60s star shunned swinging lifestyle

Judith Durham, who has died aged 79, was a secretary at the J Walter Thompson advertising agency in Melbourne when her double-bassplaying colleague, Athol Guy, invited her to hear his folk trio at the Treble Clef coffee bar in South Yarra.

She went along one Monday evening in December 1962 and by the end of the night was on stage, singing background harmonies to their American standards, Down by the Riverside and Banks of the Ohio. ‘‘They never actually asked me to join the Seekers,’’ she recalled, though she was soon their lead singer.

In May 1964 the group, whose other members were the guitarists Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley, Guy’s friends from Melbourne High School, set sail for London, paying for themonth-long passage by entertaining fellow passengers.

The intention was to spend 10 weeks in Britain, but on arrival they were taken on by an agency that booked them with clubs, variety shows and television programmes. By the end of the year they had recorded I’ll Never Find Another You, written for them by Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom, which in February 1965 reached No 1.

Although their next release, What Have They Done to the Rain?, an anti-nuclear number, made less of an impact, the Seekers’ stay extended to more than a year, during which they were named best new group of 1964. singer/songwriter b July 3, 1943 d August 5, 2022

They appeared on the same bill as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and in May 1965 A World of Our Own, also written by Tom Springfield, ousted the Beatles’ Ticket to Ride from the British No 1 spot. In 1966 they performed at a royal command performance, in a bill featuring the entire England World Cup-winning football team.

They went on to have other hits including Georgy Girl (1966), the title song of the film of the same name that starred Lynn Redgrave. The song reached No 3 in Britain and became the first by an Australian band to top the US chart. Their cover version of Morningtown Ride, the popular children’s lullaby, reached No 2 in Britain and was again a hit in the US.

The Seekers’ stirring and melodic anthems were neither challenging nor fashionable. ‘‘They reach audiences in a very simple way,’’ Durham said of the group’s folk harmonies.

Nor did their off-stage antics in swinging London match those of their rock’n’roll rivals. No hotel rooms were trashed, no television sets thrown from windows and no illicit substances imbibed.

‘‘We were true to our image. Our upbringing was Melbourne in the Fifties and that was a pretty straitlaced place,’’ said Durham, who at the height of the band’s success was cutting her own fringe, making her own frocks and touring with a sewing machine.

‘‘We were folk music lovers, so we didn’t move in circles where therewas drugs and sex and those sorts of things,’’ she added, although she did have to fend off amorous advances from Keith Moon, the drummer for the Who.

Returning to Melbourne, the Seekers were feted as heroes. In March 1967, more than 200,000 people, about a tenth of the city’s population, turned out for their ‘‘make music for the people’’ concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, in what is still thought to have been the biggest concert in the southern hemisphere.

Yet no sooner had they found what they were seeking than Durham declared that, in the words of one of their hits from 1967, The Carnival Is Over. Despite being in a group that had broken countless box office and sales records, she ‘‘wasn’t being fulfilled musically’’ and in 1968 the 25-yearold left to pursue a solo career.

‘‘On a personal level it was a wrench, although it was all very amicable,’’ she told The Times nearly three decades later. ‘‘I was stepping off a cliff and I didn’t do that lightly.’’ Fans were distraught. ‘‘People actually grieved for us,’’ she said in bewilderment. ‘‘They couldn’t understand how it could have happened.’’

The following year their album The Best of the Seekers reached No 1, briefly knocking the Beatles’ White Album from the top. It remained on the chart for 125 weeks, a tribute to the enduring sound of the Seekers and their lead singer.

JudithMavis Cock was born in Essendon, Melbourne, the daughter of William Cock DFC, a war time navigator and pathfinder who became a salesmanager for an electric company, and his wife Hazel (nee Durham). Her older sister, Beverley Sheehan, became a jazz singer and survives her.

A sickly child, she suffered throughout her life from the chronic lung condition bronchiecstasis, leaving her with limited lung capacity. Nevertheless, she contemplated becoming an opera singer and worked in a ballet school.

By 1963 she was using her mother’s maiden name and had joined Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, with whom she made her first record.

Coming from a sensible family, she was advised by her parents to take a secretarial course, ‘‘and I loved it’’, she said.

‘‘I wasn’t good at shorthand, but my typing was good.’’

After the Seekers, she was keen to explore other avenues, both musical and personal. In 1969 she married Ron Edgeworth, her British-born musical director. They chose not to have children, ‘‘which at the time was considered a little revolutionary’’, she said not long before his death from motor neurone disease in 1994. ‘‘We’ve never regretted it though, and have been very lucky together.’’

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Durham resisted overtures to be part of a Seekers comeback. But in 1990 she was seriously injured in a car crash. It confirmed for her the fragility of life and that, if she wanted to sing with the Seekers again, then this was the time.

The group reunited in 1993, the 25th anniversary of their breakup, for a nostalgia-drenched reunion tour that was both rewarding and emotionally draining.

A tiny, slender and intense figure with hazel-coloured eyes, Durham practised meditation and followed a teetotal, vegetarian and caffeine-free lifestyle.

After many years living between Britain and Switzerland, she and Edgeworth returned to Australia.

In 2003 she made a solo world tour mixing Seekers hits with diverse numbers including jazz piano and songs from her 2001 album Hold On to Your Dream.

The following decade, during another Seekers reunion, she had a brain haemorrhage, yet her musical ability was unimpaired.

‘‘The doctor said, ‘Can you sing me a bit of a song?’ and of course I sang Morningtown Ride,’’ she said, adding: ‘‘Bizarrely, I think my singing voice has improved.’’ –