Two Aussie Stars in Search of Success - Pix

By James Hall in London

FROM a distance it can look almost easy to become a success in London. Australian entertainers seem to have a charmed life here. Frank Ifield and Roll Harris hit the top. So did the SeeKers. Patsy Am Noble is on the brink.

It is a deceptively impressive roll call which continues to lure scores of youngsters from Australia so strain their bank accounts and stretch their talent in Britain.

There are more opportunities, they say, over looking the fact that there are more people clamouring for them. Most of them fail.

Of the current crop there are two girls Melbourne who may not Olivia Newton-John and Pat Carroll, who arrived independently with reputations as singers and who have now teamed up as a double act.

They have no naive illusions about becoming overnight stars, not anyway in Cleethorpes, the dreary Lincolnshire seaside resort where they launched themselves recently. But this way they feel they will be more successful, and less lonely.

There is no task as formidable and unnerving as that facing a girl, still in her teens, and alone, who wants to crack the London show business scene. Even when she is an Australian with what seems to be substantial collateral - hit records, TV appearances and a name that vibrates in Sydney or Melbourne.

AT first, everything happens: old friends ring up someone knows someone who knows a possible something. Freelancers take kinky pictures to sell to Fleet Street, one appears, saying she has looks and talent. A Sunday paper columnist mentions her. And she makes a record which no one buys.

Back home all this seems to add up to success already. Friends airmail their congratulations. In London, the poor girl wonders how she can explain that she is not a success not yet, at least, that she has merely been put through an unofficial test for personal magnetism, gently dusted with the filings of publicity to see if any thing will stick.

It is a treatment accorded every new face, particularly a pretty one. The subject tries not to be misled. She knows there is still a long way to go. She knows it takes months, sometimes of slogging determination, push, pull, personality and luck; not to mention artistic ability, which in the ephemeral world of pop is often the least requirement

Something rather like this happed to Olivia Newton-John, who is 17 and has one of those very pretty toothpaste-ad faces.

Olivia, the daughter of a university professor, was a name in Melbourne. She went from school straight into a show business career: concerts, television, records, a star of the national "GO" show.

She won a popular talent competition when she was 15 and saved the prize a return fare to Britain until this year.

She arrived here in February, with her mother. and moved into a small mews flat in Hampstead I met some entertainment people I had worked with in Australia and through them I was introduced to Doug Kennedy, an Australian singer. He was looking for a singer for the club he was working in the City. I did that for three or four weeks.

Afterwards, I went up to Leicester to see my brother and met some more people on the fringe of show business. I did a disc for them which they sold to Decca. That was in March.

It was called Till You Say You'll Be Mine a beat number. Not really my kind of song at all. I prefer ballads - the other side was a ballad. The record wasn't very good. I wasn't very happy about it, and it hasn't done anything. I recorded it because I couldn't care less at the time. I was feeling very pessimistic and homesick. I think the Bernard Delfont people would have got me work but I couldn't be bothered somehow. I did a bit of dress modelling as a sideline.

THEN, a month ago, Pat Carroll came along, a trim, auburn-haired lively girl, somewhat older than Olivia. They were friends in Melbourne where Pat, too, was a star in the same kind of world.

Pat had an introduction to the Bernard Delfont organisation and a week after arriving she was singing, second on the bill, at the Celebrity Club.

It was great, but I was very lonely. So Olivia came along to keep me company, It's terrible going to a night club every night or being out of town on a job by yourself.

At home it was okay. You know all the boys and producers. Everyone. Over here you hardly know a soul. That's why we decided to team up. It's easy to get to know people in the business when there are two of you.

We sang a few songs pop stuff and standards for some producers at Bernard. Delfont's and they said we'd be all right.

We get on together. We have the same kind of voice our vibrato in the same, you know, the quiver in our voices blends together.

Delfont's have booked them three engagements at Cleethorpes, the Jack of Clubs night spot in London, and then in Bournemouth, with the Seekers, in July. In between they plan to drive in France and Spain in a 1962 Mini van they have just bought.

Meanwhile, they say they stay mainly in the flat at Hampstead, watching TV and sewing clothes. They aren't much taken with London as a city just yet. Perhaps things will be different with the car, says Pat, whose father is a taxi proprietor in Brunswick.

But they insist they are not depressed or dis heartened. We're doing well compared with some entertainers, says Olivia. We have spoken to people who have been here much longer than we have and got nowhere. We have been lucky getting taken up by Bernard Delfont.

And they haven't found any moral peril in London show business. They have yet, for example, to see a casting couch said to be part of the amorous agent's furniture which friends in Melbourne warned them about.

That all hooey, a load of rubbish, says Pat, earnestly. Everyone we have met so far has been sweet. I mean that. No one has tried to race me

The girls will be together until September when Olivia plans to return to the source of her homesickness - Ian Turpie, compere of the GO show, whom she has known for two years.

Will success change her mind? She laughs and says she doesn't know.

Pat is more certain: Me, I'm fancy free. No one wants me she giggles with false modesty. But I'm not bothered about that. I just want to be singer. I'll stay on when Olivia goes.

I want to become a star so does Olivia. But I won't worry too much if I don't I can always go home. There's plenty of work for me there, I know. But being together for a while will be good. It's a nice way of getting introductions. We hope to get into television and the clubs.