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Billy Thorpe

Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs were an Australian pop and rock group dating from the mid-sixties. The group enjoyed huge success in the mid-1960s, but split in 1967. They re-emerged in the early seventies to become one of the most popular Australian hard-rock bands of the period. Thorpe died from a heart attack in Sydney on 28 February 2007.
The group broke through in mid-1964 with a massive nationwide hit, their cover of the Leiber and Stoller classic “Poison Ivy”, which famously kept The Beatles from the #1 spot on the Sydney charts at the very moment that the group was making its first and only tour of Australia—a feat which resulted in Thorpe being invited to meet the Fab Four at their hotel. Over the next twelve months the band reigned supreme as the most popular ‘beat’ group in Australia, scoring further hits with the songs “Mashed Potato”, “Sick And Tired” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, until they were eclipsed by the emergence of The Easybeats in 1965. The band’s recording success confirmed Albert Productions, their recording company, with its worldwide distribution deals through EMI and Parlophone, as one of the most important in Australia’s embryonic pop industry.
During 1965 the original Aztecs quit after a financial dispute, so Thorpe put together a new five-piece version consisting of drummer Johnny Dick, pianist Jimmy Taylor, guitarists Col Risby and Mike Downes and NZ-born bassist Teddy Toi. This group performed until 1966, scoring further hits with “Twilight Time”, “Hallelujah I Love Her So”, “Love Letters” and “Word For Today”.
Thorpe went solo in 1967 and for a brief time he hosted his own TV pop show, It’s All Happening, but personal problems and a widely publicised bankruptcy brought this phase of his career to an end in 1968. but then as he went solo he became more of an outcast.
Edited Extracts from Wikipedia®