Early Years and Barry Lyde
Lobby Loyde was born as John Baslington Lyde on 18 May 1941 in Longreach, Queensland, he later wrote music as John Barrie Lyde and initially performed as Barry Lyde. His mother played classical piano and his father, a builder by trade, was a multi-instrumentalist – drums, harmonica, horn, piano and trumpet – in an 18-piece R&B band and had a large collection of jazz and blues music records. His sister was not interested in a musical career but Loyde learned classical music, on piano and violin, as a child. He built his first guitar out of wood when a teenager and his father gave him a Fender electric guitar and amp. As Barry Lyde, he joined Brisbane group, Devil’s Disciples, in the late 1950s as a guitarist. In 1963, he joined The Stilettos, which played The Shadows-styled instrumentals. Growing up nearby, he competed in talent quests against other Brisbane acts – Bee Gees and Billy Thorpe.
In 1964, as lead guitarist, Barry Lyde joined a R&B group, The Impacts, which had formed a year earlier with Bob Dames on bass guitar, Mick Hadley on vocals, Fred Pickard on rhythm guitar and Adrian Redmond on drums. The Impacts supported The Rolling Stones 1965 tour of Australia and when they arrived in Melbourne found another group with the same name, so were renamed The Purple Hearts. They were named for the pep-pills (see purple hearts) favoured by band members – not the US military decoration of same name (see Purple Heart). Their debut single was a cover of Graham Bond's "Long Legged Lovely" issued in 1965 on Soundtrack Records. Their highest charting single, "Early in the Morning", was released in October 1966 and peaked at No. 24 on Go-Set's National Top 40. The band briefly relocated to Sydney then moved on to Melbourne. They had issued three other singles and an extended play, The Sound of the Purple Hearts before splitting on 23 January 1967. "Dames started calling me Lobby because I would lobby the fuck out of people ... My last name's' L-y-d-e, so he put the 'o' in because it rhymed better". 'Lobby' is also used in Queensland for a freshwater crayfish where other Australians would say 'yabby'.
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