Where did they get that song?

Sources of Australian Pop Records from the 50s, 60s and 70s plus some Aussie originals and some New Zealanders

Originals / Covers / Remakes / Songwriters / Chart Positions

What have they done to my song?

Melanie Safka

Obscure Originator Dept: Vandyke And The Bambis

Doin' The Mod (1965) was released by Melbourne band The Flies with soon-to-be-famous Ronnie Burns on guitar and vocals. This was a few months after New Zealand's Ray Columbus And The Invaders had a hit with She's A Mod. Something was going down on the teenage subculture scene, mainly in the UK where both of these songs originated and where rivalry between crowds of mods and rockers could turn violent. (In Australia, My Little Rocker's Turned Surfie [1964] reflected another variety of teen subculture.)

It seems unfair to call Doin' The Mod's writer and performer Les Vandyke an obscurity. He would not have been obscure to anyone who studiously read the tiny bracketed songwriter credits on record labels. His compositions included Adam Faith's What Do You Want ? (#1 UK) and Poor Me (#1), Eden Kane's Well I Ask You (#1) and Forget Me Not (#3) and Applejack (#4) by ex- Shadows Jet Harris & Tony Meehan.

Sadly though, songwriters often went unnoticed except for some prominent artists who wrote their own material (The Beatles, Bob Dylan) and a select few whose names became better known (Jimmy Webb, Bacharach & David, Holland-Dozier-Holland).

Many British pop fans would have also heard Les Vandyke singing, as Johnny Worth, on soundalike versions of current hits on the budget Embassy label. Sold only in Woolworths stores, Embassy's sales figures were off the grid as far as the charts were concerned, but they probably sold more than one might assume, possibly in the 100,000s. In a delicious twist, they included Johnny Worth covering his own compositions including What Do You Want? and Poor Me.

I'm guessing that The Bambis were a studio group assembled by Les Vandyke. In photos they wear false joke-shop beards, and newspaper profiles of the day decline to name them.

When I wrote about them at the website, Les's son Dave emailed with a correction and the nice detail that the name of The Bambis came from his own childhood nickname..

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