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60s star shunned swinging lifestyle

Judith Durham singer/songwriter b July 3, 1943 d August 5, 2022

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 the month-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 antinuclear 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.

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 Cupwinning 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, while her own creamy tones remained consistently sure and stirring. The group were once described as ‘‘sartorially, tonsorially and musically the group dearest to elderly parents and broadminded maiden aunts’’, though no doubt that was a large part of their appeal.

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 there was 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 their native 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. Their TV show in the same year, The Seekers Down Under, drew record viewing figures and they were joint recipients of the Australian of the Year award.

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-year-old 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.

Judith Mavis Cock was born in Essendon, Melbourne, the daughter of William Cock DFC, a wartime navigator and pathfinder who became a sales manager for an electric company, and his wife Hazel (nee Durham). Her older sister, Beverley Sheehan, became a jazz singer and survives her. For five years their father’s work took the family to Tasmania, before their return to Melbourne.

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.

‘‘I was 20 and pretty unsophisticated,’’ she recalled. ‘‘I had a sheltered upbringing and was very self-conscious about my appearance.’’

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.’’ She was secretary to a pathologist at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, but left because the pay was poor.

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 who had been with the Trebletones on the last Seekers tour the previous year. 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. Instead, she and Edgeworth lowered her showbusiness profile by recording jazz, gospel and Dixieland material from the 1930s and 1940s, and performing in small cabaret theatres. Her early albums included For Christmas With Love (1968), Gift of Song (1970) and Climb Ev’ry Mountain (1971).

Her fellow Seekers experimented with other female singers without recreating the original chemistry. They were also following divergent professional paths: Potger was instrumental in forming the New Seekers and then moved into record production and public relations; Woodley, who wrote Red Rubber Ball with Paul Simon, became a jingle writer; and the bespectacled Guy spent eight years as a Liberal representative in the Victoria parliament before running a business consultancy. All three survive her.

In 1990 Durham was a passenger in a serious car crash in which she broke her left leg and right wrist; the driver of the other car was killed. 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. ‘‘We really picked up the same relationships that we used to have,’’ she told The Age. ‘‘Real brother-sister stuff.’’

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 settled on the Gold Coast, though she later returned to Melbourne. Her authorised biography, Colours of My Life (1994), by Graham Simpson, ran to several editions and in 2014 she was made an officer of the Order of Australia.

She was, however, stalked for many years by an obsessive fan who bombarded her with phone calls, faxes and spurious lawsuits.

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.’’ – The Times

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