I bet you they won't play this song on the radio

I bet they won't play this song on the radio
I bet you they won't play this new ---- song.
It's not that it's ---- or ---- ---- controversial
Just that the ----ing words are awfully strong.
You can't say ---- on the radio
Or ---- or ---- or ----,
You can't even say I'd like to ---- you one day
Unless you're a doctor with a very large ----
So I bet you they won't play this song on the radio
I bet you they daren't ----ing well programme it
I bet you their ---ing old Programme Directors
Will think it's a load of horse ----.
- Eric Idle, 1980

Sometime nearing 11.50pm on Wednesday night…

“Oh yeah, we’re back. Um, that was Radiohead with The Bends, off their massive album from a few years back now… what was that called, Benno?”

“Uh, dunno, Bill. It’s good but.”

“Yeah. Anyway you’re with the Stoned Roses on 2NCR, just like you should be.” [This, judging by the number of times they trotted it out, was the show’s slogan. I was going to strongly suggest to the boys, next time I saw them, that it shouldn’t be.] “And now… time for some new local music, hey Ben?”

[Raspy coughing] “Oh, um, yeah. These are some new guys on the local scene with a new EP out, eh… um, we played a few tracks of this last night, and people seem to be digging it from what we’re hearing… so yeah, we thought hey, let’s play the whole thing through, like, fully… isn’t that right Bill?”

[Burbling sounds off-mike, possibly generated with the use of an Orchy bottle in concert with a short length of Nylex hose]

“Oh yeah dude, absolutely. Let us know if you get into this, give us a call on... um, I can never remember the number… [reads] give us a call on 66 25 25 25… this is Flange Gasket, with Insert Title There. Sorry, Here.”

“And apologies to all those Razorslash fans out there.”

“Yeah… apologies to both of you.” [Stoned giggling].

And then, to our disbelief, our communal stereo, tuned to 92.9 FM, began cheering at us, and my best mate’s voice came bellowing out. “G’day folks, thanks for coming out - we are Flange Gasket, the greatest rock and roll band in all of Goonellabah. Remember our name because you’ll be screaming it later.” [Small but vocal crowd cheers volubly.] “That’s what I’m talking about. This is my good friend Angus Young, folks. He’s got something he wants y’all to know about. Ain’t that right Angus?”

Then, even more bizarrely, my own voice. Doesn’t sound like me, but I’m told it’s definitely me. “You bet yo’ ass, Uncle Sam.”

And the ferocious crunch of two overdriven guitars launching into the most downright naaaasty 12 bar blues-rock riff since… well, Nasty, by the Casanovas. And they recorded that two years after we put Sketchy At Best on tape, so get THAT up ya.

I looked at McCarthy, and he looked at Phil, and Phil looked at me, and we all grinned like idiots, and I looked at Marty, and he looked at Phil and McCarthy, and McCarthy said the most sensible thing any of us could have said at that precise moment.

“I think this definitely warrants a beer,” he proposed.

So we cracked a round of Uncle Teds (the Powers of Evil had finally been overcome) and drank to the hugely unexpected success of Insert Title Here.

Which lasted until the next day, when Marty and Phil got their marks back. FAILED.

“Any basis in fact for marking you down?” I growled. “Or can’t the prick take a joke?”

“However,” the Duffer reported sourly, “he’s prepared to consider marking us up to a D minus, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

The Duffer regarded McCarthy and I carefully across the asymmetrical pool table.

“That we tell him who the other two members of the band were,” he replied.

I’d be lying if I claimed that hadn’t sent a little chill of concern tingling down my spine. If Steve Bennett could find out who was involved, even if he’d mistaken me for Sam, surely Chris Kurtin could. Kretin was a big talker, liked the sound of his own voice, but he clearly knew people around the local scene, some of whom… let’s say… lived on the fringes of legal employment. And, just as clearly, he wasn’t necessarily rational when it came to defending his reputation. Of course he wouldn’t seriously go after us, would he? Not over McCarthy declaring that we weren’t worthy to drink his piss, and suggesting he needed a kick in the love spuds to the tune of an old Aussie drinking song by Slim Dusty?

“So have you told him?” McCarthy began, uneasily.

“I don’t intend to,” the Duffer replied. “None of his damn business who you guys are.”

Phew.

“But Marty has,” Phil added.

“He what?”

“Look, he panicked. He’s never failed an assignment in his life…”

“He hasn’t lived,” I retorted. But I understood. A bit. Marty was petrified of failure. Where he came from, it wasn’t acceptable to fail assignments. Besides, Chris wouldn't do anything...

When Marty made it home that evening, he seemed pale, almost pallid. The traitorous glares he was getting from the rest of us hardly helped.

“Chris would like to see you both in his office tomorrow morning,” he said softly.

“That’s nice,” I laughed. “I have lectures all morning. Sam will be at work tomorrow morning at his job at the newspaper. Your man Chris can go and get stuffed.”

Then Marty said something rather troublesome.

“Please?”

McCarthy, with the most to lose from a confrontation with Kretin (seeing as though he’d had the most to say about him), slammed his palm against the wall. “Jesus, Marty, what the fuck is the story? What has he got over you?”

I did my best Brando-as-Godfather: “He’s threatened the family…” I wheezed. It wasn’t very good, but it was passable. Recognisable, at least. Which was a step up from most of my impersonations (or ‘interpretations’ as Marty called them).

“More like he’s threatened Marty’s almighty fuckin’ academic record… heaven forbid. Fucking hell,” McCarthy spat, throwing the toys out of the pram and storming off. In hindsight, maybe he should have been more careful about slagging off people he hardly knew. On tape. Then again, I’d been keeping an eye out all week for Steve Bennett from Razorslash, just in case the talentless arseclown brought his largest acquaintances around to visit.

As it happened McCarthy was on campus next morning around mid-morning on a job, just as I had a break, so we wandered down to the union complex for a quick coffee. And who should we meet in the line for caffeinated goodness, but…

I don’t know how I knew it was him, having never met or seen him before - I just knew. Chris Kretin, local music identity, was shorter than I’d figured, even from the diminuative, primarily unflattering portrait Marty and the Duffer had painted of him; yes indeed, here was a chronic case of ‘small man syndrome’ if there ever was one. Worse still, Kretin’s hair was going, fast. To the point that he’d belatedly gone the Peter Garrett, even through the stubble of his vastly receded hairline self-evidently declared the choice hadn’t been his. He was dressed in his trademark open-necked shirt with overly large, triangular collars and an insufficient buttoning regime that ensured the only hair of which he still had plenty, sprouted alluringly from his gorilla-cleavage. Over this, despite it being high twenties ambient, he’d presented in his trademark square-shouldered, pastel-beige tailored jacket (think Miami Vice; he clearly did, often), too-tight Tarocash jeans complete with ostentatious belt buckle, and pointy-toed crocodile-skin cowboy boots. In short, the man looked a total arse.

He knew who we were, too, largely because I could see Marty looking through the windows from outside, our very own Pontius Pilate (or was it Judas? I could never remember.) Having dobbed us in to save his grade point average, only now did he actually seem to care what became of us. I waved to him. Normally, polite people wave with more fingers than that, but I was distracted. Our resident pianist (that’s pianist, kiddies) buggered off post-haste.

“Boys,” he said firmly, “a word. Outside.”

“You must be the famous Chris Kurtin,” I began cheerily, the pair of us following him out to the outdoor table settings. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

“If you must know,” he replied, “the nation’s libel laws.”

At this point I should run you through some of the delightful pet names that were in common usage for Christopher Nigel Kurtin. There were the ones he liked, preferred, attempted to propagate the use of. Like CK. A nickname like CK spoke of style, sophistication, coolness. It didn’t speak of a middle-aged try-hard tosser in a pastel jacket and a Mazda MX5. (Which had, unsurprisingly, personalised plates. Which read, unsurprisingly, SEEK ME.) There were the others, which we’ve discussed - the obvious but reliable standby, Chris Kretin; the scientists’ favourite, dwelling on our subject’s lack of hair and verging on too-clever, Chris Keratin; and of course, the exasperated declaim, Christ Kurtin. Then there was my favourite, which came about from Kretin’s much-discussed, almost mythical habit of pointing directly at people he was talking to and snapping his fingers to make his (usually argumentative) point. It was a pathetic piece of demonstrative, domineering, look-at-me body language which told the whole story about Chris Kurtin, should anyone want to hear it. And it earned him the rather clever nickname, The Point-And-Click Interface. I wish I’d thought of that.

“I’m waiting,” he began mercurially, “for my apology.”

“And I’m waiting for Led Zep to put a new album out,” I replied disarmingly. “Both got a bit of a wait on our hands hey?”

His eyes narrowed. “Son, you’re a big talker, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “You wanted a word… word us up.”

Kretin’s beady gaze darted from McCarthy to me and back again.

“I want to know,” he said, “who the hell you think you are.”

“You already know who we are,” I replied, “you’ve coerced our friend Martin into telling you, by threatening to tell his mother on him.”

He pointed. He clicked. “Watch it.”

I fought, hard, against giggling. An actual point-and-click! From the Interface himself!

“And as for you, son,” he turned to McCarthy, “I don’t know what your issue is, but you need to learn some damn respect…”

“And you need to learn to take a joke, Chris,” I retorted. “You and your offsider Steve Bennett. You’re one for big talking with your libel bullshit. It’s not libel - in any case it would be slander, as it was spoken, not printed - it’s a joke. It’s a fucking joke, Chris. You hassling my flatmates into telling us who we are is also a fucking joke. At least I hope the university sees it that way when we report you to the registrar. I don’t think they like it when their lecturers bully their students over their right to free expression…”

Kretin changed tack; I figured that made my last effort a point-scoring punch.“You can forget ever getting a gig in this town,” he said dismissively. “You know that, don’t you. You’re finished.”
Yes, he actually said we were finished in this town. It took a power of work not to burst into laughter.

I looked at him mildly. “That’s nice, Chris,” I replied, humouring him. “Given that we’ve never played any gigs outside our own garage, and never intend to play any gigs in the future, I don't really see why we should give a flying fuck.”

He looked vaguely thrown by that. “I do mean all of you,” he added. “Marty and Phil inclusive.”

“Marty and Phil are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves. I’m not their mum. If you’re petty enough to hold grudges against them over shit like this, you’re as big a tool as those pointy fuckin' boots make you look.”

“I’m not sitting around here for this bollocks,” McCarthy began, ending his brief silence. It’d lasted from the moment we’d met Kretin to the moment we’d sat down outside. It was some kind of record for McCarthy. “Catch you later. I’m off. Some of us have actual jobs to do, rather than swanning about pretending to be university lecturers.”

“Your boss at the Star is Mac McCormack, isn’t he?” Kretin posed. He was quite the poser. Kretin, that was, not John ‘Mac’ McCormack, then-editor of the Northern Star, who was relatively reasonable so far as old-school hard-core ranting editors went.

McCarthy’s rather sullen response read along the lines of What’s It To You, You Slaphead.

A smug grin permeated his features, with the glint of gold-capped teeth at the corners. “Oh, Mac and I go way back,” Kretin responded. “We were at uni together in Sydney.”

“And that’s supposed to mean what, exactly?” I inquired. Why was I doing all the talking? “That you’ll get old mate here fired, if he doesn’t lick your winklepickers? Go to buggery.”

“Angus,” McCarthy intervened, “I’d better get moving, I’m parked in a loading zone. Catch you later mate.” He scarpered, barely looking back. If I hadn’t known him so well, I’d have said he was rattled.

I turned back to Kretin. In that light, all he needed was a cat to stroke, and he’d have been a passable Blofeld. Probably been some considerable time since he’d been anywhere near pussy at all. He stood to leave, evidently pleased with his work.

“So exactly what the fuck is it you want?” I asked bluntly.

“Reparations,” he said evasively, and was gone.

“You guys do realise that any passably competent investigation by the uni will see him stuffed faster than a Christmas turkey,” I maintained, as I’d maintained for the entire weekend since our Friday morning coffee with Kretin.

“Can we stop talking about this?” McCarthy suggested. His editor wanted to see him in his office first thing Monday morning; regarding what, he didn’t know, and didn’t want to. Marty and Phil were still marked as failures on their major assessments, even though Marty had turned Kretin’s Evidence. I was pretty much the only one who’d come out of this little adventure unscathed - notwithstanding the fact that Jessica wasn’t talking to me this week because I’d said something derogatory about church-going Christians (me? never!), such as, um, her parents. And, um, grabbed some other girl on the arse at a party. Consensually, I’d add – she was a friend (read ‘regular flirting partner’) from education. Other than that, I hadn’t done nuffin’, Your Honour. In truth, right at that moment, we’d have been quite happy to have seen the back of the whole bloody Flange Gasket situation altogether.

The Law of Murphy being what it was, though, this meant that people kept coming up to us to slap us on the back for our success, such as it was. In increasing numbers, and increasingly people who we barely knew. 2NCR-FM were apparently playing tracks off Insert Title Here in inverse proportion to how much we actually wanted them played - not just on Bill and Ben’s show but on other student-oriented shows in daylight hours which normal people (or as close to it as SCU attracted) actually listened to. And Lismore being nothing more than a large-ish country town (like Brisbane, one could say), word got around pretty quickly that we were the guilty parties behind it all. We’d all taken to wandering around town staring at our shoes to avoid meeting anyone’s gaze in the street, in case they blundered over to make a big deal out of us. Marty didn’t even want to leave the house. He figured every additional person who knew it was us, put all of us one step closer to a date with Kretin’s goons. Presumably also involving a nearby ocean pier and concrete shoes. Speaking of which, I tried prevailing upon Marty to sic his family Mafia connections onto Kretin but he strangely failed to see the funny side of this.

Sunday night, 11.30pm. Marty and Phil were in conference over the dining room table, buried in last minute crammage for an exam next day (read ‘Marty was teaching Phil the entire course as he’d failed to absorb any of it in the handful of lectures he’d turned up for’.) I’d decided to stay up and watch the 500cc Grand Prix bikes with McCarthy and get behind our man Mick Doohan, though he was clearly preoccupied with his meeting with his boss next morning. That’s McCarthy who was preoccupied with meeting his boss; our Mick was concerned only with winning a fifth consecutive world title that year on his Repsol Honda.

By anyone’s reckoning 11.30pm on a Sunday is a bit late to expect visitors. Anyone who isn’t as rude as all fuck, of course. Thus were my thoughts on hauling my arse out of the couch to answer an insistent hammering at the door around that time. Sure enough, it was someone whose track record in being as rude as all fuck was never in question. Chris Kurtin seemed smugly surprised at my annoyance at the late hour of his calling.

“I’m flattered, Chris, really I am. But this is getting to be stalking, and my girlfriend will get jealous.”

He brushed past me, asking after the fact if I minded him coming in, and tossed a CD onto the kitchen table.

“No thanks,” I said, “we’ve got shitloads of those already out the back, we’re trying to get rid of the fuckers.”

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already,” he began imperiously, pointing at Marty and the Duffer, “when I say that this is not good enough. The production is amateur and rough. The levels are nowhere, the mixing is appalling…”

“All of which was intentional,” the Duffer tried to retort, “as this is supposed to be a live recording...”

But Kretin was insistent in his slagging. Quite why he needed to do this in person at twenty-five to midnight on a Sunday night was beyond us. Possibly because he was very obviously higher than a GPS satellite on imported powdered goods and therefore this appeared a logical course of action to him.

The animated discussion of views between the Duffer and Kretin was ascending into a shouting match, given Kretin’s altered state of reality and the Duffer’s congenital inability to concede a point in an argument. I couldn’t hear Barry Sheene’s commentary over the din. I liked Barry Sheene’s commentary. ‘E woz the marster of goin’ farster, know wot I mean?

“Oy,” I interceded, planting a cold beer onto the bench near Kretin’s hand. (Well manicured, cigarette stained, and creepily small, since you asked.) “If you’re not going to fuck off, then sit down, drink that and state your fucking case.”

“Barros has dropped it,” reported McCarthy from the couch. “Front end.”

“First lap?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck, he’s useless. He’s less use than a busted arse,” I maintained. And would continue to be such through to his retirement from MotoGP several years later, despite riding a string of factory Hondas and Yamahas over that time. I am the Nostradamus of MotoGP. Who says you need to know more than two fifths of fuck all about something to make accurate pronouncements about it.

Kretin sipped his beer, but didn’t sit - instead he struck a pose, rocked back on one leg, one hand on his hip like a male model, or at least a teapot. He pointed, this time at noone in particular. Possibly at the marshals trying to exhume Alex Barros’ Honda NSR500 from the turn three gravel trap at Jerez de la Frontera Circuit, in the sherry country of southern Spain. (I have bothered to do some research for this, just not consistently across the board.)

“Marty, Phil, I’m disappointed. I thought you guys were better than this. I had high hopes. You can say it was what you were trying to do - who cares, that’s table stakes. Noone will ever sell records sounding like they were recorded on broken equipment.”

“Apart from the Sex Pistols,” I suggested.

“And the Stooges,” added McCarthy. “And the MC5…”

“How about early Motorhead,” offered the Duffer, “…the Ramones… Bob Dylan… and every live album ever that’s worth listening to…”

“Led Zeppelin live at the BBC,” Marty piped up.

“The Jimi Hendrix Experience live at the BBC,” replied the Duffer.

“The Jimi Hendrix Experience full stop,” McCarthy said. “Even the digitally remastered version of Are You Experienced has more tape hiss, snap, crackle and pop than a bowl of Rice Bubbles.”
Sensing this was really starting to wind Kretin up, I noted, “Even early Birdman and Saints sounded like they were recorded in a wheat thresher.”

To which the Duffer added, “Hey, I’ve heard Sabbath albums that sounded like they were recorded under three feet of water.”

“More likely three feet of snow,” McCarthy quipped, “given the volume of powder that lot were displacing by the mid 70s… Christ, Mick’s gapping Criville and Biaggi at a rate of knots, lead’s already out to three and a bit seconds.” Mick Doohan was indeed disappearing in the direction of Away with respect to the other Honda guys.

Kretin snapped his fingers not once, not twice, but thrice (!) to return the spotlight to himself. “Hey - I’m talking here,” he snapped. (It was a continuing theme.) “You are not Sabbath, nor are you Hendrix, or Zeppelin, or anything other than a hack covers band with some very radio unfriendly originals. For the Lord’s sake, how many gigs have you played?”

“None,” I noted.

“None?”

“One,” McCarthy corrected. “Including the recording session.”

Kretin, smugly expecting a low number suitable for derision, clearly wasn’t expecting quite THAT low a number. “You’re telling me you’ve never performed outside these premises?”

We had already told him, if he’d bothered to listen. Rather than remind him again, I looked at McCarthy, tried not to grin, and said, “We’re primarily interested in seeing where the creative process takes us, without limiting ourselves by having to focus on generating a commercial reality from the project, with gigs and so forth...”

To which McCarthy shot me a dirty look from the couch and mouthed, “You fucker.”

“Whose songs are they?” Kretin wanted to know.

“His.” We all pointed at each other. HE'S Spartacus!

“Well, ours, obviously,” clarified the Duffer. “We couldn’t have used them otherwise, could we? It was in the rules you set down for the assignment.” He might have added, “You cunt,” but was too well brought up for that.

“So you wrote them? These songs are genuinely your own?”

“To the extent that they’re genuinely not yours, yes. After all, wasn’t that the point behind the whole enterprise?” McCarthy challenged, leaning over the back of the couch. “For you to cherry-pick the best of the local talent for your own business purposes?”

“We have a card-carrying cynic amongst us, gentlemen,” Kretin smoothed the waters.

“Uh, which one of us would that be?” the Duffer inquired. “We all reached the same conclusion long ago.”

“Which is why,” McCarthy continued, rather ballsily in my estimation, “there’s no way we’d have ever used our best material on a recording like this.” He snapped his fingers, and pointed at Kretin. “So we didn’t.”

“You’re telling me you have better material than this?”

“Of course we do. You think we're fucking stupid?”

“I’d be interested in hearing it,” Kretin replied breezily.

“I’m sure you would,” replied McCarthy, just as breezily, and turned back to the bike race.

“Son, I’m serious,” Kretin maintained. “The point I was getting to, if you’d have allowed me, is that while the production on this recording is substandard…”

“As was the equipment and the timeframe allowed to do the recording,” jibed the Duffer.

“…the actual songwriting and performance is, to use a technical term, shit-hot.” Kretin let this hang in the air for a moment. “It’s crisp, it’s vibrant, and it’s got balls. As must you lot, I can see that. You don’t insult Chris Kurtin to his face like you did without massive cojones, not in this town.”

I bit my tongue. Anything not to giggle. Oh Christ, it hurts…

Kretin continued, pointing at the couch. “And if Mr Motocross here isn’t completely full of shit, and you DO have better stuff in your bottom drawer… Let’s just say if you do decide to keep it to yourself, you’ve just guaranteed yourselves a lifetime in obscurity, in a shitty little country town, working shitty little country town jobs, and screwing shitty little country town chicks. But if you decide that you have the collective balls to allow your material to see the light of day…” He set his now-empty bottle down on the kitchen bench and rose to leave. “You know where to find me.”

“Yeah,” McCarthy chided as Kretin strode pompously to the door. “Hanging around the kiddies’ wading pool at Ballina Waterslide.”

The Point and Click Interface didn’t even dignify that with a point or a click, which I found personally disappointing. We heard only the slam of the front door, the clip-clop of his pointy little cowboy boots on the driveway, and the asthmatic whine of his Mazda MX5 as he attempted to cane it furiously back up the hillside towards Ballina Road.

“Sam, what the hell are you talking about, we don’t have any ‘better material’,” Marty pointed out. “We don’t have any material full stop.”

“Just stirring,” McCarthy grinned. “Rattling his cage a bit, seeing what falls out. Hey, our Mick’s just set another fastest lap...”