The Skyhooks Years: Glam Rock in a Country That Wasn't Ready

Lifestyle, Music
February 23, 2026

The Skyhooks Years: Glam Rock in a Country That Wasn’t Ready

By Tony Mantos

Redmond Symons was born on 13 June 1949 in England, emigrated to Australia at the age of nine in 1958, and was educated at the University of Melbourne where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in pure mathematics and computer science.

That last detail is worth sitting with. Most rock guitarists can’t talk to you about pure mathematics. Red Symons can, and has, and does. It’s part of what makes him different from almost everyone else who came up through the Australian music scene in the 1970s.

After graduating, he joined Skyhooks as guitarist, and the band became one of the defining cultural events of the decade. The classic lineup comprised Graeme “Shirley” Strachan on vocals, Greg Macainsh on bass and backing vocals, Red Symons on guitar, vocals and keyboards, Bob “Bongo” Starkie on guitar and backing vocals, and Imants “Freddie” Strauks on drums.

Known for their flamboyant costumes and makeup, their music addressed a variety of issues including drugs, sex, and the gay scene while frequently referencing Australian places and culture. Six of the ten tracks on their debut album were banned by the commercial broadcasters. The band was once raided by Adelaide police for the presence of an oversized prop of a particular anatomical nature. They were, in other words, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Songs like “Living in the 70s,” “Ego Is Not a Dirty Word,” “All My Friends Are Getting Married” and “Women in Uniform” hit the Australian charts hard and fast, and they hit because they were genuinely about Australian life in a way that imported rock wasn’t. Macainsh’s lyrics in particular had a specificity and humour that felt local rather than aspirational. The band was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2005, and they earned it.

Symons left in 1977, before the band’s eventual dissolution in 1980, and went on to become something different entirely.

Red Faces and the Sarcasm Economy

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Symons became famous to a whole new generation through his role on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, the long-running Saturday morning and later prime-time variety show that occupied a strange and beloved corner of Australian television for decades.

His role was the Red Faces judge. The sarcastic, deadpan, gleefully uncharitable judge who told amateur performers exactly what he thought of them, with a precision cruelty that the audience loved because it was honest in a way that television usually wasn’t. His on-camera persona was a sarcastic killjoy, a role he apparently adopted through his appearance as third judge on Red Faces.

What made it work is the same thing that makes his whole career make sense: he’s actually clever. The dismissals were funny because they were specific. A dull person doing the same job would have been mean. Symons was mean and smart, which is a different thing entirely, and the audience could tell the difference.

In between television appearances, he was busy in ways that most people don’t realise. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he combined his on-air role on Hey Hey with composing for various film and television shows and jingle writing. Between 1992 and 1995, he played the role of the narrator in The Rocky Horror Show, touring Australia and Singapore. He also wrote music for Blue Heelers. And, perhaps most impressively, he wrote the music for Australia’s first condom commercial, which is the sort of line you don’t forget.

Nearly 15 Years at ABC Radio Melbourne

In 2003, Symons moved into breakfast radio at ABC Melbourne, and it suited him. The format gave him room to be curious, to be difficult, to ask the kind of questions that press conferences don’t allow. He hosted ABC Radio Melbourne’s breakfast show from 2003 until 2017.

Fourteen years is a long time to be in anyone’s ear at 5:30 in the morning. For a generation of Melbourne commuters, Red Symons was the voice that started the day. He brought the same combination of intelligence and irreverence he’d always had, and it worked in the medium.

The Fall, the Brain Injury, and a Year He’d Rather Forget

2017 was, by any measure, a terrible year for Red Symons.

It started with a fall in July. He felt unsteady while walking home from the supermarket, put his hand out to steady himself against a building, and fell backwards because of the slope of the hill, hitting the back of his head hard on the pavement. The result was a significant brain injury. He told ABC Radio Melbourne on his return that the brain had just rattled around in the skull for a little while, and even managed a joke about it, noting that a doctor had raised the subject of his supposed lack of inhibition in the public arena. He was off air for nearly two months.

Then came the interview controversy with ABC colleague Beverley Wang, which ended his contract. Then a divorce, and the sale of the Melbourne family home he’d lived in since 1998. And in the middle of all of it, his son Samuel, who had been battling cancer since childhood, had a serious recurrence.

Red himself said at the time that he had some dark days. “I considered myself immortal past what is technically retirement age,” he said. “My accident made me introspective about that.”

The brain injury in particular prompted him to take stock. He started swimming every morning. “You reach an age where you might as well start doing it,” he said. “I’ve led a fairly sedentary life and been an indoorsy type.”

It’s a notable thing for a 68-year-old man who’d just survived a serious head injury to turn toward rather than away from his own mortality, and to respond by getting in a pool every day. There’s something very Red Symons about that. Confronted with evidence of physical vulnerability, he applied logic to the problem and changed his behaviour. Most people don’t. He did.

Tragically, Samuel passed away in October 2018, aged 27, after a lifelong battle with brain tumours and cancer. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour at just four years old. Symons spoke about his son’s death publicly and with evident love, and then, again, kept going.

The brain injury’s long-term effects are not something Symons has discussed in detail in recent years, and there’s no specific public reporting on ongoing neurological concerns. He was confirmed to be sharp and without loss of function at the time of his return to the airwaves. But it remains part of the picture of who he is now, and it is fair to note that a significant head injury at 68 is not a small thing, regardless of the recovery. He is 75 now. The swimming continues, as far as anyone knows.

Writing, Science and Keeping the Mind Moving

Since leaving the ABC, Symons has pursued the part of his identity that the media career somewhat obscured: the writer and the science brain. He contributed a regular column to The Age over many years, and more recently has been writing for Cosmos Magazine, the Australian science publication, in a column that brings his particular sensibility, wry, observational, genuinely curious, to bear on scientific topics.

It’s a natural fit that not many people predicted. A rock guitarist from Skyhooks writing about cell biology and evolution for a science magazine sounds like the setup to a joke. But Symons has always had the maths and science background to operate credibly in that space, and his writing voice translates well. In one piece for Cosmos, he wrote about multicellular evolution by starting with the observation that he was once a single cell, noting that his memory of this was hazy, and working outward from there into a genuinely engaged discussion of biology. That’s a long way from “Living in the 70s,” and also somehow completely consistent with who he is.

Still Turning Up

He appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? again in February 2021, which is the kind of thing Red Symons does. Not because he needs to, but because the opportunity presented itself and he’s constitutionally incapable of not engaging.

He remains something of a cultural touchstone for a certain kind of Melbourne sensibility. The anti-sentimentalist who is, underneath it, clearly sentimental. The sarcastic judge who spent 15 years being warmly present in people’s morning routines. The rock musician with a pure maths degree. The man who has done more different things in Australian popular culture than almost anyone else, without ever quite being defined by any one of them.

What You Take From the Career

Red Symons turned 75 in 2024. He arrived in Australia on the same ship as the Bee Gees, which is one of the great trivial facts in Australian cultural history. He played guitar in the most specifically Australian rock band of the 1970s. He spent a decade being television’s most reliably cutting presence. He did 14 years of early mornings at the ABC. He survived a serious brain injury, started swimming every day, and kept writing. He lost a son. He kept going.

The question of what he’s doing now doesn’t have a single clean answer, which is entirely appropriate. The man has never had a single clean answer to anything. That’s the point.

You can keep up with his writing at The New Daily, where his columns have run over the years, and his Cosmos contributions are archived and worth seeking out for anyone who wants to see what happens when a rock guitarist with a science degree decides to write about the world.