Wayne Green still fighting for rock and roll

Wayne Green – Fremantle Muscians Project Phot Jeff Atkinson

Wayne Green’s face is lined with the effects of years of booze, drugs and rock and roll.

The Perth rocker, who turned 70 last year was a fixture in bands like Wayne Green and The Phantoms who were a part of WA’s roaring live music scene in the 1970s.

Wayne lived life hard without too much thought for the future and has been on the cusp of making it big, three times.

He was a member of The Phantoms, formed in 1979 which performed more than 300 shows a year in Perth.

They were staples at the Scarborough Beach Hotel where 400 fans, including bikies from different gangs who would put their colours to one side, joined the crowd on a Sunday morning from 11am. 

Wayne says the band was unpredictable, anything could happen when they played at the Criterion or Hernandos, venues now long gone.

It was wild, irreverent, and loud and the band was on the cusp of something big, but missed the opportunity to move to the east and the band dissolved.

In the 1980s, Wayne joined another popular Perth band, The Boys, who gained national attention, touring with The
Kinks
, but relationships strained and Wayne headed back to Perth after a year.

Wayne talks frankly about his life, his successes and failures in his documentary movie GREEN: The Fight for Rock and Roll is a debut feature film for writer and director Luke Griffiths which looks at an era of live music where Wayne admits he didn’t have a clue where life was taking him.

In the ‘90s, he launched a solo project under the name Kid Green which gained enough notoriety to inspire a movie. This took him to Nashville, but the movie stalled, as did his chance to work with Delta Records. 

Now, at 70, Wayne is still playing gigs around Perth and reckons the cigarettes he smokes are keeping his voice in shape which is as good as it ever was.

The gigs don’t come as thick and fast as they used to, so Wayne supplements his music with gardening to keep the dollars coming in.

He first got involved with bands when he was around 19.

“I got involved by accident. I was very shy, I was at a party, Hogmanay, a Scottish New Year celebration and there was a guy there who’d played in bands with members of Deep Purple throughout Europe,” Wayne says.

“He came here as a 10 pound Pom and got a job at Claude Neon Signs. He was just giving music up, a fantastic guitarist, but he heard me singing, it’s like a Hollywood story or something, it’s weird.”

Wayne told him that while he loved music, he wasn’t a singer, but after a few beers Wayne was encouraged to sing and helped put a band together.

It gave Wayne the bug which has lasted over 50 years.

Wayne hadn’t really decided to pursue a particular career at this stage.

He says the making of the new documentary also largely came about by accident.

“I got a call from a friend called Greg Garbolino, who I knew from years ago. And he said, ‘oh, there’s a bloke who wants to do a documentary about you’. At my age, I’m not overly cynical, but I questioned it a little bit.

“Why would they want to do it with somebody pretty well unknown outside of this state. But it turned out that he and Halo Films had seen me sing when he was 18 and had the song Five Percent stuck in his head. I don’t know how many years ago that is now. Forty odd. 

“And he originally had an interest, when I was singing with The Boys.

“And he just loved it. And when he originally rang, he just wanted to do a local film about a mystery around The Boys
and a lot of bad feeling because there were two different singers. It was just chaotic, but he wanted to do something, but it was just too hard to do, so he said ‘I’ll just do one on you’.”

Wayne agrees the film is pretty frank.

“I just wanted to be honest, you know all the foibles you go through as a younger person.

“I was brutally honest with them because I thought if they’re going to bother to do that, they might as well, have an honest overview of what it’s really like to try and play live rock and roll in pubs in Australia.”

“I still had to work over the years because it’s a long apprenticeship to rock and roll and there’s no guarantee of money in it at any stage, but I just got the bug and the passion’s never left me,”

Wayne has no intention of giving up singing any time soon and says age is no barrier.

“I think I’ll know when it is time to stop, but I can still do an hour and a half. It’s very energetic, a really loud, blistering rock and rolI. I might have lost a few dance moves, but the voice is still there, thank goodness. And my passion is 100 per cent for it still.”

He also still turns his hand to some country and western.

“I’m just about to embark on that now because I’ve got about three unreleased country albums.

“A couple of the avenues that have opened up from interest shown in the film and I’m really keen on doing that because that was like a bucket list thing really for me. And the older you get the closer the bucket gets,” he said.

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Allen Newton
Journalist and public relations specialist Allen Newton has worked across major media organisations in Western Australia and PR locally and internationally. He and wife Helen Ganska operate Newton Ganska Communications. Allen started his journalism career at the long defunct Sunday Independent and went on to become the founding editor for news website PerthNow, Managing Editor of The Sunday Times and PerthNow and then Editor-In-Chief of news website WAtoday. As well as news, he has been an editor of food and wine, real estate, TV and travel sections. He’s done everything from co-hosting a local ABC television pop show, to editing a pop music section called Breakout with Big Al, and publishing his own media and marketing magazine.