Imagine this! It was 1967 & the Mike Perjanik Band with vocalists Tommy Adderley & Allison Durbin were in Sydney. Very early in their time there Mike obtained some work as an arranger for EMI. This lead to reps from EMI going to the Oceanic to hear the band, offering to record them & offering Tommy a song to record.

Tommy was very good at imitating English singers. EMI producer David McKay played Mike an acetate of a song written by American song writers: Ray Gilmore, Dave White & Johnny Madara, knowing that it would be a great hit & knowing that the song would suit Tommy. (These writers had had previous success with pop songs. Madara & White had written You Don’t Own Me which was a big hit for Lesley Gore in 1963.)

Weeks rolled by. Tommy, whose first love was jazz, considered himself to be a serious singer. Sadie, the song he been offered was lightweight & comical. He was already singing Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter because audiences wanted to hear it & he was fed up with the frequency he had to sing that. If he recorded Sadie he knew he’d have to sing that every time he performed.

The acetate languished in Mike’s apartment for weeks. Tommy hummed & hared. He did not want to record the song, describing it as ‘this garbage’. EMI hassled Mike to get it recorded. Tommy returned to Auckland, David McKay said to Mike: “That’s it. I’ve got this little plumber in Melbourne. I’ll give it to him to do.”

And the rest, as they say is …

References:

Interviews with Mike Perjanik, Sydney, 1997 & 2017

Playing to Win by Jeff Apter. Nero: Melbourne, 2016

Photo credit: Murray Menzies, Christchurch