John Brewster is calling from Encounter Bay, on the Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide, where the Southern Ocean does whatever it wants and a man can play golf and not be bothered about very much. It is, by his own account, a good life. His wife Sue is nearby. His knee replacements – both of them, done last year, one in August, one in November – have transformed his walking and his golf swing in ways that modern orthopaedic medicine should probably put in the brochure. He sounds, in short, like a man at peace.
He is also about to several months on the road.
“Some of my friends say to me, when are you going to retire?” he says, and you can hear the smile. “And I say, let me talk about that. I stand on the stage, I’m playing to thousands of people who love what we do. I turn to my right, and there’s my son Sam on the bass. One over is my son Tom on the drums. And on the other side of the stage is my dear brother Rick. We’ve been together for nearly 60 years. It’s just brilliant.”
This is not the complaint of a man who needs persuading to keep going. This is a man who cannot imagine why you would stop.
The tour that brings The Angels back on the road in June 2026 is titled Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again – 50 Years On, which raises an immediate question: is this a celebration or a farewell? The title certainly has the ring of finality about it.
“No, no,” Brewster says, firmly. “The book hasn’t been written yet. It’s still being written.”
Fifty years. The song was released in March 1976, the band’s first under the name The Angels – they’d been the Moonshine Jug and String Band, then The Keystone Angels, before the name settled. It was produced by Harry Vanda and George Young, the Easybeats brains trust who would go on to produce AC/DC’s earliest and best work. The song was originally an acoustic ballad – you can hear the ghost of it if you try – before someone in the room made the decision that changed everything and turned it into a hard rock anthem with an ambulance-siren guitar riff that Australians of a certain age can reproduce in their sleep.
“When we released it,” Brewster recalls, “it didn’t do anything, really. It was not a successful single.” He pauses. “But over the years, it just got bigger and bigger.”
Last July, the song came in at number 12 in Triple J’s Hottest 100 of Australian Songs – the oldest track in the Top 40, sitting between AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and The Temper Trap’s Sweet Disposition in a list compiled from more than 2.65 million votes. Songs that were recorded before most of the voters were born, ranking alongside songs from this decade, because the music doesn’t care how old it is.
“We were blown away,” Brewster says simply. “Blown away.”
There is a mythology around the song that has grown so large it has taken on a life entirely separate from the music itself. The chant – No way, get f***ed, f**k off – is now as Australian as a Hills Hoist and considerably louder. Anthony Albanese used it during the 2025 election campaign, dedicating it to Peter Dutton on national radio with the kind of larrikin timing that no amount of media training can manufacture. Even prime ministers are in on the joke.
But where did the chant actually come from?
The origin story is better than anything a marketing team could have invented. The band had actually dropped the song from their set. Then, at a gig in Mount Isa in 1983, the crowd kept demanding encores. Backstage, with nothing left to play, they looked at each other and decided to dust it off. When they hit the chorus, the room erupted with the chant – fully formed, like it had always existed. Afterwards, Doc Neeson grabbed someone in the crowd and asked what was going on. The explanation: a DJ at a Blue Light Disco in Fairfield, Sydney, had been stopping the record at the chorus and letting the crowd fill in the gap. The chant had spread from there, across the country, invisibly, in the years before the internet made such things traceable.
Brewster laughs at this.
“I have no idea how that spread around the country the way it did. No internet, no mobile phones. But it went right around the country like wildfire.”
The current lineup of The Angels is, depending on how you look at it, either the most unusual in the band’s history or the most logical. Founding brothers John and Rick Brewster remain the musical core – Rick on lead guitar, John on rhythm, the two of them playing together for the better part of six decades. On bass is Sam Brewster. On drums is Tom Brewster. John’s sons.
This development has attracted some commentary. There are people, not entirely without reason, who raise an eyebrow at the family arrangement. Brewster is unbothered.
“Some people might have a go at us about that,” he says. “But why? It’s a great band. We play great. They’re there for the right reasons, they play brilliantly. And when I turn around and see them on stage, it’s just fantastic.”
The current lineup features Nick Norton on lead vocals, who took over the front man role. Brewster is effusive about Norton – “just absolutely brilliant as a front man” – and equally proud of the band’s new album, 99, which he considers a benchmark alongside Face to Face, No Exit and Dark Room.
“The thing I love about this band is that we’re still creating new music. I understand that new music has no real hope of great media exposure. That’s fine. I mean, I’m not particularly interested in hearing a new Rolling Stones song either. But we keep writing because it matters to us.”
They play two new songs on this tour. Two. The rest is the repertoire they built across 50 years.
The amps are worth a small diversion here, because Brewster lights up talking about gear the way some men talk about grandchildren – with genuine, uncomplicated delight.
The Angels bought their original Marshall JMP 100-watt heads from AC/DC in the mid-Seventies. The two bands were friends, running in the same hard-working, pub-circuit lanes. When AC/DC headed overseas, they offered the Marshalls to the Angels. “That had a lot to do with changing our sound in a very positive way,” Brewster says.
These days, the Marshall stack is history. What Brewster carries on tour now fits in a small Pelican case.
“Amp modelling,” he says, with the reverence of a convert. “There’s a little box that’s not much bigger than a cigarette packet. And it gives me the same sound – the JMP Marshall 100-watt sound – that I had way back then. I can’t pick the difference, nor can anybody else. All I need now is a speaker cabinet. The signal goes straight to front of house. They’re not even micing up the cabinet.”
He spent years hauling valve amplifiers onto planes, paying excess baggage fees, worrying about them in freight. Now he carries everything in a case that goes in the overhead locker.
“I never thought I could use anything other than a valve amp. These things are incredible.”
Brewster was 76 in November. He saw the Beatles play in Adelaide in 1964. He saw Bob Dylan in Adelaide in 1966 – the electric Dylan, controversial at the time, life-changing for a teenager from a musical family, whose father was a conductor and cellist.
“Dylan changed my whole life,” he says. “I wanted to get into music. My dad said absolutely not. He said it was a rat race. And of course he was right. But then you get to this part of the journey and it’s no longer a rat race. It’s just great fun.”
He wasn’t sure he’d be alive at 76. He says this without drama, as a simple statement of how it felt to be young and broke and burning every bridge behind you.
“I remember catching up with my good friend Russell Morris in a Virgin Lounge when we were about 70. And Russell said, John, did you think we’d still be doing this at this age? And I said, no. Not my way. But we are. And I can’t see myself stopping. Something will stop me probably. But it hasn’t yet.”
The knees required attention. Both of them, both last year. “Walking through airports was a nightmare before the knees were done. Everything is a long way away.” Now, he says, it’s a breeze. He was playing golf again at six weeks after the first replacement, five weeks after the second. His son Sam appeared at his hospital bed and told him to take the rest of the year off. “I said, okay. That’s a good plan.”
He went back the following year.
When you ask Brewster about legacy – about what it means to have played for 50 years, to have written songs that have become part of how Australians understand themselves, to have given the prime minister a punchline – he goes quiet for a moment.
“You don’t think about that every minute of the day,” he says. “But when you stop and reflect – yes. It blows me away.”
The tour begins in Queensland in June and ends, appropriately, in Adelaide in early November. The band’s home. The city that made them.
Is there a moment every night when it all clicks – when you know you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be?
“Yeah,” he says. “There is. Every time.”
The Angels — Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, 50 Years On — tours nationally from June, concluding in Adelaide in November. Tickets at theangels.com.au