Little Pattie: “He's My Blonde-Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy”

Rare early footage from 1963 of 14-year-old Patricia Amphlett singing her first hit on Johnny O'Keefe's TV show Sing, Sing, Sing - while looking like a deer caught in the headlights. The flip side of the single was Stomping at Maroubra. 

Re. this song, over to Matt Warshaw and his Encyclopedia of Surfing newsletter (as tweeted in the comments): “The Beatles were always going to do what the Aussie town council aldermen could not, and kill the Stomp in Australia (it was already over in America), but pop star Little Patti saved them the trouble with her late '63 single He’s My Blond-Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy. 

"Fourteen-year-old Patti is indeed tiny, and in her own way completely delightful, but when you hit #2 on the charts with a song so sugary and fun that you're grade-school cousins are chasing each other around the yard while singing it, the craze itself has jumped off the cliff and is freefalling to its end.”

Now 74, Pattie’s a popular podcaster and music teacher, and has been a committed advocate for Vietnam vets ever since she toured there as a 17-year-old to entertain the troops and had to be evacuated out in a chopper during the Battle of Long Tan. What a legend.