll.

They played their first show in the winter of a year in which Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira was made the exception among his people in being granted full Australian citizenship; Denmark's Joern Utzon won the design competition for the Sydney Opera House; and Patrick White's loss took out the inaugural Miles Franklin Award.

"You were mentioning about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in the '70's," says keyboard player Murray Robertson, 58. "When we were working . . . in the late '50s and early '60s, people were dealing with sly grog shops. I can remember one at Essendon where you used to pull up at a guy's back gate and unload cartons of VB out the back of his shed. It was six?o'clock closing. As soon as these pubs closed, all these dances go on. People had to get the booze from somewhere."

Their first outing attracted a big crowd among sons and daughters of World War II veterans who'd gained Housing Commission houses in Broadmeadows. "A pretty small beginning," says Frith "We didn't have any money for security. So I let the local toughs, Birko and junior, in for nothing to control the crowds. To cut a long story short, we ran for a couple of months and then the police closed us down. There were fights. There was a lot of trouble at rock 'n' roll dances."