Vanda and Young. The names are familiar to any veteran AC/DC fan. The production team behind all the Aussie blues-metal powerhouse's career-launching early releases through 1978's Powerage, Harry Vanda and George Young returned to the fold again in the late '80s. Some may even know that George Young is the older brother of band guitarists Angus and Malcolm.
But the Vanda and Young partnership has a far richer history than their work with AC/DC, a legacy that sprawls across continents and decades, from Australia to the British Invasion of the mid-’60s, through ’80s New Wave and beyond.
It was an unlikely partnership from the start. Young—one of eight children born in Glasgow, Scotland—emigrated with his family to Sydney, Australia in 1963. That same year, the family of fair-haired Johannes Hendricus Jacob Vandenberg also moved from the Hague, Netherlands to Sydney.
Young recalls, “Glasgow was one of the centers for blues music in Britain, and it wasn't 'til I came to Australia that I started playing rock music.”
It was at Sydney’s Villawood Migrant Youth Hostel that the teenaged Young and Vandenberg―who’d soon shorten his moniker professionally to Harry Vanda―started chasing their musical dreams. Hooking up with 16-year-old Australian singer Stevie Wright, already a veteran of local clubs, another transplanted Dutchman (bassist Dick Diamonde, born Dingeman van der Sluys) and English émigré drummer Gordon "Snowy" Henry Fleet, guitarists Vanda and Young began playing a primitive, British Invasion-influenced rock sound George says got them kicked out of at least one pub for being “too loud and filthy.”
Drummer Snowy gave the band a moniker that both captured the era’s sensibilities and stuck: the Easybeats. At an early Sydney gig then-real estate manager Mike Vaughn approached the band about managing them, offering as enticement his connections with Ted Albert of famed Australian music production/publishing house J. Albert & Sons, where they soon laid down their first recordings. The Vanda/Young/Albert connection would eventually blossom into a full-fledged pop empire. In the meantime, George Young was also unwittingly laying the foundation for another storied part of his future, showing his two young, still-adolescent brothers, Malcolm and Angus, how to play the guitar in his spare time.
Young notes the first Easybeats single “didn't do that good—they had trouble getting stations to play it—the old reluctance to get in deep with an Australian band … Stevie and I were doing most of the writing then. Harry could barely spell English, so he worked on the music and really got into writing later on. We kept playing and went back into the studio and put down ‘She’s So Fine.’”
But when that record quickly shot to No. 1 on the Australian charts in 1965, Young recalls it was a decidedly mixed blessing: “With a No. 1 record, that’s where all the b.s. started. We weren’t really playing anymore, we were trying to satisfy demand, trying to please the record company, promoters, record stores, radio stations, fan magazines, here, there, everywhere. It took all the enjoyment out of actually playing. We went out and did one half-hour, nobody could hear, we could have gone out and picked our noses, it wouldn't have made any difference.”
The band continued to score more hit records in their native Australia for most of 1965 and ’66, before making the fateful decision to move to London late that year. It was there that the Easybeats quickly collaborated with early Kinks producer Shel Talmy to cut what would become their internationally renowned anthem, “Friday On My Mind.”
“Being hostel boys, that's what you dream about: Friday!” Young said of the song’s inspiration. “It was practically a repetition of the same situation with our first record in Australia, not many people were interested. But then the pirate radio stations, who had Australian DJs would slip in the record even though it wasn't programmed. It went No.1 and it was one-in-the-eye to everyone who thought it wouldn't make it. It didn't take long before we were back in the old scene.”
The record became a sizable hit in America as well, while its influence on a young generation of English musicians was so great that David Bowie covered it faithfully on his 1973 tribute album to his own pop roots, Pin-Ups.
But while they’d soldier on for a few more years, the tide was rapidly waning on the Easybeats’ fortunes. Nearly broke, Vanda and Young returned to London, hoping to use the connections they’d forged to become writers and producers. The ensuing years found them working with a wide roster of artists little remembered today, including Grapefruit (featuring yet another Young brother, older sibling Alex), Tramp and Marcus Hook. Even more up and coming bands were covering the duo’s songs, including acts as diverse as Savoy Brown and the Bay City Rollers. Rod Stewart even covered the pair’s “Hard Road” on Smiler.
After returning to Australia to pursue more production work, the pair learned that an American label had taken an interest in the Marcus Hook project and George recalls working on the album at EMI’s Sydney studios: “We had Harry, myself, and my kid brothers Malcolm and Angus. We all got rotten (drunk), ’cept for Angus, who was too young, and we spent a month in there boozing it up every night. That was the first thing that Malcolm and Angus did before AC/DC. We didn't take it very seriously, so we thought we'd include them to give them an idea of what recording was all about.”
The duo also worked the soundboard with Au
ssie artists John Miles, Les Kirsh, William Shakespeare, Cheetah, Rose Tatoo, and old Easybeats bandmate Stevie Wright, whose single “Evie” topped the charts. And when AC/DC started building their own considerable career, Vanda and Young also began producing them via their own long association with Albert Productions, with George even occasionally playing bass early on. Even more remarkable, as George was helping his younger brothers forge one of the most potent blues-metal acts ever, Young and Harry Vanda also decided to tackle the era’s budding New Wave sounds head-on via their arty, studio-only outfit cleverly dubbed Flash and the Pan.
Featuring video clips whose style smartly anticipated early MTV by half-a-decade, F&TP’s debut single “Hey St. Peter”
cracked the American charts, while its follow-up “And the Band Played On (Down Among the Dead Men)”
did even better in the UK. 1979’s “Walking in the Rain” became an epochal club hit when covered by Grace Jones before “Waiting For A Train”
cracked the British Top Ten in 1983. Other singles like the Roxy Music-inflected “Media Man”
and “Midnight Man” percolated through the pop charts worldwide during the decade, with Vanda & Young also returning to the production helm of AC/DC’s Who Made Who (soundtrack to Stephen King’s quirky directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive) and Blow Up Your Video during the era.
Following the usual career path of veteran rockers, Henry and George mounted a successful Easybeats reunion in 1986, while their quirky Flash and the Pan incarnation soldiered on into the ‘90s. In 2000, they returned to the AC/DC fold yet again to produce Stiff Upper Lip, while not long after Harry Vanda left his 25+ year association with Albert Music to open his own private recording studio, Flashpoint Music, with son Daniel. The new Vanda & Vanda team quickly produced yet another hit, David Hasselhoff’s 2005 No. 3 U.K. single “Jump in My Car,”
carrying a remarkably diverse, 40-year hit-making tradition into a new century and generation.