Interview: John Brewster on 50 Years of The Angels
More than five decades after The Angels first formed, John Brewster remains as energised by the road as ever. In this conversation with Sheldon Ang Media, the 78-year-old co founder and guitarist reflects on the unlikely afterlife of Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, from its tragic lyrical origins to its evolution into one of Australian rock’s most enduring live anthems. He also looks back on the band’s wild rise through the pub-rock era, the lessons learned from life at full throttle, and the family spirit that now powers the current lineup. With The Angels taking their Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again… 50 Years On tour around Australia from June to November 2026, Brewster makes one thing clear: this is still a band built for the stage, the crowd, and the kind of rock and roll that hits hardest in a packed room.
The interview is also available on YouTube
Sheldon Ang: 1976 is a great year. First of all, it’s the release of Am I Gonna See Your Face Again…and it’s also the year that I was born!
John Brewster: (Chuckles) There you go!
Sheldon Ang: Back in the ’70s, did you ever think the song would still be sung live by future rock stars such as Metallica to over 100,000 fans, by future country singers like Keith Urban, and quoted by a future prime minister on election victories?
John Brewster: No, we didn’t think that we would still be around 52 years after we formed the band. But here we are. My brother Rick and I are in good shape, getting older gracefully, I think, and we’re really excited to get out on the road again.
It’s great to celebrate Face because it doesn’t just celebrate the song; it celebrates a whole journey, and all the people who’ve played in the band with us over the years. When I left the band, it continued, and here we are now with Nick Norton singing at the front. He is brilliant.
I’m still playing the guitar. They can’t get rid of us because we are a guitar band after all.
Sheldon Ang: Just getting off track here, what were the pubs like back in the ’70s and early ’80s?
John Brewster: The thing was, the pubs all became disco, so disco was our enemy back then. There were even people who had badges that said “death to disco” because we were competing with that. We’d do somewhere like Checkers, which is not a pub, it’s a club in Sydney, and you’d do half an hour with the band playing, and half an hour with the disco. The dance floor would be full of mainly young women, which was fine, and then we’d hit the stage, and the dance floor would empty. Boof – all gone.
But eventually, it sort of started with us with a song that I wrote called I Ain’t the One, which was really quite a full-on, frenetic kind of song. We were playing Checkers one night and the floor filled up.
So we were part of that process. All these pubs that had disco machines, they were basically thrown out, and they went rock and roll. It was great. We were just one band among a number that caused that situation to happen.
Sheldon Ang: Am I Gonna See Your Face Again has that Aussie larrikin vibe about it. It has that happy-go-lucky vibe, that drunken song we’d be singing at midnight at a pub. But it was written off the back of a tragedy, right…?
John Brewster: Am I allowed to swear in your interview? (Yes) So it has the chant, “No way, get fucked, fuck off.” We have no idea how it happened, and it happened in a massive sort of way. Now it’s huge. I’d love us to do that at the AFL Grand Final. It would be fantastic. Imagine a hundred thousand people chanting that.
The song was actually written by Doc Neeson, and Rick and I got involved in the music a bit. It was about a friend of his who died in a car accident. If you look at the lyric, it’s really quite a sad song.
But we being into rock and roll, we revved it up a bit and turned it into a rock song. But it’s quite a sad song.
Sheldon Ang: I think by 1979 there were three versions of this song.
John Brewster: That could be right, because we rerecorded it with Chris Bailey when he joined the band, and in the late ’70s we recorded the song for the American album Face to Face. So there’s probably a live version of it as well, and then the original. There were three versions. One was on our very first album, which is called The Angels, which I don’t particularly like. For some reason, we slowed it down and turned it into a bit of a boogie song. I don’t think it’s a great version.
I love the original single with Charlie King on the drums. It’s got a bit of magic. It’s Vanda & Young magic – they produced it. I think they are the greatest producers this country’s ever known. There are other great ones, too, but I think they were amazing.
So I love that first single. We’ve had three different singers through our history: the wonderful Doc Neeson, then Dave Gleeson, who is a great friend of ours and was with us for 13 years, and now Nick Norton has been singing the songs for three years. Everyone loves him. It’s great.
Sheldon Ang: Arguably there are actually four versions, with the “No way, get fucked, fuck off” chant. I know you said you’re not sure where it came from, but can you guess? What have you heard over the past 50 years or so?
John Brewster: It’s impossible to work out because we’re talking about the early ’80s, when there were no mobile phones and no internet. Communication was a lot more difficult. It was the day when you had to queue up at phone boxes to make calls to your girl when you were on the road.
So how it happened, we just had no idea. I know when we first discovered it, which was 1983 in Mount Isa, but that doesn’t mean it started there. That was just when we first heard people do it, because we hadn’t played the song for a couple of years. We sort of thought we could leave that song behind us, probably not a very smart idea. But when we did it at Mount Isa, we did so many encores. People kept calling for more. We did five, and 3,000 people chanted it back. We went back into the dressing room after the show and said, “What the hell was that all about?”
I said, “Oh well, Mount Isa is an isolated community. It’s probably just something that happens here.” So we put the song in the show and worked all the way down the East Coast, of course to Perth, and on to Adelaide, back to Melbourne, back to Sydney, where we were living at the time, and wherever we played, they did it. It spread around the country like wildfire without our knowledge.
Sheldon Ang: So by 1978, The Angels were the highest-paid band in Australia, and moving forward, ten of the band’s albums reached the top ten. I believe the Brewster brothers and Doc Neeson were responsible for the writing and producing of those albums. What’s the secret recipe for success in this industry?
John Brewster: I don’t pretend to know, except to say that one of the things we learned from our experience with AC/DC, and with George Young and Harry Vand – just stay true to yourselves. Don’t chase fashion. Just stay true to what you’re doing. So I think that’s probably the biggest lesson we learned, because when we got to record the Face to Face album, which was actually produced by Rick and me with Mark Opitz, that’s exactly what we did.
We discovered our style, or angle, or whatever you want to call it, and that album represents it really well. Still today, we’re basically the same.
Sheldon Ang: Yeah, and The Angels supported the likes of David Bowie and Pearl Jam back in the ’70s and ’80s. What was it like to be part of The Angels in tits heyday?
John Brewster: Fantastic. Back when the band started to hit the big time, it was a bit like being on a lead racehorse, flying along, and you couldn’t get off because it was too dangerous, but the other racehorses were just behind us. It felt like that. It was a rush, and I was glad to be a part of it.
To play gigs like Bondi Lifesaver, which should probably have been licensed for about 300 people, and there were nearly 2,000 there, was pretty exciting. Pretty dangerous too. Fortunately, nothing ever really happened at gigs, not on any decent scale anyway, so apparently we were lucky. But it was a very exciting era.
For me it’s still exciting. Every time I stand on a stage with my brother over the other side, and our sons in the band playing bass and drums, it’s just amazing. The songs don’t feel dated.
Sheldon Ang: And despite all the success, you left the band in 1986. What was the reason?
John Brewster: Well, we’d been touring the world from 1980 through to ’85, and the 1985 tour got pretty crazy over in the States. I remember being stuck in Milwaukee for a week, not knowing where the next gig was going to come from, but in the meantime money was just flowing out of our bank account.
Had we not come back to Australia and sort of picked up the pieces back here, I think we might have all lost our houses. So it was a pretty tough time, but it was exciting. Some of the tours we did in America were really exciting, particularly in the mid-’80s when we were headlining gigs on the West Coast, like the Paramount Theater in Portland and alsothe Paramount Theater in Seattle, those sorts of venues. We were playing to thousands of people, headlining. It was really quite exciting. There were cities like New York where we did really well, Chicago, Los Angeles, but we had an agent then who I think was the wrong agent for the band, and it just got pretty crazy. So we came back, and I think my brother and I needed a break from each other, so I left the band. I came back, though, and it’s all good now.
Sheldon Ang: No regrets at all?
John Brewster: No regrets. I had fun, actually. I got to be best friends with Alan Lancaster, the bass player from Status Quo, and we joined The Party Boys. Then Swanee came into that, and I produced a song called He’s Gonna Step On You Again, which went to number one. So that was good fun.
Sheldon Ang: And in 1988, The Angels were inducted into the Hall of Fame. What does that mean to you guys?
John Brewster: It’s a wonderful honour bestowed upon you by your peers, so it means a lot. I don’t wake up every morning and go, “Oh, I’m in the Hall of Fame.” I don’t even think of myself as being famous, but I do think the band is famous, and we’re proud of that.
We’ve also been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame as well. And of course, here in South Australia, we now have a lane, The Angels Lane, bestowed upon us by the Adelaide City Council. We had a fantastic celebration of that. It’s behind the Her Majesty’s Theatre, which is a fantastic venue in Adelaide.
Sheldon Ang: And The Angels are touring Australia from next month onwards. There are four Brewsters in the current lineup, so I guess you guys won’t have any major arguments at all.
John Brewster: No, it’s a really happy camp. Nick Norton is part of the family too. So it’s become a family band for all the right reasons, in my opinion, which is that these guys play brilliantly. They’re there for what they can do musically.
It just so happens the two of them, Sam and Tom, are my sons. Our grandfather started this whole thing. He was a concert pianist. Dad was the lead cellist in the symphony orchestra in Adelaide. Rick and I think there’s a bit of a gene thing, a genetic connection. So to play with Sam and Tom on bass and drums is pretty fantastic.
Sheldon Ang: “We are basically a live band playing rock and roll for people who want to come down and dance.” Do you remember who said that?
John Brewster: That sounds like Doc.
Sheldon Ang: Yeah. Is that what we can expect from The Angels of 2026 in a live show?
John Brewster: Not too much different to that. People can’t dance to The Angels too much because there are too many of them, they’re all jammed together like sardines. But the relationship between the band and the audience has always been the biggest deal for us, and it was a big deal as songwriters too, because we didn’t just go off the road to write songs. We wrote songs on the road, in colour, so to speak. Then you play a new song to your audience, and if they didn’t respond very well to that song, we’d just go and write another one. So that live relationship with the audience has been huge, and it continues to be.
Sheldon Ang: So finally, what can we expect from this tour from The Angels? It’s the greatest hits tour as well.
John Brewster: Pretty much every time the band plays as The Angels, it is kind of a greatest hits show. We try and put songs in there that aren’t necessarily singles but are huge songs. “Marseilles”, for example, wasn’t a single here; it was overseas, but not here, and we’ll finish the show with that because it’s a great set closer.
So it’s a combination of greatest hits and greatest songs, songs that weren’t necessarily hit singles. But I can tell you it’s still a great experience to both play in The Angels and, obviously, to come and see them too, because the response from our audience is amazing.
The Angels will be performing across Australia from June to November. Tickets are available from The Angels – Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again – 50 Years – Touring In 2026
About the interviewer: Sheldon Ang, photojournalist, writer and the founder of Perth-based Sheldon Ang Media (est. May 2022) has been accredited to over 250 of the hottest acts including Taylor Swift (ERAS Tour in Sydney), Coldplay (Perth), AC/DC, KISS, Metallica, Iron Maiden, RHCP and P!NK with reviews shared by the likes of Belinda Carlisle, UB40, Delta Goodrem, and Roxette. He has interviewed rockers Suzi Quatro (pictured below), the late Ace Frehley (KISS), John Steel (The Animals), Frank Ferrer (Guns N Roses), Phil X (Bon Jovi), Andrew Farris (INXS) plus over 100 artists. He’s also a contributor on Triple M Radio as a music journalist.
