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The Twilights - 1968 - Once Upon a Twilight
The Twilights were an rock group of the mid to late 1960s. Alongside their own career successes, The Twilights are also notable for the inclusion of vocalist Glenn Shorrock, who later fronted Axiom, Esperanto and Little River Band, and guitarist Terry Britten who went on to become an internationally successful songwriter and producer and pen major hits for artists such as Tina Turner. Alongside The Easybeats and The Masters Apprentices, The Twilights are widely considered to be one of the most significant Australian rock groups of the 1960s. Highly popular bands with teenage audiences, they were renowned for their musical excellence and live prowess, as well as their on-stage humour, and they were held in high respect by fellow musicians. The group is also notable as one of the few major Australian rock bands of the period to retain the same personnel for virtually all of its career. Like most of their contemporaries, they began as a cover band, playing accomplished renditions of hits by popular overseas bands of the era such as The Beatles, The Who and The Small Faces, and their early hits in Australia were all cover versions. The Twilights were noted for being on top of current musical trends, and their early repertoire was regularly updated with the latest British and American rock hits, which were regularly sent to them on record and tape by family and friends in the UK. Later in their career guitarist Terry Britten began to write original material but the group did not last long enough for this to have a significant impact on their career. 1968, the watershed year for The Twilights started optimistically with the Aussie chart success of "Cathy Come Home" and continued with the invitation by the Seven Network to develop a weekly television sit-com series based around the group at work and play, loosely along the lines of "The Monkees" or "A Hard Days’ Night". At the time, Go-Set magazine documented the pilot of "Once Upon A Twilight" with photos of the group on location around Melbourne, with their proposed co-stars, comedienne Mary Hardy (playing the role of the band’s secretary), and a youthful Ronnie Burns. The fate of the TV show was decided at the end of the year, when the Ford Motor Company withdrew its sponsorship and the project was cancelled, but the project helped to propel work on what was to become The Twilights’ greatest recording achievement. The "soundtrack" to the shelved TV show took on a life of its own. A long gestation period, interspersed with the band’s most concentrated regime of live touring yet, resulted in one of the finest Australian albums of the era, "Once Upon A Twilight". 01 - Once Upon A Twilight 02 - What A Silly Thing To Do 03 - Bessemae 04 - Stop The World For A Day 05 - Mr. Nice 06 - Take Action 07 - Blue Roundabout 08 - Devendra 09 - Found To Be Thrown Away 10 - Tomorrow Is Today 11 - The Cocky Song 12 - Paternosta Row LINK
