He had an interest in theatre, and was keen to take part in the annual Auckland University capping revue. To give himself an in, he enrolled in a night class at the art school and played as a reserve in the university rugby team.
Auckland’s student revues were of the quality “you would see in nightclubs or film sketches”
“I had seen one of their student revues before moving up to Auckland and it was so professional and the standard was so high in terms of the humour, the staging, the ideas and the whole process,” Scott says.
“In Christchurch, the revue was a rabble. In Auckland it was like the stuff you would see in nightclubs or film sketches.”
The producer of the 1959 revue, Gabriel “Borrie” Prendergast, cast Scott as a singing gravedigger for one of the skits, ‘My Fair Hamlet’.
“Borrie and Graeme Nixon, who were the major drivers of the revues for a number of years, discovered me. I was flatting with a guy who played guitar, and they saw us singing together at this party we were at on the North Shore. They said ‘do you want to be in our student revue?’ and of course I did, and I had been intending to audition.”
The revue was written by Vincent O’Sullivan, who went on to become a leading poet and writer of fiction and biography. ‘Gravedigger’s Rock’ is credited to O’Sullivan and Phil Crookes, who set up Audion Records to release the single. Instrumental backing is credited to the Zanyopolis AU Students Revue, where Jim Paterson was musical director and Bernie Allen the arranger, but in fact most of the band had no connection to the university.
Drummer Bruce King says guitarist Graham “Gray” Bartlett, who he first met at the Sunday night teen club in Mt Albert, knew Scott from clubs around town and roped him in for the recording along with pianist Pete Common. The bass player was drawn from the revue orchestra.
This band also played on the B-side, ‘Cool ‘n’ Crazy’ by Rob Maxman and the Martians.
“Ron was a builder called Ron Paterson who wanted to be Elvis. He sang the songs and had the mannerisms and hung around the clubs. I think he offered to pay for the record, which the student union was happy to take him up on,” King says.
“Later on he developed a studio in his house in New Lynn, where I did some recording.”
‘Gravedigger’s Rock’ was recorded in the studio of Auckland Wireless Services (later Mascot), upstairs in the long-gone Pacific Building on the corner of Queen and Wellesley Streets, where owner Bruce Barton was known for his knack for getting a usable sound out of the limited equipment available.
Scott promoted
‘Gravedigger’s Rock’ by performing it at gigs around Auckland
“Because of import restrictions it was hard to get equipment, so there was no echo machine. They would feed the sound into toilets and put another microphone there to get the echo,” Scott says.
While the flip side, ‘Cool ‘n’ Crazy’, was claimed to be drawn from the previous year’s revue, Triptomania, there is no hint of the song nor of rock and roll on the album from that show, custom-released on the Ranfurly label.
Zanyopolis was put on in the 1300-seat Playhouse, later the Mercury Theatre, off Karangahape Rd, and would be packed out for its week-long run in May, 1959.
Undaunted by the absence of radio play for ‘Gravedigger’s Rock’, Scott promoted it by playing rock and roll gigs around the town, including a regular Saturday night dance at Avondale College, where drummer King was still a pupil.
Scott and pianist Common started writing songs, with Crooks sending them back into the studio to record the second Audion single – ‘Bluebird’ backed with ‘Treasure of Love’ – billed as Clyde Scott and the Clansmen.
When Bartlett got an invitation from club owner Bob Sell to audition as a guitarist for either of his restaurants, the Colony or La Boheme, the quartet worked up a set of Bobby Darin nightclub numbers, wearing American-style college letter cardigans from an Avondale College theatre production.
“Sell was sold. He put us and our set straight into his Colony floorshow, cardigans and all, as Clyde Scott and the Senators. We presented as an up-front quartet, linked by our cardigans with Bruce standing at his snare drum and foot-operated pair of cymbals – that’s all he used so he could stand and balance the formation across from Gray flanking me. Showman Bob Sell worked this formation out, right there at the audition! And so it stayed – at the Colony, and wherever we played as me and the Senators. It all worked – for three years plus,” says Scott.
The Colony featured a midnight floor show bringing together a number of acts, including the likes of the Howard Morrison Quartet, Antoni Williams, jazz singer Marlene Tong, The Keil Isles, Kahu Pineaha, Ricky May, Tommy Adderley, female impersonator Noel McKay, and even a young Kiri Te Kanawa.
“After Bob Sell sold the club, I became part of the house band, which would back Clyde and anyone else who would come through,” King says.
Scott remembers getting musical support at the Colony and other clubs from pianists John Wilcox, Billie Farnell, Claude Papesch playing saxophone, and bassist Kevin Haines (Nathan Haines’s father) and Billy Kristian.
Auckland’s music scene was buzzing, with live music at many venues on a Saturday night
“The music scene was so lively, at one time there were 30 places you could go see live music on a Saturday night.
“I used to have four or five gigs on a Saturday night. I’d do three or four numbers at the Sorrento [on One Tree Hill], the Bayswater sailing club, Archer’s Ranch on the Shore, several nightclubs up and down Queen Street. There would be a big interchange of musicians zigzagging across town to venues.
“I’d do rock and roll at the dance shows and I did Copacabana type numbers in the nightclubs – Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, ‘Mack the Knife’, ‘Clementine’, those sorts of songs.”
The Senators also picked up a gig playing at the Majestic Cinema in Queen St before screenings of Hound Dog Man featuring American teen idol Fabian.
Scott also remembers singing with the Mike Walker Jazz Trio at coffee houses such as the Picasso and the Montmartre, standing in with Bill Sevesi’s Big Band at the Orange Ballroom in Newton Road and his Christmas and New Year fixtures at Waihi, playing the Peter Pan Ballroom with the Arthur Skelton and Jock Nisbett big bands, and the Sorrento where the Toni Williams band had a residency.
He needed the alternatives because the various Senators weren’t always around. Because they could read music they were in demand for touring shows. King backed Connie Francis in 1961 and Helen Shapiro the following year.
Scott was tapped as a compère by promoter and La Gloria label owner Harry M. Miller, who asked him to introduce shows for the Howard Morrison Quartet.
“Because of my work I couldn’t do the tours but I would do Auckland, Whangārei and Hamilton, where I could come back the same night.
“Howard and his group were very creative. I remember going in the bus to Whangārei when they decided to make ‘chur’ a word. At every point of the concert that evening they made a point of emphasising ‘chur’ and it took off.”
Foreign acts Scott compered for included Connie Francis, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney and Adam Faith.
Miller also arranged for Scott to cut a copy of the Everly Brothers’ hit version of ‘Lucille’ backed with ‘So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)’. The US duo had switched from Cadence to Warners, which had no New Zealand licensee, and Miller rush-released the single on Wellington’s Lotus label. “The week after we recorded it Phil Warren came back from London with the rights to Warner Records, and he flooded the market. My record got sidelined,” Scott says.
A similar fate befell his fourth and final single, released on Miller’s La Gloria label. Scott remembers nothing about Miller’s choice for the A-side, ‘When the Time is Right’ by prolific R’n’B and doowop songwriter Billy Dawn Smith, but he was keen to record what he felt was an underrated song from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical Carousel.
“Two weeks after I did ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, Gerry and the Pacemakers came out and had a huge hit with it and I was eclipsed again.”
Alongside the music, Scott continued to do three or four amateur theatre productions a year, many of them rehearsed and performed at St Andrew’s Church on lower Symonds St until the Presbyterian elders decided theatre wasn’t a suitable use for church space. He also worked on making his mark in advertising.
“I set up my own firm in 1960, Gray Scott Advertising, with Russell Gray who had been the production manager at Goldberg. Our big early account was Doug Bremner, who had been importing carpets from America but with the import restrictions decided to manufacture them here as Bremworth Carpets.
“Gordon Dryden, in one of his books, said we produced the first ads in New Zealand to use lifestyle to sell a product.
“On the advertising side there was tremendous opportunity for creativity. [Sir] Bob Harvey started McHarman the year after us, and we were the two hotshot agencies in Auckland. We changed the nature of the business and brought the studio out from the back of the agency to the front. That was our creativity and that’s what we endeavoured to promote. That is what an agency should be providing – we weren’t suit-and-tie people.
“A lot of the companies that started up about then because of the import restrictions, their advertising budgets were small so the big agencies wouldn’t take them on. Being small ourselves, those budgets suited us and we could get a return that was viable.”
Scott’s music connections helped him recruit the musicians for jingles and his theatre experience gave him a head start in tackling the new world of television advertising. He also got work on the small screen, taking over from Stewart Macpherson to compère pioneering TV music show In the Groove in 1962 and Teen 63 the next year, and co-hosting Swinging Safari with Ray Columbus in 1966 – New Zealand’s first music show to be filmed live and outdoors.
Scott’s music connections helped him recruit the musicians for advertising jingles
It was about that time he stepped back from entertainment to concentrate on running the advertising agency, although he continued with amateur theatre and the occasional foray into film and television.
He made his big screen debut in John O’Shea’s 1964 film Runaway and was in Roger Donaldson’s 1977 film Sleeping Dogs, the docudrama Beyond Reasonable Doubt based on the Arthur Allan Thomas case, another Donaldson movie from 1980 Nutcase, Geoff Murphy’s Goodbye Pork Pie from 1981 where he plays an elderly traffic cop, and parts in the television series Winners and Losers (1975-76) and Mortimer’s Patch (1980-84).
After the sale of what was by then Gray Scott Inch Advertising to multinational Young & Rubicam was finalised in 1990, Scott went back to his art school roots, becoming a successful painter.
He’s also got some musical ideas left in the tank. “I’m writing a show at the moment, a musical, which I hope will give me the chance to get back on stage. It’s an old story I’m putting a new slant on that I’m intending to do this with my brother Lloyd [veteran RNZ announcer Lloyd Scott]. I’ll play one part and he will play many. I’m hoping to have that in a position so can talk to a production team about the middle of this year,” Scott says.
“As to my musical career, it was good while it lasted and certainly a lot of people remember this stuff, and it’s been circulated internationally, so it wasn’t a complete failure.”
