Show business

You learn to sing, you learn to play
Why don’t the businessman ever learn to pay?
That’s show business... that’s the way it goes.
- AC/DC, 1974

Let’s diverge for now from the sordid details of my sexual past and take a moment to have an intellectual, reasoned discussion about the origins of life, the universe and everything (no, the answer is NOT forty-two, you sad bastard.)

Intelligent design, like Russell Crowe’s band, is a fucking pile of shit.

I know this because I was being cajoled into teaching it on Straddie as part of Science, even though it was about as scientific as Scientology. I also know this because somewhere along the line, I’ve actually managed to retain enough information in my sieve-like scone to be awarded an honours degree in biochemistry/molecular genetics/developmental biology/whatever the hell it was supposed to be. As such, I know a little bit about about evolution, the idea that populations have natural variation (usually as the result of random genetic mutations) and that selection occurs in favour of the most appropriate or ‘fittest’ members of the population under whatever conditions or circumstances the population finds itself challenged by. I like evolution. In fact, I think evolution is a very cool concept and I think it applies not only to biological organisms, but to many phenomena we see around the modern world today. Such as the design of modern cars. Think of the Falcon and the Commodore as competing species - large, lumbering land-based mammals, if you will. In 1998 Ford brought out the AU Falcon, following on from Holden’s VT Commodore the previous year. The AU Falcon was not a success. It looked like the result of a random genetic mutation. It was selected against, while the Commodore remained hugely popular. Accordingly, when Ford brought out the replacement BA Falcon in 2002, it had evolved to look less like a random mutation and more like an exact copy of the VT Commodore. We call this convergent evolution. (At least I think we do.)

This phenomena is also seen in rock music. Jet evolved to sound like the Beatles, the Stones and AC/DC. The Vines evolved to sound like Nirvana. Modern R&B evolved to sound like shit. Even individual songs showed signs of Darwin’s roadmap. Take AC/DC’s iconic track, It’s A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna Rock And Roll, from their breakthrough 1975 album T.N.T. This treatise explored themes of displacement and alienation associated with the lifestyle of a touring rock band throughout metropolitan, rural and regional Australia, further emphasised in the title of the piece. It’s A Long Way To The Top was however the second part of a duology, a sonic diptych if you will. Its evolutionary prequel could be found on their previous, not as broadly appreciated (or anywhere near as good) album High Voltage. This was the elegaic work Show Business, which explored similar themes of corruption, decadence, moral degradation, financial hardship, and personal exhaustion within the music industry; and yet the protagonist, addressed ingeniously in the second person, would be told once and again throughout their ordeal that this was ‘show business’ and ‘that’s the way it goes’. Fittingly, Show Business was positioned by Burwood’s finest as the final track on High Voltage; whereas It’s A Long Way To The Top was the first song heard when T.N.T. was placed carefully on the olds’ Pye record player, and the needle dropped thereon. The symbolism of this, I feel, is unequivocal, and from a personal viewpoint, speaks volumes. Particularly with reference to the experiences of my own band throughout the last half of 1998 and into the summer of ’99.

I quote from the original text:
You learn to sing, you learn to play.
Why don’t the businessman ever learn to pay?
That’s show business, show business.
Show business - that’s the way it goes.

By summer of ’99 Flange Gasket were now busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger. Throughout the balance of 1998, we were gigging fairly relentlessly, spreading the word far and wide, writing new material one week, adding it to the setlist the next - each week getting further away from being a covers band who played originals, to an originals band who padded their set list with the odd reinvented cover version. However, I don’t remember any great sense of achievement or satisfaction. I just remember feeling completely buggered most of the time. Band time was starting to overlap with uni time, particularly now that I was starting to head out on week-long practical placements to various schools around the Northern Rivers for my education course. Phil and Marty had the same problem, in terms of gigs, rehearsals, band meetings and travel time cannibalising their uni schedules.

You pay the man, you pay your dues.
When it’s all gone, you sing the blues.
That’s show business… that’s the way it goes.

McCarthy was the worst off, of course - he had a full-time job, which was suffering badly. Of course, given that Andrea was in his office, he was being made to suffer badly as well. Thankfully, though, these days he didn’t spend that much time in the office - there were plenty of junior shitkicker assignments for he and young Thommo to be dispatched on, while the real journos were off covering actually important stuff like car accidents and local political scandals. He’d taken to letting Thommo do the driving (because there was always driving involved - more often than not, the crappy little jobs were distributed at the furthest reaches of the Star’s catchment area) so he could catch up on racking zeds in the car. Thommo was a good lad, he’d make sure he woke McCarthy up when they got there.

“Whafurghhh?”

“Sorry, Sam… we’re at the job.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Wasn’t asleep, just thinking with my eyes shut. It’s a visualisation exercise.”

They’d been out to Brunswick Heads and back already this morning - the Brunswick-Byron fishermans’ co-op had built a new shed and a bit of decking on the marina shoreline where the trawlers moored, and this had been deemed newsworthy by someone or other, so they’d already clocked up some miles on the work car. At least Thommo was happy with the shots he’d got of the trawlers steaming back into port in the morning sunlight. Of course, in those pre-digital days, he would have no idea whether the shots were any good until he’d done the black-and-white proofs that afternoon, which he had to do manually. Thass old-school, dawg.

Given the completely fucking random nature of the assignments they were handed, it was no surprise that their next job was all the way back into Lismore again, this time at the NORPA theatre on Bangalow Road. NORPA was the Northern Rivers Performing Arts society - amateur drama, performing arts, musical theatre, that sort of thing - and at the time they based near Trinity College, sharing some of their facilities with the school. The school itself was deserted, this being the September-October school holidays. But don’t be thinking that just because it was holidays for the kids, and mid-semester break for SCU, that Gasket’s schedule was any less congested. There were weekend gigs, as there always were, but for the rest of the week we’d Burning the Midnight Oil (I didn’t have a copy of their ‘best of’ 40,000 Watt RSL yet, so Phil copied the CD for me) with some late nights in the rickety old studio at SCU.

Kretin had been pressuring us endlessly to record something ‘polished’ and ‘market-ready’. He wanted something he could ‘take to radio’, something better ‘targeted’ towards ‘shifting units’ in the marketplace. Our cheap ‘n’ cheerful live recording Insert Title Here had endured reasonably well for a few weeks to months earlier in the year, particularly on the back of Harold Holt’s local notoriety, but he was constantly nagging us since then that we’d lost our momentum (Kretin, not Holt) without any ‘product’ to ‘leverage’, ‘going forward’. I wondered if he had a book somewhere where he was getting all this rubbish from. Recently Phil had found the website which generated those random Wankword Bingo gamecards for management meetings with words like ‘convergence, ‘synergy’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’, and for a time we started bringing them to band meetings, but Kretin threw a tanty after a while and made us stop.

You wanna roll, you wanna rock.
You find it hard, if your guitar’s in hock…

Actually we weren’t doing that badly, in a financial sense. We weren’t going well, but at least it wasn’t losing us fistfuls of dollars, as it seemed to do for others we knew - Three by Three f'rinstance must have been doing it for the love, 'cos it werent for the riches 'n' bitches. We certainly weren’t making a living out of playing in Flange Gasket - maybe five or six hundred a night, split between the four of us, after Kretin had his cut - but it was enough to keep the enterprise going; it meant my working holidays to the farm for sustenance funding were less frequent than before. Consumables were a major wallet-burner - travel costs, car repairs, equipment maintenance, road food, the list was towering. The Atomic Mandarin Mark II went through a period of chewing pickups, until I finally stopped using cheap Taiwanese ones. The Duffer seemed to break a set or two of drumsticks each gig, and that alpine beech ain’t cheap stuff. The postie van spat a main gearbox seal on the way back from Tenterfield and trailed Dexron III all the way down the Bruxner Highway, but all it needed was a new seal and a service; snapping and catapulting the driver’s side wiper arm into a ditch coming back from a weekend gigging around the mid North Coast in torrential rain was a bit more of a shitfight. Rain-X, and lots of it, saved the day on that occasion. McCarthy’s Camira wagon, though, died an unglamourous death by degrees: brake master cylinder, head gasket, clutch, and finally a lunched gearbox. It was costing him more than it was worth, and despite Uncle Sam’s endearingly loyal attachment to the benighted bucket of shite, it soon found itself on blocks at the local wreckers, grass growing through the developing rust holes in its underbody. He was too distraught to find a replacement. That, and was too broke, and couldn’t be arsed. It wasn’t as if we were short of motorized transport at Gasket HQ anyway. The Chateau Dodgy carpark was as much a carpool as anything these days.

Given his insider knowledge as a member of staff, and the fact we were using the facilities after hours during the mid-semester break, Kretin had managed to organise us a fairly equitable hiring rate for the interactive museum that was the SCU recording studio; however we couldn’t help but wonder how much of the hiring fee was ending up in the back pocket of Kretin’s overly tight Tarocash jeans. He was certainly doing well for himself; he’d just traded in his white mid-‘90s MX5 for a brand-new red example, one of the just-released facelift models without the pop-up headlights. The other annoyance regarding our fearless leader’s involvement with the studio was literally his involvement with the studio - insisting on being present the whole time we were there, overseeing the recording process. We would have suggested ‘overseeing’ was a little misleading; ‘interfering with’, ‘white-anting’ or ‘getting in the fucking way’ would have been more accurate. He seemed to think we should be trying to synthesise a clean, crisp, flawless production, referencing the efforts of Queen, Pink Floyd and even Def Leppard’s Hysteria (!) as examples of what we should be trying to achieve. The problem was, unlike Def Leppard, we didn’t have four years, three studios, a million dollars and old mate Mutt Lange to produce our album; we had four nights and a bunch of old, busted gear that was only capable of reproducing old, busted sounds, something like early Stones, early Black Keys, or the Stooges’ Raw Power. But on the other hand, for most of the rest of us, that was the sound we actually wanted to capture at the time, rather than Def Leppard-style bullshit ‘80s hair-farmer guitar solos and ludicrous light-as-air falsetto harmonies layered ad infinitum. And at least our drummer still had two arms.

So that was the crux of McCarthy’s problem: he was pulling late nights in the SCU studio through the week, but didn’t have any opportunity to replenish his missing stocks of zeds by sleeping-in of a morning like the rest of us, because he and Thommo were criss-crossing the Northern Rivers in a Noddy-looking red Mazda 121 Metro emblazoned with the newspaper’s logo. Usually, with McCarthy dozing off in the passenger seat. We were all tired, but McCarthy was totally, utterly, shagged. Not that he was actually getting shagged, of course.

You pull a chick, take her home.
No use man, you’re worn out to the bone…

Ah, can’t say that was a problem I was afflicted by… and if I was, of course, I wouldn’t be declaring it in this forum. But our schedules and lifestyles, McCarthy’s in particular, did tend to mitigate against any kind of moderately serious or longer-term relationship with a girl. Anything longer than one-night, of course. That, depending on your personal philosophy (and indeed your standards), was relatively easy to come across, as it should be when you’re in your early twenties, are not entirely repulsive to look at, can speak without drooling, and most important of all, play in a touring rock band.

Problem with that was, McCarthy ‘didn’t believe’ in one-night stands - as though they were some kind of mythical creation like the Easter Bunny - but what he meant was that he wasn’t prepared to set aside his moral values for some quick and dirty fun. His position was that sex was intrinsically linked to love; he’d never made love to a girl who he wasn’t in love with at the time. Although he was starting to realise that his relationship with Andrea probably hadn’t been true love, just good old-fashioned lust dressed up with a little friendly banter. Personally, I didn’t have so much of a philosophical problem with brief, alcohol-fuelled liaisons ‘leveraged’ from the ‘synergy’ of me being in town, playing guitar in a rock band, and them being in the front row, bouncing up and down to show their adoration. I was just getting a little tired of playing games with silly little first-year uni girls, straight out of school and demonstrating their painful lack of life experience every time they opened their mouths.

Which is why I was pretty thankful when Kirsten came along in early September. Kirsten was doing honours in the school of education, and like me the previous year, she was earning the odd bit of pocket money by working as a teaching assistant, running tutorials. Whether she’d intended to or not, she also managed to emulate my efforts of the previous year by using this as a means of picking up younger undergrads, i.e. me. Dr Cletus would not have been impressed by her professionalism. Kirsten was twenty-five, slightly more grown-up than your average undergrad having worked and backpacked around Europe for a couple of years before coming home to the North Coast and heading to SCU. Not only was she good fun, but she was interesting company, more so than anyone I'd dated before. She was writing up her thesis at the time we were in the studio, putting in similar hours, so anytime I needed my sanity reinstalled after listening to the Duffer argue with Kretin for half an hour over how his snare should be miked up, I’d wander over to the postgrad students’ office space in the school of education to be defrazzled by Kirsten, and vice versa. Which, I'll admit, occasionally took the form of having carefree stress-relieving sex across the notes and textbooks across her desk. Hey, as someone who also knew the stress of thesis writing, providing Kirsten with personally-tailored frustration relief was the least I could do.

McCarthy, tired and cranky most of the time these days and particularly this week, wasn’t that happy that I was skiving off across campus during our precious studio time, even if it was only during times when I wasn’t required (eg laying down drum tracks, or arguing about how we should be laying down drum tracks). It wasn’t as if I was ever gone for all that long, it didn’t take much to make Kirsten happy, which was fine by me seeing as though I was working to a deadline. The subtext to McCarthy’s unhappiness was that he’d been single since Andrea had kicked him to the kerb a few months back, and inevitably he ended up comparing his situation with mine - notwithstanding one-nighters which didn’t really count, I’d also been single since Jessica had left me. Even though it wasn’t exactly fun being single, it wasn’t quite as painful if we had beers to drink, sport to watch, Goldeneye N64 to kill each other on, etcetera. Problem was, Kirsten clearly wasn’t a one-nighter, and McCarthy was being reminded of his singleton status on far too regular a basis for his liking. In these situations you never set out to rub your mates’ noses in the fact that you’re now in a relationship again (if that's what this was) and they’re not, but even so, inevitably, it happens.

So McCarthy was tired and cranky and dicked-off about him being single and sleep-deprived and the inability of the rest of us to get our shit together in the studio and the world taking a set against him in general, when he stumbled out of the Star car, grabbed his official-looking filofax notepad and pen, waited for Thommo to painstakingly extract and assemble his camera gear from his bag, and trailed him into the NORPA theatre, silently grumbling that it was all right for Gavin to have a nice clean ironed work polo to wear because he still lived at home with his mother, while he’d been obliged to wear one which was ever so slightly on the crumpled side, and by Christ that was a long sentence for someone with that little serotonin in his system. His mood wasn’t improved by being presented with a row of not-quite-legal teenage girls in flimsy, disturbingly tight leotards, gyrating and writhing in vaguely polished syncronicity. I don’t need this, he thought, figuring half the thoughts which were circling his head should have him locked up; as a great philosopher once said, fifteen’ll get you twenty. Young Thommo was still young enough to have overlapped at school with a few of the older girls, judging by the coquettish teasing he was getting from a few of the more forward ones.

“Thanks so much for coming,” said a voice behind them. It didn’t sound like old Daphne Dunleavy, the venerable old dragon whose eponymous dance and drama school for ‘gels’ was the largest in the area. For one thing, the statement involved saying ‘Thanks’. In the Northern Rivers area, Mrs D was an institution; many of her former pupils would have suggested she should have been placed in one long ago. Her tirades had reduced more little princesses to tears for missing a cue and befouling a group routine than any cranky old biddy within a two hundred mile radius. No, the voice behind them was younger, less barbed, didn’t automatically set the teeth on edge. This was presumably her new 2IC, whose name had been given as Angela in their sparse briefing notes.

“No problem,” McCarthy smiled thinly, turning to intercept the voice. The girl was probably mid-twenties, fresh-faced and beaming - she definitely hadn’t worked for Mrs B long then - straight brown hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a sweat-dampened tight-fitting white T-shirt from some long-forgotten high schools’ eisteddfod over a black sports bra, and grey gympants which showed off all her most favourably toned dancer's contours. McCarthy was instantly relieved there was someone he could look at in this building without being arrested.

“Hi, how’s it going - Sam McCarthy, Northern Star. This is Gavin Thompson, one of our photographers.”

“That would probably explain the camera then,” she smiled brightly. “I’m Angie… Angie Mills.”

She squeezed his outstretched hand; her hands were soft and smooth, very feminine. Angie’s clear brown eyes regarded him warmly. McCarthy was smitten pretty much immediately. Ten seconds at most.

They were there to cover Mrs B’s dance ensemble and their annual spring concert, which usually followed the school holidays. It was a big deal for the girls involved, their parents, and Mrs B, who was stationed at the other end of the hall barking instructions like a SS commandant at Stalag Luft 9. Although she’d requested (i.e. demanded) that someone from the Star come and cover their concert - given that Star editor Mac McCormack’s daughter was among the ensemble, he’d not been in any position to decline, in case his little Janet was unceremoniously benched - she gave the distinct impression that she saw their attendance as an imposition and certainly wasn’t going to descend to the level of actually speaking to the media herself.

McCarthy had no particular problem with those arrangements, though. While Gavin flitted about capturing the rehearsal on film, trying not to get in the way and be barked at by Mrs B, Uncle Sam sat down with Angie and interviewed her. His angle, he figured, was profiling the face behind the new, fresh energy which characterised this year’s spring exhibition by the Daphne Dunleavy School of Dance. Of course, this gave him broad licence to spend a good hour in conversation with Angie about herself, her background, what her interests were, and all the while spooling out the relaxed charm and ready wit which he was renown for (or at least was capable of scaring-up when he really needed to.) The story, when it appeared, was very well received; even Mrs B was happy with it, although she had a brace of complaints over the lack of focus on herself, her years of experience, her track record, etcetera, etcetera…

Angie called him at the Star the day after the story came out. She was also happy with the story, just a little embarrassed over the photo Gavin had taken of her - then again, find me a girl who’s happy with any photo taken of her - but McCarthy assured her she looked great, which she seemed to appreciate. He then suggested maybe that they should catch up for a coffee sometime. She said she’d like that. She sounded like she'd like it quite a lot, in fact.

Hey presto, McCarthy now looked like he had one less thing to whinge about.

His newly-optimistic expression as he strolled into our last night of studio time contrasted markedly with the sour, thunderous faces amongst the rest of us in the control room. Time was almost up, and the piecemeal approach we’d taken had resulted in having bits and pieces of songs lying around like smashed plate fragments at a Greek wedding; you might be able to recognise drum tracks for some songs or guitar parts for others from the remnants, but you were buggered if you wanted to try and piece something together out of them to make even a single coherent piece of music. Kretin had insisted that this was the only ‘professional’ way to record, but it clearly wasn’t working; the bits we did have in remotely completed form sounded too clean and clinical, even soulless. Kretin wanted us to plane off all the rough edges, but when all you really have to begin with is rough edges…

McCarthy strolled into the midst of yet another argument between the Duffer and Kretin about some ridiculous bit of minutiae like whether Marty’s keyboard part in Gis A Recording Contract Ya Cheap Bastards, intended to emulate Jon Lord’s organ sound off Deep Purple’s Machine Head, was more like a Hammond organ MIDI sample or a Farfisa organ MIDI sample. Marty had donned the UN peacekeepers’ gumby blue stackhat and was attempting to mediate the discussion; I was sitting in the corner, staring out the window and texting Kirsten who was having just as much fun trying to wrangle a complex figure for one of her chapters in Microsoft Word for Mac, which I knew from honours to be carnivorous when it came to figures. I caught McCarthy’s eye as he walked in, and watched his cheery expression droop like a Dali clockface as he realised, yes, these bastards were still at it.

Suddenly, I realised, he reached an epiphany. Aforesaid epiphany amounted to opening the door to the studio proper, carefully unpacking his guitar (thankfully we’ve already done the epiphany/Epiphone line), plugging it into his amp, manhandling same across to the doorway, dialling up Maximum Attack and blazing an ear-shattering D chord out of it. In the tight confines of the control room it was absolutely deafening; ears were ringing long after he’d let it echo to silence.

“Thanks for your attention.” He switched off and set the guitar down. “Next person to argue about MIDI samples gets this guitar up their arse. BIG END FIRST.”

Kretin opened his mouth to chastise McCarthy about his act of sonic bastardry, but McCarthy wasn’t to be interrupted. “Chris, shut the fuck up. You’ve wasted enough of our time as it is.”

As Kretin turned incandescent with speechless rage, I figured now would be a good time to chime in. “Sambo’s right. We don’t have time for this shit. Pick a setting and run with it. They both sound pretty fuckin' Purple to me.”

Kretin regained his powers of speech, and began to absolutely slate us for our pathetic work ethic, our lack of respect for his massive expertise, for the fact we’d be nothing without him, etcetera. I glanced at McCarthy and surrupticiously pointed a finger at a substantial roll of black gaffer tape near his feet. He nodded, and I moved in from Kretin’s six o’clock, grabbing one wrist, then the other and wrenching both behind his back. He kicked and struggled as he heard the rrrrip of McCarthy peeling off a generous strip of gaff. I held Kretin firmly by the forearms as McCarthy methodically bound Kretin’s wrists. Then I held him a headlock, while another strip was slapped across his mouth as a gag, while all the time he writhed like Peter Garrett dancing. Aghast and furious, he shouted muffled obscenities at us as we positioned a stool in the furthest corner of the control room, and patted the seat condescendingly for him to climb aboard. I’m not sure who was more shocked, him or the other boys. But we’d heard enough crap, and wasted enough time, to last us months.

The Duffer looked about to say something, but McCarthy hushed him with a casual wave of his roll of gaff. For once he remained silent, suitably chastened.

“Now, boys, it seems to me that we have one night left out of four to record this EP, or extended single, or album-ette, or whatever you want to call it. And that we’ve managed to record precisely two fifths of fuck all in the first three nights. We’ve spent far more time in this fucking control room wanking on about production values than we’ve actually spend out there in the studio producing any value. That about right?”

“Yeah,” Phil protested, “but what we have got, really sounds...”

“Shit,” I declared. “Flat, sterile and hollow, but mostly just shit.”

“Angus is right,” agreed McCarthy. “It’s got nothing. No guts, no balls… doesn’t even have the balls of Insert Title, which was done for about two bucks fifty. This is nothing like we sound like live, and we all know it. So there’s only one thing for it.” He pointed through the glass to the studio proper. “We get in there and play live.”

“But what about bleed?” Phil protested.

“Fuck ‘bleed’,” I declared, more angrily than I’d expected to be. “Bleed is good. Bleed proves you were actually in the same room as the other guys at the same time, rather than phoning in your performance from another fucking continent.”

Bleed, the anal-retentive audio engineer’s biggest nightmare (other than feedback) was where you could hear the guitar in the background of the drum track, and vice versa for everyone else, when everyone was playing live simultaneously. Recording all the parts in isolation, as we’d been doing, fixed this but was utterly neutering the sound. I reckoned there was a palpable change in the energy of the performance when we were all playing together, compared with sitting in the corner wearing headphones and bashing away all on our own.

McCarthy nodded; the string section were in agreement. “Besides, we’ve got four or five hours max to finish this off. Fucked if I’m staying here until three or four in the morning again, I’ve got to be compos mentis by ten tomorrow morning.”

“Important job at work?”

“Nah, coffee with total babe dance instructor I met the other day,” he said.

Gee, he slipped that in nice and casually, hey folks?

Phil set up the desk at a rough approximation of what he figured would be OK - we put him on a two minute limit to pick his settings, stop fiddling around and be done with it. Fiddling around was a serious problem for the Duffer. He’d once announced, in mixed company, that he couldn’t wait to get back to uni so he could fiddle around with little knobs; that to me sounded much more like something you’d get arrested for than McCarthy being troubled by overdeveloped fifteen year old girls in leotards. The rest of us tooled up in the studio, did our pre-launch checks, and most importantly of all, TURNED THE FUCK UP. The Duffer gave us the thumbs-up, set the tapes rolling on the eight-track, then vaulted into the studio, jumped into his drum stool and counted us into Gis A Recording Contract Ya Cheap Bastards. Never did find out whether the Hammond or the Farfisa sample got used, but it sounded suitably prog-rock, as intended.

We listened to the playback - it was rough, lazy and hairy-arsed, straight out of 1971. Perfect. Or at least nothing which Phil and Marty couldn’t clean up in post. We were so pleased with it, we even took Kretin’s gag off. He only had one word to say to us, after ripping off the tape. That word was Aaaarrrghhmyfuggenmouthaaarrrghhfaarrkyoufaarrkencarrrnnts. I hope I’ve spelt that correctly. By this method, in quick-fire fashion, we bashed out quite serviceable variants of several new songs - Gis A Recording Contract Ya Cheap Bastards, Ode to Joy from Lennox, Farmarama ’91, Don’t Tell Me Mum and The Last Spice Girl - plus the ‘definitive’ studio version (i.e. the only version we ever recorded in a studio) of our minor hit Learn To Swim With Harold Holt, as well as new crowd favourite (I Wanna Be) Angus Young.

Gis A Recording Contract Ya Cheap Bastards, as we’ve discussed, was ‘influenced’ (i.e. ripped off) by early ‘70s Purple and Sabbath, hence pre-dating Wolfmother by several years. Ode to Joy from Lennox, also foreshadowed previously, had been ‘storyboarded’ as the Gasket version of AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie, but turned out more like grubby, grotty garage punk. Farmarama ’91 was a Cruel Sea-esque instrumental call-and-response groove played out between Marty’s keys and McCarthy’s axe, named after the sticker on the back of the old man’s Subaru Brumby farm ute. Don’t Tell Me Mum was the definitive tale of Martin di Biagini’s nude run down Garrick St in Port Douglas at three in the morning back in July, which Phil had written and Marty had wished he hadn’t. Finally, The Last Spice Girl (full title Would The Last Spice Girl To Leave Please Turn Out The Lights) had first been brought into this world as an early-90s Chili Peppers-style jam at a recent gig, based around the intro riff from Wannabe by the Spice Girls, slowed down and funked up with some cool slap-bass (or as close to as Marty’s keyboard could produce) and some Seventies-porno wah-wah guitar work from yours truly, getting some use out of my new Seventies-porno wah-wah effects pedal. Phil and Marty spent a couple of days on turd-polishing duty, Kretin finally okayed the finished product (and was forced to admit it sounded fairly kick-arse) and that was that: the prototype of our first official studio recording, a seven-track EP named El Spurioso.

McCarthy outdid himself with his ‘concept’ for the cover art, a homage to Nirvana’s Nevermind, painstakingly recreated in the shallow end of the Lismore pool using a US dollar bill on a fishing hook and line, a cabbage patch doll with a cardboard cutout of John Howard’s face taped over its head, and a cheap disposable underwater camera. After hearing the ridiculous lengths he’d had to do to to get the perspectives and angles right of the doll relative to the floating currency, none of us had the heart to tell him that on the Nirvana original, the cash-on-a-hook was added digitally after the fact - if you look real close you can see the pixels. He did a bloody good job though, to the extent that some people, once the finished article eventually reached the general public, thought he’d just Photoshopped the original.

If only, McCarthy muttered. He’d suffered for his art, dammit. After tooling about underwater in the pool for half an afternoon, he’d ended up with swimmers’ ear.