Peter
Clifton ... excited about a premiere at last. Photo: Wolter Peeters
Garry Maddox, The Age, reports
Peter Clifton lost track of his film on the Easybeats for more
than 40 years.
As a 21-year-old director from the northern beaches, he spent
three weeks travelling around Britain with the great Australian rock band in
1967, filming them performing their international hit Friday On My Mind, being
chased by teenage girls down Carnaby Street, visiting the pirate broadcaster
Radio Caroline, playing football with the Small Faces and singing a rock
version of the traditional Scottish song Loch
Lomond - wearing kilts, no less - by Loch Ness.
It was a rare insight into a band Clifton says was ''bigger in
Australia than the Beatles'' at the time.
But when he sent the 52-minute film for processing before a planned
screening on the ABC, disaster struck. First, the negative was damaged, which
meant two sequences had to be dropped and others shortened. Then the film, Easy Come, Easy Go, just
disappeared. ''Nobody could ever find the negative or the print,'' Clifton says.
Within two years, the Easybeats had broken up. The lead singer,
Stevie Wright, started a solo career that included another huge hit, Evie (parts 1, 2 and 3),
before well-documented problems with alcohol and heroin. His fellow band
members Harry Vanda and George Young found further success writing songs,
including Evie,
and producing for AC/DC.
In Britain, Clifton went on filming bands, including Led Zeppelin,
the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, Jim Morrison,
the Bee Gees and the Sex Pistols.
It took an approach by an author writing a book about the
Easybeats for Clifton to find his lost film. ''It turned out somebody stole it
and took it to America.''
With out-takes from his library and funding from the National Film
and Sound Archive, Clifton has restored a 35-minute version of Easy Come, Easy Go. It
will be screened for the first time at the Sydney Film Festival, which opens
with the comedy Not Suitable
For Children on Wednesday.
Easy
Come, Easy Go will be shown at the Sydney Film Festival with Searching For
Sugar Man on June 14.
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