Mushroom 50

The Man Who Created a Nation’s Mixtape: Michael Gudinski and 50 years of the Mushroom Group

By Jeff Jenkins

1973 was not a great year for music. As the legendary Australian critic Ed Nimmervoll would later write: “This was the worst year for singles music – filled with middle-of-the-road sentimentality. Record buyers rediscovered Perry Como and danced in the old-fashioned way with Charles Aznavour.”

Not a single Australian album topped the charts in 1973 and just three local singles reached the summit – ‘Heaven Is My Woman’s Love’ by pop pioneer Col Joye, and ‘Delta Dawn’ and ‘Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)’ by Helen Reddy, who was then living in the US.

We might not have realised it at the time, but 1973 was actually a landmark year for Australian music, with the first releases for a new Melbourne label named Mushroom Records: singles by Madder Lake (‘Goodbye Lollipop’) and Friends (a cover of Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’) and Australia’s first triple album, Sunbury 1973, The Great Australian Rock Festival.

They were not big chart hits, but they heralded the arrival of a company that would change Australian music forever. As musician and writer Dave Warner observed, “When he formed Mushroom Records, Michael Gudinski did much more than just start a new record label. He began a partnership with the Australian people. Or maybe, more specifically, Australian youth. You don’t have to like Michael Gudinski – you don’t even have to know him – to be part of that partnership.”

Gudinski had announced the label the previous year when he was just 19-years-old. It’s remarkable to think that the founder of one of the world’s leading independent music companies was a teenager, but Gudinski always had an eye for business. At the age of seven, he was renting out a parking space at his parents’ Caulfield home when it was race-day at the nearby Caulfield Racecourse, charging two bob a car. He could squeeze eight cars into the yard.

At the age of 16, it could be said that Gudinski ran away to join the circus. He quit school and got a job working for Bill Joseph, a leading Melbourne promoter who also managed Bon Scott’s band The Valentines. “I was pretty green, had never seen any of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle,” Gudinski would reflect nearly five decades later. “I was still a virgin and had never seen drugs. I was a clean-cut, straight-down-the-line sort of kid.”

Gudinski accompanied The Valentines on a tour to Adelaide. “Let’s just say it opened my eyes.”

Matt Taylor remembers when Michael Gudinski was young. At the end of the ‘60s, Gudinski was the office boy at the Melbourne agency AMBO, who booked gigs for Taylor’s band, Chain. “I would go in there to see the big-wigs and I’d end up talking to Michael because he loved music,” Taylor recalls. “He was just 17 and his dad thought he was a bum because he had quit school, but he had more front than Myers.”

Gudinski became Chain’s booking agent and manager. “Look,” Taylor points out, “Michael was going to become a multi multi-millionaire no matter whether I was part of his story. But everyone needs someone to have faith in them, to give them a break, and that was us.”

At the Long Way To The Top concert in 2002, Gudinski called Chain “the band that inspired me to start Mushroom Records”.

Frank Stivala, Gudinski’s partner in the booking agency Premier Artists, fondly recalls the early days in the ‘70s. “We were just young kids trying to take over the world but winging it because there were really no rules in those days. We invented our own rules as we went along. It was just a bunch of guys having fun.”

The Mushroom team in Melbourne, and the Alberts label in Sydney, helped to shift people’s perceptions of Australian music. “Back then, people thought of Australian music as second-rate,” Gudinski recalled. “It was an era when people loved imported cars, imported clothes and imported records. Everyone was interested in the latest trend from England and America.”

And then Skyhooks came along.

Fronted by a man named Shirley, Skyhooks exploded the cultural cringe with unforgettable songs about their home city of Melbourne. Their debut album, Living In The 70’s, showed there was a massive market for local music, that you could get paid “for just bein’ a freak”.

“It was the start of the whole acceptance of Australian music that had a local identity,” noted Skyhooks’ producer, Ross Wilson.

It was a serendipitous time for Australian music. Mushroom launched in 1973, Countdown premiered the following year, and 2JJ started broadcasting in 1975, just before the music papers Juke and RAM landed.

But one anecdote reveals how precarious it was running an independent label in Australia in the 1970s.

With Living In The 70’s still at No.1 and having become the biggest-selling Australian album of all time, Skyhooks returned to the studio to make their second album, Ego Is Not A Dirty Word. But the studio manager wouldn’t let them in – because the bill for the first album had yet to be paid.

Confirming that story, Gudinksi explained: “It was ludicrous running an Australian label back then. I mean, you could have a gold record and lose money. The Skyhooks phenomenon was really good timing because Mushroom Records really needed it.

“Mushroom was started on the smell of an oily rag and naïve guts and determination. And even though we’d had a few successes already, we were losing money and in financial trouble. If an accountant had come and looked at Mushroom before Skyhooks succeeded, they would have shut it down and said, ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ That’s where the faith paid off. At the time everyone thought Mushroom was making a fortune, but all we were doing was paying off all the debts that we had before Skyhooks happened.”

As well as releasing Skyhooks’ records, Gudinski also managed the band and booked their gigs. The music mogul proudly pioneered the ‘360 deal’ – years before the music industry was even aware of that expression.

The Gudinski apocryphal story is that a schoolteacher once asked him: “What is 10 per cent of $2,000?” Young Michael replied: “Exactly. What is 10 per cent of $2,000?”

With his finger in so many pies, Gudinski was often criticised for wanting too big a slice, with his recording and touring empire also including music publishing and merchandise.

A popular music industry joke concerned Gudinski both managing Jimmy Barnes and releasing his records: “When Barnesy is negotiating his contract with Mushroom, does Michael have to jump across his desk and argue with himself?”

Skyhooks’ Greg Macainsh admits the band had many ups and downs with Gudinski, “but we had no nasty experiences on the business side”. “Michael was never a personal manager,” Macainsh adds. “He never packed our suitcases, did our banking or wiped our noses. But if a group of people needs someone like that, generally it won’t be successful because they will be waiting for someone to tell them what to do. All a manager can do is get you seen and heard, and Michael certainly did that. A Mushroom motto is ‘success is artist-driven’ and that is pretty true.” Put simply, Gudinski loved musicians, and musicians loved Gudinski.

He genuinely believed in artistic freedom. He didn't tell his artists what songs they should record, what videos they should make or what their album covers should look like.

Ross Wilson says Living In The 70's "turned out really well because Mushroom didn't interfere in any way."

Kylie Minogue said Gudinski "believed in you when you couldn't believe in yourself".

International artists loved touring Australia for Gudinski. Bruce Springsteen declared: “I’ve toured the world for the last 50 years and never met a better promoter.”

Billy Joel, who did six Australian tours with Gudinski, said: “Sure, he was a businessman making money, but he really loved what he was doing. He was so into the music and a real music fan.”

Dave Grohl called the Foo Fighters promoter “a magic person... every experience we ever had with Gudinski was a celebration of some kind. I always considered it a celebration of life.”

And Ed Sheeran – who became the first artist to sell one million tickets on an Australian tour – loved the promoter so much, he installed a life-sized bronze statue of Gudinski at his home in Suffolk, England.

Gudinski would regularly tell his staff: “Our artists are our strength.” He was also a big believer in loyalty. Radio legend Lee Simon highlighted one of his mate’s favourite sayings when explaining his continued success: “You can stab me in the front, but never stab me in the back.”

“He respected loyalty and repaid it generously,” Simon explained.

At a time when the music industry could best be described as blokey, Mushroom Records stood out for hiring and promoting women, including Gudinski’s long-time assistant Mary Bainbridge and record executives Amanda Pelman – who signed Minogue – and Michelle Higgins.

Higgins remembers a ferocious fight with Ian “Molly” Meldrum when she was trying to get pop artist Christie Allen on Countdown. Molly didn’t appreciate Higgins’ forthright approach and suggested to Gudinski she should be sacked.

Getting acts on the top-rating music show was the key part of Higgins’ job and she went home that night believing her music career was over. She arrived the next morning to find that Gudinski had left a note on her desk:

“You’ll never lose me for believing.”

A few years later, Higgins locked herself in a room at Sydney’s Sebel Townhouse, refusing to come out until Gudinski re-signed her favourite artist, Paul Kelly. After nearly a week – and a mini-bar bill of $4,000 – Gudinski did the deal and rang Higgins, pleading: “Please get out of that damn Sebel!”

Their faith was rewarded when Kelly’s next single was his radio breakthrough, ‘Before Too Long’.

Gudinski was also a passionate supporter of Indigenous music, signing Yothu Yindi – the first Aboriginal band to have a Top 40 hit – plus Christine Anu and releasing all of Archie Roach’s records.

Paul Kelly, who co-produced Roach’s debut album, Charcoal Lane, says Gudinski released the record knowing that commercial radio wouldn’t play it. “He continued to back Archie and many other First Nations artists over many years,” Kelly points out. “He believed their music and storytelling, that their various perspectives were an important part of the national conversation.”

Gudinski was rightly proud of Mushroom’s impact on Australian culture. “We had a lot to do with Australians becoming aware and proud of their own heritage and their own music and their own arts.”

Veteran Australian music journalist Toby Creswell, the former editor of Rolling Stone, believes: “Without Michael Gudinski, or someone incredibly similar to him, there wouldn’t be any music industry in Australia.”

John Watson, manager of Midnight Oil and Missy Higgins and head of Eleven: A Music Company, concurs, calling Gudinski “a cheerleader for Australian music” – regardless of whether the artist was on his label.

Watson also believes that Melbourne is the music capital of Australia – and one of the world’s greatest music cities – largely because of Gudinski.

“That often irritates people in other states,” Watson notes. “But every time you get a ticket sales report, you can see that it is the music capital of Australia because it simply sells more tickets. There are all sorts of different reasons for that, but probably the main reason is that, over half a century, Michael Gudinski and the Mushroom Group built, brick by brick, a culture of live music in Melbourne.”

Watson thinks of Gudinski whenever he goes to a gig in Melbourne. “Rod Laver Arena always reminds me of Michael Gudinski. It always felt like he was saying, ‘Welcome to my house.’ So anytime you’re at Rod Laver, it always brings back a fond memory of Michael. I love that there’s now the statue of him out front.”

It’s perhaps ironic there’s a statue of Gudinski, as the music mogul could rarely sit still. His notoriously short attention span was legend at the Mushroom Group. Martin Fabinyi, the former head of Mushroom Pictures, once asked his boss if he’d read a script they were planning to produce. He replied, “I’ve read part of it all the way through.”

Gudinski was constantly on the move, desperately trying to find the next big thing. “In this business, you can’t be catering for today’s trends,” he explained. “You’ve got to be finding tomorrow’s trends and finding things that are unique and original.”

A few years back, I worked with Gudinski on the foreword for the book Every Poster Tells A Story, 30 Years of the Frontier Touring Co, which gathered posters from every tour his company had promoted.

“For someone who can’t play a note – and Jimmy Barnes has told me in no uncertain terms to not even sing in the shower – I’ve been blessed to have worked with so many incredible musicians,” the foreword started.

Indeed, it was a remarkable rock ‘n’ roll life. Whenever he bumped into his old friend at the end of the ‘70s, Bon Scott would always remark, “My, haven’t you done well for yourself.”

But despite his success, Gudinski never stopped championing Australian music, shepherding the local industry through the dark days of the pandemic, creating Music From The Home Front, Sounds Better Together and The Sound on the ABC.

Like Slim Dusty, Gudinski died with his boots on. He was working until the end, as passionate as ever.

His final No.1 came just a week before he died, when The Rubens landed on top with their fourth album, 0202. Later that week, Gudinski went to Sydney to see Midnight Oil at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre.

It was his final gig.

Bruce Springsteen dedicated the video for ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’ to Gudinski, which was appropriate for a man who always dreamed big and was responsible for creating a nation’s mix tape.

He dreamed of filling the MCG (something he did three times over with Madonna in 1993 and then again with the all-Australian line-up for the Mushroom 25 concert in 1998).

He dreamed of winning the Melbourne Cup (which he did as the co-owner of Almandin in 2016, repeating the feat with Rekindling in 2017 and Twilight Payment in 2020).

And he dreamed of having a No.1 in America.

That dream didn’t come true – the closest he got was Minogue’s ‘The Loco-Motion’, which reached No.3 in 1988.

But that was the business Michael Gudinski was in. He understood that not every dream came true. Not every band he signed made the charts. And not every tour made money.

But he never stopped trying.

As Bruce Springsteen noted, he was “first, last, and always a music man.”

About the author

Jeff Jenkins is the author of several music books, including 50 Years Of Rock In Australia and Ego Is Not A Dirty Word: The Skyhooks Story, and the co-author of Mark Opitz’s life story, Sophisto-punk, as well as two books with Ian “Molly” Meldrum – The Never, Um, Ever Ending Story and Ah Well, Nobody’s Perfect. Jeff is also a regular on RRR and ABC radio.