BIG Sunday Interview: with Matt Lennon
It’s early 1977 and Little River Band frontman Glenn Shorrock is sitting at the desk in his room at the Las Vegas Hilton, on the phone to Jo Swan, his partner at the time. The home-grown Australian band is not quite at the summit of its popularity in the United States, but is well on its way, its way, midway through a gruelling six-nights-per-week residency at the hotel — the same venue Elvis Presley had earlier completed an unprecedented string of 636 sold-out performances over seven years.
Bandmate and lead guitarist David Briggs is sitting nearby, inadvertently eavesdropping on Shorrock’s conversation – perhaps out of boredom more than anything else – when he begins scribbling on a piece of paper.
At the end of the call, Briggs shared his rough notes and instantly, Shorrock knows it’s a song, grabbing the paper from Briggs and adding to it.
The result of this exchange now sits in Little River Band lore as ‘Home on Monday’ – track two, Side B of Diamantina Cocktail, the band’s third studio album released in April 1977, reaching number two on the Australian charts and certified gold in the US and selling more than half a million copies. This album also featured timeless LRB hits including ‘Happy Anniversary’, ‘Witchery’ and arguably the band’s best-known hit, ‘Help Is on Its Way’.
Speaking to Starts at 60, Shorrock says the lyrics in Home on Monday are virtually verbatim from that innocuous-at-the-time, now-legendary phone call. And as Shorrock recalls, he did make it home by Monday from the Las Vegas Hilton, now the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, which links to the city’s fabled Strip via Elvis Presley Boulevard – the man from Memphis.
Little River Band itself was a confluence of serendipitous circumstances that, had any one of them not happened, may have led to the band sounding significantly different – or perhaps not existing at all.
Guitarist and vocalist Graeham Goble’s band Allison Gros was renamed Mississippi after relocating from Adelaide to Melbourne, adding fellow guitarist and singer Beeb Birtles, drummer Derek Pellicci and later, Graham Davidge as lead guitar prior to the arrival of Briggs and bassist Dave Orams.
Another key figure at the time was Glenn Wheatley, then the bass player for The Masters Apprentices and just starting out as a talent manager, tapping into his contacts and securing record deals and live performances.
“Glenn was doing the circuit that The Twilights were doing, so we saw a lot of each other, and Jim Keays and people like that, in the dressing rooms of various venues and TV studios. As time went on, Glenn drifted into management and that’s how I really got to know him better.
“He came to me with the idea of me fronting the remnants of Mississippi. We were all in London in various states of disrepair and all ready to give it another go.
“Wheatley saw me doing backing vocals for Cliff Richard and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got Beeb Birtles and Graeham Goble here,’ and I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Come and have a listen.’
“They played and we sang ‘It’s a Long Way There’ acoustically and the harmonies were instant. So, we all agreed to meet in Melbourne in early 1975, and Glenn was there as well.
“He did all the management and went around getting contracts, and we were honing our stage act as LRB, and it was very good. We got off to a good start with ‘Curiosity Killed the Cat’ and things started to happen.”
While early performances being under the Mississippi banner, not everybody was sold on it being the band’s long-term name, with several alternatives being bandied about. During a car ride between shows, Shorrock casually spotted the town ‘Little River’ on a street sign and instantly knew that was it. Little River Band. But the others needed some convincing.
“They didn’t really go ‘yeah, yeah, that sounds good’,” Shorrock remembers. “It just found its way into our lives. I was convinced it was a good name because there was a relationship with Mississippi. That’s a big river in America and this was more to our modesty, really. There one of those in every country in the world, so that was the rationale behind that.”
At its genesis, Shorrock and his band were a collective of supremely talented musicians, already known in Australia either individually or from various other bands, but all hungry for something to stick and generate ongoing success. Virtually everybody had journeyed overseas to try their luck in the UK but had come back disappointed.
For Shorrock, his first mainstream band, The Twilights, brought some success, which led to Axiom and his first collaboration with Brian Cadd, sparking a duo and a friendship still going strong six decades later. Axiom also performed well but failed to crack the UK, where it disbanded.
At the time, the UK was in a heavy rock and glam era, and the softer, more melodious tunes of Shorrock and Axiom were a non-starter, in competition with the Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Queen, David Bowie and others, leading to virtually no chart or radio success.
UK hotel rooms and concert venues were also feeling the wrath of these seemingly untouchable performers living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, with many left in horrific states, which Shorrock said simply wasn’t his style.
“I think I dropped a telephone book out of a window once,” Shorrock joked. “I ran and hid in the cupboard. Oh, it was wild man.”
“[But] Australian bands have [generally] never done really well in in England – only sporadically.
“The Easybeats had a big hit with ‘Friday on my mind’ but never followed it up. The Twilights released a couple of singles, but never really got going. They call it traction. We never had any traction. So we fell apart, and the same thing happened with Axiom.”
Undeniably charismatic behind the centre microphone, Shorrock drew inspiration in his performing style from his early influences, names like Mick Jagger, Manfred Mann and The Kinks, delivering energetic performances night after night.
As success grew, LRB embarked on a tour of the UK as a support act for Queen. The UK was still proving a nut too hard to crack, but Wheatley’s suggestion for the group to head across the Atlantic to the US turned out to be a masterstroke, with repeated and sustained success on the charts across both singles and albums. Shorrock believes the group’s efforts in the US helped to pave a more comfortable path stateside for Australian stars of later years including Men at Work and INXS.
Behind the scenes however, simmering tensions between Shorrock, Goble and Birtles were reaching boiling point.
“Graeham had a very firm idea of how his songs should sound and be presented and should sound and how they were recorded. That was a bit of a sticking point between he and I.
“He was a very fastidious, creative person that wanted it the way he wanted it, and I was more ‘Oh come on – that’s enough of that one. Let’s do another.’”
By early 1982, Goble was seeking a new sound and wanted to replace Shorrock with another Glenn Wheatley client, John Farnham. Shorrock recalls this decision as being a blindside that caught him completely off guard.
“I got a big shock,” Shorrock recalls. “And when they said ‘we don’t want to work with you anymore Glenn…John’s going to join.
“Oh, really? OK.
“And I told them all to get f****d, got up, went around to Brian Cadd’s place and we got drunk.”
Shorrock describes Little River Band’s frequent personnel changes as a revolving door, adding that the band has seen dozens of members come and go over the years. Asked what he would do differently if he had his time again, Shorrock’s harsh inner self-critic says he should have worked harder and stopped “goofing around so much”.
“Pull your finger out, do some more work, put that drink down, get up and do something. Learn an instrument. I’ve tried. I play a little bit of guitar and a bit of piano, but it’s very basic. I should have kept on with those studies, and to read music would have been handy as well.”
But while people can, and have, taken Shorrock out of LRB, they haven’t taken LRB out of Shorrock.
In recent years, the legal dispute with former bandmate Stephen Housden over the Little River Band name and trademark has been well documented and is described by Shorrock as “an irritation”. But while he can’t perform under the Little River Band name anymore, no law or ruling can stop him singing the LRB songs he helped write.
Even now, it’s not too late to catch a Shorrock performance live. At the time of writing, Shorrock’s 2026 schedule includes two performances. Fans on the NSW Central Coast can see him at The Art House in Wyong on March 20, while Melburnians can catch his act at the Memo Music Hall in St Kilda on 30 May.
“I’m still carrying the torch as it were, and my live work is 90% singing LRB material and stuff that is similar. LRB is the driving force of my live shows still, and I’m pleased with that. I like the songs. I’ve written a lot of them.” There’s a clear sense of pride in his voice with this.
For generations of Australians, Glenn Shorrock’s voice has been the soundtrack to long drives, late nights and lives well lived. And as long as he’s still standing under a spotlight, singing the songs that shaped a nation’s musical identity, the journey continues. It really has been a long way there – and for those still listening, the road home has never sounded better.
Starts at 60 would like to send its best wishes to Brian Cadd, who suffered a stroke last year and resides today in aged care on the Gold Coast. Shorrock said he visited Cadd recently, describing him as a “frustrated man” as he’s partially paralysed “unable to speak properly, write or read”.
“We all rally around him and try and keep him in the loop. He listens, he’s aware of everything that’s going on around him, he just can’t join in. And Brian was a great joiner in. He could be into anything he wanted to be.”