Starkie last month cancelled 50th anniversary shows for the band’s seminal debut album, Living in the 70’s, due to ill health.
Starkie’s daughter, Indiana, quoted in the same post, said he “peacefully departed listening to Chuck Berry. Snuggling with his fur baby Bonnie, surrounded by friends and family”.
“He has felt the love till the very end.”
Red Symons, the band’s lead guitarist more recently known for his media career, told this masthead he first met Starkie when the latter was just a teenager.
They met through his older brother, Peter, a founding member of Skyhooks who both Symons and Starkie learned guitar from.
Starkie joined the band in August 1973 as a replacement for Peter. Peter died in 2020, aged 72, after falling from a ladder.
The younger Starkie proved the perfect foil to Symons, with the duelling solos midway through You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed a particular highlight of their six-string partnership.
Symons said he last saw Starkie at his home a week before he died.
Symons (second from right) and Starkie (right) both learned guitar from Starkie’s brother Peter.Credit: The Age
“It was nice to see him and show affection towards him,” Symons said.
“By his description, he didn’t have a lot of energy. I saw him at the start of this year when he was first given a diagnosis. It seemed as though we were coming to the end of our relationship.
“When you’re a bunch of blokes all hanging around together, you do very little of that. But what better time than to simply and positively say ‘I love you’?”
Symons also said he greatly respected Starkie’s decision to enlist a female singer to tour Skyhooks’ songs in later years, in that it honoured Shirley Strachan’s unique vocal range without trying to replace him.
Skyhooks were early favourites of the Melbourne-produced music TV series, Countdown, pairing their quirky, place-based songs with glitzy stage attire.
Bob “Bongo” Starkie on guitar and backing vocals for Skyhooks.
The quintet was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1992, while Living in the 70’s, produced by Ross Wilson, was added to the National Film and Sound Archive in 2011.
That album sold more than 300,000 copies, despite six of its 10 tracks being banned from radio due to sex and drug references.
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