A tale of music and mayhem from the man who made Cold Chisel rock and roll superstars.
Ladies and gentleman, Rod and Gaye Willis, have accepted our invitation to sit with us in this room tonight. It would be fraudulent for us to accept any lifetime award without Rod being part of it. He was our guide, and our manager and our close friend for thirty two years from 1977. When we were languishing in Sydney - no record contract, unable to get gigs, meaning nothing to anybody - he managed us to success here, through our half-hearted failures and our disintegration elsewhere, and managed the band's legacy when there mostly wasn't a band.
--Don Walker on accepting the 2016 Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Service to Australian Music.
At the age of eighteen, Rod Willis jumped on a boat for London, the Mecca for music and fashion in the 1960s.
A decade on he would return to his homeland of Australia after a career of working in the US and Europe with a variety of international groups including UFO, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac and Emerson Lake and Palmer. A burning desire to find an act that he could help take to the top led him to an unknown band from Adelaide by the name of Cold Chisel. Little did he know that when he took on the role of manager - becoming the latest in a procession of hopefuls - Rod would begin a remarkably successful relationship that would continue for the next thirty-two years. Along this journey he would be forefront in establishing the trail blazing Dirty Pool Management Agency representing Cold Chisel, the Angels and Icehouse which would change the local music industry forever.
From the 1960s through till the 2000s, this is a journey that took an eighteen year old surfer from Sydney's northern beaches to a career in the international music industry and to the forefront of Australian music history.
