I know everything about everything

I know everything from history
I don't need to watch the news
I find it easy with my vast intelligence
No one tells me anything new
I often wonder why no one talks to me
They must be threatened by my charm and grace
I know everything about everything
I'm especially witty when I'm off my face
- Frenzal Rhomb, 1997

I had good reason to reflect on McCarthy’s motivations a few weeks after our commercial radio debut (which sounds grander than it was), having found myself in front of a technicolour rack of second-hand electric guitars in the cramped but cheerful quarters of River City Rock Centre, Spring Hill, Brisneyland. In my years in Brisbane I’d occasionally shopped at the ‘RC’ (or the ‘Arsey’, as we called it) for minor bits and pieces of gear, like replacement strings, pickups and stuff, when I was still trying to prolong the existence of the ancient and clapped-out Stratodoppelganger I’d inherited from Matt. I’d also picked up a cheap acoustic there to tool around on, after I blew up my crappy little amp (which was broken more often than it worked throughout my uni years) for the sixth and final time while procrastinating over exam study towards the end of third year.

However, this was the first time I’d stood in front of that mouthwatering array of glossy, pointy, expensive-looking shapes with enough cashola burning a hole in my pocket to consider making an actual purchase.

Gonna wander off on a tangent and talk about my financial arrangements, if that’s OK with you. In my time in Brisbane throughout the back end of the ‘90s I was a student, and was, not surprisingly, reasonably busted-arse broke. I lived in dodgy sharehouses, never bought anything in a tin that wasn’t labelled Savings or Home Brand, and drank the cheapest beer which myself and my assorted degenerate flatmates - including Dr Cletus who was an edumacated man and shoulda known better - could afford or be arsed to chip in for. (Tasman Bitter, since you asked. It was the ‘Home Brand’ beer of Liquorland, granted, but at least it was brewed by Boag’s in Launceston and didn’t taste predominantly of arse, unlike, say, Reschs Real or Tooheys Red.) At the time I was on Austudy, which given that my family owned a large property asset (namely a farm) would have amounted to two-fifths of fuck-all, had I not been able to claim independence from them. (At least until Little Fuckin’ Johnny got into power midway through my undergrad degree and changed the independence cut-off to 25 years of age, instead of 21. Fuckin’ dwarf.) In any case, even at its maximum level, Austudy was barely enough to feed a dog - it was just as well they were all back on the farm and got fed by the old man - so I had a couple of part-time jobs over the years, as well as working for the old man over the holidays. I worked in a hardware store in Toowong in second year, which was a pretty cool job in a casual shit-kicking sort of way. It was kinda fun being that guy in the hardware store who everyone goes to for advice - you know the guy, the one who knows what gauge of this and how many mil of that will do the job. Obviously, most of the time I was just making shit up off the top of my head, but you get that on the big jobs.

The best job I ever had though was thanks to a guy called Mick Martin, who I’d worked with at the hardware store in second year. Like Dr Cletus, I’d met Mick at college - Mick dropped out of uni after first year, not that he was ever really at uni enough to say he had a first year. Mick was a funny bastard, an absolute madman, and a lunatic on a motorbike as well. Mick’s uncle was the proprietor of Mount Road Motorcycles, a new Yamaha dealership which opened on Waterworks Road in Ashgrove in early ’96 (my third year) and Mick managed to score both of us start-up jobs there. Ashgrove, a leafy and affluent suburb about eight or nine kays to the north of St Lucia would have seemed an odd place for a motorbike shop, had it not been parked pretty much smack-bang on the junction of Waterworks Road (which further on became the sinuous Mount Glorious Road, an legendary haven for bikers) and Enoggera Road (which led to the Samford Valley, another brilliant series of twisties which linked up with the Mount Glorious Road up near Mount Nebo an hour’s ride away.) Mount Road Motorcycles became almost like a pit-stop en route for bikers heading up into the hills for a morning’s scratch up the Mount, particularly on weekends, or coming back to share anecdotes, trade war stories, or order replacement tyres/brake pads/fairings/entire motorcycles. Mick’s uncle, fairly cleverly I reckoned, had anticipated this would be the case and had set up an informal coffee shop in the front part of the dealership to enable it to happen. He’d even invested in a proper full-café-spec Saeco coffee machine, which I used to demonstrate my barista skills on - I’d worked in a few cafés, made the odd coffee and pulled the odd beer at a few bars in my time. It turned out to be a bloody good idea and quickly won his new business a lot of custom, or at least a lot of gnarled streetbiker types drinking his coffee and talking bullshit on his couch. In fact the margins on the café produce were better than the margins on some of the bike parts!

The rest of the week, Mick and I worked in the sales or the spare parts departments, which basically involved sitting around talking about bikes all day with each other and/or the occasional bloke who wandered into the shop. Given the slow rate of business across the week, other than on ‘scratching’ mornings, I wasn’t really sure how the venture made any money, but Mick’s uncle was an enthusiast first and businessman second. Anyway they must have been doing something right, because last I checked Mount Road MCs is still open for business to this day on the junction of Enoggera and Waterworks. Should also say that the other great thing about working at Mount Road in Ashgrove was that the bakery a block or two away (the Golden King, I think it was) did by far the best pies in Brisbane, and their chicken and salad rolls were also fuckin’ tops. And the Vietnamese owner’s daughter, who served behind the counter and remembered my name, was an absolute slammin’ hottie. More often than not, lunch break at Mount Road involved the following: (1) flirting with the owner’s daughter, (2) a quick lunchtime scratch over the nearby Mt Coot-tha scenic drive past the TV stations, and (3) a pie and sauce in one of the picnic areas up there.

Mick and his uncle, and the atmosphere surrounding Mount Road and the tribe of Saturday regulars, persuaded me to get properly into riding on the road - up to then I’d mainly ridden dirtbikes and chook chasers - and after not too long, Mick and I could also be found in the coffee shop at Mount Road on the days we weren’t rostered on or when uni wasn’t calling me, caffeine-loading in preparation for an ascent of the south-east face of Mount Glorious. We made an odd pair. Mick was a jockey-sized bloke with a thing for big, thundering Italian V-twins - he had an old Moto Guzzi 750 café racer which he used to tear-arse up the hill with - whereas six-foot Angus here preferred hanging off lithe, nimble little things that handled spectacularly... and liked his motorbikes the same way. (Sorry. Bit obvious, yeah?) Like the faintly terrifying Suzuki RG250 race-replica which I’d picked up from Mount Road’s pre-loved collection for cheap. It’d been dropped a few times by the previous owner(s), not surprising as the throttle was so on-off it may as well have have a Clipsal part number on it, but hadn't been bingled so badly that the frame was bent or cracked, according to our on-site experts. Out on the road with the RG250, I couldn’t live with Mick on the straight bits, but could gather him back up on braking and corner entry without too much mortal risk. Unless he’d overdosed on the brave pills and was really giving it a handful, of course. No way was I ever as insano as he was. When he was really pressing on, you could almost see the frame of the old Guzzi flexing as he wrangled it through the twisties - he and the front-end would be banked over into the turn, but the back end would still be upright trying to catch up.

Mick, as I’ve said, was a madman on or off a bike. I say was, for the same reason that past tense is almost always used in regard to guys who ride flat-out on public roads. Today, Mick’s five-seven frame contains more steel scaffolding than your average city construction site. His left leg is now a full inch shorter than his right, and as a result he walks like he has a prize-winning carrot wedged somewhere indelicate. That all of the above was not the result of flinging the Guzzi into the trees at warp speed on the Mount Glorious Road, but of being cleaned up at sixty by a hat-wearing Volvo driver on Swann Road, Taringa - who pulled out of a side-street directly onto the piece of tarmac that Mick occupied at the time, and punted him into an adjoining suburb (Indooroopilly, as it happened) - is one of those little ironies which make life just that bit more exciting. He was lucky, and he knows it. Quite a few other Mount Road regulars weren’t as fortunate, ending up in wheelchairs, or under several cubic feet of dirt.

Mick’s crash in late ‘96 pretty much ended my interest in riding ludicrously fast on public rights-of-way. Fast was OK; ludicrously fast was borrowing time from a loan shark. I figured I’d be wise to quit while I still had my looks, brains, motor skills and teeth. It also meant the end of my employment at Mount Road, as it was a bit demoralising trying to sell motorcycles and accessories for the enjoyment thereof alongside a dude encased in plaster and fibreglass, whose physical condition was a bloody good advertisement for pitching your helmet and leathers in the nearest skip and taking the bus to work. In any case, I was about to start my year-long honours project at the CMCB and figured I needed to focus on that, so I brewed my last Saturday morning coffee and said my farewells to Uncle Doug and the Mount Road regulars.

To supplement my pitiful income through fourth year I took Dr Cletus’ advice and worked as a lab demonstrator for undergrad biochemistry and genetics subjects, which provided me with a little pocket money, as well as the phone numbers of several pretty tidy second and third years. Dr Cletus, uncharacteristically I thought, didn’t seem to approve of that sort of thing. He got up on his high horse and called it ‘bordering on academic misconduct’, largely because he didn’t have the trouser to try and pull it off himself. My argument was that the girls who found me attractive were, more often than not, the ones who needed the most intensive tutoring. (I’m not saying you necessarily had to be thick to be attracted to me, but the stats did point that way.) When you thought about it, with the intensive one-to-one interaction I was offering, I was giving the department better value-for-money than any other demonstrator out there. At least that’s how I argued it to the course convenors.

Now that I was back in Lismore, I’d thrown in all the part-time work to ‘concentrate’ on my education course - reason being that the better the mark I scored, the more likely I was to get sent someplace nice for my first placement as a teacher, and the less likely I’d end up somewhere busted-arse like Mount Druitt or Brewarrina. Also, now that I was only living about half-an-hour away from Broadwater, I was able to head back to the farm fairly regularly on weekends and holidays, and as the old man had plenty for me to do around the place now that the Jeff had flown the coop, that basically became my cash-in-hand casual job.

The Jeff, by now, had headed off to uni himself - he was also nominally a UQ student, but being the practical sort, he’d enrolled in an agricultural science degree at the old Queensland Agricultural College out at Gatton, between Ipswich and Toowoomba (in the Yee-Haa Heartland.) The Jeff decided pretty much off his own bat that he should go away and ‘study up’ to get some more background knowledge for a career in farming; quite reasonably, he figured that out of the remaining pair of brothers Young, he was probably the most likely to run the family farm after the old man eventually chucked it in down the track. He was quite contented and pragmatic about it, and the whole family were all pretty impressed with his focus and dedication, me included. There’s no fucking way I’d want to spend three years in Gatton, for Christ’s sake.

Anyway, in his absence, I became the old man’s offsider for his larger projects, usually in the uni holidays, and usually involving fixing things, demolishing things, rebuilding things slightly to the left of where they were, and demolishing things again, as well as planting things and harvesting things, of course. I was still as skint as I’d always been, but at least my rent was lower at Chateau Dodgy than it’d been in St Lucia, I had more spare time during the week, and I was cut, baby. And I don’t mean Jewish styles.

So now I’d reached a crossroads. Standing in front of all those lovely, shiny-new (or near-new) axes, all sharp and pointy, I had to make a decision, pressured by my financial situation. McCarthy’s elaborate stunt had scored a whole lot of airplay, and a whole lot more attention, for a band which only existed for the purpose of an assessment task for a third-year SCU audio engineering subject. Which, last we’d heard, had either been failed or given a D-minus. Now, we were slowly coming around to the idea that Flange Gasket could be a bit more than that - cajoled by McCarthy, rapidly getting numbed by the tedium of a workaday job in a regional town (after the manic intensity of his former life amongst the Drama Queens in Sydney), and trying to recapture that live-performance buzz which he’d enjoyed so much; and by Chris Kurtin, who in Flange Gasket’s ‘better material’ (entirely theoretical of course) seemed to be seeing a very big pile of large-denomination currency, wrapped in a pretty ribbon, with a card saying ‘For Chris, love from The Universe’. Already, even seemingly by accident, we’d had more radio play than anyone Kretin had managed for years - even the much-vaunted Razorslash, although that was understandable to the extent that all their songs had titles like ‘Buried Alive Bitch’, ‘Mutant Foetus’, ‘Haemmorrage Against The Machine’ (nice), and ‘Die Screaming With Sharp Pointy Implements Sticking Through Your Head’. The last one they didn’t actually write, but I kinda wish they had.

So were we going to take Flange Gasket seriously? Write songs, play gigs, devote time, energy and effort to the cause? We felt we had a pretty good idea what was involved - we weren’t going into this with any romanticised images of being in a band. Through Marty and Phil’s muso connections, we knew a lot of people in bands, and Phil had even played in a few, usually filling in for some drummer who’d lost the plot or couldn’t make the gig because someone had put him in a round room and told him to sit in the corner or something. Actually, judging from all the jokes, I figured all the missing drummers were out there somewhere trying to change a lightbulb.

In any case, we knew about the endless shit-list, the ugly side of the deal. Rehearsing. Lugging in. Lugging out. Broken strings and busted gear, held together with gaff and goodwill. Pissed punters bellowing for Khe Sanh from song one, or trying to deck you in the carpark afterwards ‘cos you looked at their chick ay. Dodgy venues, dodgy venue owners, even dodgier promoters. Smoke-choked rooms from nearby TAB facilities, or just from your own gear spontaneously combusting. Trying to play loud enough to hear yourself over the din of the pokies, and getting abused by management because of it. Playing Blister In The Fuckin’ Sun, again, and again, just like last night, and the twenty gigs before. Driving home from some shit venue like the Plantation Hotel in Coffs crammed in the stinking Tarago, bitching, moaning and sick to the back teeth of each other, getting home at 3am and having to get up for work at 7. Or, worst of all it seemed to me, going through all that, just to play to an empty room, or barely quarter-full of disinterested punters who couldn’t give a shit.

It’s fair to say that we had no illusions about what we could be getting ourselves into. By ‘we’, obviously, I mean those of us who weren’t Sam McCarthy. On the other side of the coin, though, there was a very simple argument in favour: it might be fun. Demoralising, exhausting and expensive, but fun.

If we decided to go ahead with this - if - I stood to incur more expense than most. I lacked the Tools of Trade. Phil already had his snazzy purple-swirl Pearl drumkit (unaccountably, purple was his favourite colour); Marty his cool Roland DX7 MIDI keyboard; Uncle Sam his Epiphone axe and genuine ‘Arshol’ amp. I lacked the necessary tools of trade. I also lacked the necessary fun tickets to remedy this situation, so for me, the decision as to whether to take this seriously was financially very critical. It was time to take a long, hard look at my most valued possessions, to see which I could potentially do without.

• One 1989 Nissan Skyline wagon, red, with a hundred and fifty thousand on the clock. Pros: Cruises well. Might be useful for carrying shit, particularly to and from gigs. Cons: Looks vaguely like a postie van.

• One Suzuki RG250 of similar vintage, currently unregistered, on which I’d spent several weekends scaring myself witless on the Mount Glorious Road in a previous life.

• One ex-Jonny Marsh 5’10” thruster (that’s a surfboard kids), barely dinged, bought for cheap because I knew his brother from the SCU education course. Jonny Marsh was a Lennox local who’d turned pro and scored a contract with Billabong, which explained their stickers all over the board. His credibility also explained the inscription from the shaper: For Marshy - Cut sick bro!!!

I guess I’d basically swapped surfing for bikes while in Brisbane, as the twisties were closer to home than the barrels. I’d bought the board shortly after moving back to the Northern Rivers, with the thought that McCarthy and I were somehow going to find time to head out to Lennox or back home to Chinamans at Evans and peel off a few. Like me, though, he’d pretty much let his surfing slide while in Sydney - largely because his nearest decent surf beach was Maroubra, home of the fearsome Bra Boys, not a group to take kindly to pasty yokels from the North Coast dropping in on them. As a result, neither of us seemed to be getting out amongst it much, even though we were back in friendlier waters.

So I kept the postie van, sold the bike to some teenaged lunatic in Kyogle (I hope he survived it, and not the other way around), sold the board to some Japanese surf-tourist in Byron who paid hundreds more than he should have, then headed up to the ‘Arsey’ in Brisvegas and invested in a second-hand Ibanez axe in a delightful shade of iridescent orange.

“Ibanez? Cool, Satriani plays Ibanez,” McCarthy enthused over the phone. “Not a Satriani signature model is it? Or a Steve Vai one?”

“Nah, it’s a RT-something. 280 or 350 or some other random three-digit figure. Mid-Eighties, I think. It’s the one with the trapezoidal headstock, and the three pickups, and the pointy bits, and stuff… Mate, you know me, I know as much about guitars as I do the molecular genetics of developmental stuff.”

“Wasn’t that your honours topic?”

“Less said about that the better, yeah.”

I could hear McCarthy tut-tutting to himself down the end of the line. McCarthy made it his business to know everything about everything, every nerdy detail and specification. He knew everything about guitars and amps, every brand and model, every accessory and feature. Just like he knew every Grand Prix World Champion since 1950, pretty much every Premier League footballer and what clubs they played for, could recognise any car on the highway from a fleeting glance at the left-rear taillight assembly, or recite entire Monty Python TV scripts off the top of his head. He had an astonishing memory for detail, and an equally astonishing obsession with filling it to capacity with useless trainspotting drivel, or so it often seemed to me. About the only field of interest I could compete on was motorbikes, given my retail background.

In fact, it was almost out of sheer bloody-mindedness that I’d planned my axe-purchasing trip up to Brisbane at a time when I knew he couldn’t join me - he’d pre-booked a weekend away with Andrea, climbing Mount Warning or something equally healthy-sounding (her idea). They got rained out and stayed home anyway, as it happened. I’d probably have purchased more wisely with McCarthy on board, but likewise, my complete and utter ignorance of what seemed the mere basics of guitar and amp specs would have been highlighted in fluorescent marker pen.

“So what sort of nick is it in? What’s it sound like?”

A guitar, I felt like saying. “Sounds real good. It’s got a lovely timbre in its higher cadences.”

“Higher cadences?” McCarthy laughed. “Bullshit Angus, you don’t give a fuck so long as it sounds like the real Angus, and don’t try to pretend otherwise!”

He was right. First thing I’d tried out in the shop when I was demoing it was Jailbreak. Followed by Jailbait. You know the one… ‘You’re jail-bait… and I just can’t wait… Jailbait baby, go down…’ A modern classic, off Motorhead’s epic Ace of Spades album. And a fearsome Fast Eddie Clarke riff to go over the top of Lemmy’s swaggering bassline. I had the Duffer to thank for putting me onto Motorhead; he in turn probably got the idea from the Metallica Garage Inc. compilation which had a bunch of Motorhead covers on the second CD.

And truth be told, it did sound awesome, but then again, so did most of the guitars I tried out in the shop; I didn’t have the critical ear (or the subtlety of technique) to distinguish one from the other, and nor did I need to, given the stuff I wanted to play. Don’t buy a Ferrari if you’re only going to drive it like a V8 Kingswood ute (i.e. sideways, with four bags of cement in the back and some bogan mate hanging their arse out the window).

To be honest, I’d only heard of Ibanez because I remembered watching Countdown or Rock Arena or something as a kid, recalling that Paul Stanley from Kiss (or ‘those makeup-wearing poofters’ as older brother Matt called them) used to play Ibanez guitars, and then smash them up into bits afterwards, largely because he could. Basically I bought the Ibanez for two reasons: one, it was cheaper than the red Fender Strat (the genuine article) I was comparing it to, and two, it looked fuck-off cool. Particularly in the gleaming metal-flake tangerine the one I liked was finished in, just like my late lamented Torana. Yes, I bought the thing because I liked the colour. I AM a woman. In fact I had an irrational hankering to slap a ‘Holley Equipped’ sticker on it and christen it the Atomic Mandarin II.

By the same logic I bought a beer fridge-sized Orange (brand) amplifier. I told McCarthy it was because I’d heard good reports on their performance, but it was mainly for the colour. In hindsight I probably looked like I was playing for the Dutch national team at the Eurovision song contest. Oranje iss cool, yesh?

“Happy with it?” McCarthy wanted to know once I’d got it home.

I grinned.

“Gissa go?”

“Bugger off,” I replied.

“Fair enough,” said McCarthy, and went back to tuning his Les Paul. He figured if he tuned it again, then maybe a decent riff would magically come out. Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, he was holding an Epiphone, not an Enigma machine.

“Any ideas?” I mused hopefully.

“Nup.”

I thought for a moment, strumming a few power chords aimlessly. Then ripped into something. Shit, that sounds cool!

“What’s that?”

“Um,” I realised, “Bomber by Motorhead.”

“Still, it’s cool… Hey, why are we trying to reinvent the wheel here? Can’t we just go through the archives and dig out our old shit?”

“We could,” I replied, “if it wasn’t literally that - shit.”

McCarthy shrugged, in acceptance. I felt like an idiot. I’d spent all this money on a guitar and couldn’t think of anything to play. We had a couple of our own songs and could probably crank out a bunch of someone else’s, if it came to it. All well and good, but if we went down that path, we were going to end up being just another shit-ordinary, standard-issue pub covers band. Reading my mind, McCarthy swore, “I’m not in this just to be part of another shit-ordinary, standard-issue fuckin’ pub covers band. There will be no Khe Sahn on my fuckin’ watch.”

“Or Blister in the Sun,” I suggested. “Or Brown Eyed Girl…”

“How about the Proclaimers, 500 Miles… Throw Your Fuckin’ Arms Around Me… anything by Matchbox 20… fuck, there’s a lot of shit out there,” McCarthy remarked. We’d seen a lot of shit-ordinary, standard issue pub covers bands in our time.

“So what are we gonna play?”

“Interesting covers,” McCarthy contended. “Obscure shit, or at least as obscure as we can get away with. Stuff which might be mistaken for originals, maybe.”

“Yeah…” It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard. “And more mainstream stuff, but only if we’ve fucked with it a bit. Given it the Gasket signature.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, the shit we carry on with when we’re tooling about down here. Remember when we were messing about with that Dandy Warhols’ track Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth, and you came up with the half-arsed idea of singing the chorus of Enter Sandman over the ‘Heroin is soooo passé’ bit?” I started strumming through the chords to Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth, or as near to it as I could come up with, and started singing in a chirpy Courtney Taylor-Taylor warble, “Ex-it light… en-ter night… take my hand... we’re off to never never land…”

“Fuck, that actually works… lemme try that. You play the Dandy Warhols bit, I’ll transpose the Metallica riff over the top.”

“You don’t remember doing this?”

“Don’t think so…”

“You must have been pissed as forty bastards, it was only last fuckin’ week.”

We had a bash through it, me doing the Dandy Warhols guitar and vocal, Uncle Sam the Metallica-derived parts. In a wonderfully stupid kind of way, it worked. It couldn’t fail to put a grin on someone’s face, surely.

By the time Marty and Phil made it home half an hour later, we’d scrawled together a list of suggested covers which would be fun to play, based on previous beer-fuelled reconstructions. We figured the boys would be most impressed.

They weren’t. Not really. Not even after we’d demoed some of our suggestions. Actually, make that particularly not after we’d demoed some of our suggestions.

“Git the Led Out, okay, that’s fair enough…” considered Phil. “But Hot Potato?”

“...By the Wiggles, yeah. We can do it like the Living End, rockabilly-style, it’ll sound great.” Sam attempted to prove his case by playing Hot Potato like Chris Cheney on go-fast. It sounded… interesting.

“Do we have to do the Slim Dusty one again?” Marty asked.

“Hey, these are only suggestions,” I pointed out. We ran through the idea of playing Last Junkie On Earth which would become Enter Sandman at the end; similarly we figured you could turn the Presidents’ Peaches into Thunderstruck by the same method. Some of these songs were so close to each other, we claimed, they cross-pollinated seamlessly.

The Duffer and Marty indulged us for a few more minutes. Then the Duffer slung a tardily handwritten sheet of A4 onto the pool table. The spidery handwriting, reminicent of a serial killer’s, was that of one Christopher Nigel Kurtin.

“That’s our setlist,” he said. “It would seem.”

“Oh fuck off,” I declared. “First he waves that bullshit contract under our noses, now he’s dictating what songs we’re playing as well?”

“Tell him,” directed McCarthy, “to stick it up his arse.”

“Tell him yourself,” suggested the Duffer. “He’s upstairs.”