Before Young Talent Time, Johnny Young was a songwriter who rivaled the best of his era

Faith Moran/GC Images Johnny Young has died at 79 from pancreatic cancer, and Australian pop music has lost another of its multifaceted creatives of the ‘60s and '70s.

While there may be different assessments of Young’s legacy, it’s undeniable he made a major impact on this country’s musical and television landscape.

John de Jong was Dutch-born and raised in Kalamunda, in the hills of Perth.

As a pop singer he was an early beneficiary of the generosity of the first wave of Australia’s international pop sensations: the Easybeats’ George Young and Stevie Wright wrote him a hit single, Step Back.

But Barry Gibb taught the man to fish.

Young had paid for Gibb to fly from Brisbane to Sydney for a television appearance, in the days when the Bee Gees were one more struggling pop band dying for a break.

In London, in 1967, Young was poised to enter the British hit parade with covers of the Bee Gees’ Craise Finton Kirk and Every Christian Lion Hearted Man .

They didn’t chart, but Gibb took Young under his wing and gave him some tuition on songwriting.

Young was not only an eager student, he applied his learning quickly with enormous success.

He penned The Real Thing , which famously became a number one for Russell Morris.

Embellished as it was with Molly Meldrum’s overblown psychedelia, is surely Young’s best known song.

The story of Meldrum wrestling the demo of The Real Thing (originally intended for Ronnie Burns) from Young to turn it into the debut solo record for Morris, his protege, is as legendary as the story of Meldrum soundlessly gesturing to backing band, The Groop, in the studio to keep playing the rudimentary track for minutes beyond the time they’d rehearsed.

Meldrum would go on to augment The Real Thing with Hitler speeches, choirs and the atom bomb to make what could either have been an iconic masterpiece or an embarrassing, costly folly.

Luckily, it was the former.