The Angels On 50 Years Of The Iconic ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again’
Rock Legends The Angels are back on the road in June to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their debut track, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, a song that is an indelible part of the Australian culture. Kicking off in Queensland, dates have been booked for capital cities and key regional centres across New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia. The tour will appropriately conclude in the band’s beloved, original hometown of Adelaide in early November.
Instantly recognised by its famous ambulance siren guitar riff and released in 1976, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again was originally produced by Harry Vanda and George Young (of The Easybeats) and was written by current, original band members, brothers John and Rick Brewster and the late Doc Neeson. Further re-recordings followed until a live version of the track was released in 1988 reaching #11 on the charts.
In recent times, the single notably came in at #12 on Triple J’s Hottest 100 of Australian Songs in July 2025 and was the oldest title in the Top 40. The classic has also been honoured with covers by Dune Rats and Ruby Fields for Triple J’s famous segment, Like A Version with John and Rick Brewster happily obliging to the band’s invitation to feature on the recording in 2023. New York garage rockers Baby Shakes also released a cover of the single with an accompanying video in 2020. The legendary John Brewster speaks to Rob Lyon about this milestone and the origins of that iconic crowd line in the chorus.
You must be really thrilled with such another significant significant milestone. Out of all the accolades the band could have, fifty years of Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, how does that sit with you when you sit back and look at that milestone?
Yeah, it sits really well. It just amazes me. Well, for starters, we’re fifty two years old now, the band is. Of course, you know, Rick and I are the only originals, but the fact that Face Again has become such a huge song is… it intrigues me, and it was our first single. Didn’t really work very well at the time. It kept us poor for years, but it’s always been a good song, and I just think what the general public have done with the song is really great. The larrikin Australian sense of humour for it to be associated with our song, I think is fantastic.
It’s amazing. It doesn’t really matter where you are, at an Angels show, at a festival, or a DJ plays it, or it comes on the radio in the car. It’s just one of those iconic songs that continues to have its own legs and build its own legacy. I guess as an artist, that’s beyond anything you could hope for with any song?
Oh, absolutely, yeah. It’s like maybe every fortnight I’d get a request from our publishing company for it to be added to some movie or TV show or whatever. I just think it’s fantastic. Of course, we’ve got other songs that I love just as much, like Take a Long Line, and Marseille, and Coming Down on Me, No Secrets, there’s a whole string of them. We’re very fortunate, we kind of made our own luck, I guess, but we’re very fortunate we’ve got so many songs that people love, because we can go out there and play these songs. They don’t feel like they’re dated, they feel quite on the money.
I mean, we couldn’t see this coming. We couldn’t see that we’d still be playing in our seventies. I mean, I’m seventy six years of age, and I feel great. Things been done to me, got two new knees. I can walk through airports now with ease, and I don’t mind admitting all this sort of stuff, because I think it’s just fabulous that we can be in our seventies, and suddenly you get proud of your age that we can still play, and play with a great band, with my son Sam on bass, my son Tom on the drums, they’re wonderful players. Nick Norton out the front, who’s just knocking everyone out, he’s amazing. So life in the band is great.
It’s a testament to good songs that really stack up, and even when you look at how the music of The Angels has transcended numerous generations now, the kids of kids who are following the band, that’s mind‑blowing as well?
It is. I remember we did The Gov a couple of years back, and right down the front there was a whole string of people, and we were doing The Dark Room album. We did the album from start to finish, I’m looking at all this and I’m calling them kids, but they’re seriously like eighteen years of age and they were singing along with every song on that album. I was just saying, well, where does that come from? That was great and that’s what happens when we play, we get a lot of young people, young and old, we love them all.
Going back to the single, back in the day, working with people like Harry Vanda and George Young, how was that experience? They had their own legacies they created themselves. It almost seems like the perfect partnership?
Those guys were just amazing. Of course, they produced that first single of Am I Gonna See Your Face Again. It’s my favourite version of the song. They’re very original. We’ve done it a few different times, and there’s a few of them out there, but that particular version has Charlie King on the drums, Doc on the bass, and Rick and I on rhythm guitars, well, rhythm and lead guitars in Rick’s case. There’s just something about it, and to me that’s a classic Vanda and Young production. George would always make sure that whatever he released would swing and it does, it swings. That’s what rock and roll’s about. I remember Malcolm Young describing it: you’ve got the rock and you’ve got the roll. I’m proud to say The Angels rock and roll. We’ve got the rock and we put the roll.
Could you ever imagine an Angels show where you didn’t play that song? I think there’d almost be a riot.
I think they would today. We actually didn’t play that song for a few years, so we didn’t know that chant was going on until we did this gig in Mount Isa, which was the first time we ever played Mount Isa, and that was 1983. We hadn’t played Face Again for at least two years, probably three. Because we just thought, well, you know, we’ve got Face to Face, we’ve got No Exit and Dark Room, so there was a whole style going on with those records, and we just thought, well, Face Again is a really good song, but it belongs back then. So we stopped doing it.
Until we did Mount Isa, and then we had three thousand people hollering for encores. We went back out and played Face Again, and they all chanted “No way, get fucked, fuck off.” It blew us away. So we put the song in the show from there on, and wherever we played, they did it. So we were the last to know.
Was that the origin of where the chant started in Mount Isa?
No, I don’t think so. Well, no, definitely not, because the number of people who put their hand up and said, “Oh, we started it…” The simple answer is: we have no idea who started it. But what intrigues me is that it spread around the country like wildfire, without any mobile phones or internet, because in the early ’80s it didn’t exist. That was when you queued up at a phone box to make a call back home when you were out on the road.
But you were talking about George Young, I’ll take the opportunity to say working with Vanda and Young was one of the greatest experiences of my life, and Rick would say the same thing. Any of us, Chris Bailey, we’d all say the same thing. They were amazing. One of the things that happened with them is that the last song they produced was Comin’ Down on Me, which we put out as a single. It didn’t work, so we were still struggling financially, really struggling, and struggling to get the band to hit the big time.
It wasn’t until I wrote I Ain’t the One, which started the band on a path musically. Rick wrote Take a Long Line, which was our first big hit. But Vanda and Young, George and Harry, took Rick and me out into the hallway outside the studio one day, and George did the talking. He said, “Look, we’re going to pull out of producing the band.” Initially, I was absolutely crestfallen. I thought, “Oh, they’ve lost interest.” But that wasn’t the case. They saw something developing in what Rick and I were doing, and they basically handed the ball to us, along with Mark Opitz.
I suspect that if we had delivered an album that didn’t work, they probably would have dumped us… but I probably shouldn’t say that, because they were so loyal. Those Albert years, with John Paul Young, Ted Mulry, Rose Tattoo, ACDC, Vanda & Young, Stevie Wright, those years were just amazing. We learned so much from George, and I think that’s one of the reasons The Angels can still exist today.
When you look at Face Again, have you been impressed by the covers? I remember seeing Dune Rats supporting Youngblood at the Entertainment Centre, twelve thousand people going off to that song. Do you have any personal favourite cover versions?
Well, I’m pretty touched that Metallica did it and they did it in Adelaide. I can’t remember the name of the band [Baby Shakes], but the all‑girl band in New York City that did the song, I thought they did a great version. But my favourite version of the lot is the Dune Rats. Rick and I were asked to come and join them for the Triple J Like a Version. I was with my friend Peter Hanlon, and they sent me a link to their demo of the song. I said to Peter, before I listened to it, “No one ever gets it right, but let’s have a listen.” I’d already dismissed it. I put it on, just through my phone, and I looked up at Peter and said, “This is fantastic.” They really did a great version. So it was a great pleasure for Rick and me to join them and we also joined them on stage at Splendour in the Grass, seventy thousand people, unbelievable, so many young people, it just went off to the song. That makes us feel really good.
Do you think sometimes the meaning of the song is misunderstood? It’s always high‑energy, the crowd’s excitable, but when you look at the lyrics, is it misunderstood, or does it not really matter?
Well, I don’t know. It probably doesn’t really matter. The fact is, it’s an uplifting song with a sad story behind it. It’s a story about a girl who lost her life in a car accident. “I’ve got to stop these tears falling from my eyes, I go walk out in the rain so no one sees me cry.” That’s pretty sad. Lyrics like that, they’re great lyrics, and credit to Doc for those. The girl was actually a friend of Doc’s. So it’s a very personal lyric, but at the end of the day, it’s a great rock and roll song. So I don’t think the fact that people go “No way, get fucked, fuck off” is a bad thing happening to a song with sad lyrics. It’s just the lyric in Australian. Good on them.
Another big tour which is under way. Do you enjoy it even more now than you ever did back in the day?
Yeah, well, there’s been good and bad times. Like any rock and roll band’s going to have some bad times, particularly when you’re young and you’re burning the candle at both ends. Then, of course, you start having children, and trying to still be in a band and have a young family, it’s not easy. Doc’s first marriage fell apart, so did mine, so did Rick’s, so that says it all, really.
But, we’re still doing it. We’re still out on the road playing. The hardest thing for me is airports. It’s been terrible because my knees were shot, and just walking through airports, everything’s a long way away in an airport, it was hard for me. But I’ve got new knees now, so it’s fantastic. So, they get older and they make it younger.
Are there any plans for new music and keeping creative?
Well, yeah, I mean, we always do it. I’m really proud of the album we released last year called Ninety Nine. I think it’s a great album, and it’s a real credit in particular to Nick Norton, because he wrote a lot of the songs lyrically, not necessarily musically, although he did write some of the music as well and so did my son Sam, so it was great to see those guys step up and get creative within The Angels thing. The other credit really goes to my brother Rick, because he wrote some amazing songs on that album. I think the Ninety Nine album’s one of our best ever. I was getting over a heart attack, so they went into the studio without me. I did all my guitar parts on tour with the band in hotel rooms, which of course you can do these days, it’s fantastic. But they went into the studio and got all the rhythm tracks.
Beyond the tour, what’s next for The Angels?
Of course we’ll do some more new music. It’s really hard, but I think it’s essential for a band like us to continue to create stuff. I think just going through the motions of only playing your old songs is not the right idea, even though when we do a gig, that’s what people pay their money to hear and we don’t disappoint. But internally, it’s nice to come up with ideas, and we’ve got a great band to play those ideas and develop them.
Even with all the newer material plus the back catalogue of hit singles, it must be hard to condense it down without playing for three or four hours?
Really hard, that’s our biggest problem. That’s our biggest problem when we go out on the road: what are we going to leave out? We know all the songs we’ve got to leave in, and that virtually fills… and it sounds like I’m bragging, but in a sense, perhaps I am, because people love our songs, and so do we. But we’ve got songs like Skid Row After Dark, for example, there’s no real place for it in a seventy five minute show. Even Can’t Shake It, which I reckon is one of our best songs, we don’t play it that often. I hate that we don’t play it, because you just can’t. When we play live, we want to add a couple of the new songs, and I think that’s really important too, because Nick Norton’s the songwriter, lyrically, of those songs. So we do the song Ninety Nine which just slots right into an Angels set, it just belongs. The other one I love doing, which we’ll do on the next tour, is Minor Truth, great song. We’ve been around for so many years and got such a list of songs, what don’t you do?
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch The Angels on the following dates, tickets HERE…
