While not my normal fare, the Seekers were a favorite of my step-mother who was a quintessential 50's-60's folkie, After graduating from the University of Indiana in 1955 she moved to NYC to change the world. Of course living right on Washington Square didn't hurt either. She became friends with Dave Van Ronk, The Village Stompers and others who would show up once in a while for dinner, much to the displeasure of my father who would put on his headphones and listen to classical music while guitars and bongos would be going on in the living room. He did get back at her by having her listen to Alan Ginsburg read his poetry (my father was a HUGE beat poetry fan) or himself read
Rimbaud in the original French. And people wonder why I left home at 15.
Back to the Seekers. They were an Australian group that formed in 1962. After becoming faily popular for their live show they were offered a recording contract. What was unusual is that
Judith Durham the lead singer took itupon herself to send demos to major record companies in England on hope of building enough interest to get them out of just the Australian market. It worked...sort of. There was interest but nobody wanted to pay to either fly or sail the group to England so the band made arrangements to play on a cruise ship in exchange for passage. Foruneatly there was a record producer on board who thought they had some potential and after hearing of their plight booked them some free time in the studio on their 2nd or 3rd day after arriving in England. That interest coupled with the demos sent from Oz finally lead to a recording contract a few days before they were set to leave. And fortunate it was because in 1964 they palced and many songs in the UK charts and the Stones and the Kinks albeit a little lower down. In any case they rode the folk revival both here in the UK and Australia with their returning home concert supposedly drawing almost 200,000 people or over 1.5% of the entire population at the time.
So in small doses it can bring back fond memories but I can only handle about an hour of it.