Children Of The Sun

The Zoo Crew is rolling “Children Of The Sun” by Billy Thorpe, off the 1979 album of the same name, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this one does not behave like a regular radio single. It opens like a dispatch from somewhere past the last exit ramp, a voice coming down out of the sky, ships setting fire to the horizon, and a whole crowd of earthlings invited onto crystal ships. That is not a love song dressed up in a spaceship sleeve. That is the record Billy and producer Spencer Proffer actually set out to make, and they wrote the heart of it in one long night.

The story the two of them told later is a good one. They had been at a party, got bored with the room, and ended up at Proffer’s place with a couple of guitars and, as Proffer put it, a little bit of good smoke. Somewhere around five in the morning they had a seven-minute song and a name for the visitors: the Children of the Sun. The pitch was a friendly race from another galaxy watching the earthlings tear themselves up. Proffer called it a cousin of the last scene in Close Encounters, only they took the story one step further and put it on a record instead of an album cover. Thorpe told a radio interviewer the session had started as a fairly conventional album, and that after they cut the title track he looked up and said they had a real story on their hands. Side two of the LP is that story, start to finish: the landing, the leaving, the welcome, a short solar anthem, and a beginning on the far side of the trip.

They cut it at Pasha Music House in Hollywood with a band that could carry the weight. Session bass ace Leland Sklar and drummer Alvin Taylor were in the room, and the record came out on Capricorn in the States, Thorpe’s first album as an American release. The single climbed to number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album landed in the Billboard top 40, around 39, and made number 44 on Australia’s Kent chart. Proffer later said the stations that had the nerve to play it got the phones lit up, and that inside a month “Children Of The Sun” was the number one record on the only ten rock stations in the country that would touch an eight-minute science-fiction sermon. Album radio kept it alive long after the Hot 100 forgot it. Years afterward the title track turned up again in the second season of Fargo, which tells you the thing still has a pulse.

Thorpe took the show off the stage and into planetariums, laser light and all, which is about as close as a rock singer gets to playing inside the story he wrote. The follow-ups, 21st Century Man and Stimulation, stayed in that electronic lane, and in 1987 Proffer issued Children of the Sun… Revisited, five songs from the original plus three new ones, closing on “East of Eden’s Gate.” The 1979 LP itself became scarce. It showed up on CD once, a limited Australian pressing in 1993, and collectors paid for the privilege. In 2026 Iconoclassic finally put an authorized remaster of the original album back out, with Proffer’s help and new notes, which is why a lot of Zoo Freaks are hearing the full side-two ride again instead of the radio edit they grew up on.

Before any of that Hollywood night, William Richard Thorpe was a kid from Manchester who landed in Australia in 1955 and settled in Brisbane. He was ten when a television producer heard him singing and playing guitar out behind his parents’ store in Moorooka, belting a Hank Williams tune. He went on Queensland television under the name Little Rock Allen, stock whip and all, because a boy that age was not supposed to be working the rooms. He said later that from the night of his first gig, a tiny church hall on the edge of Brisbane in 1956, he could not get enough of music. He was never treated like a kid. The older players coached him without calling it coaching.

At seventeen he moved to Sydney and auditioned at Surf City in Kings Cross. The band waiting there was a surf instrumental outfit called the Aztecs, with a young Vince Melouney on guitar, later of the Bee Gees. They became Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and in 1964 their cover of “Poison Ivy” sat at number one on the Sydney charts while the Beatles were in town, which got Thorpe an invitation up to the hotel to meet them. “Over the Rainbow,” “Mashed Potato,” and “Twilight Time” followed. He hosted the national TV show It’s All Happening! with the Aztecs as the house band. When that run ended he drifted into cabaret, grew his hair, grew a moustache, and in Melbourne rebuilt the Aztecs as one of the loudest bands in the country. He said the sound was like standing on a pair of Boeing 747 engines. It cracked foundations and broke windows. At Sunbury in January 1972 he unveiled “Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy),” ponytailed and bearded, and told the crowd to suck more piss. The song went to number two. The Myer Music Bowl show that autumn pulled a crowd big enough that police closed the roads. Historian Ian McFarlane later called him the unassailable monarch of Australian rock, the man who went from child star to cuddly pop crooner to the wildest blues rocker in the land.

He folded the Aztecs in 1975, cut Million Dollar Bill and Pick Me Up and Play Me Loud, and in December 1976 moved to Los Angeles. Children of the Sun was the second act. It sold on the order of half a million copies and gave him a cult following the pub-rock years never quite reached over here. After the live work slowed in the mid-eighties he ran an electronics shop that did jobs for Disney, Mattel, and Universal, owned a studio, and scored television, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Columbo, and War of the Worlds. With old Aztec Tony Barber he built a soft-toy company and wrote stories for The Puggle Tales. He also wrote the songs for Mick Fleetwood’s side band The Zoo, which is a name this station does not take lightly. He came home in 1996, published two books, Sex and Thugs and Rock ’n’ Roll and Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), and went into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1991. He died of a heart attack in Sydney on 28 February 2007, at sixty, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia afterward.

You can catch the rest of the freeform ride with the Zoo Crew over at THE ZOO. The working home for Thorpe’s music and the old stories is the official Facebook page at Billy Thorpe, where old Capricorn hands still post about the album they helped take to radio and where fans trade Sunbury memories under the old Aztec cry. The domain that page lists as his site does not answer anymore, and there is no official Instagram or X account for this Billy Thorpe that a browser can open and tie back to the record, so those stay off the card rather than send you down a dead road. Put the needle on side two when you get home. The ships are still out there.