Lifestyle & Entertainment
7 March, 2026
No victory lap for Ross Wilson
ANNIVERSARIES tend to tidy things up. They package a life into a phrase — in this case, 50 Years of Hits — and suggest something complete. Ross Wilson doesn’t speak like someone finished. And he's coming to Ararat.
Spend ten minutes chatting with him and the mythology drains away. There’s no talk of legacy. No rehearsed reverence. Just the mechanics of the next show.
You get to town.
You do the soundcheck.
You find something to eat.
Then you walk on stage.
“It’s all about that one and a half hours or so,” he said.
“We’re just playing our little hearts out.”
He didn’t say it lightly. He’s been around long enough to know it doesn’t last for everyone.
That’s the job.
In an era when music is flattened into clips and metrics and thirty-second judgments, Wilson still talks about the gig like it’s a craft. The audience might know every word, but that doesn’t make the night automatic.
“What I try to achieve is that people go away feeling they got more than what they expected.”
There’s no nostalgia in that. There are standards.
A tour built around five decades of hits could easily drift into preservation — the big songs delivered faithfully, the edges smoothed off. Wilson isn’t naive. The obvious tracks are there. They’d be mad not to play them.
“Fortunately, the big hits are all good songs.”
He lets the understatement sit. Then he talks about stretching them, letting the band breathe, slipping in the unexpected.
It’s the same instinct that has shaped his career.
Daddy Cool was ignition.
Mondo Rock was evolution.
“Daddy Cool was sort of like rock and roll high school,” he said, “But Mondo Rock — I’d grown up, and the music had grown up too.”
That shift defined everything that followed.
Where some artists freeze inside the moment that made them famous, Wilson moved. New collaborators. Different textures. A willingness to share the songwriting load rather than carry it alone.
And then there’s the song that slipped the leash.
“Eagle Rock” has long since left the building.
Wilson can pinpoint the moment it stopped belonging to him. Not when it first went to No.1 in 1971. Not when it became shorthand for a certain kind of Australian exuberance. Later — when Molly Meldrum told him what happened in nightclubs if the dancefloor started thinning out.
“If I’m having a slow night, I put on ‘Eagle Rock’, and they all hit the dance floor.”
He laughs at the memory — not triumphant, not possessive, more intrigued by what the song had become.
That was the moment it shifted from hit to utility, something DJs could reach for when a room needed resetting.
It climbed again, embedding itself beyond its era and into the culture.
Wilson doesn’t romanticise that. He notes, with plain pragmatism, that a song with that kind of afterlife “brings me reasonable income.”
Gratitude without illusion.
He’s still writing. Still road-testing new material. Still listening to albums properly — front to back. At home there’s a jukebox stacked with hundreds of 45s. He presses a random button and lets surprise take over.
Curiosity is the constant.
The banner might say 50 years.
Wilson talks like someone focused on the next hour and a half.
And when he steps onto the Ararat Town Hall stage, it won’t feel like a retrospective. It will feel like a musician trying to raise the bar again.
The rest — the mythology, the milestones, the tidy headline — can take care of themselves.
Ross Wilson & The Peaceniks play Ararat Town Hall on Saturday, March 28. Doors from 7:30pm, tickets available at www.ararattownhall.com.au
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