A heady mix of fun and famous

The Rolling Stones got Perth's teenage girls' knickers in a twist, Barry Humphries introduced audiences to Mrs Norm Everage (before she became Dame Edna) and a young writer from Geraldton published what was has been hailed as The Great Australian Novel.

A young Bon Scott was thrashing around as a drummer with the Fremantle band the Spektors long before he found fame as the wild frontman for AC/DC and Marcel Marceau silently made his first Perth appearance at His Majesty's Theatre.

Perth's 1965 arts and entertainment scene, just as it is now, was in a state of flux as changing technology threw down challenges and opportunities for performers and audiences alike.

City cinemas and theatres faced the stay-at-home competition of television (STW Channel Nine started up in 1965 and TVW Seven had been broadcasting for six years) and the lure of suburban drive-ins, then at the height of their popularity.

Rock'n'roll was king at the Canterbury Court Ballroom, the Embassy Ballroom, the Swanbourne Stomp, the Broadway Stomp, the St Pat's Stomp in Fremantle and the Pagoda Ballroom.

Holding sway were bands in colourful matching suits and equally colourful names such as Johnny Young and the Strangers, Ray Hoff and the Offbeats, Peter and the Drifters, Mort and the Mobees.

In those days, the minimum drinking age was 21 and stomps were mainly for teenagers who would sneak outside between sets for sly swigs of rum and Coke.

Young had his first TV break when he replaced Gary Carvolth as host of Seven's pop show Club 7Teen, which featured local and touring bands.

Five decades before the Perth Arena, the big tours rolled through the 2250-seat Capitol Theatre.

Big tours included the Rolling Stones and Roy Orbison on the same bill, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, Gene Pitney, the Seekers and the National Bandstand Tour featuring Max Merritt and the Meteors, Jade Hurley, Ray Brown and the Whispers, and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs.

The Capitol also was home to the WA Symphony Orchestra, which performed regularly at the William Street venue until the theatre's demolition in 1967.

WASO then moved to Winthrop Hall at the University of WA before the Perth Concert Hall opened in 1973.

Several significant "picture palaces" were bulldozed during the demolition sprees of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the Ambassadors Theatre in central Hay Street (long before it became a mall), the Metro and the Grand.

The Royal and the Piccadilly both still stand but remain disused and dilapidated. In Barrack Street, the Liberty Cinema was the SBS of its day, advertising itself as showing "continental films".

Ivan King, historian at the Museum of Performing Arts, said the mid-60s was the era of the impeccably groomed "picture theatre usherette", who wielded her torch as a symbol of authority.

"It could be a wand, it could be a baton," Mr King said. "Those at the Piccadilly were rather soignee but top of the pops. Head of the food chain were the Metro girls." Interviewed by the now- defunct Daily News, a former usherette said: "We, the Metro girls, were an institution. We were the glamour girls of Perth, the chosen few."

The Metro theatre was the most glamorous in Perth, with full houses nearly every night and bedlam at the Saturday matinee, she said.

By 1965 television was eating into those audiences and the Art Deco masterpiece, the Metro, was demolished in 1973 after a special screening of Gone With the Wind.

With ticket sales declining at His Majesty's Theatre in the early 60s, the then owner Eric Edgley became the first Western promoter to tour acts from behind the former Iron Curtain, including an exclusive Australasian tour by the Great Moscow Circus in 1965 complete with bears on motorbikes and other animal acts.

Darlington and Bickley were bohemian enclaves led by artists such as Guy Grey-Smith, Brian Mackay, Robert Juniper and Howard Taylor.

Leading writers of the day included Dorothy Hewett, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Tom Hungerford and Randolph Stow, who was WA's first Miles Franklin winner with To the Islands.

After the release of Stow's The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea in 1965, leading critic AD Hope described it as probably The Great Australian Novel.

The great French mime Marcel Marceau made his first Perth appearance at His Majesty's in May and humble Moonee Ponds housewife Mrs Norm Everage was a pre-Christmas offering in Humphries' show Excuse I.

Reviewing the show, _The West Australian's _Tony Thomas said Humphries projected an "aura of titanic energy and insane enthusiasm to the back row of the theatre".

The same year, Frank Baden-Powell and John Gill opened Perth's first in-the-round theatre, the Hole in the Wall.

They presented such controversial plays as Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs, The Knack, Rattle of a Simple Man and You'll Come To Love Your Sperm Test, which earned an extended season.

"We sat on stolen milk crates," recalled historian David Hough, then a young teacher, dancer and actor. "The stage lighting was borrowed."

The theatre was created by knocking a hole in the wall between a nightclub and a hall on the corner of Stirling and Newcastle streets. "It was one of the hottest places in town," Diana Warnock, who was then a film critic and feature writer with the Weekend News, said. "Everybody had to go."

The Playhouse Theatre in Pier Street, demolished in 2012, was the centre of the Perth theatre scene under director Edgar Metcalfe.

The 1965 season included Barefoot in the Park, Salad Days, Photo Finish and a production of Macbeth, where a school audience caused the Playhouse to suffer "its first exhibition of semi-vandalism and bad behaviour", according to reports.

The Playhouse year rolled into 1966, with the festive season show Dick Whittington teaming Metcalfe as the pantomime dame and pop star Johnny Young in the title role.

Mrs Warnock also recalls a high time at the 13th Festival of Perth, where a highlight was a Bach festival at the Basil Kirk Studios at the former ABC building in Adelaide Terrace, along with the Gogol play Diary of a Madman at the Playhouse and Shakespeare's Othello at UWA's New Fortune Theatre, which had opened the year before.

The Octagon Theatre had yet to be built and the original Dolphin Theatre was an old cow shed.

Impromptu after-show parties often broke out at Mrs Warnock's apartment at the foot of Mount Street, where she was sometimes woken by the "terrible noise" of early morning construction work on the new Mitchell Freeway barely 100m away.

"We used to meet artists at the airport and have giant parties in terrible flats like mine for quite important people," Mrs Warnock said. "When I think about it now, I can't imagine what they thought of Perth at the time but it was fairly informal at the time.

"Things were a lot less formal at those times."