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This chapter is a historiographic examination of one of Australian rock’s most important, yet oft-overlooked recordings. In addition to the original 1973 release of the Coloured Balls’ Ball Power album, space is given to crucial bonus material included on the 2006 digitally remastered reissue by Aztec Records. This consists primarily of early non-album single releases, and the seminal Sunbury1 1973 live recording of Coloured Balls’ perennial centrepiece, ‘G.O.D.’ What follows is informed by dozens of conversations between the author and Coloured Balls members Ian ‘Bobsie’2 Millar and the late Trevor Young that have occurred since 2008. This chapter could not have been written without them. The examination begins with a brief overview of the career of band leader and chief songwriter Lobby Loyde,3 with a specific eye on the through line of musical themes, innovations and styles that fed directly into the formation of the Coloured Balls. It then explores the origins of the band and some relevant key events leading to the recording of Ball Power, before offering a detailed exploration of the album’s songs. It wraps up by discussing both the band’s disintegration and the album’s legacy.

The key characteristics that eventually came to be considered to be Australian ‘heavy metal’ emerged between 1965 and 1973. These include distortion, power, intensity, extremity, loudness and aggression. This exploration of the origins of heavy metal in Australia focusses on the key acts which provided its domestic musical foundations, and investigates how the music was informed by its early, alcohol-fuelled early audiences, sites of performance, media and record shops. Melbourne-based rock guitar hero Lobby Loyde’s classical music influence and technological innovations were important catalysts in the ‘heaviness’ that would typify Australian proto-metal in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, loud and heavy rock was firmly established as a driving force of the emerging pub rock scene. Extreme volume heavy rock was taken to the masses was Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs in the early 1970s whose triumphant headline performance at the 1972 Sunbury Pop Festival then established them as the most popular band in the nation. These underpinnings were consolidated by three bands: Sydney’s primal heavy prog-rockers Buffalo (Australia’s counterpart to Britain’s Black Sabbath), Loyde’s defiant Coloured Balls and the highly influential AC/DC, who successfully crystallised heavy Australian rock in a global context. This chapter explores how the archaeological foundations for Australian metal are the product of domestic conditions and sensibilities enmeshed in overlapping global trends. In doing so, it also considers how Australian metal is entrenched in localised musical contexts which are subject to the circulation of international flows of music and ideas.