1999

They say two thousand zero zero party over, oops, outta time
So tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine.
- The Artist Formerly And Now Probably Again Known As Prince, Unless He's Changed His Fucking Mind Again, 1982

Right that's enough of that smut. Let’s go back to that first Sydney recording trip, June ’99, the one where we scored the place in Maroubra as our southern operations base. We caught up with Richie Richardson again on the Saturday, the day after the UWS end-of-semester gig with Spiderbait, over lunch at a pub near his place in Surry Hills called the Trinity, a vaguely Irish themed pub that was set up like an old library inside - a pretty cool local, to be honest. He ashed his B&H, set aside his pint of Guinness, and cut to the chase.

“Disappointing, lads,” he began. Not among your all-time most encouraging starts. “Harold Holt. This is pretty average. That version you did back up home was better - and as we all know, home brew should never be better than proper stuff…”

“Well, I dunno about that…”

“You boys aren’t home brewers as well are you?” he queried dubiously. “Lord save us. Look - it was a first attempt - we’ll take it as such and move on. Angus Young. This is all over the place. I know you had two different production teams working on it, but the listener isn’t supposed to know that. Got to rise above that sort of thing. Now, straight off the bat, that’s the main aim of the recording sessions gone - we don’t have a saleable version of either of your two best singles, so no double-A side.”

I could see McCarthy bristling a bit - he hated being told where he was going wrong - but he knew Richie was right on this, even if he was as likely to admit it as he was to come out of the closet as Liberace Gay And Lovin’ It.

“In hindsight,” I offered, “we should have warmed up with something less critical, like an old cover - just to get the hang of the new surroundings before trying to record something as important.”

“Ideally, yeah,” noted Richie. “If studio time grew on trees. You’ve just got to get better at getting up to speed more quickly. Anyway, you know it, I know it, and you’ll do better next time, I have no doubts.” And, turning to McCarthy, he added, “And yes, Sam, before you say it - Cocksy is a fucking useless producer, I agree you were better off without him - but you can’t use that as an excuse. Excuses don’t pay studio bills - your advance does.”

McCarthy nodded, reluctantly.

“So that said - the new stuff. Fifteen - you haven’t quite captured the live essence here, it’s a bit bland, but great vocal on this one. Angus, you sound like the seediest, dodgiest bastard alive on this...”

“That’s because he is,” noted just about everyone who could respond in time.

“Dead Animal Product,” he grinned. “I love the title. The song almost stacks up against it, but not quite. Probably not strong enough to release as a single, even though this is your best effort in terms of recording quality out of the lot of them. Starting to get into your stride here - a bit late, but we’re getting there. And the last one, the Massive Attack cover…”

I almost felt like apologising for wasting studio time on an in-joke, but I didn’t want to admit that it was an in-joke. I figured Richie’s patience was wearing thin with our musical pisstakes (eg playing Layla at soundcheck at the Annandale back in March, given that he’d subsequently figured out there was more to McCarthy and Lena than we’d admitted at the time).

“I like it,” he said, surprising us. “I mean that. It’s really cool, and I love how you’ve captured that spur-of-the-moment inventiveness that your live show has. Then again, release that as a single and it’s a double-edged sword - covers get airplay, but they only make money for the original artists, not you. You get your performance royalty, which gets swallowed up by management fees, advance payback and so on, whereas the songwriting royalty goes straight to Massive Attack. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the sort of business plan I’d be basing my livelihood on for the long-term.”

We sat around, looking at the floor, the walls, anything inanimate. Richie had very politely and respectfully told us we’d just wasted two days of studio time. And we didn’t know how we could fix this. We couldn’t just pinch the old versions of Angus and Harry from El Spurioso, because Richie’s official position was that the recordings weren’t good enough for commercial release. Unofficially, we’d figured out that Richie didn’t want to touch them because the rights on these recordings were assigned to Seek, which would have meant some sort of profit-sharing or licensing deal with Kretin; whereas if we re-recorded those tracks now that we’d signed to Exocet, Kretin’s take would only reflect his role as manager of the band - that issue of performance royalty vs songwriting royalty again. Kept those suspicions to ourselves in Richie’s earshot, of course.

“OK, shop talk over,” Richie declared. “Let me get the beers in.”

“I’ll go,” I offered, taking the proffered twenty from him. Basically, I needed a walk to cheer myself up. And what better way than by flirting with the cute brunette behind the bar?

We were left to stew over our substandard studio showing for longer than we’d have liked. Sure, the live shows were going well - we wrapped up that Sydney trip with a show at the Hopetoun supporting You Am I and at the Annandale supporting Spiderbait again, who were probably sick of the sight of us - but we’d missed a trick with those two days at 301. Like an opening batsman ruminating on a first-innings duck and a scrappy second-dig dozen or so, we were left waiting for our next chance to get out in the middle to justify our existence before the selectors could start eyeing off other options. Problem was, that next chance didn't come for a long, long time. Before we could get back in the studio, we had a good few months of touring and gigging, as well as several weeks off-stage paying the bills and catching up on uni back on the North Coast.

The second annual Tour de Pants ran the length of the Queensland coast in July-August, but like most sequels it wasn’t really a patch on the original - the weather wasn’t as good, the venues were just a little less frentic (and hence not as entertaining), the wanker quotient was considerably higher, and the other bands Kretin had brought along knew each other well and were tight with each other, saw us as big-city sellout tossers (even though we’d only been Sydney-based all of fifteen minutes) and basically weren’t as much fun as last year’s tribe. There was also tension over the fact that this was a Seek tour, not an Exocet deal, as the subtle armwrestling between Kretin and Richie continued in the background.

We had a month and a half back on the North Coast after that, an opportunity for us to relax and unwind. Fat fuckin’ chance - we had so much shit to catch up on we were flat-strap the whole time. I even had a couple of weeks’ practical teaching at Richmond River High to get through. Again, McCarthy stayed in Sydney with Lena, bumming around the house between occasional scraps of casual work, his absence preventing us from keeping our hand in and our bank balance up with some hometown gigs. Frustratingly.

Then, back down to Sydney, but with only enough time to play a couple of quick shows, finally unpack our shit and sort out our new digs in the 'Bra (though Lena, Sam and Super Dave had done sterling service raiding second hand places and op shops for furniture and furnishings) and pack the FLANDGE CRUISER for a six-night September sortie to the south - Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, then a Fri-Sat-Sun run through Melbourne. Our first venture into Victoria. Oh yeah, and one other minor detail which might impact upon our enjoyment of the tour: we were supporting deusexmachina. Not just touring with them. Supporting them.

Needless to say, the prospect was deeply unpleasant. And that was just the prospect of listening to their fucking set every night, without actually having to engage with them on any sort of personal level. Richie expected us to be professional, to see it as all part of the learning experience - which it was. Through this experience we learned was the same lesson most of the rest of the Exocet stable had already learned - we didn’t want to tour with deuxexmachina because they were obnoxious, talentless arseclowns, with an obnoxious, artless fanbase.

In the end, we all developed our own methods for dealing with adversity. McCarthy withdrew within himself and basically sulked, in as manly way as you can foresee - not having Lena around didn’t help, of course. I preferred intimidation and violence, as in ‘Priddle, you pudgy cunt, if you fucking slag our set off on stage one more time, I’ll make you a whole lot less fuckin’ pretty and your Thai rentboy won’t find you attractive anymore’ (or variations thereon.) Phil tried his hand at hands-across-the-waters diplomacy - he got on reasonably well with their drummer, basically because they could sit around backstage watching legendary live set videos and pulling cones together ad infinitum - while Marty, like Sam, retreated to a Happy Place and just counted the hours until the end of the Sunday afternoon show at the Espy in St Kilda.

We got there, eventually.

“Cheers folks, we’ve been Flange Gasket,” I announced as our Espy set drew to a close, to reasonably smatterings of applause - whether because we were leaving or because someone down here actually appreciated our music, I’d given up trying to guess.

“Up next are deuxexmachina,” McCarthy added, his mind already faraway in that ramshackle house overlooking the northern end of Maroubra beach, his girl there waiting for him.

What the fuck kinda name is that? bellowed a wag in the audience.

I grinned. “Good question,” I nodded. “Uncle Sam, you’re the literary geniarse, can you enlighten us?”

“I believe it’s Latin, Andrew,” McCarthy noted with a hint of faux pompousity. “The God in the machine.”

“…So they’re a Christian band then?” I proposed.

“…I think so, yeah.”

Laughter. McCarthy started strumming Kumbaya, and then murdering the vocal part appallingly, to more laughter. Oh Lord, Kumbaya.

“Anyway folks, we’ll get out of your way, and leave you to the God squad… This is our last, it’s called I’d Be A Vegan But Dead Animal Product Tastes Fucken Tops. Though not on Fridays obviously because it’s a sin.”

So we played our last song, packed up (ignoring Brady Priddle’s attempt to make an issue of our labelling them Godbotherers), lugged out, and drove back to Sydney. Which all of a sudden, compared to this AFL-obsessed, rain-streaked, wanker-populated shithole, looked a bloody inviting place to spend some time. I was actually starting to enjoy living there, amazingly enough. Sun, surf and sex will do that to you. Even though I’d been on fairly meagre rations of all three over the winter and early Spring. Tour de Pants notwithstanding (having lived up to billing this time around.)

It was Tuesday when we were hauled into Richie’s office. Apparently, Priddle had lodged a formal written complaint, whatever the fuck that was, because we’d deliberately misled some bigshot Melbourne music reporter by claiming they were a Christian rock act. But how was it our fault that Mike Cross (aforementioned bigshot Melbourne music reporter for the Age) had been in the audience at the Espy when we'd mildly inferred deusexmachina might be religiously inclined? Or that he had run with it in his Monday column, doing impromptu dissections of their tortuously-written tripe and concluding their deliberately obtuse lyrics were really all about The Lord Our Saviour. Mike Cross, according to Mike Cross, had single-handedly cracked the great nascent enigma of the Melbourne rock scene. Mike Cross was taking the piss, sure, but he was doing it so delicately, so perversely, that you could almost buy into it. It was a beautifully crafted piece of journalism and it sent Priddle and co into apoplexy, whose mindset wasn’t helped by Richie’s initial response to Priddle’s tirade: what the hell was wrong with Christian rock? It sold by the shitload - a lot better than whatever it was that deusexmachina played. OK, maybe Richie didn’t express those exact sentiments, but he wasn’t overly sympathetic to Priddle’s hurt pride. He certainly directed Priddle to make no comment or denial whatsoever that would be seen as slagging off Christians or Christianity, because his band wasn’t in a position to be alienating any parts of their fanbase. Priddle, furious, conceded defeat. One-nil to the Gasket. And the start of one of the most infamous, persistent rumours in the industry.

Our fault, boss? Of course not! It was just a little joke, just a bit of on-stage banter. We didn’t even know Mike Cross, hadn’t even met him. If we had, we’d have shaken his hand and bought him a beer. After which maybe he'd have given us more of a writeup than just nailing us for murdering his beloved Massive Attack. Obviously he used it for guaranteed shagging music too.

Another couple of weekends in Sydney and surrounds, one in Newcastle - we always had good times in Newy - then back to the AFL-obsessed, rain-streaked, wanker-populated shithole. In Grand Final week. Oh my fucking lord. We thought the Vics’ prophensity to put AFL on the front, back and middle pages even through the height of the off-season was astonishing, but compared to being there the week of the Grand Final… fuck me.

Well, at least the place was lively.

Friday we played the Prince of Wales with Even, a fine and upstanding Melbourne act with some very elegant and melodic rock and roll tunes in their repertoire, even if their bassist Wally was as big an AFL-head as any other bastard in this town. The Martyescent bits of our set really complemented Even’s sound, the crowd were numerous and enthusiastic, the ales were cold and refreshing, and the night went rather bloody well, in truth. Our first decent show south of the Murray - and all we needed to do was to start the rumour that deusexmachina were God-botherers, such that they never wanted to bother with having us on their bill ever again. Oh yeah, and having former local Lena to chaperone us around helped, too. The girl had an eye for cool bars, and Melbourne, to its credit, did cool bars as well as anywhere in the land.

Saturday was AFL Grand Final day, which meant one thing: Bathurst was next week. “Who’s gunna win?” was the most common question fired at us that weekend; I reckoned Skaife and Lowndes were looking pretty good in the lead HRT entry, Murphy and Richards in the Kmart Commodore were dark horses, and the Fords could go fuck themselves, but apparently that wasn’t what they were asking about. We played Saturday night at a rugby-themed pub in Carlton, with Pommie backpackers and big Maori and Polynesian bros and cuzzies in All Blacks jerseys predominating; I was amazed such a thing existed as a rugby pub in Carlton, but was just as thankful to have some brief respite from the barrage of AFL. Sunday we played the Espy again, in the immediate aftermath of Melbourne’s hugely dubious NRL grand final win; completely bent and dodgy though the result might have been, it gave us an unexpectedly upbeat Sunday evening crowd to surf along with. Basil Fawlty didn’t mention the war; we didn’t mention the penalty try. Monday through Wednesday was hitting the streets doing promo stuff, then Thursday night we played Latrobe Uni with an up-and-coming Melbourne band called the Casanovas. They were even more straight-ahead four-on-the-floor rock and roll than we were - even though there was only three of them - think AC/DC and Cheap Trick having a drunken argument in a dingy blues bar with low ceilings. Suffice to say they complemented our sound a hell of a lot better than deusexmachina, and for that we liked 'em. Their set-opener Nasty and our Sketchy At Best were practically separated at birth.

Next night we were back in in our Sydney constituency playing low key gigs on the Friday and Saturday, as much as a means of recruiting mates and pissheads for our Inaugural SOD-Off Bathurst BBQ on the Sunday as anything. We had a good posse by now, based around McCarthy and Super Dave's solid cadre of uni mates, plus Lena and Beck's loopy arts crowd and our new mates from the band scene, who turned up at our gigs, brought beer to our BBQs, crashed on our couch and generally made for Good Times. We rarely only had as few as six under our rambling, shambling roof, what with the Jeff using our place as a crashpad for his increasingly regular trips down here to see Beck (the old Subie racked up some stupid miles in those days - we put him to good use as guitar tech and general dogsbody) as well as the constant flow of agreeable randoms surfing our couch. Was a damn fine household, SOD-Off, not at all harmed by our bohemian (bogan-hemian?) rock lifestyle.

Bathurst was a case in point. As per the tradition of previous years’ events at Chateau Dodgy, the first beers were cracked as the green lights flashed and the field got away at 10am. Six and a half hours of racing (and drinking) later, Murphy and Richards won, making me a genius, apparently, given I'd claimed it at our prediction cutoff at the end of lap one. I needed reminding of this by lap one-sixty-one as by that stage of proceedings I was slightly second-hand. Maybe third or fourth hand, in all honesty; next morning, to be fair, I was profoundly rancid. Being awoken shortly after 11am by about three dozen text messages arriving all at once (that piercing Nokia ‘message received’ tone doing stellar work again) didn’t really amuse.

Until I found out why - according to just about everyone we knew who wasn’t passed out inside the walls of this house, we’d just been played on Triple J.

This explained the next batch of messages which I received an hour later from the Jeff and seemingly the rest of the state of Queensland. Gotta love the Queenslanders and their aversion to daylight saving. At least their curtains don't fade. Of course, none of the band actually heard this mythical event for themselves, the national broadcast of the ancient El Spurioso version of (I Wanna Be) Angus Young - presumably Kingsmill had finally gotten around to listening to the copy we’d sent him 12 months ago - but we certainly heard about it. Later that week, returning from a Thursday night show at the Manning Bar at USyd with the J’s providing background music in the FLANDGE CRUISER, we got to hear it for ourselves. And went straight home to get very, very drunk in celebration.

All of a sudden, the last six months of frustration and fatigue made a whole lot of sense.

So by the time we saw the inside of a studio again in mid-October, (a) we’d forgotten what the inside of a studio looked like and (b) Richie was becoming very, very keen that we turn out an Exocet-release-ready version of Angus Young sometime soon. Say inside the next ten to fifteen minutes, if you can arrange it, lads… In fact, we only heard we were going into the studio when Richie turned up to our Sunday night show at the Excelsior - well, it was just down the street from his house in Surry Hills - and casually mentioned we were booked into 301 again as of 9am next morning. Get a good night’s rest, boys.

We weren’t too worried. OK, so that’s a lie. McCarthy was chewing his fingernails frenetically and Marty looked greener than Kermit and Bob Brown combined. But we were armed with a hell of a lot more weaponry than we'd even had in mid-year when we’d last laid anything down. Touring with big grown-up bands, learning from them and comparing ourselves against them, had taught us huge amounts. We’d learned something new every time we’d turned up to a gig. Not wanting to turn this into a name-dropping exercise, but in the space of the six month period since signing with Exocet we’d toured up and down the eastern seaboard with the likes of Spiderbait, Grinspoon, Regurgitator, TISM, the Fauves (check out the doco 15 Minutes To Rock which was made about them at the time - sums up the struggles of a touring rock band and the realities of the music business in a way I couldn’t possibly do justice to), Even, You Am I (everyone tours with them at some stage - it was almost like a rite of passage for a young band to tour with You Am I, like it was with the Hoodoo Gurus in the era before), Powderfinger, Custard, Eskimo Joe… OK, so this IS turning into a name-dropping exercise and I’ll pick them up again in a sec before someone trips over them, honest. But playing with and against these guys taught us shitloads - not only plenty about showmanship, songwriting, professionalism and giving the people what they want, but that… hey, we matched up pretty well to these guys, or at least the age-matched controls within the group. Seemingly, we had the chops, even if we were off-them on a semi-regular basis - something else we learned a lot about from the veterans on the tour.

Richie turned up at the studio even before we did, takeaway coffee in one hand, lit B&H in the other; he’d called in sick at work, and looked ill enough to carry it off. He felt we needed some level of responsible adult supervision in the building, given that we’d decided to use Phil, Marty and Macgyver as our production team once more - no fucking way were we using Cocksy again. But the sight of Richie pacing up and down outside the booth, lighting up, stubbing out, and lighting up again, disappearing down the street for more coffee and another pack of smokes, and generally looking as though he’d washed his jocks with new Itcho-Agitate laundry detergent (ask for it by name) and was thoroughly regretting it. As long as it was that he was regretting, not signing this bunch of yeehaas from the sticks and spending lots of lovely money on studio time for them. He didn’t want to interfere - he knew we needed to do this on our own - but just having him around was disconcerting enough.

We mentally blocked him out. Likewise the other vaguely disapproving faces in the building, the fatigue from a heavy weekend of gigging and travelling, and anything else that wasn’t immediately relevant to the task. It was 9am, Monday morning. Time to go to work. Plugs in, headphones on, amps cranked up to eleven (because it was one louder.) Task one: lay down a baseline version of Angus Young live-to-tape, then see what needed polishing or re-taking afterwards.

McCarthy closed his eyes, mentally filing throught the chord progression he needed to recall for this one. It wasn’t that hard, really. It was pretty similar to that of Good Times by the Easybeats, Rocks by Primal Scream, Shoot To Thrill by Acca Dacca and Kickstart My Heart by the ‘Crue. Adopt, adapt and improve, motto of the Round Table…

(I Wanna Be) Angus Young
Music and lyrics by Flange Gasket (McCarthy/Young)
Copyright Gasket Goo Publishing Emporium, 1998

The greatest rock guitarist? Tell me who’d you rather be
I gots my own opinions and I’ll tell you this for free
There’s some with more ability and some with greater cred
But I’d rather be the midget with the horns on top his head.

I wanna be Angus Young… He’s thunderstruck
I wanna be Angus Young… Half his friggin’ luck
I wanna be Angus Young… Rock guitarist, alpha male
I wanna be Angus Young… Though he only plays one scale.

An-gus! (Aah-aah-aah AAH aah-aah AAH AAH…)
An-gus! (Aah-aah-aah AAH aah-aah AAH AAH…)

Some say Hendrix was the greatest with his backward Strat in hand
He went out like Bon and Bonzo, they’d have made a decent band
And Jimmy’s work for Zeppelin sent pretenders down the crapper
But best forget the story of the groupie and the snapper.
The Stones go through guitarists like Ray Martin goes through rugs
Keef’s lucky to be breathing, well-preserved by all the drugs
And he really ain’t that skillful, gets shown up by Ronnie Wood
Despite his lack of Floaties Brian Jones would be as good.

I wanna be Angus Young… He’s the man in form
I wanna be Angus Young… Chicks dig the uniform
I wanna be Angus Young… He got drugs and sex for free
I wanna be Angus Young… Now he sticks to herbal tea.

An-gus Young (oy! oy! oy!)
An-gus Young (oy! oy! oy!)

(To the bridge, driver, and step on it)
No need to cry, no need to moan
I learned to swim with Brian Jones
No need to go and play the fool
I learned to swim in Brian Jones’ pool…

Now Van Halen had Eruption to demonstrate his cred
And a massive fuck-off mullet that was stapled to his head
Clapton, he had Layla, had the chops and could he thrash
Now he plays acoustic and just counts his piles of cash.
Ace Frehley? C’mon, really - all he played was glammed-up punk
The makeup was a gimmick, made him look just like a skunk
Jeff Beck no-one remembers, Satriani’s lost his hair
Ritchie Blackmore was a wanker, only Angus had the flair...

I wanna be Angus Young… Angus Young, he’s got the skills
I wanna be Angus Young… Angus Young, took a lot of pills
I wanna be Angus Young… Angus Young, played better on crack
I wanna be Angus Young… Angus Young, he’s back in black!


I’d often wondered what Angus Young (the real one, not this cheap knock-off) thought of this song. Particularly the assertion that he played better on crack. Or even just the assertion that he’d been on crack in the first place. Given that we never heard from his lawyers, I’m guessing he never actually heard it, which was just as well. It was a true Gasket coproduction: my riff, McCarthy’s lead, lyrics scrambled and bashed together between the pair of us over several beers, from an original idea by moi (i.e. slagging off as many famous axemen as possible). Over the years since we’d written it – it’d been the SCU band comp the previous year we’d debuted the song at - Marty had reinvented the bass part we’d come up with and improved it immensely; Phil’s drum part was pure metronomic thunder. The whole thing was unapologetic swaggering old-school rock; the glass in the booth shook as we crunched through our first take. A cacophony of noise and destruction, and then silence. Macgyver gave us the thumbs up, as the smoke cleared.

“OK, let’s play it back and play Spot The Obvious Mistake,” declared McCarthy.

One problem with that, though. There wasn’t one. Playing it back, it sounded fucking kick-arse. What more could we do? We looked at each other and at Macgyver and scratched our heads. We turned to Richie, who merely smiled (for the first time today) and reminded us this was our show, not his. Marty admitted he wasn’t happy with the way he’d played his bass part, but we convinced him it was fine. Phil talked about laying more drums over the top, or tinkering away with production, or overlaying the guitar part with another bit, but we managed to forcibly restrain him from doing a Pink Floyd ‘wall of sound’ job on our perfectly good rock song. In the end McCarthy volunteered to supplement his guitar part with a few little licks that tipped the hat to the Axeministers that were being saluted, as he occasionally liked to do when playing the track live - a quick bit of the Eruption tapping solo in behind the Van Halen reference, a bit of Hendrix engineered to fit that part of the song - which took far longer than recording the song in the first place. And then, once we’d done all that, Richie calmly pointed out that we’d need to get the rights to put all those bits (eg Eruption, Layla, Purple Haze, Satisfaction etc) into the song if we wanted to publish it as our own composition and release it for commercial gain. So we quietly dropped the idea, though McCarthy kept the borrowed ‘links’ for our live show - to the point where I ended up playing a composite of both our original lead and rhythm parts, and McCarthy was solely playing bits of other people’s songs over the top, somehow integrated seamlessly into one.

So two hours in and we had our ready-to-race version of (I Wanna Be) Angus Young. Another hour and we’d ripped out a solid rendition of Harold Holt - not picture-perfect, but nothing a few minutes on ProTools couldn’t fix, and certainly more rounded and professional than our SCU recordings. Mission accomplished. Which was just as well, Richie subsequently admitted - he’d only booked us in for the morning, banking on our ability to get the job done quickly (and hence cheaply). Front End Loader were due in here at one o’clock. Nice of you to mention it earlier, Rich.

He held up his part of the bargain by the speed with which Exocet turned that recording around into a saleable product. McCarthy ‘borrowed’ the software which the Drum Media’s graphic design team used to do the layout of the publication, and spent two days straight agonising over cover concepts; meanwhile Marty, Phil and Macgyver did post-production mixing and editing on the latest pair of recordings, as well as polishing Dead Animal Product and Protection Racket from the last lot of studio sessions for B-side duty. That evening, McCarthy’s final cover concept was unveiled: reminiscent of the animations from the Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV series, he’d put together a series of cut-outs of famous people in famous situations with Angus-style glowing red devil horns protruding from their heads, eg JFK with Nikita Khrushchev, Neil Armstrong on the moon, the Pope, Maggie Thatcher, Peter Brock, Captain James Cook, that photo of Norm Provan and Arthur Summons covered in mud at the end of that league grand final (as used for the NRL trophy), and most amusing of all, Keef Richards. Don't know how he got usage rights, I suspect he actually didn't. Sticking red devil horns on the Pope was the latest in a long line of blatant attempts on McCarthy’s part to attract attention and/or controversy; he was left rather disappointed this time when the Catholics failed to bite. The master copy was signed off and sent to Exocet’s Melbourne manufacturing subcontractors that Friday; it was pressed and ready for market within two weeks, complete with glossy inserts. Much better than inserting the bastards ourselves with rubber gloves (and less likely to generate double entendres).

Richie brought the first copy around to SOD-Off with a bottle of cheap bubbly, which we supplemented with a case of Tooheys Old. Here it was - (I Wanna Be) Angus Young, our first release for our first real record label. We weren’t sure whether it was actually a long single or a short EP, we weren’t sure whether the new versions of Angus and Harry were markedly superior to and/or would get played in preference to the El Spurioso ones, and we weren’t that sure about the cover art, on either legal or artistic grounds - though I did like the idea of Keef wanting to be Angus, probably just to get access to some younger, marginally less abused internal organs. But it was ours.

We were a bit nervous about it to be honest. So much of this was out of our control - Exocet’s promotions and distribution people (largely other small outfits under subcontract to Exocet) would be getting the thing into stores and onto radio playlists, whereas we’d previously done that ourselves, albeit piss-poorly. The main thing, at least from McCarthy’s perspective, was getting the new version played on Triple J instead of the old. For some reason he thought we’d failed if Triple J didn’t play the new tracks, and stuck with the old El Spurioso versions which occasionally got a spin late at night or in the depths of the mid-afternoon-siesta timeslot. No, I replied, we’ve failed if they don’t play us at all. The new version of Angus sounded way bigger and rocked way harder, but I didn’t see the old version as quite the massively heinous and embarrassing conglomeration of shite that he now did. Anyway, it was moot; Richie had a word to Kingsmill at the J’s, who he’d known for many a moon, and asked politely if the new single could be substituted into the Current Playlist in place of the old EP. No pressure whatsoever to play Angus any more than they were currently doing, of course... but if they would, just to use our New and Improved version rather than last year's model.

Apparently it worked. A Tuesday in early November, Paul and Mikey, just before eight in the morning. Prime time for radio exposure. Of course, the only reason I knew it was on was because my clock radio was set to 7.45 and blared the J’s at maximal voluminous in a forlorn attempt to try and get me out of bed. I sure as hell did so once I’d realised what was going on, to see if anyone else had picked up on the latest developments. Lena and McCarthy’s door was still closed, and what they were playing sounded more like Morcheeba than Triple J breakfast - evidently Massive Attack wasn’t doing it for them anymore. But Marty was up, and even had coffee on the brew as well as the J’s on the loungeroom stereo (at a respectful volume which took into consideration all of those who were still abed. Good lad.) His producer’s ear had also recognised the differences between the old and new version, sufficient to identify this as the new; I’d just heard them back-announce it as being our new single, rather than being off the EP. Either way, I proposed a toast, and we clinked coffee mugs in celebration. The day just got better when Richie phoned at half-eight to tell us the second and final announcement of acts for this year’s Homebake festival had been released.

“And you’re telling this because there’s some cool bands which we might want to go and see?” I queried with half a grin.

“What if I said that wasn’t why I was mentioning it?” replied Richie with a full-sized grin you could hear down the phone.

In vague disbelief of what we’d heard, we jumped on the Homebake website as soon as we got off the phone to Richie (only had dial-up internet in those days, arrgh begorrah bollocks) to try and get a second opinion. Because everything you read on the internet is true, right?

Homebake 1999 (Sydney and Gold Coast): Josh Abrahams & Amiel, Area 7, The Avalanches, Dirty Three, Frenzal Rhomb, Gerling, Grinspoon, iOTA, Jebediah, Alex Lloyd, Powderfinger, Resin Dogs, Silverchair, Something for Kate, sonicanimation, Shihad. Gold Coast Only: Custard, Gota Cola, Not From There, Pretty Violet Stain, Rollerball, Soma Rasa, Sunk Loto, Screamfeeder, The Whitlams. Sydney Only: 28 Days, 51 Monday, 78 Saab, Big Heavy Stuff, Bluebottle Kiss, Deadstar, Del-Emmas, Flange Gasket, Killers on the Loose, The Monarchs, The Porkers, Pound System, Rumanastone.

I looked at Marty and a big grin split my face. Unless that was a massively large typo…

McCarthy, who’d appeared out of nowhere in a old T-shirt and boxers, squinted at the screen through tired eyes.

“Bugger,” he said. “Would have liked to play the Gold Coast too.”

The Domain, on the first Saturday in December. Thirty-odd Australian bands (including a couple of lost Kiwis. Shihad, I'm looking at you.) Four stages. Six beer tents. This would be Homebake then. Fuckin' TOPS.

We were second cab off the rank on the third-largest stage - not the main stage or the Big Top, but the smaller one over the back near the Art Gallery; fellow Sydneysiders 78 Saab were first up and The Monarchs were to follow. The Monarchs were a high-octane rock act led by former Gurus lead axe Brad Shepherd and populated entirely by long-term Aussie rock personnel (eg You Am I’s backup live guitarist on second axe and the future manager of the Vines and Jet on bass) - we were sharing the stage with Australian rock royalty here. I was really hanging out to see them play, which took my mind off our own set; Marty and Macgyver (who’d astonishingly accepted our invitation to join our shambolic road crew on a permanent basis, on the proviso his offsider Capt’n Snooze could sail with us as well - they joined the Jeff when he was in town, and Super Dave when he wasn't, on General Shit-Kicking and Head-Cracking Detail) were nervous about the large amount of audio bleed from the other stages - a stiff westerly wasn’t helping, blowing their spillover noise over to us. Phil would have had similar concerns had he not been four cones under par for the morning. Meanwhile McCarthy had that vaguely demonic look to him, as if he was either (a) about to rip the top off a motherfucker of a show, or (b) about to confess to some heinous practical joke, such as having supplemented Phil’s weed with a fragrant pot pourri of parsley, pubic hair and desiccated dogshit.

Midday. A crowd - not a huge one, but not bad for an hour since the gates opened - bathed in dappled sunshine, well-lubricated courtesy the beer tent in the background, lightly seeded with familiar faces from the local scene (many of them very seedy indeed) and keen ‘n’ ready for some Rawwwwkk. And let there be no questioning of the following simple and unequivocal FACT: Flange Gasket, on our big-time festival debut, were MORE than happy to oblige. Fuelled on adrenalin and freebie Uncle Teds (slightly before the sun was over the yardarm) we laid down a big, stonking, thermonuclear explosion of a rock and roll show that shook the trees and had the kids writhing and wobbling all over the place. Buggered if I can remember much of the set itself - like all the good ones it’s a blur, and that has nothing, I repeat NOTHING, to do with the number of beers we consumed before, during or after - but according to the setlist which I kept as a souvenir (nostalgic bastard ain’t I) we played everything you’d expect us to, including one or two new tracks we’d written for the new album, such as the rather Spiderbait-esque three-chord fuzz-thrash Never Cut Goey With Ajax. Told you we’d learned a lot from the other bands we’d played with, including appropriating their stylistic approaches. We were a bit like Regurgitator in that respect, who’ve always been the bowerbirds of the Australian music scene.

The highlight of the show, of course, was our Big Finish - like it was most nights - our new single. Just like the first ‘festival’ we’d ever played, the SCU band comp just 15 months ago, we cranked Angus Young with evangelical fervour, like it was the national anthem of the Republic of Flange Gasket. Which it was.

We’d come a long way, I considered afterwards, as we watched The Monarchs carve it up from side of stage, having lugged our shit back to the truck and finished our day’s work (before lunchtime, thanks very much.) I glanced over to McCarthy, Lena by his side, the pair of them enjoying a refreshing beverage… well a slightly warm bottle of Uncle Ted. Hey, at least we were allowed glass backstage, it was cans or nuffink out the front where the rest of the Gasket Nation was going epically apeshit. He grinned and we clinked bottles.

“You thinking what I am, brother?” I queried.

“Yeah,” he remarked, indicating The Monarchs on stage, as Brad Shepherd went absolutely OFF (white leather pants, spangly jacket - don’t exactly know how he pulled it off, but he did, and McCarthy had already begun stealing half his moves.) “These bastards need to get something on CD so I can go out and buy it, pronto.”

Not sure what was the best part of that day. Our first festival set, our first time getting Actual Glassware from a festival bar, me somehow persuading the supremely hot A&R girl from Festival Mushroom that her evening would be most favourably enriched by spending it hanging off the bedhead in my room reliving her adolescent gymnastics career, or Priddle from deusexmachina mouthing off in the press about the blatant Sydney bias of the corrupt stinking malfeasant Homebake organisers preventing his band from getting to play there, thus guaranteeing his band would, to this day, be permanently disinvited from playing Homebake.

The firsts continued - from our first playing on Triple J, to our first festival show, to our first Live At The Wireless set, just before Christmas. OK, so it wasn’t a full-scale Monday primetime LATW slot (rather the Australian Music Show late on Wednesday nights) but it was pretty bloody big for us. We’d heard all the bands we loved and respected being played on the J’s, many of whom had been captured by their live music team, so to be invited into Studio 227 at Ultimo to put a few tracks down live-to-tape with their renown production team was a monumental experience. We didn’t completely fuck it up either, which was a bonus. McCarthy had an attack of either the nerves or the squirts (not sure which, but he was a bit off-colour on the day) so our intra-band banter between tunes wasn’t up to our usual vaudevillian standards, but the tunes themselves passed muster. We'd played a live set on Triple J. Fuck me. They were giving Angus Young a reasonable nudge, to be fair and someone reckoned the stoners on the late night show on Triple M had started cranking it too.

The Gasket Touring Missions were growing further and farther afield, too - now as far west as Adelaide supporting Superjesus at the Old Lion, getting sung off the stage and drunk under the table by the awesomest rock chick in the history thereof, Sarah McLeod. (Don't even ask. I wasn't a shit show in hell. She had taste and discernment, apparently. Bloody private schoolgirls.) To the south, Melbourne was looking up. (Geographically it was obliged to.) Sydney backed its own, we had people in this town. Brisvegas and the Goldie howled the house down when we showed. Newy and the Gong, particularly the unis, looked after us well. The provinces loved it rural, and rural was how we brought it.

Finally, to cap off an astonishing 1999, there was a frantic week of shows through our second (third?) home of south-east Queensland, culminating in a memorable New Years’ gig in Brisbane - the infamous ‘Millennium Buggery’ show when all involved were fully expecting the gig to get shut down at midnight after all the power fell off the grid and the world was shunted back to 1900. That was probably the best-case scenario, compared to the various end-of-the-world scenarios various loony millennium cults were pedalling in the media. We were playing the Plough Inn on Southbank, with the river and the city lights behind us, a massive teeming crowd of funseekers not giving two good shits whether the world was about to end or otherwise. We played a couple of sets before midnight, then one after the massive fireworks display at about 12.30.

“So, not dead yet?” I queried the audience after we’d discarded our coldies (literally, Carlton Colds, in plastic bottles) we remounted the stage. A deafening affirmative cheer. “Ah well. It’s only 10.30 in Perth - still hope yet.”

McCarthy quipped, “Wasn’t aware the end of the world ran on WA time…”

We finished sometime near two when the noise abatement people intervened. Then it was time to get properly drunk, until the sun rose over the first day of the new millennium - and yeah we knew it wasn’t really the new millennium but we didn’t really give a rat’s. What we knew was that new millennium or not, the new year was going to be our year. The Noughties, the Zeros, the Cecils (as in Cecil B. De Mille... deux mille... two thousand... yeah I told McCarthy it was too fucking tryhard but did he listen?) - the new decade was going to be our decade. All starting on the morning of January 1, 2000. Now that we weren't gonna die hideously of planes falling on our heads and shit.

The only problem was that the morning of January 1, 2000 dawned grey and heavily overcast over Southbank, buggering up my mission to see the first sunrise of 2000, and hence kick off the whole Gasket-decade world domination lark. But then, a little window of clarity over the Telstra tower on Kangaroo Point, and as if ordained from above, the sun ascended and appeared in that window.

“Tops,” I declared. “We can go home to bed now.”

As we did. Except that I kinda went home to bed with Lauren, with whom I’d somehow managed to hook up. OK, so she’d come along to the show with Dr Cletus and about fifty of our closest friends from Brisvegas with the express purpose of hooking up. I’d not seen her for a few years; maybe I’d changed, but she hadn’t. She might have changed her look (disturbingly Sarah McLeod rock-chick actually, which didn't help given my monumental unrequited crush on the former), might have thrown in her arts degree to run Jeans West at Westfield Indro, might even have stopped opening twist-tops on her forearms and burping the national anthem before Wallabies games, but she was still Lauren. And Lauren, under that fresh, thinly applied coat of nail polish, was still a very, very dirty little girl. I knew what I was getting into. And yet I got into it. And then we had breakfast and got into it some more, until the neighbours complained about the noise and the coffee table broke.

So, yeah, I’m not proud. But then again, I’m not repentant.