Mark Trevorrow AKA Bob Downe – (Part 1/2)
“I was born February 4, 1959 in East Malvern, Victoria. I came into the world on my Dad’s 28th birthday. I was the 3rd of 3 boys and my sister came along later. My father had just wound up his building business which he had with my Grandfather. His father had died suddenly while working on a job about 3 years before I was born. My father wound up the business and studied at night to get his teaching certificate. His first day of teaching tech was the day I was born. I can just imagine his stress because that was in the days when men weren’t allowed or welcome at the births of their children. He was called to the Head Master’s Office to hear the news that I was born.
It was 11 am when I came into the world and what was really strange about that day and time was in the early hours of Feb 3rd in the mid west that was the exact hour that Richie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down in that plane. It was also the week that they were shooting ‘On the Beach’ with Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck and the beautiful Ava Gardner. It was also the week where Frank Sinatra was in Melbourne doing concerts and he and Ava Gardner hadn’t seen each other since they broke up. Bert Newton told me that he was in the front row at the concert at Festival Hall and she made a very late and ostentatious entrance, walked right down the front and he sang The Lady is a Tramp while she stood there, hand on hip, eyeballing him. Also the No.1 song when I was born was Kiss me Honey Honey Kiss me by Shirley Bassey. I love that!
I grew up in a Murumbeena, the 3rd generation of the family to live there. I’m one of 3 boys and I have one sister Claire and we were all born in a small private hospital. Mum was a Midwife but gave up her nursing when she had Andy, my eldest brother. The little hospital is now an old people’s home so I might die there as well. The family is very Melbourne, 6 generations.
I grew up obsessed with pop music and all forms of media but I was particularly obsessed with newspapers and magazines. I used to make my own little newspapers and mags at home. We would all camp with Dad’s best mate Keith Walker and his family on the Gippsland Lakes all through our childhood and teens and I would make daily newspapers. I did the school paper in Murumbeena High so it was destined that I would be a Journalist.
In my teen years I was really tall, lanky and shy and closetty. I knew I was Gay and I had a great little gang of friends. I was in the school musical Joseph and I also had a little band where I played Piano with friends from school and church. We used to perform at this lovely place in Brighton called the Bailey House which was a daycare centre for people with Down Syndrome. I had this long hair I could hide behind while I played piano and a girl called Christine sang. It never occurred to me in a million years that I would end up a performer because I was very shy.
I wasn’t shy among family and friends but when you know you’re Gay and you’re being picked on and bullied about it at school, the idea of having any sort of high profile is the furthest thing from your mind. Also if you were Gay and you were a professional performer, you kept it under wraps. It was such a horrible era, I mean it was still illegal. It was such a blight. It restricted not only your possibilities but it was also a restriction on you, on your personality, on you as a person. So my teen years were taken up with coming to terms with my sexuality and becoming friends with other Gay friends at school. We never told each other until after we left school. That’s how secretive it was. It was horrible.
I got a cadetship in ’77 as a Copy Boy on the old Melbourne Sun when I was 17. My brother John was already there. He stole my thunder. He had decided to go into journalism in his last year of school and started 2 years before me. I was furious because kids really try to carve out their own niche. It was made clear to me that the only reason I was getting the job was because of how well John was doing and I was the one making all the frigging papers (laughs). Anyway I was there for 5 years and ended up doing the daily Pop column which was heaven. I did 6 columns a week so I got to interview all the visiting pop and rock stars, I‘d go to every concert and get every record that was released.
It was a fantastic time because it was before Murdoch took over the Herald Weekly Times so it was basically a sheltered workshop. It was hilarious. The papers were hugely successful, they had a huge editorial staff, both the evening and the morning papers. It was like something out of a movie. We’re in this 20s Daily Planet kind of a building. My job as Copy Boy was to put the Chief of Staff’s bets on and get people out of the pub. It was so much fun. People yelling at each other, throwing phones and typewriters at each other, coming back drunk. You go to media offices now and the quietness is like a funeral parlour. There’s no creativity in that.
I started a group called The Globos with Wendy De Wall, we started as a party act where we roped in all of our friends to lip sync old records and TV commercials. I left Melbourne and we were on the first bill of the opening of Kinsellas in Sydney in 1982. We had this unbelievable hit, people lining up down the street to see us. All the people in our group ended up living in Sydney and that’s why Sydney has been my home for the last 42 years, with 10 years in London in between.
We did this famous old Italian rock and roll hit called Tintarella di luna by Mina who was the biggest female pop star in Italy. Through friends at Mushroom Records, I persuaded them to let us record it as The Globos and it was a hit. We did a cover and next thing it was a Countdown chart buster. It just happened that the record was breaking the same time Kinsellas opened in late ’82. We did a party in Melbourne and the amount of people who say they were at that party is hilarious because it was just in a flat. We’d have to fill the Rod Laver Arena with all the people who say they were there. To this day people still tell me they were there.
I was at The Sun with Wendy Harmer and she was already dabbling in performing. She got us our first professional gig at The Flying Trapeze which is one of the little shopfront cabarets that were happening in Melbourne in the late 70s, early 80s. It went alongside New Wave music, people like Los Trios Ringbarkus and this famous comedy Producer called John Pinder who had opened The Flying Trapeze, sold it to Ralph Kerle and then Pinder and a partner opened The Last Laugh which was a very famous comedy theatre restaurant.
Wendy had her 25th birthday party at a share house she was living in Fitzroy. At that party I met Gina Reilly who was 18 and I was 20. She was already performing in a Cabaret trio and St Martins Youth theatre was raging. It turned out Gina lived across the road from me in Sth Yarra. Through Gina and Wendy The Globos gradually became a professional lineup with people we met at St Martins. Then we started recording our own sketches and lip syncing those. Before we knew it we were this massive hit at Kinsellas and all of our lives were changed overnight. The Globos went from ’80 to ’86 but I invented Bob in 1984.”