Ross Hannaford and Ross Wilson were barely teenagers when they met. The meeting of the two Ross’s would create one of the most iconic partnerships in Australian music history.
Today Ross Hannaford left us after a battle with cancer.
The following quotes come from a conversation I had with Ross Wilson at the Concert for Hanna last year, the benefit for Ross Hannaford. It is the story of a couple of school kids who became life-long friends.
How They Met:
Ross Wilson: “Ross Hannaford and myself were schoolkids when we first met. I lived in Hampton and he lived in Moorabbin, South Road. He was going to Brighton High School and he hadn’t quite turned 13. I sat in with a friend’s band at a church hall in Marriage Road in Brighton. I was playing harmonica. I didn’t actually sing. He had this band that played instrumentals, Shadows and stuff. He came up to me after and ‘that’s the sort of music we want to play. We want to play the blues and can you sing?’. I went down to Hannaford’s place where they were practicing in the garage the next weekend to have an audience. They already had a singer. I played a few songs, I’m in, he’s out. I mentioned to Hanna recently ‘whatever happened to that guy, did you keep in contact’ and he said ‘no, whenever I see him he is really weird towards me’ and I said ‘that’s probably why’.
Beatles vs The Stones:
Ross Wilson: “I remember being in the city rehearsing at the back of Scots Church somehow. It was the weekend The Beatles were in Melbourne. Quarter of a million people are outside the Southern Cross Hotel. We were wandering around but by that time we were already over The Beatles. We were onto the Stones and couldn’t be bothered going and seeing The Beatles with all those other people”.
Two Kids Who Musically Just Gelled:
Ross Wilson: “We were The Pink Finks when Hannaford and I got together and we were really lucky to have found each other. We evolved this style from pop music and blues stuff. We were learning about John Lee Hooker. We had this rapport. That was the basis of the Daddy Cool sound. It evolved into The Party Machine with Mike Rudd and when I came back from London we got Daddy Cool together. It had that interplay between me and him on guitar. Intuitively we just knew how to harmonize with each other because we had been doing it for 5 or 6 years. I always think of it as this amazing miracle that in the wilds of Hampton and Moorabbin, two young guys with the same rhythmic approach, which believe me was rare, that we somehow found each other and made careers out of that. It was incredible”.
The Propeller, the Fox Tail and Those Crazy Daddy Cool Outfits:
Ross Wilson: “The thing with Daddy Cool is we were just having fun. Hanna was going to art school at that time. His art-school mates would make us things to wear. They made me a foxtail, someone made Gary Young a chicken suit and another time he was Hot Stuff, the little devil. They just made it up. They would make them at art school and say ‘wear this this week’. When we got really big a lot of that dropped off. Hanna had a suit that he painted to look like bricks, like a brick-veneer suit. We weren’t around the art school mates anymore so we weren’t as crazy because we didn’t have people making us costumes”.
R.I.P. Ross Hannaford 1950-2016
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