Life in a Padded Cell: a Biography of Tony Cohen, Australian Sound Engineer by Dale Blair ©Copyright
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Life in a Padded Cell: A Biography of Tony Cohen, Australian Sound Engineer by Dale Blair ©copyright ~ One ~ Satan has possessed your Soul! ‘Tony is very devout in “God’s Lesson”. I cannot speak highly enough of Tony’s manners and behaviour. They are beyond reproach’. It was the sort of report card every parent liked to see. It was 1964. The Beatles were big and Tony Cohen was a Grade One student at St. Francis de Sales primary school, East Ringwood. The following year he took his first communion. The Beatles were still big and there seemed little to fear for the parents of this conscientious and attentive eight-year-old boy. The sisters who taught him at that early age would doubtless have been shocked at the life he would come to lead – a life that could hardly be described as devout. Tony Cohen was born on 4 June 1957 in the maternity ward of the Jessie MacPherson hospital in Melbourne. Now a place specializing in the treatment of cancer patients it was a general hospital then. He was christened Anthony Lawrence Cohen. His parents Philip and Margaret Cohen had been living in James Street, Windsor, but had moved to the outer eastern suburb of East Ringwood prior to the birth of their son. Philip Cohen was the son of Jewish immigrants who had left Manchester, England, and settled in Prahran, one of Melbourne’s inner eastern suburbs. Philip’s father had served in the First World War, survived and then migrated to Australia with his wife and infant son (Tony’s Uncle David). He was a plumber by trade and found work at the Williamstown dockyards. 1 Life in a Padded Cell: A Biography of Tony Cohen, Australian Sound Engineer by Dale Blair ©copyright Tony’s mother’s family was of resolute Australian-Irish catholic stock, at least on her maternal side – her grandfather having arrived in 1857 as an eighteen-year-old from County Limerick. Margaret had met Philip at the Australian Film League which Philip used to attend with his best friend Lawrence Costen after whom Tony was partly named. The league was an acting school that also held social functions. The friendship between Philip and Lawrence would prove instrumental to Tony’s career. Tony was raised as a Catholic – his father had changed faith so that he could assuage the staunchly catholic leanings of his future mother-in-law’s family. In 1965 the Cohen’s moved to 14 Wakool Avenue, Mentone, a middle-class southern beach side suburb of Melbourne. By that time Tony had a younger brother, Martin. Martin’s earliest memory of his older brother was of playing with a large Frankenstein toy and model Thunderbirds in the sandpit in their backyard. When the opening strains of the cult American science fiction television show Lost in Space drifted from the lounge-room the boys would race excitedly inside. Doctor Who was another favourite of Tony’s and the influence of that show permeated through the doodles and sketches that decorated his work diaries of later years. The brothers would embark on widely different career paths with little shared interest beyond a love of animals. The older would spend much of his working life cosseted in a small room with dimmed lights that was the recording studio while the younger became a biologist with a love of the outdoors. The twin loves of football and cricket that were an addiction for many Australian boys of the 1950s and 60s passed Tony by. He could not avoid some exposure to them as his father was an avid sports fan being a passionate supporter of both the St. Kilda and 2 Life in a Padded Cell: A Biography of Tony Cohen, Australian Sound Engineer by Dale Blair ©copyright Prahran football clubs – it being common in those days to support two sides, one from the Victorian Football League and the other from the Victorian Football Association, the two competitions being quite separate. Philip Cohen regularly attended St. Kilda matches at Moorabbin, the home ground of the Saints, taking along both his sons. As Tony got older he began to attend matches at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch the Richmond Football Club which a number of his mates supported. His attendance, he said, was less about the football and more about the mischief he and his friends could get up to. Although Tony inherited an interest in the St. Kilda Football Club and Australian Test cricket team from his father, he had no interest in playing sport whatsoever, in fact, he loathed the idea. His father recollected watching him play football at high school and remembered Tony being notable for being where the ball wasn’t. It is with wounded resignation that brother Martin remembers a childhood spent playing football by himself in the backyard shunned by his older sibling who preferred to lock himself away in his black curtained bedroom smoking marijuana with his mates. ‘I was not allowed into the inner sanctum of Tony’s black bedroom.’ says Martin with a laugh, adding ‘He probably did me a favour by not letting me in and smoking joints at eight to ten [years old]’. Dope had insinuated itself into Tony’s life at a young age and it was that plus his dabbling in the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, better know as LSD, that contributed largely to the neglect of his school studies as a teenager. Taking LSD did not help Tony’s academic endeavours but he claimed it opened his eyes to other things. ‘I’d drop it before school and the teachers would turn into monkeys and I’d bolt. By 11 o’clock I’d be out the door, I couldn’t stand it. I’d just run out. I remember hiding behind 3 Life in a Padded Cell: A Biography of Tony Cohen, Australian Sound Engineer by Dale Blair ©copyright trees that were probably three inches wide and thinking I was getting away with it and my friends told me later the teacher would be at the window saying “What’s wrong with Cohen? What’s he doing?” The funny thing was I always felt the smoking and tripping made me see the whole school thing at St. Bede’s and all that sort of thing in a different light and I didn’t like what I was seeing. Whether I was right or wrong that’s beside the point but at the time I just thought “No.” Because I don’t think if you talk to anyone who dropped real LSD, not this stuff what they have these days but actual lysergic acid, they would say that it awakened them to things. And that’s how I felt. I’m not saying this is right or wrong, I’m just saying that’s the impression it gave. It’s just that I saw the hypocrisy in the brothers. I saw one guy who was a disciplinarian and he seemed to enjoy what he did. And stories I heard from the boarders and things like that basically made me think “Nah, this isn’t what they’re preaching at all.” At the same time there was good and bad. You can’t judge everyone.’ Tony’s memory was of having been expelled from school although his mother remembers him just flatly refusing to go back after either the May or August school holidays in 1973. His expulsion was probably a temporary one and due to a measure of bad luck, according to Tony, when some hashish was found in his locker. ‘They were searching for stolen books so it was not my lucky day! A few days later, my friend and I (Mick Butler) get called to the head Brother’s office for what I can only describe as an exorcism! He, Brother Peter (better known by the students as Poofta Pete, as he was keen on perving at the boys in the shower rooms, enough said) sat silent staring at us, bug-eyed with throbbing veins for what felt like an hour. All of a sudden, he yelled, “Satan, has 4 Life in a Padded Cell: A Biography of Tony Cohen, Australian Sound Engineer by Dale Blair ©copyright possessed your souls!” Fuck man, it was only hash! (and a few amytal, some kind of heart pill that spun you out if you took enough). Anyhow he went quite red and freaked us out. Next thing it was pack up all your books and bugger off. Mum and Dad thought something wasn’t right. I got home around seven o’clock with a very full school bag. Bugger!’ Looking back on his schooldays Tony declared, ‘I just hated it.’ His mother says he was bored by it. His dabbling in drugs undoubtedly lay at the heart of his waning interest in his formal education. Progress reports for 1971 and 1972 indicate that he had been a co-operative, enthusiastic and capable student to that time. A letter to his parents, brother and pets sent from a school trip to Mildura in August 1971 reveals a boy enjoying his friends and the adventure of being away from home. His only concerns were for his father’s health and his record collection which he hoped his brother hadn’t touched. It was written in neat connected writing as opposed to the printed script that characterised his letters and postcards in later years: 10/8/71 Dear Mum and Dad and Martin and Katy and Biff and Mike and Fred and Freddy! I wrote this on a piece of paper because the postcard was too tiny.