The Twilights (band)

The Twilights were an Australian rock and pop music group of the mid to late 1960s. Alongside their own career successes, The Twilights are also notable for the inclusion of vocalist Glenn Shorrock, who later fronted Axiom, Esperanto and Little River Band, and guitarist Terry Britten who went on to become an internationally successful songwriter and producer and pen major hits for artists such as Cliff Richard and Tina Turner.

Alongside The Easybeats and The Masters Apprentices, The Twilights are widely considered to be one of the most significant Australian rock groups of the 1960s. Highly popular with teenage audiences, they were renowned for their musical excellence and live prowess, as well as their on-stage humour, and they were held in high respect by fellow musicians. The group is also notable as one of the few major Australian rock bands of the period to retain the same personnel for virtually all of its career. Like most of their contemporaries, they began as a cover band, playing accomplished renditions of hits by popular overseas bands of the era such as The Beatles, The Who and The Small Faces, and their early hits in Australia were all cover versions. The Twilights were noted for being on top of current musical trends, and their early repertoire was regularly updated with the latest British and American rock hits, which were regularly sent to them on record and tape by family and friends in the UK. Later in their career guitarist Terry Britten began to write original material but the group did not last long enough for this to have a significant impact on their career.

The Twilights formed in the satellite town of Elizabeth, 20 km north of Adelaide in South Australia, a town whose population in the 1960s was largely made up of families who had recently migrated from the UK, and all the original members were born in Britain. Like many other nascent pop bands, The Twilights were strongly affected by The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night and other emerging British beat groups, notably The Hollies, The Who and The Small Faces, and they kept abreast of the latest trends with packages of records and tape recordings of Top 40 radio shows that they regularly received from relatives in Britain. Drawn together by their common origins and musical interests, singer Glenn Shorrock (hailing originally from Kent, UK), and his friends Mike Sykes and Clem "Paddy" McCartney (born in Belfast) formed an a cappella trio, eventually gaining regular bookings around the small Adelaide folk/coffee-house circuit.

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