What look like diamonds, are actually diamantes.
The silver platform boots are only spray paint. The silk satin shirt is really cotton sateen.
Nothing is one hundred percent what you’d think.
On stage, under the lights, what looks like Abba, is Abbalanche.
Cut to fifteen years ago, and hard rock band Who’s Guilty and all their instruments, equipment, luggage - everything except their manager - is crammed into a van, on a road, somewhere. It’s their last day on an itinerary that has them playing Sydney – Queensland – Adelaide – Sydney on four consecutive nights.
By this stage, everyone hates everyone.
The driver is the keyboardist is Bob Wheatley and he’s starting to hallucinate. From the front, his thin voice floats into the rear cabin and says, “Someone else has to drive now.”
Cut to thirty seconds later, there’s still just the same old stretch of grey highway meaning they could be anywhere in the world. And then, up ahead, the glowing red and yellow lights of a McDonalds rolls into view and doesn’t do anything for anyone’s sense of displacement.
Cut to the interior of a McDonalds restaurant, where the entire congregation are staring wide eyed. Put a spotlight on a mother who snatches up her daughter’s hand, and pulls her close. This same mother, she wrinkles her nose. What they’re looking at is the five rockpigs who have just spent four days in the same enclosed space and maybe don’t smell so hot. What they’re looking at is Bob Wheatley dragging himself to the front counter and ordering a sundae.
The employee hurries away, flustered, to get Bob’s order and comes back only seconds later with a shaky hand and just a squirt of ice-cream in the bottom of a plastic cup. A wonky little sausage, a dribble of caramel sauce. Bob’s bleary eyes land on the cup. He reaches out and lifts it to his eye level.
To no one in particular, he exhales, “They’ve given me a Friday.”
And then he collapses to the floor, laughing delirium.
“Sir, you have to leave.”
“I’m not leaving. I have to finish this. I don’t know if I can, you’ve given me a lot.”
“Sir, please...”
Fade out the begging store manager and jump forward again, fifteen years. Here and now, in Bob Wheatley’s house, things have settled considerably since his rock days. Sure, there’s a thong lying on the kitchen floor, but it’s the kind you put on your foot. Upstairs, there’s a young lady sprawled on the bed, only its Bob’s step-daughter, home from school with the flu. In the kitchen, Bob sips from a cup of coffee and maybe there’s a splash of something in there, but probably there isn’t.
The house is a two storey suburban with an organised chaos kind of feel. The inside is a foreign land of computers, speakers and sound mixing gear. From the floor sprout tiny foothills of books and electronics. CD Skyscrapers and Magazine Mountains. Next to the Ironing Board Plateau, just off the west coast of the Couch, you crane your neck to try and see over the peak of the Clothes-to-be-ironed Superdome. Mayor of this town, Bob leans back at the kitchen table, comfortable in a dark velvet jacket. With his wiry straight hair that stops as if by guillotine at his shoulders, parted one way, it’s a look that says Lifelong Musician. But part it the other way, and to everyone’s surprise, it’s Benny from Abba.
“When I first joined Abbalanche, I’d never played in a covers band. I’d done nothing but original music. I stayed away from the lure of making regular money doing that because, y’know, I was a musician, that’s what I did. I didn’t play that dreadful covers stuff.”
Since he could reach the piano, that’s how long Bob’s been playing. Born in Hornsby, he attended Thornleigh Primary – a school which was knocked down in its ninety-ninth year to make way for a Bunnings and McDonalds. “I knew at a very young age I was going to be a musician. Fifth grade was when I first thought yeah, this is what I want to be, and by the time I was in mid high school, I was absolutely dead certain.” Bob grew up playing classical piano but with the advent of high school and what was the inevitable effect of the eighties, he traded in the piano for the keyboard and his powdered-wig icons for more contemporary artists, who nonetheless loved powder in their own special way. He’s always played in bands, but it’s only after graduation that he fell into it more seriously. “It’s then I went through all the politics of being in a band - that’s always a steep learning curve for a kid.”
Bob Wheatley has had record deals. His band Who’s Guilty were the Australian finalists in the 1994 Yamaha World Music Quest. “They flew us to Japan and we had to play one song, which was live on television to apparently forty-two million viewers,” Bob rubs his face, “I don’t know what they thought of us.” It was a big year for the band, and in 1994, Who’s Guilty also won Drum Media’s Rookie of the Year and were set to become the next big thing.
Only they didn’t.
“You think this is it, this’ll be the big break, and then it all falls in a heap yet again.” What most people don’t know is that record deals have a ninety-five percent failure rate.
Who’s Guilty broke up in mid 1995, when Bob realised the band had gone as far as it was going to go without changing the line up. Not that he didn’t try that too, “I did,” he insists, “and the last line up was actually a really good band, but the singer who was meant to join decided to stay with another band,” he closes his eyelids, “called Unlikely Sex Sandwich.” It’s as though time hasn’t worn the edges off the disappointment at all, and you can zoom in on the moment in 1995 when Bob threw his hands up in the air and walked away. “So after more than a decade of flogging my arse up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia for no money, and because of where I was in my life, when I got offered the gig in Abbalanche I thought ‘Aw yeah, I’ll do this and make some money for six months or something.’ Ten years later...”
From the moment they go onstage, to the moment they bow out, Abbalanche speak in Swedish accents. At the end of every show, they crown a Dancing Queen. They wear tight pants. They’re liberal with eye shadow. They do not take themselves seriously. “We have such a ball on stage. A lot of people, especially husbands are like ‘Mate, I bloody hate Abba...but you guys are great!’ And that’s the bottom line of it all, you have to go out there and put on a good show. I just like going on stage and jumping around like an idiot. Doing what I do.”
Bob’s stage style is a point of discussion. As remarked by a fellow band member “Anyone who continues to bounce around on their piano stool after what that nurse said deserves everything they get”. There’s head banging and a fair amount of the pogo, but Bob’s moves aren’t as blasphemous as they first appear, and are actually kind of justified. Sort of. “I watched some [Abba] videos, but Benny never did that much. The best thing he did was in Hedstars, a band he was in back in the mid sixties, which is where he used to jump around on stage like a complete lunatic, which was really unusual for the time. He was a madman. So I thought yeah, cool, I’m allowed to do that.”
It’s a reasonable compromise once you consider it all has to be done in three inch heeled shoes. Bob points to an open box on the ironing board. Inside is a pair of platforms that shimmer from purple to silver and back again at an immeasurable rate per second. “Those are the hardest at the moment because they’re new. I got them from pimpcostumes.com, from the States.”
High heels and white pants, a lycra-sequin romance, being in Abbalanche is nothing if not a sacrifice in self-image. But maybe the biggest cosmetic issue sits on top of Bob’s head. Not that it isn’t a dynamite style, but ten years in an Abba band...ten years with the same haircut? Bob is not concerned, “It doesn’t annoy me too much. Maybe on a windy day. But I don’t think the kids would let me cut it now anyway,” he takes his voice up an octave, “‘Oh, you wouldn’t look like you!’”
When Abbalanche started, fourteen years ago, none of the current band members were involved. Peter and Lesley Watters who play Bjorn and Frida (and are married in real life – to almost no controversy) joined thirteen years ago and then bought the show from the original owners a year later. The band name was passed along in the same transaction. “I wanted to go with Abbathetic,” says Bob, “but nobody would let me.” As far as names go, Abbalanche is doing pretty okay. The tribute band scene has spawned some of the major pun offenses of the last twenty years and the line between magic and tragic is dangerously thin. Abbacadabra; funny, inventive. Abbasolutely Fabbaulous; somebody has sprained a muscle. There’s Abbamania, Abbaration, AbbaDabbaDoo, Babba, Fabba – it’s like being stabbed repeatedly in the face - but easily the most recognisable name in the industry is Bjorn Again.
A tribute band that started out small in Melbourne, Bjorn Again have been in business for twice as long as the original Abba. They now have five troupes of performers on four different continents. It’s a franchise. Bob shakes his head in disbelief, “Bjorn Again are at the top of the pile, because I mean, they are world famous. They’re not necessarily better than us, but I’m not going to get into that argument, but they have better publicity. And I mean good luck to ‘em. Their name is just worth a fortune.” Bob is not wrong.
Cut to the 1992 Reading Festival and Kurt Cobain refusing to perform unless Bjorn Again are on the bill.
Cut to publicity you can’t buy.
So there’s a hierarchy among tribute bands? “Sort of yeah. We’re probably second level down from Bjorn Again.” Turns out that’s not such a bad place to be.
Rewind to the days of Who’s Guilty, somewhere in the mid 90s. The band manager has called a meeting. He informs the band that they’re playing one night in Adelaide and the next night in Perth. They will, he says, be driving in the van. Bob has some concerns about this and expresses them in the form of slamming an atlas on the table. He traces his finger along the 32 hour drive between point A and point B and says “Here you go, tell me how fast per hour we’ve got to go to actually make it in time.” The manager shrugs, “Well, we might have to go a bit over the speed limit.”
These days, with Abbalanche, they fly. They’ve performed internationally as well as toured Australia with legendary disco-era acts like KC and the Sunshine Band, The Village People and Boney M.
A man of many ventures, when he isn’t taking creative liberties with Benny’s stage style, Bob can usually be found at a little home studio in Thornleigh. This is Stolen Planet, the production company Bob has set up, where he records albums and demos for up and coming artists. It’s here that Bob recorded the album Ngarukuruwala (We Sing Songs), which received the Northern Territory Indigenous Music Award for the Best Indigenous Recording of 2008. But Bob shrugs his shoulders and says how it doesn’t really mean anything; “I’m just a sound engineer”. It’s this modesty and self-deprecation that makes you see how all Bob’s experiences have whittled him into a wise, good bloke. Salt of the earth, an Aussie Battler. That is, until he puts one finger in the air and corrects himself; “Award winning sound engineer.”
By night, Bob hosts trivia twice a week in Castle Hill and Berowra. Using a grand piano for a desk and running the show with commentary drier than your Nanna’s elbow skin, it’s clear that he is a natural performer. Abbalanche, trivia, sound engineering, Bob has organised his life so the jobs he does are all the things he enjoys. “I really just get paid to have fun. I never ever wanted to be sitting in an office, doing a job I hate. I’m glad I didn’t subscribe to that.”
Not that it’s been easy. Music isn’t a career Bob would quickly recommend. According to him, you’re born a musician; it’s not so much a choice as it is a fulfilment. Years have gone by, and all Bob’s original bands have broken apart. They never became the rock stars they were supposed to be. Bob’s daughter finds a song on an old cd lying around the house and tells her dad how she thinks it’s really cool. Until he tells her, she has no idea that the song is his.
Now, we’re outside in Bob’s front yard, and he apologises for the state of things. The grass is long and growing in every direction. It’s shrubs and trees and weeds all blurred together in an assault of green. It’s very rock and roll.
- Jana Roose
www.abbalanche.com.au
