In the vast history of rock 'n roll, there have been many stars who have given girls conniptions of the heart. In the late 1950s, though, the undisputed king of the teen scene in Australia was Col Joye. He recently passed away at the age of 89.
He was born Colin Frederick Jacobsen in Sydney, Australia, on 13 April 1936. The first Australian artist to achieve a number one hit with ‘Oh Yeah Uh Huh’ (1959), he went on to experience much chart success with his band, the Joy Boys.
Joye left school at 14 and worked as a jewellery salesman until he started a band with his brothers Kevin and Keith. The Jacobsen brothers released two singles in 1959 – ‘Stagger Lee' (a cover of the Lloyd Price U.S. original) and ‘Bye Bye Baby’ – with the latter reaching number one on the charts, establishing Joye as a major star.
On the advice of a clairvoyant, he changed his name to Col Joye and became a regular on the Australian music show Bandstand for 14 years. He soon won legions of fans for his natural charm, best displayed in the bluesy covers he recorded, like ‘Be Bop A Lula’ (1963).
Col Joye and the Joy Boys was the first Australian rock band to reach the American Billboard chart in 1959, touring the U.S. with Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs in the mid-1960s and early '70s.
Joye also famously performed with The Sapphires, an all-girl group comprising First Nation performers.
The KJ quintet became Col Joye and the Joy Boys when promoter Bill McColl added them to the bill of his October 1957 Jazzorama concert at the Manly Embassy and then used them to warm up audiences at screenings of the film The Tommy Steele Story.
Like the punk acts which followed them in the 1970s, the Jacobsens were very much into cutting out the middleman and going DIY.
Kevin Jacobsen recalled:
We ran our own dances and managed ourselves from the start.
We would draw two and a half thousand kids to the Bankstown Capitol on vinyl every Saturday night, with about 20 bouncers trying to stop the brawls.
The band found itself in demand for Sydney Stadium shows and shared billing with Little Richard, Gene Vincent, the Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Fabian and arch-rivals Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays.
Australian music historian Glenn A Baker wrote:
Back then, they were a menace to the morals of the nation, purveyors of the devil’s music, leading the young down the primrose path of degradation — and loving every minute of it.
Armed with youthful confidence and rudimentary sound equipment that could be carried in a Holden station wagon, Col and his boys were able to blaze a trail across the country in the name of rock ’n’ roll.
“Hard work is a family characteristic,” he would later quip.
...Col was a competent if not necessarily spectacular singer and was prepared to turn his tonsils toward anything that took his band’s fancy.
Joye was quite prolific, with a new single every couple of months and a regular flow of albums, such as Jump For Joye, Songs That Rocked The Stadium, Joyride and The Golden Boy. Some charted, some didn’t, but it hardly mattered.
It’s hard to come to grips with just how many magazine covers, newspaper headlines and television time were devoted to Joye over a 10-year period. Ordinary Australians felt secure with this regular bloke who never attempted to big-note himself.
“Bandstand was very important to my career,” Joye himself once conceded, “because we didn’t know how to be anything more than what we were and that was fine with Brian Henderson [the host]. We felt that we might not have been that good, but we weren’t bad either. We never got parents offside and we weren’t controversial — we didn’t know how to be. If we did anything wrong at home, we got the strap! But yeah, we did rise to some pretty great heights in this country. I have to say that.”
Joye would score a tally of 16 chart entries, enjoying an unexpected number one in 1973 with the country-oriented ‘Heaven Is My Woman’s Love’. This achievement placed him in a rare category, alongside Jimmy Barnes, John Farnham, Johnny O’Keefe and Daryl Braithwaite.
Col Joye married Dalys Dawson in 1970 in a joint wedding ceremony with his sister Carol Jacobsen and Sandy Scott in Fiji. The couple had two children, Amber and Clayton.
In his later years, Joye started a new career as a music promoter and established a talent agency with his brother Kevin. They discovered the Bee Gees in Surfers Paradise and brought them to Sydney.
In 1981, Joye was awarded the Order of Australia medal and then in 1988, Joye was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
Bad luck soon followed. In 1990, while pruning a neighbour’s tree with a chainsaw as a favour, Joye slipped and fell six metres onto brick paving, striking his head and falling into a coma as well as sustaining serious lower back and shoulder injuries and losing his sense of taste. He recovered and tentatively started performing and touring again in 1998.
Joye’s passing prompted a flood of tributes.
Entertainment reporter Richard Wilkins said:
“Col was an absolute pioneer of the Australian rock ‘n roll scene during the ‘50s with his band the Joy Boys. He was a real legend.”
One of Joye’s contemporaries, Normie Rowe, described his friend as “a true gentleman in the industry”.
Said Rowe:
“Col was in my psyche right throughout my entire life. I watched him and I thought if I’m going to be a singer, that’s the sort of singer I want to be.”
Jenny LeComte is a freelance journalist currently based in Port Lincoln, South Australia.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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