A lot of halls come to mind when I think of
Phil Hungerford and his music.

The first is the Bilpin Memorial Hall in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where as a bunch of
school mates dreaming out loud, we played "And I Love Her" and pretended we were apple-
crunching versions of the blokes who recorded the song on the Apple label.
Bilpin is as famous for its apples as it is for being Phil's home, though he will quickly add he
actually comes from Berambing, which is a suburb of Bilpin ( if a town with a petrol pump,a school
and acres of apple orchards can have a suburb).

Then there was the Richmond School of Arts by which time Phil had surpassed the rest of the boys
in the band and was writing his own songs and performing as a solo artist,supporting such
emerging glitterati of the Sydney singer-songwriting circuit as Annie Kirkpatrick, Mike McClellan,
Kevin Johnson, Ward and Johnson.

Gees, just writing these names down creates a tsunami of nostalgia.

Then there was the big concert at the Sydney Opera House and we all had to admit the boy from
Bilpin, or Berambing if you're going to be pedantic, had made it big ... well biggish.
By this time there was a little list of songs that had their own small but strong following -
"Davey Jones", "Mandy" (Barry Manilow pinched the title, we were convinced).

Somehow thereabouts we drifted apart, well if you live in Tasmania for nine years as I did ,you drift
apart from most things. But I contrived to get him to Tasmania and another bloody hall, one in
Georgetown, the venue for the Tamar Valley Folk Festival. He did the usual Phil set. My wife and I
were probably the only ones in the audience who knew all the songs.Thanks to the local radio
station 7NT, a few people had heard "Sweet Mary". The live to air bit of the concert was proficient
because they always are with Phil and at the stroke of midday, the outside broadcast finished.
But the audience wanted more. So Phil and his side-kick Dave looked at each other. Then a voice
shouted from the back of the hall, play "The Rage". Yeah, all right it was me. I had heard it in my
living room maybe once or twice before as Phil polished it andsought feedback. Anyway, Phil
got the big fat 12-string with the open tuning out of the guitar case,hoped like blazes it was in tune
then pounded into the opening riff. It could have been Roger McGuinn playing the jingle-jangle start
to "Mr Tambourine Man", or Neil Finn's belter "She Will Have Her Way" for the impact it had.
Remember, this was a song that no more than four people in the joint had heard before but soon
the roof was lifting, the walls were rocking and more than a couple of open chords had been
struck with the audience. Lyrically, it's a powerful song. You're immediately in Condobolin, Lake
Cargelligo, well I don't know, some small country town in the mid-west of New South Wales where
these things happen every Saturday night. Phil says it's a bit like a movie. Yeah, maybe a scene
from Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show" 'cept with Australian accents and idioms.
"Passion", "dangerous eyes" ... I don't know where young Phil gets these ideas from!! His music
certainly covers a whimsical and intriguing journey. Maybe something more than singing Beatles
songs happened in and around the old Bilpin Memorial Hall way back when they were the Fab Four
and not the Fab Two.

Once we planned to go to the West Coast and conquer the world from there. But life got in the way
in a way that none of us would regret for a moment. But as the years march by, there's still more
than enough of the Berambing dreamer left to produce music that demands attention and repays
the listener many times over.

So come on, feel the Rage ... !


Warwick Hadfield.

ABC radio.