Aussie rock legend's death shocks industry

News.com.au

2 days ago

Australian music has lost a legend with the death this week of Colonel Joye.
The pioneer singer/songwriter and musical entrepreneur had been in declining health in recent years however with characteristic determination bounced back from an episode of ill health in 2022 after his one-time contemporary Normie Rowe took to the radio airwaves on 2GB to talk up Joye's precarious health, infuriating the singer's family.
Rowe was doing the rounds again hours after Joye's death on Wednesday morning playing the arbiter of bad news.
Born Colin Jacobsen in 1937, Joye, as he became known, was the second of four children born to a furniture factory worker and his music-loving wife.
'Kevin, Colin, Keith and Carol … Mum never did it on purpose. I was gonna be June..' he recalled of the family naming convention speaking to this writer in 2022.
Joye was raised in Sydney's southwest in humble circumstances in a small corrugated-iron house with a mud floor.
As a boy Joye learnt to play the piano and guitar and was drawn to the sounds of 'hillbilly music' emanating from the wireless.
'I was always interested in music,' he told this writer. 'I'd get up at 5.30 and listen to the wireless, the hillbilly music as they used to call it, and so country music has always been ingrained in me.'
While working for a jeweller, Colin, on piano, and little brother Keith, on bass, joined older brother Kevin's band.
The group would become The Joy Boys after finding their niche playing dances at the Bankstown Capitol Theatre and Bronte Surf Club on Sunday nights.
Helped along by appearances on Channel 9's pioneer music program Bandstand which launched in 1958, the group would celebrate three hit songs in 1959 with Bye Bye Baby, Rockin' Rollin' Clementine and Oh Yeah Uh Huh topping the charts.
A concert live album featuring the band and released that same year became Australia's first nationwide number one record.
The fledgling television industry was heavily reliant on live musical performances at the time and the renamed Colonel Joye and The Joy Boys found themselves in huge demand.
Along with regular appearances on Bandstand for 14 years, there would also be performances on programs Bobby Limb's Sound of Music, Sing Sing Sing and The Bryan Davies Show alongside the homegrown stars of the time including Judy Stone, Lonnie Lee, Sandy Scott, 'Little Pattie' Amphlett (sister of rocker Chrissie, and married for a decade to Colin's brother Keith), The Delltones and later Johnny O'Keefe and Olivia Newton John.
The affable Colin would strike up lifelong friendships with many of his contemporaries including Bandstand host Brian Henderson and radio's 'top disc jockey' of the day John Laws.
Joye readily acknowledged America's influence on his music and by 1965, buoyed by Col's discovery in 1961 of boy band The Bee Gees, brothers Colonel and Kevin started their own artists' management company, ATA Allstar Artists, later spinning off the successful promotions company, Jacobsen Entertainment which toured acts including Shirley MacLaine, Demis Roussos, The Two Ronnies and Newton-John.
Kevin would later lament in 1980 not having been a better manager to his younger brother: 'I should have left (The Joy Boys) a long time before (1962). I would have been a far better personal manager to Colin if I had.'
'We blew a lot of money, spent a lot of money and we should have done a lot more than we did,' Jacobsen said.
By the 2000s the brothers had fallen out bitterly over profits from the hit stage musical Dirty Dancing which was produced by their company, which by that time also employed their children.
Kevin Jacobsen later filed for bankruptcy claiming he had been cheated out of rights.
In 1970 Joye married wife Dalys in Fiji.
The ceremony, a private affair, was a joint wedding ceremony. Joye's younger sister Carol Jacobsen also exchanged wedding vows with singer Sandy Scott.
There would be near misses for the noted thrillseeker over the decades.
In 1977 the keen waterskier had a narrow escape after his new 200hp boat stalled on its maiden outing in Moreton Bay throwing him into the path of an oncoming boat. Joye was hospitalised with four broken ribs and a punctured lung.
Years later in 1990 he was hospitalised again after falling six metres from a tree and onto a driveway next door to his Hunters Hill home while pruning a tree, breaking seven ribs and again puncturing a lung.
Colin and Dalys welcomed two children during their long 55-year marriage and both followed their father into the entertainment industry.
Son Clayton is a successful New York-based director/producer (The Man from Snowy River arena show) and daughter Amber is an entrepreneur (Toby's Estate coffee) and musical producer.
In 2022 Joye said becoming a grandfather for the first time at age 80 had given him much to look forward to in later life.
'They're the light of my life,' he said, adding that while he was no longer capable of getting down on the floor and wrestling his grandchildren, he could still love them 'a hundred mile an hour'.