Drugs

Drugs
And money.
But there's nothing
I'm gonna do about it.
You're right
I'm crazy.
But there's nothing
I'm gonna do about it.
- Ammonia, 1995

The Jeff appeared at the doorway of my room (actually, I think it was Mike the geologist’s room; McCarthy had Jase the med intern’s room and Jeff, being the hired help, got the couch) at first light next morning. He looked vaguely uncomfortable, shifting about. I was sure the stench couldn’t be that bad, and said so.

“No, it’s not that… though you are a stinky fucking bastard,” he said, refusing to pass up the opportunity for a sledge. “Look, it’s like this… I’d be keen to go and check out the spot where Matt crashed. But I don’t know where it happened… and I was hoping you did.”

We didn’t talk about Matt much. Didn’t need to, really. He’d been gone for four or five years now. And besides, we were rural Australian males, we didn’t discuss our feelings. What feelings were there were pretty bloody obvious and didn’t need to be raked over to any great degree: he was our brother, he was dead, we missed him. The end.

“Look, I don’t really know myself… I know it was on the old Pacific Highway, north of Hornsby, but that’s about it…”

“More than I’ve got,” he countered. “And I figured since we’re headed up that way… I mean Castle Hill’s not too far from there, isn’t it? Can head up before the show, Beck reckons she can borrow her Mum’s car…”

I’d figured Beck was involved in this somewhere. I wondered how much he’d told her about it. Probably everything, knowing how she was able to draw confessions from people, and he’d probably never talked about it before with anyone else, so the weight of wanting to tell the story would've been immense. If I sounded unhelpful, I wasn’t trying to be, but I didn’t really want to spend the day winding up and down the old road between Berowra and Brooklyn, down by the Hawkesbury. Problem was, I knew more than I was saying, and the Jeff knew it. Even if I couldn’t pinpoint where his accident happened, I had my theories on why it happened. And it didn’t necessarily correlate with the single explanatory paragraph which had been published in the Northern Star, either.

Super Dave dropped the three of us at Bondi station on his way to work at Mascot; it wasn’t really on his way, but he didn’t mind the detour. We took the train to Town Hall, changed for Pymble, then walked the short distance up the hill to Beck’s parents. Some sweet-talking on Beck’s part secured our wheels; she drove tentatively along the midday Pacific Highway traffic through Turramurra, Waitara and Hornsby as I reluctantly revisited what I knew, or believed to be true, about the last days of Matthew Robert Young.

After Matt died, the old man went down to Sydney to recover his personal effects. He headed down in the old Subaru wagon (we were a bit of a Subaru family - the old man, quite the innovator among the local farming community, got into them in the late ‘70s for their 4WD robustness, light weight and reliable engineering, and bought a series of them over the years). He ended up packing the old wagon to the gunwales and towing a box trailer back as well, full of his ‘effects’. Mum didn’t want to go near any of it - too soon - and Jeff was too young to have to deal with that shit, so Dad and I ended up going through it all, trying to sort it out. Figured it was the only useful thing to do.

We found a lot of things Matt had probably never intended to see our eyes. His diary, for one thing. Seems a bit gay for a twenty-year old male to keep a diary, you might think. Well I fuckin' did anyway. Went with the hairdo and the outfits maybe. Then curiosity won out, and I opened the book marked 1993 - unfinished, of course. There wasn’t any ‘Dear diary. Those horrible boys were cruel to me again today…’ in here, more along the lines of a running commentary on his life, almost what you’d now call a blog but in old-school analogue form - a diatribe against politicians, public or sporting figures he didn’t like, salutes to the heroically idiotic things his heroically idiotic mates did or said, the finer attributes of girls he was chasing, and as time went on, an account of his pursuit, and eventual ‘capture’, of a girl called Zoe.

Zoe was in his film course at the CoFA (College of Fine Arts, or Fine Arse as he termed it – no clues for guessing where McCarthy got the idea of calling his journo course the Bachelor of Arse) in Paddington. Now, I’ve spoken before about inner-city life being a little intense, and inner-city girls being likewise; might have given the impression as well that people associated with the dramatic or performing arts are unpredictable, flighty, psychologically unbalanced, manipulative, untrustworthy, and not to be approached with any inclination towards entering into a relationship. Zoe was the prototype, the industry standard, and Exhibit A for the prosecution on that one. He’d included a Polaroid of the pair of them at some art-school party - with a name like Zoe, you’d think maybe Greek, maybe German, but from the photo, you’d say south-east Asia had something to do with her origins as well. She was stunningly attractive, and looked like she knew it very well. The photo showed Zoe perched coquettishly on his knee, pouting for the camera in that sultry, blatantly sexual way that Angelina Jolie has made a career out of. That look that says to its infatuated male viewer: Beware. I am a crazy slut who will fuck with your head. I will drain you and leave you a shattered husk, broken and begging for more. Then again, maybe I just have unresolved Angelina Jolie issues because she’s a damn freak.

What was clear, even from some of the more cryptic or oblique references in the text, was that he was absolutely fucking goneski, arse over tip in love with her. Which she responded to by playing him like a yo-yo - reeling him in, toying with him, then spinning him out again. The phraseology is emotional, because he was an emotional guy, much more so than either Jeff or myself. When Zoe drew him in - the mental image I inevitably get is of a black widow spider seducing her mate - he would write in raptures about her, about the way she made him feel, about the intensity of the spiritual, emotional and physical relationship between them. When she chucked him aside and fucked some else, the prose would run black with self-loathing; he believed it was his own lack of worth which pushed her away, and no doubt she reinforced that. It was only when I read his journal that I realised how close Matt sailed to the black winds of depression. If he wasn’t clinically depressed, he was certainly borderline. Didn’t help of course that he began self-medicating.

Drugs started appearing in Matt’s story around the same time as Zoe did. He despaired because ‘she only says she loves me when she’s high’, so he figured on joining her, to get on her wavelength. Began with the Duffer’s herb of choice, Nimbin Weed. Yeah, seems to be okay for some people, but for the wrong people, it’s very, very bad shit. Particularly anyone with depression, bipolar or any kind of psychological illness - and the irony is, of course, that it’s usually these sorts of people who find the need to self-medicate. (Yes, Duffer, I’m talking to you. Stick to Prozac, champ.) Matt seems to have started taking drugs to fit in with his art-school crowd - sounds like something out of a late 80s Drug Offensive ‘Just Say No’ video when you put it like that - but that’s how it seems to have happened. She also borrowed a lot of money off him, which presumably went in her pipe, down her nose or up her arm - again, don’t know what she was using, but Matt inferred it was much harder stuff than the shit he was using, which he was using a lot of by mid-1993.

By this point the entries became more intermittent, the prose darker and more caustic. She cheated on him, buckets of times. Guys he knew, randoms he didn’t, dealers who could help her score - she didn’t discriminate. But then there was tears over the phone (hers more than his, usually) as she coaxed and pleaded for him to take her back - and, hating himself for being so weak and so sick and so in love with her, he takes more and harder stuff to deal with his anguish, or just to keep up with her. Dissect it down, that was probably part of the reason I still felt so fucking lousy over Artemisia - in another life, Matt had been the poor bastard on the end of the crocodile-tearful phone call which she’d habitually made to Jessica’s flatmate David. Way I saw it, I helped another Zoe make a fucking mess of another Matt. Not proud of that.

“It’s mostly supposition,” I admitted to Jeff. “Probably reading more into it than I should. But he was in a very dark place for the last few months of his life. Hey, I think this is it.”

Beck dutifully guided her mother’s Volvo over to the side of the road, and pulled up. I had no idea why I thought this was it, it just seemed to fit my own image of the crash site. It was a sharp right-hander when approached from the south, from the city, sweeping slightly downhill through dense eucalypt forests, with aging armco railings running around the outside. I walked around the outside of the corner to the other side - the approach from the Brooklyn end, where he would have been coming from. If this was it, he would have gone off heading into the uphill left, slewed straight across into the railing on the outside, and into the trees. One of the railings looked a little less elderly than the others, and beyond this stood a pretty solid stand of river gums, one of which bore some significant gouges… Hell, you could convince yourself of anything if you stood here long enough and tried hard enough. Could have been here, sure; could have been anywhere.

Jeff pulled out a sheet of A4, waited for the traffic to pass, and crossed the road to where I stood on the apex on the corner. He compared his sheet to what he saw, then handed me the page and said, “What d’ya reckon?”

It was a printout of a newspaper article from the local suburban paper of the area, which had a lot more to say than the Star had. ‘Speed kills again on local roads’ the headline read.

“Beck helped me dig out the microfiche from the Mitchell Library the other day,” Jeff admitted.

The photo told the story: right in front of us was the point at which Matt’s Saab 900 had speared off into the trees. The grainy black-and-white image showed the wreckage of the Saab being attended to by police, while a little further into the scrub, ambulance personnel stood around some sort of shape shrouded in a white sheet. No fuckin' prizes for guessing, folks. The 'Speed kills again' tagline was just shit-lazy journalism or subbiedom, as it happened - the body of the article quoted the local Chief Wiggum as blaming speed, alcohol, possible abuse of other drugs, the weather conditions, and on top of that, not wearing a seatbelt. ‘Sheer suicide’, he called it. Yeah thanks for that. No other vehicles were said to have been involved. The name of the victim had been withheld until the family were informed.

“What the fuck is this?” I wanted to know. “What happened to being sideswiped by a truck? What happened to the fuckin’ seatbelt mounts breaking, or whatever?”

“Don’t know, mate. I’m wondering where the skidmarks are, to be honest,” he pointed out, indicating the virgin-looking tarmac leading from the turn to the crash site in the photo. “Also kinda wondering if Fred Barnes mighta written the story up for the Star...”

Fred Barnes and the old man went to school together in the local area, and they were still good mates when the three Young brothers were growing up. Fred wrote for the local paper for years - he was based in Woodburn and reported the goings-on in Evans, Broadwater, Coraki and surrounding areas, until the main office decided they could cover all the local regions from Lismore and closed the small office in Woodburn in the mid-90s. They offered him a desk in town, but he chose at that point to win fifty thousand playing scratch lotto tickets, sell up and retire to the Gold Coast. He dropped off the twig a few years ago, funeral was a pretty big deal around the area. He was a good bloke, all told. I remembered Fred encouraging a school-leaver-aged Matt to become a journalist, with his writing skills - he went on work experience at the Star with him in year 11 - but he was having more fun making surf movies, which is how he became interested in film. There’s still some half-arsed films kicking around home of myself and McCarthy surfing at Chinamans south of Evans and other local breaks in our glorious, spotty early-90s pomp, with Rage Against The Machine and Chili Peppers as the soundtrack. He had a real talent for it, even then.

“It’d make sense, I guess,” I said. “Fred has a word to the old man, bit of creative storytelling to protect Matt and the family… I can see it. Wish I couldn't.”

The day before his crash, Matt wrote about Zoe’s 21st birthday, which was supposed to be the next night, down at her parents’ holiday house on the Hawkesbury at Brooklyn. Despite the blackness which had descended in the preceding months, he wrote with surprising cheer about how much he was looking forward to it, how Zoe had told him that turning 21 was a chance for her to grow up, settle down, kick her various habits, and start repaying his love for her. I’m guessing the night didn’t go to plan. Maybe they had a fight. Maybe, probably, she got high and took up with some other guy, again. Whatever happened that night, it brought him to the point where Jeff and I stood, four years and four months later. It brought him to the point of being drunk, wasted, wearing no seatbelt, spearing into a sharp left-hand turn at probably at least double the advisory 65km/h, and with apparently no great inclination to operate the wheel or the brakes. I wonder sometime how many car accidents, particularly single-car ones, are actually suicides, particularly involving young males.

A postscript. Long before the Jeff’s bit of detective work with the local paper, I’d figured out for myself ithat Matt hadn’t been in sound mind when he had his accident; his journal, which I read soon after, told that he’d been hurting badly, that he’d been using drugs, was in a very dark place, and periodically wanted to end his own life. It didn't take much joining of dots, which was good, 'cos I'm a shit artist. I didn’t know who to talk to about it - Jeff was only fifteen, Mum was in denial, Dad was silent and stoic. I finally talked to the old man, and told him what I learned, or what I thought I'd learned, though not sure and a bit fearful how he’d react. He got up and left the room without a word. When he came back, he had a plastic sandwich bag in his hand. He dropped it onto the table. There was some weed in there, buds and resin, plus some unidentifiable pills and tablets, and a little plastic bag of powder.

“Found this amongst Matt’s things,” he said. “Plenty of other stuff just like it too, but that went in the incinerator. You know what this stuff is?”

“I know to keep away from it,” I said, figuring that was what he wanted to hear.

“Do you know what this stuff is?” he repeated.

I didn’t. Not the pills and shit, anyway. I could have a guess, but he didn't seem up to playing 20 Questions.

“It’s what killed your brother,” he said. “So if you don’t keep away from it, you’re as big a fuckin’ idiot as he turned out to be.”

As delivered by my father, it was a slightly more powerful message than “Drugs are bad, mmmkay.” And it worked. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve thoroughly abused, or at least taken advantage of my position in the music industry over the years, to drink vast quantities of alcohol, conduct myself like a juvenile delinquent, and have meaningless, indulgent sex with a lot of cheap, slutty women (and quite a few nice ones as well). But I just never got into the drug thing, despite it being just as prevalent as you’d imagine in the music scene. I’ve seen backstage areas that looked like an Escobar brothers’ warehouse, and I’ve had plenty of opportunity and encoragement to change my mind. But whether it was Matt’s demise, the Duffer’s endless self-medication, the fact that drugs generally make you look, sound and act like a complete arse and the come-down lasts four times as long as the high, or just the fear that my old man would regard me when I was gone as nothing more than a fuckin’ idiot who threw his life away for nothing… take your pick. I did. I picked beer, and lots of it. I’ll see you at the bar.

The Hunters Hill gig was subdued, for the reasons I’ve outlined above, and because it was simply a quiet Monday in suburbia. Tuesday’s gig in Parramatta at Ubiquitous Irish Pub #2736B (more craic than Roseanne in a G-string) was also fairly uneventful, apart from a bunch of fulleh siiick wogboys dropping by to slag off the skippys in the band. Quite why a bunch of second-generation migrant kids thought that an Irish pub in Parramatta was their spiritual homeland, to be defended at all costs from the infidels, kinda escaped me at the time. Anyway, it kept us from nodding off. We’d had a lot of gigs in succession, and could have done with a night off. Judging by Kretin’s scathing review of our performance that night, he reckoned we’d already taken it.

The only other thing gained from the experience was the latest issue of Drum Media, fresh that day, which I picked up during lug-out and read over breakfast next afternoon. That’s not a misprint. I don’t compromise my lie-ins on tour, dammit. We’d gained a mention in the gig guide the previous week, but nothing more than a casual mention as Grinspoon’s support for their Roundhouse and Annandale shows, and listing our other dates. To be honest, it was more out of gallows curiosity to see what Lena had written about us - if she hadn’t just ignored us altogether or launched an all-out assault, Andrea-style. I flipped from the contents page through to the gig reviews in the back.

The North invades New South
Lismore bands Grinspoon and Flange Gasket packed out UNSW’s Roundhouse for Friday’s O-Week gig, as our Megan Lane explains…

Megan Lane? Who the hell is… ah. I get it. When everyone mispronounces your first name, and your last looks like the winning answer on Wheel of Dyslexia, it’s not surprising that you choose to write under a pseudonym. Lane was presumably derived from the preferred (or at least most prevalent) pronounciation of Lena; Megan could have come from Magda, via Maggie or Mags which is what a lot of her friends called her. Megan Lane, Magdalena. Fair enough, I’ll buy that for a dollar. Except the thing was, Lena just wasn’t a Megan. All the Megans I knew were cute blonde girls who I wanted to sleep with. (OK, so I knew one from high school, a couple more from uni in Brisbane, and another from my Education course who was good-naturedly batting away my advances and would continue to do so for some time. Perhaps this wasn’t a representative sample.)

Lena’s (or Megan’s) article continued to say that ‘Orientation Week at UNSW was closed out with the Union’s traditional Big Gig, this year headlined by inaugural Triple J Unearthed winners Grinspoon. However, it was fellow Lismore (NSW) band Flange Gasket, who stowed away in the Grinspoon Tarago for the trip down the Pacific Highway to the big smoke and stole the show in the absence of primary support deuxexmachina…’

Wow, almost sounds positive. She went on to describe Grinspoon’s headline set in less-than-glowing terms: the sound was muddy and garbled, they weren’t exactly ‘tight’, and Phil Jamieson apparently looked like he was absolutely trolleyed (probably because he was). I could see why we compared favourably. I felt vaguely bad for the Spoon; everyone has off nights, we’d just had one ourselves, but theirs were on a more prominent stage (literally) than ours. Then I remembered they’d pretty much made it, and we hadn’t, and stopped feeling sorry for them.

Earlier in the evening, the non-appearance of Melbourne band deusexmachina obliged second support act Flange Gasket to step into the breach and duplicate their own blistering opening set. The boys from the North Coast did that and more, returning triumphant for a second bite at the cherry of their enthusiastic young audience. The Gasket, as they will inevitably be tagged by the National Union of Unoriginal Radio Jocks at their forthcoming AGM, not only impressed this observer greatly, but earned the personal gratitude of Union events coordinator Emma-Kate Caldwell for saving the day, with charismatic singer-guitarist Sam McCarthy singled out for particular thanks…

Oh, Lena, you bad girl. Saucer of milk, table two. Mrrrowwrr!

She went on to say that we had a big future, unique approach, vibrant twin-guitar assault, sharply-written songs with crisp riffs and dialogue far too clever to have come out of Lismore… for more, see our interview with them on page 15.

Interview? Who’d she interview, Marty? Phil? I flipped back towards the pointy end of the paper, to page 15. Nope, she’d interviewed Uncle Sam. Allegedly. This should be good. We’d (or he’d) merited half an A3 page, including a photo (seemingly taken by a photographer from the UNSW student paper Tharunka, which Sam and Lena had both written for in their years here) of the band rocking out at the Roundhouse, with Uncle Sam front and centre and hogging the spotlight as usual.

First, a confession. I am a music writer, apparently, which is an occupation which requires me to remain objective and level-headed about music; never to bring my own tastes into my work. But sometimes, the lines start to blur between bands I like because they are genuinely brilliant, and bands I like, because, well, the lead singer makes me feel all giddy and I think I want to bear his children. This is more of a problem than you’d think, being a single girl in gender-unbalanced inner-city Sydney… but enough about my problems, we’re here to talk about a band called Flange Gasket from a town called Lismore. Yes, the same town from where Grinspoon was Unearthed, the same band who the Gasket boys are supporting on selected Sydney dates of their current tour.

Let’s get this out of the way nice and early. I love these guys. I love their sound, I love their approach, I love their energy. I love the fun they have playing live. So many bands trudge through their sets looking disinterested and dispassionate, almost scolding their audiences for daring to enjoy themselves. Flange Gasket throw themselves around the stage, bounce heroically stupid banter off each other, dive headlong into riff-laden jams, and charge through their endless catalogue of thunderous old-school rock songs laden with irresistable sing-along hooks and devious lyrics. They simply dare you to enjoy yourself even half as much as they’re doing up on stage, and you can’t help but do so. They are ridiculously easy to fall in love with. If there was ever an antidote for the deeply self-involved, reflective, depressive, must-take-ourselves-seriously art-school approach which pervades music today (I’m talking to you, Radiohead), its name is Flange Gasket. Use only as directed, and if pain persists, cheer the fuck up.

But most of all, in a pathetic-teenage-crush, Smash-Hits-pinup kind of way - and I can’t believe I’m admitting this in public - I think I love their mercurial, swaggering lead singer-guitarist Sam McCarthy. Because, like, he’s soooo dreamy, and stuff. Drum Media caught up with Sam after their double-overtime support slot at the O-Week gig at UNSW’s Roundhouse, and tried very hard not to dribble all over him or offer to have his babies. The first thing he told me was that he most definitely wasn’t their lead singer.

“Lead singer? Christ no. Lead guitarist, maybe, but only because Angus can’t be arsed wanking on through endless showboating solos…” he laughs.

The first thing you notice about McCarthy is that he laughs easily, at his own expense more often than anyone else’s. It’s not what you necessarily expect when you see him on stage: a frenetic, pulsing source of dark energy, like Dave Grohl’s evil younger brother - black Led Zeppelin T-shirt, faded black jeans, short black hair, dark eyes, angular black sideburns, wielding his black Les Paul like he’s struggling mightily to exorcise demons from within his midst - his or the guitar’s, it’s never quite made clear. Contrast that with McCarthy’s foil, the perennially-cheerful, ever-laid-back Andy ‘Angus’ Young, with his scruffy brown hair, lairy T-shirts and laconic grin, looking like he just climbed on stage after knocking back a few with his mates in the beer garden. Which is usually the case, apparently. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Angus too… but every girl likes a bad boy, right?

Attempting to impress him with my incisive sociological dissection and understanding of his band’s craft, I suggest to McCarthy that his lyrics are often acerbic, politically-charged and sharply phrased, while Young’s are more from the Frenzal Rhomb school of comic swearing, slagging-off of random people, and knob and plop jokes. He disagrees. Wounded, I consider therapy. “We don’t necessarily sing the songs we write - and everyone writes, there’s contributions from all of us on the new EP [El Spurioso]. But most of the really dodgy stuff is mine, I’m afraid,” he admits wryly. Like Ode To Joy From Lennox, a ‘tribute’ to an ex-girlfriend who wasn’t as virtuous as he might have hoped, in the style of AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie.

By contrast, their most ‘political’ song yet (if you can call it that), the infamous local hit Learn To Swim With Harold Holt, was written by Angus. It’s hard to see how a vibrant surf-rocker like that could create so much controversy in the Gasket’s home town, but never underestimate the conservatism of small-town rural Australia, as McCarthy explains: “The local National Party MP came out in the press and slated us for disrespecting his old brother-in-arms Harold Holt, who had been a close personal friend of his, blah blah blah... Of course, a day later the local paper figured out that he and Holt could never have actually met each other because Holt was already permanently unavailable for comment before this clown even entered politics. As such our esteemed local member was most definitely talking out his arse, so there was a bit of media attention over that,” he grins.

For an up-and-coming local act, the attention was absolute gold. Flange Gasket have been touring relentlessly on the back of Harold Holt and their EPs Insert Title Here (no longer available) and El Spurioso, as far north as Port Douglas and as far south as Sin City, winning over audiences up and down the east coast with their witty lyrics and hook-laden songs which leap between genres, steadfastly refusing to be pigeonholed. There’s old-school rock in there in all its glorious variations, sharpened up with plenty of late ‘70s garage punk, but listen hard and you’ll find an eclectic undercurrent of influences, from James Brown groove to Delta blues, from serrated-edge grunge to Chili Peppers slap-bass funk.

I remind myself what kind of unprofessional precedent it would set for a credible music journalist (ha!) to let a touring rock musician talk his way into her pants; ask him a serious question and stop flirting, you cretin. I ask whether they’ve ever been concerned, given their whimsical approach, that they wouldn’t be taken seriously. Again, he disagrees with me. I want to curl up into a little ball. Note to self: start getting out and meeting people more often. “For that argument to be valid,” he points out, “we’d never have seen the rise of bands like Spiderbait, or Regurgitator, or TISM, or Frenzal Rhomb, or even say the Hoodoo Gurus. Obviously, we’ve got a hell of a long way to go before we could even be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys – though I just did of course – but the point is, you can write songs with funny, light-hearted or even darkly satirical lyrics, and so long as they’re inherently good songs, people will support you.”

Angus, who’s been bending half an ear to the conversation from across backstage, quips laconically, “Just the ‘writing inherently good songs’ part that’s fucking us up at present.”

But that’s just the Gasket boys’ self-deprecatory nature; they don’t take themselves seriously, and don’t expect you to. They only ask that you come see them play, jump around like an idiot, maybe buy their new EP El Spurioso, and have as good a time seeing them play as they had writing the songs in the first place. They won’t batter you with tortured, self-indulgent soliloquies about their angst, their misery, or their alienation from modern society. Flange Gasket sing songs about Play School presenters, Prime Ministers who couldn’t swim, and the after-hours proclivities of famous guitarists. Go and see them. You might even have fun. Meanwhile, I’m off for a cold shower...

Flange Gasket play Tuesday at PJ Gallagher’s in Parramatta, Wednesday at Caringbah Bizzo’s, Thursday at the Manning Bar at Sydney Uni (with Eskimo Joe and deusexmachina), Friday at Revesby Workers, and Saturday at the Annandale Hotel (with Grinspoon and Eskimo Joe). Their new EP El Spurioso is available from their website www.scu.edu.au/flangegasket/ or at their gigs.

It was a lovely piece of writing, affectionate and personal, and hugely supportive of our cause. A quick skim-through of other articles or reviews by ‘Megan Lane’ in this week’s issue indicated that this definitely wasn’t her usual tone; she was far more often cynical and damning-with-faint-praise (or just damning full stop), like when she described deusexmachina as ‘among Australia’s finest Radiohead tribute bands’. Amongst prose like that, our profile read like an unabashed piece of fan mail.

The only problem was, it was entirely ficticious.

Lena, presuming she was ‘Megan Lane’ (and I couldn’t see who else could be) had simply made up the entire contents of the interview, either from conversations she had with Uncle Sam in the past, or maybe (probably?) just some idealised image of him which she carried around with her in her head. It all sounded like things he would say, for sure - I just knew he hadn’t said them. Not on that night, anyway. Not in that mood. The rest of the information she would have got from our website, or press clippings, or somewhere or other - it wouldn’t have been that difficult. She’d picked up a copy of the EP somewhere as well, because her review of that was also in this week’s issue; again, she raved about us. Either she was genuine in her regard for what we were doing, or she was just trying to make McCarthy feel lousy for being such a bastard. If it was the latter, it didn’t work.

“I can’t believe she’d just make up an entire interview, that’s completely unethical. I don’t care if it’s ‘positive’. I’m contacting her boss,” he said, reaching for the phone book and turning to D for Drum Media. He soon found the phone book ripped from his grasp and tossed to the floor.

“Fuck off you’ll contact her boss,” I informed him. “You’ll send her a big fuck-off bunch of flowers is what you’ll do. What kind of massive cunt-arsed bastard are you anyway?”

He looked at me with eyes fuming, and there was the slightest suggestion he’d try and take a swing. But, when it came down to it, a physique gained through hauling fertilizer bags right through adolescence isn’t such a bad thing for defusing arguments with. Old man Sam really oughta have spent his own adolescent afternoons helping his old man in the nursery instead of playing the guitar and/or the Amiga 500; he thought better of it, and stuck to verbal attacks. “Send her your own fuckin’ flowers,” he retorted. “Whose side are you on anyway?”

“Ours,” I said. “Flange Gasket’s. I like people who say nice things about our band and tell people to come and see us play - no matter what their motivation might be. As for you - yeah, she fucked you over, but haven’t you punished her enough? She came over to say sorry and you laughed in her face, and smeared yourself over Emma-Kate in front of her to try and make her jealous - classy fuckin’ move, by the way… Now she’s reduced to degrading herself by writing basically an open love letter to say sorry. Enough. You win. Take the points and let it fucking go, you tool.”

“Open love letter, fuck off, she’s taking the piss. It’s what she does, she’s taking the piss out of the lot of us, and me in particular. She loves all that self-indulgent woe-is-me Radiohead shit, anyway - who the fuck is she trying to kid? Open love letter, fuck me - where do you get this stuff from? She’s only got one message to get across, and it’s NOT ‘sorry’. That is,” he declared, affecting the accent of some random upper-crust lady of the landed gentry, “Isn’t it just so HILARIOUSLY IRONIC that someone as GORGEOUS as ME could be attracted to this FOOL who writes silly little songs about Play School presenters!! Just IMAGINE! How FRIGHTFULLY perverse!” He regarded me sourly. “That’s the fuckin’ message she’s sending. And getting received, loud and clear. So don’t come up with this crap about her being sorry or whatever. You don’t understand her like I do. She’s a fuckin’ twisted girl.”

Well, that went well, I thought.

Intra-guitarist relations hadn’t improved much by that evening’s performance at Caringbah Bizzos, a well-known house of rock and/or roll in Sydney’s south, latterly specialising in punk. We had a decent crowd for a Wednesday night - maybe because of our positive write-up in the street press, maybe just because there’s fuck-all else for kids to do of a Wednesday night in Caringbah but go and watch a punk rock show. And it was a punk rock show - as the back end of our career would illustrate, we tend to play faster and harder when we’re pissed off, either with each other or with external forces. The other mitigating factor was that we were supported (yes, someone was there to support us!) by a couple of nu-skool skate-punk outfits from the Sutherland Shire, who Lena had neglected to mention in our puff piece in the Drum Media. They weren’t brilliant musicians, but that’s half the fun of punk rock - you don’t need to be any good to have fun. We certainly weren’t, and did. They had noted their own absence from the gig listings underneath our interview, and weren’t overly happy about it, casting aspersions on the professionalism of one Ms Megan Lane.

“Did you root her, at least?” one of them wanted to know.

McCarthy shook his head. “Bit of a porker, actually,” he replied. “I ain’t a member of Chubby Chasers ‘R’ Us.”

I managed to restrain myself from smacking him one across the head.

At least until he dedicated our cover of the Dead Kennedy’s Too Drunk To Fuck in her honour, with the afterthought ‘If only I fuckin' had been.’

Thursday night, and into the den of the Auld Enemy, at least in the case of our UNSW alumni guitarist; the long-term rivalry between Sydney and NSW unis is as fierce as it is pointless. They compete in terms of research grants and publications from their researchers, the perceived ‘quality’ of their degrees, and most importantly, the number of molly-coddled private school kids who they can dupe into enrolling each year on the premise that they’ll get a better quality education than, say, the University of Obscure Shit in Woodenbong. One thing Sydney Uni could hold over UNSW, at least until the advent of the Roundhouse as an established venue, was the number of live acts they attracted to their various bars around campus, in particular the Manning Bar. You weren’t a proper live band in Sydney until you’d played the Manning Bar. Actually, you weren’t a proper live band in Sydney until you’d been barred from the Manning Bar for some kind of offensive or lewd conduct, e.g. Machine Gun Fellatio or Frenzal Rhomb.

The first surprise of the evening was getting to the venue and finding out we weren’t playing at eight. We’d been told we were playing at eight. Were we playing at all? We sought out the venue manager, a suitably alternative-looking chickie (alternative to what, is the obvious question) called Vanessa-Jane, who admitted that she’d had a chat with her opposite number over at the Auld Enemy, an old school friend (who also happened to have a double-barrelled Christian name, if you follow) and on her advice she’d swapped the running order around - the unreliable deusexmachina would play first, and we’d take their prime support slot before Eskimo Joe came out to rescue the kids from our evil grasp. All of a sudden, Uncle Sam McCarthy’s decision to walk Emma-Kate home didn’t look so self-serving. Well, it still looked self-serving as fuck, but it’d had an unexpected positive consequence.

The second surprise of the evening was that deusexmachina actually existed. The first indication that this might be the case was finding a Victorian-registered Avis minivan parked in a loading zone blocking the access doors when we were trying to lug in. Inside, we found Vanessa-Jane surrounded by a group of twenty-something gents dressed more for a Melbourne winter than a Sydney summer, berating her like English Premier League footballers surrounding a referee who’s just given a penalty against them. That was well out of order, in my opinion; time for a few yellow cards. I stuck my nose in and asked if they wouldn’t mind shifting their van so we could lug in. Nice though it was that they’d bothered to turn up this time. 'Course if they wanted we could always move their van for them, using a large chain and a Landcruiser we happened to have to hand. Despite my pleasantness and my inherently sunny disposition I was told to fuck off.

“Ah yeah, that’s right,” I said, stroking my stubble thoughfully. Four days' growth was becoming one of my favourite props. “You pack of overdressed cocksmokers have to lug in first anyway, yeah? Should work out well for you.”

Bands feuding backstage isn’t as common as the music press would like you to think, particularly in the local industry. An atmosphere of mutual acceptance and tolerance generally pervades, even between styles of music that would seem irreconcilable. So when the larger of the four guys in black jackets, scarves and black jeans approached me later, and proffered his hand, I extended mine in armistice. He then whipped his hand up behind his head and smoothed his oily black hair. I hadn’t seen anyone do something so juvenile since year 8, and wondered whether an atomic wedgie would be an appropriate response. I later learned this individual to be Brady Priddle, singer and tortured lyricist with deusexmachina; for now, he was just a pasty, pudgy, jowly dude with John Lennon tryhard sunglasses and a bit of a paunch, looking far too old and sad to be in a up-and-coming band with a ‘breakthrough’ new sound (i.e. OK Computer run through a Xerox with a bit of Live’s overblown theatrics and a dash of REM’s funereal dirge action thrown in.) Furthermore, he was only one ‘y’ away from qualifying for Brad Cock Theory - close enough for government work.

“What the fuck is this amateur fuckin' shit, hey, where you Sydney fags can pull rank on us just by sweet-talking these fuckin' uni bitches?” he scowled.

“Pull rank? Last time I pulled rank, mate, it was your mum and she fuckin’ loved it.” Thank you Super Dave. He’s here all week, try the exits. “By the way, just a suggestion here Chubs, but when you’re trying to get established in a new city, if you actually turn up to the odd gig you’re booked for, you tend to do better.”

Chubs was incandescent. “You Sydney fags are all the same, hey,” he declared derisively. “All so fuckin’ smug and self-congratulatory. The scene here, hey, is so fuckin’ pissant compared to Melbourne, it’s a fuckin’ joke.”

“So what the fuck are you doing here, Chubs? And by the way, fucktard, check your records. We’re not from Sydney.”

“Oh yeah,” he recalled, “you’re that bunch of cow-fisters from the country.”

“No way to speak about your own mother,” I remarked. “Be fair, it was the only way I was touching the sides.” Yeah, well off colour. I know. But for some reason, I'd taken a set against this clown the moment I'd met him, and I soooo wanted to provoke the fat fucker into having a swing. I’d been on edge for days, and I could really use the opportunity of burying a fist in this guy’s pudgy face. Suffice to say, I did not like him. I continued, “We’ve been in this town just as long as you have, we just know how to make a decent impression. Check the street press if you're interested. And if you can fuckin' read with those poxy fuckin' glasses on.”

“Yeah, well I don’t need some skanky ho street press slut rubbing her cunt over my band, hey, my music actually has enough credibility not to need it.”

I laughed derisively. “Jesus, have a listen to this one. Take ourselves a bit seriously, do we princess? Mate, you’re a fuckin’ joke. Get out of my sight before I do something you’ll regret.”

He started to storm off, before turning and pointing an imaginary gun at me, and pulling the trigger. “We will blow you off the fuckin’ stage,” he pronounced.

“Your mum blew me off the fuckin’ stage,” I replied. “Just off side of stage, as it happened…”

“Shut the fuck up about my fucking mother!” he howled.

“Mate, I’d love to shut up about fucking your mother, but she keeps telling everyone around town. Took an ad out in the paper about it...”

Come on, Chubs. Have a dig. All mouth, aren’t ya, you lippy fucker. Happy to scream abuse at some little girl from the union, but you don’t like it when someone vaguely your own size – apart from the arse of course – gives you a free character reference, do you?

But by now, his spindly, clearly drug-ravaged bandmates were starting to tug him away from our discussion. Lemme see, I reckon the drummer does speed and shitloads thereof, he’s as sickly-white as fluorescent lighting. The bass player probably injects some kind of shit because he still hasn’t taken off his long-sleeved black skivvy even though it’s thirty degrees in here. The guitarist could be on anything or everything, judging by his demented stare; let’s say Draino, just for argument’s sake. And old Chubs here is carrying a few extra pounds, so I’d say coke’s the real thing for him… I was getting reasonably good at linking substances of abuse to their respective abusers. Sydney was kinda handy for that kind of training.

“What was all that about?” McCarthy queried afterwards.

“Putting our Victorian support band in their place,” I said. “Mouthing off about our girl Vanessa-Jane here, as well as your little mate Emma-Kate.”

“Since when did you become the arch-defender of every wronged double-barrelled girl in this city?”

“Oh for Christ's sake, don’t you start as well.”

Needless to say, later that night we blew deusexmachina off the stage, out the door, into the gutter and halfway down City Road. (That’s the beauty of these sorts of feuds. I can claim anything I like and there’s no quantitative way of proving otherwise.) Despite all the niggling issues which were circling us, we put together a solid, engaging set and got the kids jumping. It was hardly a fair fight, this wasn’t deusexmachina’s trendily downbeat audience, it was ours: an enthusiastic melee of wound-up first-years, juiced up on cask wine and inferior-grade spirits and looking for some fun. So yeah, we blew them off the stage. And then Eskimo Joe in turn blew us off the stage; we clearly still had a lot to learn.

We were tired, we were cranky, we were pissed off with this town, and with each other. We just had to hold it together for two more nights.