Peter Doyle

Born in 1949, Peter Doyle enjoyed a varied and successful career which took him from Australia to the UK, the USA and back again.

He started singing aged nine on the Australian television talent show Swallow’s Juniors and by the age of 14 was appearing on Sunday afternoon pop shows at Melbourne’s Festival Hall.

At 16 he scored a record deal with the Sunshine label and began appearing on the Australian TV show The Go!! Show.

Matched with backing group The Phantoms, Doyle recorded six singles for Sunshine; Conway Twitty‘s Speechless (May 1965), Solomon Burke‘s Stupidity (July 1965), The Small Faces‘ What’cha Gonna Do About It? (November 1965), The Platters‘ The Great Pretender (January 1966), Something You Got Baby (May 1966) and Mr Good Time (November 1966).

In 1967 Doyle moved to the Astor label and issued two further singles, You Can’t Put That In A Bottle (April 1967) and Neil Sedaka‘s Plastic Dreams And Toy Balloons (June 1967). He also utilised the services of Grandma’s Tonic as his backing band.

In May 1968, with his solo career ebbing, Doyle joined Rob Lovett (ex-The Loved Ones) and Malcolm McGee (ex-The Wild Cherries) in the heavily hyped Walker Brothers wannabes The Virgil Brothers.

The vocal trio issued three singles but had folded by 1970. Doyle then accepted entrepreneur David Joseph’s offer to join The New Seekers, who promptly found the chart success Doyle had been chasing for so long.

Doyle had a relationship with his fellow New Seeker, Lyn Paul but left the group in 1973. He was replaced by Peter Oliver.

He continued to work in the UK until 1981 but without any real success.

After a brief spell in the US with a band called Regis, he returned home to Australia and continued to perform on the club and nostalgia circuit.

Peter Doyle died in Australia of throat cancer on 13 October 2001. He was just 52.