Sunbury - Highlights of 1973 and 1974

Since the Sunbury Pop Festival was held on a 620-acre private farm, the event was touted as Australia’s Woodstock. But as this incredible compilation reveals, the festival inadvertently served as a transition point where the hippie movement had to make way for pub-rock’s rise in the early '70s. Following a Joe Cocker–inspired cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” and the whimsically jazzy “La La Song,” both by a band named Friends, Lobby Loyde and his band of toughs, Coloured Balls, kick out a harder, meaner jam in a rowdy rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” replete with gang vocals shouted over towering, distorted guitar riffs. All Woodstock comparisons aside, this moment seems akin to Black Sabbath following Seals & Crofts at the 1974 California Jam. Sydney’s Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs unleashed some similarly heavy numbers with “Going Back Home” (a nearly 13-minute epic of hard, psychedelic proto-metal) and the behemoth-sized boogie-rocker “New Orleans.” Buster Brown also helped usher in this sea change with a hard-hitting “Roll Over Beethoven.”