Col Joye was first teen idol who sparked riots and made girls swoon, but ‘silly’ parents loved him

Signed to Festival Records in 1959 by A&R man Ken Taylor, Col Joye & the Joy Boys debuted on vinyl with a rudimentary version of Lloyd Price’s Stagger Lee. The first hit came with single two, Bye Bye Baby, which streaked to the top three, followed by Rockin’ Clementine (No.2) and Oh Yeah Uh Huh (No.1).

The latter made him the first Australian pop artist to have a No.1 record Australia-wide. Joye would score a tally of 16 chart entries, enjoying an unexpected No.1 in 1973 with the country-ish Heaven Is My Woman’s Love. This achievement placed him in a rare category, along with Jimmy Barnes, Johnny Farnham, O’Keefe and Sherbet/Daryl Braithwaite.

In the studio, the accomplished Joy Boys, like JO’K’s Dee Jays basically made up the rules as they went along. Technical shortcomings were more than compensated by unlimited energy and exuberance. Original gems such as Going Down Town (To See Miss Brown) were knocked off on the way to gigs or between takes in the studio. Like O’Keefe, Col was a competent if not necessarily spectacular singer and was prepared to turn his tonsils toward anything that took his band’s fancy.

Ever-smilin’ Col Joye was born Colin Frederick Jacobsen on April 13, 1937, in the Sydney suburb of East Hills. Upon leaving school at 14 and working as a salesman for a wholesale jeweller, he met impressive young player Dave Bridge, who persuaded him to take guitar lessons.

Joye was quite prolific, with a new single every couple of months and a regular flow of albums, such as Jump For Joye, Songs That Rocked The Stadium, Joyride and The Golden Boy. Some charted, some didn’t, but it hardly mattered. As the centrepiece of “the Bandstand Family” for 14 years, Col became an incredibly popular national figure, loved by both parents and their daughters. He also enjoyed significant Japanese popularity, touring there several times in the ’60s. He also played in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam.

It’s hard to come to grips with just how many magazine covers, newspaper headlines and television time was devoted to Joye over a 10-year period. Ordinary Australians felt secure with this regular bloke who never attempted to big-note himself.

“Bandstand was very important to my career,” Joye would later concede, “because we didn’t know how to be anything more than what we were and that was fine with Brian Henderson [the host]. We felt that we might not have been that good but we weren’t bad either. We never got parents off-side and we weren’t controversial – we didn’t know how to be. If we did anything wrong at home we got the strap! But yeah, we did rise to some pretty great heights in this country. I have to say that.”

Not that he failed to take advantage of all the perks that stardom provided. I recall him once admitting to me: “O’Keefe was ‘The Wild One’ and parents would keep their daughters away from him. But I was the Golden Boy, the ‘Mild One’ you might say, and so they had no problems there. Silly parents!”

He got on well with American singer Connie Francis too taking her to Luna Park while she was visiting Sydney.

The Bandstand family included Judy Stone, Noeleen Batley, the DeKroo Brothers, Patsy Ann Noble, the Allen Brothers, Tony Brady, Little Pattie (who married Keith Joye) and Sandy Scott. National exposure made them almost as popular as “leader” Col.

In the days before a publicity manager was de rigueur for entertainers, he achieved a most remarkable level of exposure. From Win A Date With … to TV’s £50,000 Bachelor to milk ads to a set of gloves emblazoned with his signature, the market was consistently bombarded.

Joye discovered the Bee Gees in Surfers Paradise. He brought them to Sydney, to be managed by Kevin, and signed Barry Gibb to Joye Music — his first publishing contract. (He would also nurture and launch the career of Andy Gibb 15 years later.) In 1963, they put the trio on a Chubby Checker tour and Col recorded Underneath The Starlight Of Love for release as a single – one of the first songs by Barry Gibb to be released by another artist.

When the first flush of popularity ebbed, the Jacobsens used both their clout and experience to establish a talent agency which would grow into Kevin Jacobsen Productions, one of Australia’s largest and most diverse talent organisations.

In June 1981, he was appointed an AM for his entertainment and philanthropic work. In 1989, he was back on deck musically with the high-powered single Take Me Back To Rock’n’Roll, taking his place on national concert stages with Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Lesley Gore and the Supremes’ Mary Wilson on a revival tour that his company presented. In 1988 he was inducted into the first class of the ARIA Hall of Fame.

In 1990, while pruning a neighbour’s tree with a chainsaw as a favour, Joye slipped and fell six metres onto brick paving, striking his head and falling into a coma as well as sustaining serious lower back and shoulder injuries and losing his sense of taste. Initially given a poor prognosis, he recovered and tentatively started performing and touring again in 1998.

But all was not well in the Jacobsen camp. In May 2007, Kevin and Col descended into an abyss from which they did not emerge. Kevin had filed for bankruptcy over massive revenues from the Dirty Dancing musical. The dispute arose after Kevin’s son, Michael, and Col’s daughter, Amber, joined the business. They have battled it out in the British High Court and in the US, as well as at courts in Australia.

There was almost no scandal attached to Col Joye, who gave an enormous amount of his time to good causes (usually showing up with his trusty ukulele) but in 2013, Australian pilot Malcolm Hansman claimed that he was Col’s love child, saying that his mother, Ingrid, was a long-term girlfriend of the star. Joye never acknowleged this claim.

Col Joye married Dalys Dawson in 1970 in a joint wedding ceremony with his sister Carol Jacobsen and Sandy Scott in Fiji. He was married for the remainder of his life. They had two children, Amber and Clayton.

GLENN A BAKER

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.