[12][14] "Fleetwood Plain" was subsequently covered by Australian country musician, Reg Lindsay,[15] and by Canadian folk-rockers Creamcheeze Good Time Band[16] on their 1973 album, Home Cookin'.
[7][12] By May 1971, Country Radio's line-up had changed with Blanchflower and Quill joined by Mal Algar on bass guitar (ex-Chorus), John A. Bird on keyboards and Ace Follington on drums (ex-Chain).
[7][9] With the "classic" line-up of Quill, Tolhurst, Bird, Bois, Bolton and Blanchflower, Country Radio recorded their second and most successful single, "Gypsy Queen", with producer John French, in Melbourne in April 1972.
It was featured on the soundtrack of director Rod Hardy's 2007 film, December Boys, starring Daniel Radcliffe, and in the 2009 ABC-TV series, East of Everything.
The chart success of the single and the interest of expatriate Canadian music promoter and label representative, Michael McMartin, led to a contract with Toronto-based MUCH Productions, which issued "Gypsy Queen" in Canada in 1972.
[7][20][21] On 4 October 1972 the group had recorded a live-in-the-studio performance before an invited audience, which Infinity released as their debut album, Country Radio Live, in December.
[7][9] It included a selection of originals, plus two tracks, "Some Lonesome Picker" and "Never Goin' Back", written by John Stewart (ex-The Kingston Trio).
[24] They appeared on concert and festival stages with different artists of the era, including Creedence Clearwater Revival, Elton John, Santana and Stephen Stills.
[7][9] Tolhurst abruptly left the band after the second Sunbury festival, briefly joining Mississippi, before forming The Dingoes in Melbourne, with singer-harmonicist, Broderick Smith.
[7][17] we were playing this very gentle, acoustic, ringy mandolin music, with lots of romance in the lyrics ... it happened right at sundown, with a rather spectacular sunset [...] I remember, after a couple of songs, looking out and seeing 80,000 people standing up and screaming and waving and clapping.
– but it was for us!Quill, Bolton and Du Bois were joined by Adelaide guitarist-songwriter Russ Johnson (ex-Mississippi) – effectively swapping places with Tolhurst.
[7] The four-piece ensemble opened for British folk-rock band Fairport Convention on three dates of their 1973 tour, which despite promotions did not include former lead singer, Sandy Denny.
It was produced by John L Sayers and featured Country Radio alumni: Blanchflower, Bolton, Du Bois, Hinton and Tolhurst, plus former collaborator Jones on keyboards.
It included Quill's cover of the country classic "Singin' the Blues", which featured Renee Geyer on backing vocals and Stacpool on guitar.
A re-arranged and remixed version of "Been So Long", with parts added in Toronto by bass guitarist Steve Hogg, singer Ian Thomas and keyboardist Hugh Syme, was released in Canada as Quill's first solo single there, but it was the B-side, the raucous, guitar-heavy "I Wonder Why", that got most of the attention on Canadian radio, particularly Toronto's then hard-rock FM station Q107 (CILQ).
At the final gig of the tour, at the Bridge Hotel, Sydney, Quill and Tolhurst were joined on stage by Country Radio bandmate Blanchflower.
From June 2006 to March 2008 Quill compiled and hosted the hour-long weekly Canadian roots music speciality program, River of Song, on Sirius Canada satellite radio.
He returned to Australia in July 2009, and played two shows in his home town, one at the revived Shack in Narrabeen, and another at the Excelsior Hotel in Sydney, where he was joined for several songs by former bandmates Agostino and Blanchflower.
In January and February 2011 Quill toured Australia's east coast, playing 15 dates with Toronto singer-songwriter, Jon Brooks.
On his website, Quill described Ironbark as "an extension of the traditional bush music and country-rock roots of core members Quill and Wilkins, whose musical kinship extends even further back than their time with fabled Australian country-rock bands Country Radio and Flying Circus, respectively, to Sydney's folk, blues and jug band haunts in the late 1960s".
[1] His family announced that he had "passed away suddenly but peacefully this afternoon from complications due to pneumonia and a recently diagnosed case of sleep apnea".
Warner Music (who now own the Infinity/Festival Records archive) are set to release a new edition of Gypsy Queen as a CD compilation, expanded with previously unreleased tracks.
In addition, Quill had announced plans to reissue his "lost" solo album, Correspondence, which had been recorded in Toronto in 1980 with producer Alan Thorne and featured contributions from Amos Garrett, Mike McKenna, and Ian Thomas.
Quill had said that the album was being restored from a safety master that had recently come to light, and that it would also include bonus material, recorded around the same time in Canada for radio broadcasts, with his bands, Hot Knives and Southern Cross.