Ossie Byrne and the Bee Gees and the famous single Ossie co-produced. Photo: Supplied.
Oswald Russell Byrne was born in Queanbeyan in 1926.
He was the youngest of nine kids and during the 1930s Depression the family did it tough and needed the help of Salvation Army to feed and clothe the children.
And it was in a Salvation Army band that young Ossie Byrnes learned to play the trumpet.
He served in the RAAF in New Guinea during WWII. Badly injured, he ended up losing an eye.
But Ossie had a natural flair for music and ended up playing piano in various bands in Canberra.
He continued working in bands when he moved to Sydney where he worked as a finance officer in Rockdale before moving to Wollongong sometime in the mid 1950s.
Ossie’s interest in music had developed so much that he built his first small recording studio in a house in Tarrawanna.
Soon he was managing a Wollongong group named the Del-Fis who even got gigs supporting the soon to be successful Digby Richards who’d come up from Narooma.
The Del-Fis then played on a single backing a Wollongong singer named Derek Lee which was released on the Leedon label in mid 1965.
Expanding from Tarrawanna, Ossie set up an only slightly more sophisticated St Clair recording studio in Hurstville.
A group of brothers with the surname Gibb who had little money turned up and wanted to record some of their songs. And Ossie Byrnes’ St Clair studio proved to be just what they needed.
So in June and July 1966, Ossie began producing and supervising their attempts to get down some tracks.
Ossie produced the tracks, sometimes with the Gibb’s co-manager, Nat Kipner and sometimes with the Gibb brothers having a go at the very basic mono controls themselves.
Their father, Hughie Gibb, who then co-managed his sons, and Ossie spent a lot of time together at the studio and became good friends.
Together they put out quite a few singles produced at the Hurstville studio – some written by Barry or Maurice Gibb and some even co-written by Ossie Byrnes and Nat Kipner.
They had little commercial success – except for one song. Released in September 1966, it was called Spicks and Specks.
Go Set magazine declared it the best record of the year. It was then released overseas in February 1967 and became the Bee Gee’s first European hit.
On the basis of that success Ossie travelled to record in England with the Gibbs, even though neither he nor the Gibbs had any formal technical qualifications or training.
Yet they worked together honing their skills in London and both the Gibbs and Ossie learnt as they went along.
In a London studio, using stereo equipment for the first time, they came up with a more polished sound on tracks like To Love Somebody and New York Mining Disaster 1941 than had been possible at either Tarrawanna or Hurstville.
Nonetheless Spicks and Specks, produced on almost the same primitive equipment Ossie Byrnes had first built himself in Wollongong, itself has an amazingly good sound.
And it all pretty much happened thanks to a bloke who started building a tiny studio and learned to become a record producer in Tarrawanna.
Thanks largely to Ossie Byrne, in 1965 – just a year before he co-produced Spicks and Specks that launched the Bee Gees internationally – I’ve been told Port Kembla’s Commonwealth Rolling Mills (CRM) hired Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb for a special Illawarra performance.
They played for a crowd of almost 2000 people at the Corrimal RSL Club (as part of the CRM Christmas party), which also featured a giant carousel.
Original Article published by Joe Davis on Region Illawarra.
