9/23/2023 0 Comments Cold steel 3 dark dragon lairLeft to right, Paul Hewson, Neil Storey, Ray Goodwin, Marc Hunter, Robert Taylor, Todd Hunter. The Dragon line-up that recorded the first Australian single ‘Star Kissed’, 1975. Occasionally they would take the train to a gig out of town, singing songs to the girls on board for food. The band took any work they could get – clubs, pubs, lunchtime high school gigs, nature strips, ice rinks – and Marc learnt quickly how to manipulate any crowd. Luckily, Dragon’s Vertigo labelmates Buffalo checked into the White Sands and their manager Sebastian Chase – who Marc had already tried to convince should manage Dragon prior to De Gruchy’s involvement – persuaded the Perth promoter to pay Dragon’s airfares back to Sydney. Paul had pretended to go play the piano in the hotel only to sneak into the kitchen and steal a chicken to feed the band upstairs. When the Quo entourage left Perth to fly back to Melbourne later in the month, De Gruchy had lost interest in Dragon and they were broke and stranded at the White Sands Motor Hotel in Scarborough. There was an inauspicious start to the trip when Paul and Robert stole a bottle of Scotch from the Quo dressing room during the first gig at the Hordern Pavilion. Wayne De Gruchy scored a coup for the band when he secured them the support slot on the Status Quo tour of Australia that October. Dragon’s founding members – Marc’s older bass-playing brother Todd and guitarist Ray Goodwin, who struck Angelique as a stylish Bryan Ferry type – remained relatively separate. When they weren’t egging each other on, Paul and Angelique would hang out with guitarist Robert Taylor and drummer Neil Storey. Both men shared a similar cruel sense of humour, and Marc’s larger-than-life persona would come to be equally as important to the band as Paul’s songs. Paul had become especially tight with Dragon’s singer Marc Hunter, who had run the gauntlet from Tom Jones to Jim Morrison in the two years since joining the band. The shared accommodation and sleeping hours of the musicians, including Paul, were anything but conducive to the sleeping patterns of a baby, and Angelique would rise early and take the children on long outings to Centennial Park. About six weeks later, they joined Paul in Sydney, but the reunion was not as welcoming as the young mother had hoped for. The first songs Paul put forward were ‘Life Has Just Begun’, which Cruise Lane had demoed two years earlier, and the epic ‘Dance’, which though never recorded would be a staple of Dragon’s live repertoire for the rest of the decade.īack in Auckland on August 18, Paul’s wife, Angelique, gave birth to a daughter she named Syreeta, a little sister for Daniel, now three. Undeterred, the band rehearsed and wrote every day. The song didn’t catch on with record buyers, but was there ever a more prophetic refrain than “Sooner or later/You know we’re gonna/You know we’re gonna get you”? The day of Paul Hewson’s arrival, De Gruchy had Dragon at EMI to record Ray’s ‘Star Kissed’. Several of the city’s movers and shakers had shown up at their debut gig at the Coogee Bay Hotel and the band had opted to go with Wayne De Gruchy, who also managed John Paul Young. Arrivalįrom the outside it looked as though Dragon had landed on their feet since arriving in Sydney in May. Even Dragon guitarist Ray Goodwin, who had jammed with Paul in Auckland and introduced him to the band, wasn’t aware just how prolific the 22-year-old pianist was.ĭragon’s rise to the top of the Australian pop scene coincided with something dark and sinister.īut Dragon’s rise to the top of the Australian pop scene coincided with something dark and sinister, and the band’s New Zealand manager would unwittingly put Dragon directly in its path. Nobody could have predicted the impact his songwriting would have, not just on the band, but on Australian music over the next four years. He hardly knew the men in Dragon he’d left his pregnant wife and son in New Zealand for, but he knew this was his time. Paul Hewson arrived in Sydney in July 1975 with little more than the clothes on his back and a headful of music.
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