2001

Lookee y'all, 2001
Now you're gonna get some real fun
Sure enough, the place to be
Goddamn brand-new century
Get it, then I'll make it clear
All you ever see starts here.
- The Monarchs, 2001 (funnily enough)

Where were we up to?
Ah yeah. The Skank. Everyone loves a bit of Skank.

May 2001 saw the release of Skank Factor Nine, Flange Gasket’s third album and their creative and popular zenith. The album itself briefly reached number one on the album charts, and the boys managed to squeeze a top five chart single out of The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less. Which also managed a mildly impressive first place in the following Australia Day’s Hottest 100, with three other Gasket songs embedded in the top fifty. Add to that a bunch of ARIAs, their debut Big Day Out apperance, and a first ever US tour bookended by the legendary South by Southwest music festival in Austin…

OK, ‘US tour’ is laying it on a little thick. We were there barely a week and played a couple of West Coast shows to large rounds of indifference on the way to SXSW in March, which went much more pleasantly - largely through our instantaneous buddying-up with Kiwi kindred spirits Hayabusa, after bill-sharing with them at a tiny club in Austin one night. Though I can't recommend sharing too many bills with Hayabusa - certainly not bar ones anyway.

But Lena was right - the year of the Skank was something else. Which in itself was kind of remarkable, this was 2001 we were talking about, which for a lot of people was a horrible anus, or whatever it was that the Queen had that time (presumably piles). Even though shit like September 11 did its best to suck the fun out of the room - luckily we had the chance to visit BEFORE the beardy nutter shitfight, and we noticed massive fuck-off attitudinal shifts the second time we visited the US a year or so later, making the place very unpleasant to visit compared to our euphoric pre-9/11 SXSW sortie - we were still surging on the up-and-up. In a bizarre way it might even have helped us. People didn’t want heavy intellectual shit to deal with. They wanted our poorly thought-out rubbish, and we were happy to deliver it.

The day of the 2001 Hottest 100, i.e. Australia Day 2002 - well it kinda still counted as 2001 - we were playing the Sydney Big Day Out at the new Showgrounds out at Homebush. In yet another of our Greatest Moments EVAAARRRR (each rapidly being topped by the ones to follow) we’d been invited to play the East Coast leg of the BDO tour, slotted into the late-afternoon Big Top schedule between our Homebake '99 colleagues The Monarchs (who had eventually managed to fulfil McCarthy’s wishes and get into the studio to get their live sound onto tape - the resultant album Make Yer Own Fun got cranked round-the-clock on the SOD-Off stereo) and The White Stripes ‘before they were famous’.

Backstage, just prior to going on, deja vu tapped me on the shoulder. Not literally. That would be weird. Instead I had a random mobile phone thrust into my paw by one of our crew. These days our crew, who used to chase us to gigs in the big old FLANDGE CRUISER-with-trailer while we kicked back in promo-deal Swedish luxury, numbered three (well, three and a half) - Macgyver (audio engineer), Capt’n Snooze (a bit of everything), The Jeff (part-time guitar tech, full-time pisshead) and Super Dave (as little as he could get away with) - and it was the Capt’n, looking desperately out of breath and in need of a beer, who’d raced up to me, planted the Nokia in my hand then raced off on another do-or-die last-minute mission. As observed previously, Capt’n Snooze was called Capt’n Snooze because he (a) looked like Rod Quantock when he was doing the Capt’n Snooze TV ads and (b) operated at very low throttle percentages on account of being almost permanently stoned. If the Capt’n was panicking and/or moving at pace, something was up.

At some stage in all this I must have remembered to actually answer the phone.

“This is Angus,” I said. “What can I do you for?”

“Angus Young from Flange Gasket?” said a very put-upon female voice.

“Yup.”

“Thank Christ,” she said. Not often girls were THAT pleased to talk with me. Something WAS up. “Can you hold?”

“Not really, I’m meant to be playing a gig at the Big Day Out in about two minutes…” But I was talking to hold music. Decent hold music - it was Powderfinger, one of their near-ubiquitous ballads, but at least it was better than The Girl From Ipanema.

“You there mate?” A vaguely familiar voice, which I couldn’t place.

“I’m here.”

“Good. We’ll back announce this one, and then we’ll cross to you - try and sound like you don’t know what’s going on.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Good answer,” said the voice. Which I'd finally figured out was Adam Spencer. As in, Adam Spencer and Wil Anderson’s weekday breakfast show on Triple J. Except in the afternoon. On a public holiday. Hmmm.

Burnt Fanny and the Powdered Fungus finished singing about it not being their kind of scene for these days to have turned out nothing like they had planned, or something. The enthusiastic back-announcement came: Powderfinger with Ubiquitous Ballad #172-C. Number two in Triple J’s Hottest 100. Jesus fucking Christ on an inflatable trike, I reckon I know what’s going on here.

“So, we have Angus from Flange Gasket on the line… Angus, what are you up to at the moment?”

“As it so happens, I’m frantically being signalled to put down the phone and get my arse onstage to play our set at the Sydney BDO. Yourself?”

“Ah well we’re announcing the number one song from this year’s Triple J Hottest 100… which is…”

“If it’s those fuckin' choad warriors from deusexmachina, you can fuck right off,” I said. ‘Choad warrior’ was another Super Dave-ism, inspired by the US title of Mad Max. Which inspired a girlie giggle-squeal from Anderson and a reminder from Spencer that we were live to air…

“Ah. Sorry. Won’t say fuck then.”

“…Congratulations, your song The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less has been voted number 1 in this year's Triple J Hottest 100!”

“That’s… really… good!!!” I realised how limited my vocabulary was when you took all the swear words out. “Hey, if you like, it’s our set opener so we can play it live for you in about 30 seconds, but only if you’re really well behaved, Australia. I’ll just leave the phone on the speaker stack. I guarantee it’ll sound absolutely bloody awful.”

The four songs ‘inside 50’ were Meaning of Life, Farken Champion Maaate, Stupid People Shouldn’t Breed and The Record Company Reckons They’ll Play This On Commercial Radio If We Say Funk Instead Of Fuck - seriously, put swearing into a song and Triple J will play the arse off it. The year before we’d had a couple in the back half of the countdown with Cock Rock Will Never Die, Title Track and Smorgasboard Of Crumpet, but we’d moved dramatically north since then.

So in hindsight, Lena enquired in ‘interviewer mode’ across the rickety plastic outdoor table at the Duffer’s, which meant more to us - the chart success or the Triple J acclaim?

“I don’t know,” Phil replied, “Hottest 100 results were a great ego boost…”

“…But sales charts actually meant people were handing over actual money in shops to hear our recordings,” I finished, and he nodded his agreement. “Which meant we could afford things like the rent and food and beer and stuff.”

“That’s bollocks and you know it,” she replied. “Friday night, you were going on about being Exocet’s first ever Hottest 100 winner - you can’t tell me that doesn’t count as big. I was there, Angus. I remember.” So when I say something she doesn’t agree with, she was there, but otherwise she’s not part of the story. Riiiight. Got it.

“Look, all of it was awesome,” I declared. “I'm not splitting it. We were all Triple J diehards, so the Hottest 100 was like our own people, our own generation cheering for us. The ARIAs were the industry backing us - and you’re not an Aussie band unless you’ve had one year where you’ve won a bucket of awards at the ARIAs, then lost at least one at the afterparty in some kind of punching-on fiasco. [Actually I think McCarthy lost it down the back of the couch at some plusho nightclub lounge. To suggest he was off-chops at the time would infer he'd had any chops to begin with that evening.] But the chart success - that was the lunatics taking over the asylum. What I liked about the chart success - other than the riches ‘n’ the bitches of course,” I added tongue-in-cheek, “was that amongst all that total shite, all that hyper-produced commercial dance rubbish like Barbie Girl and the fuckin’ Vengaboys, there we were, one huge raised middle finger mocking the whole lot of them. That was really cool… Jesus Christ, do I sound like a sad old fart reminiscing about the old days, or what?”



Skank Factor Nine
Released May 2001 (Exocet)

1. The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less
2. Why Aren’t We Drunk Yet
3. Stupid People Shouldn’t Breed
4. Non Compous Mentus
5. Licenced To Phil
6. Doctor Cletus I Presume
7. Boring As Batshit
8. For Christ's Sake, What Blind Bastard Designed The Front Of The New WRX
9. Farken Champion Maaate
10. The Record Company Reckons They’ll Play This On Commercial Radio If We Say Funk Instead Of Fuck
11. Yee Haw Billy Bob
12. Brown Mullet Rides Again
13. Gis Our Bunnies Back Murdoch You Seppo Bastard
14. All Nighter For A Donut
15. Who Let Phil Get Control Of The Car Stereo Again

Skank Factor Nine was an album that crossed over into a lot of different areas - more than any of the others, this was an album that saw airplay across the whole spectrum of radio styles and stations. The rock stations like Triple M got stuck into the garage punk stylings of Stupid People Shouldn’t Breed and Why Aren't We Drunk Yet, while mainstream pop stations put The Meaning Of Life on high rotation. My favourite tracks tended to be the ones that were most fun to play live, though, and Phil agreed. On Skank, it was definitely Yee Haw Billy-Bob, which was the most frantic rockabilly-psychobilly-thrashfest ever attempted by anyone other than The Living End. I recall bollocksing that up on a regular basis. Very difficult to get right, particularly the hundred mile an hour Duelling Banjos ending but when we did, it was good fun.

By early 2002, in the afterglow of nicking Powderfinger’s Hottest 100 crown from under their very noses, Flange Gasket were soaring. The band had been in existence three and a bit years, had released three moderately-to-hugely successful albums, enjoyed saturation airplay of their singles, and like their heroes Spinal Tap had toured ‘the world and elsewhere’ - well, Australia, New Zealand and bits of the US, anyway. They had the run of the whole house, so to speak. How did they cope with it all? And where could they go next?

First of all, they coped very easily. It was still a huge joke to them. Being a Famous Rock Band was supposedly a huge hassle and the recipe for eternal misery, disaffection and alienation… but they felt like they were pulling off some enormous scam on everyone and getting away with it. The money wasn't affecting them much - after Exocet had taken its fair share and Kurtin had taken his unfair one (or so it was beginning to appear, given that he was still top-slicing his percentage for doing increasing amounts of bugger-all), it wasn't really the ridiculous sum you'd think a multiple-platinum selling band would score. At least it meant they weren’t living on Mi-Goreng noodles and Tasman Bitter any more, in the run-down house near Maroubra beach which formed the international headquarters of Flange Gasket Inc.

“Ah, so you remember the patented Flange Gasket Weight Watchers Program as well…”

Actually it wasn’t Flange Gasket Inc, it was Flange Gasket Pty Ltd - we became a proprietory-limited company, as it was the most sensible way to handle the band’s collective finances - and the company eventually ended up buying SOD-Off off the developers who’d finally given up on their evil scheme to make Maroubra beach’s northern approaches even uglier than they were now.

And second of all, they went where they could only go from there - overseas. Abscessive Compulsive, Flange Gasket's #4 record (with apologies to You Am I), was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Bob Rock (Metallica, Veruca Salt et al). The culture shock compared to recording in the garage at Chateau Dodgy was as obvious as a McCarthy rhyming couplet punchline. The irony was of course that all that lovely record company money spent on Big Studio and Big Producer didn't make the album any more popular in Australia than their early garage-band efforts. [To be fair, it’d have been difficult to top Selfy, More Arse and the Skank given how well the things had sold, and continued to sell even after we released Absessive Compulsive.] The other irony was that the lovely record company money didn’t come out of Exocet’s pockets. After an audacious swoop by multinational label Intercom in late February of 2002, reportedly offering twice the amount which Exocet could afford, Flange Gasket left the independents and joined the big leagues.

“Presumably Richie’s none too happy about the reference to not being part of the ‘big leagues’, considering this is supposed to be an Exocet release, yeah?” I offered.

She replied with a sour smile, indicating I wasn't too far from the truth. “Richie has some issues, and we're working through them.”

That Intercom deal was something else, though. As near as I can tell, they illicitly managed to get their hands on a copy of Richie's final, heavily squeezed, more-than-he-could-really-afford Exocet offer, multiplied all the numbers by two, and made it their offer. The deal was astonishing, in its structure as much as its size - the only thing I can compare it to would be the sorts of American sports contracts you hear about on ESPN Sportscenter - signing bonuses, guaranteed money, incentive payment structures, endorsement tie-ins (largely for companies from the same parent company umbrella as Intercom)… the figures were mind-bending. Here we were, twenty-five or thereabouts, still living in a sharehouse, being offered more money than God to do what we would have done for free - and had pretty much been doing, setting aside the various contra-deals which had furnished us with housing, transport, equipment and so on. Even the meat tray that turned up weekly from the local butchers was a quid pro quo deal. Good snags from that joint too. Grilled up brilliantly.

To this day, I can still see Richie Richardson’s face when we told him we were leaving, for real, for definite, do not pass go, do not collect $200. He thought all along we were taking the piss - he really didn’t think we’d go, figured we were just trying to shake a better deal out of him, really had no idea about how much resource ‘the Septics’ (as he dismissively called them, even though everyone we dealt with at Intercom was local) were putting into getting us on board. I can still see his face. It kinda... fell off, sank bottom-first into his desk. He was stunned, just had the wind taken out of him completely.

In truth, he and McCarthy hadn’t been getting on terribly well - all the attention was beginning to get to McCarthy, he didn’t like Richie’s controlling influence, and his ego was expanding to fit the available space (and beyond) to the point where Lena was increasingly having difficulty containing his prima donna tendencies - so McCarthy wasn’t particularly gentle in breaking the news, but I felt a bit lousy. Scratch that, I felt a lot lousy. I liked Richie. He’d been fucking good to us, always treated us well, if a little paternalistic, and he’d done us a massive favour in signing us in the first place. But twice as much money is twice as much money. Which is double. I done Maths at uni, hey.

To prevent the Intercom deal being ratified, Exocet belatedly tried to enforce our contractual obligation for the last two albums of our deal under the option that had been taken up in 2000, but in the end they backed down, unwilling to get into a legal punchup with Intercom’s frighteningly slick legal squadron. Instead, with our blessing (or at least general indifference) Exocet made up the difference by releasing a live album, Highway to Lithgow (from the mid-2001 tour of the same name through rural and regional NSW, culminating in a show at Lithgow Workers), and an ‘assorted leftovers’ album made up of B-sides, rarities and excerpts from our first couple of EPs, appropriately named after the first song Flange Gasket had ever put on tape - Sketchy At Best. The plans to release these two had been afoot long before the Intercom deal went through, so at least we’d had input into those releases. Usually, when you leave a record label, they dig up all the crap out of the back catalogue which you thought you’d had buried in the vault marked ‘Never to be released’, and try and make a swift buck out of it at the expense of your new label, so it could have been far, far worse. Still, it made Richie's bleating and whinging from 1998 about the unsaleability of our original SCU recordings seem pretty ironic in hindsight. Particularly when what we referred to as the 'Offcuts and Shite' record was his label's biggest seller for the year.



Highway to Lithgow
Released March 2002 (Exocet)
Recorded July 2001, Lithgow Workers Club

1. Title Track
2. (I Wanna Be) Angus Young
3. Yee Haw Billy Bob
4. Learn To Swim With Harold Holt
5. Blip On The Gaydar
6. Sketchy At Best
7. The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less
8. Stupid People Shouldn’t Breed
9. Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees
10. Max Tractor
11. Seventies Porno Music
12. Drum Phil
13. Rocky 5 Man United 2
14. Farken Champion Maaate
15. It’s Not Technically Plagiarism If Led Zep Ripped It Off Someone Else Before We Ripped It Off Them
    
    
    

Sketchy At Best
Released March 2002 (Exocet)

B-sides and rarities
1. Fifteen’ll Get You Twenty
2. Crib Notes To Jane Austen’s Ponce And Pretentiousness
3. Less Thinkin’ More Drinkin’
4. (I’d Be A Vegan But) Dead Animal Product Tastes Fucken Tops

El Spurioso
Recorded at Southern Cross University studios, Lismore, September 1998
5. Gis A Recording Contract Ya Cheap Bastards
6. Don’t Tell Me Mum
7. Farmarama ’91
8. Ode to Joy from Lennox
9. Would The Last Spice Girl To Leave Please Turn Out The Lights

Insert Title Here
Recorded live at Chateau Dodgy, Lismore, April 1998
10. Sketchy At Best
11. Learn To Swim With Harold Holt
12. Nirvana In Pyjamas
13. Git The Led Out
14. I Love To Have A Beer With Just About Anyone

“Kretin agitated strongly for the Intercom deal, didn’t he? He figured (a) it would get us out from under the Richie Richardson yoke which he saw as ‘choking our creative development’…”

“Whereas he’d always used a very hands-off management style, hey?” Phil laughed.

I grinned. “And of course (b) it would make us, and particularly him, a great big shitstack of money. Ironic of course that he never got to see any of it…”

That was because within days of signing the Intercom contract, we’d dispensed with his services - well, actually we just declined to sign the usual annual management contract renewal that was sorted out each year at around that time, and told him to tell his fuckin' story walkin' pal. Despite the conclusion everyone at the time and probably you reading this right now immediately jumped to, it really had nothing to do with personalities - he still didn't have one, he was as massive a pain in the arse as he’d always been, which hadn’t stopped us continuing to employ him in the past. Basically we didn’t need Kretin any more, particularly now that we’d joined Intercom, who’d provided us with a three-person A&R team pretty much just for us who handled absolutely everything we could have wanted from a management setup. Our A&R manager, who coordinated our bookings, recordings and all our day-to-day business was a slimy fuck, but at least he was being a slimy fuck for us rather than against us, and we also had our own legal advisor capable of providing relatively independent counsel (obviously Intercom knew what they were getting into by signing us). They even provided an accountant who took on the task of unfucking the Flange Gasket Pty Ltd accounts, which had been run by our previous CFO (McCarthy’s accounting mate from college, Gorgeous George Valinsky a.k.a. the King of Seed) reasonably well, but shall we say, on the fringes of legality in terms of certain taxation arrangements and adherence to company law.

Exocet’s double release of Highway to Lithgow and Sketchy At Best in March obliged Intercom to delay the release of Abscessive Compulsive until August of 2002. As noted by Lena, we’d been star-struck by having legendary rock producer (he’s so rock it’s his name dammit) Bob Rock associated with our recording. And I do mean ‘associated’, I think we met him twice, once when we got there and once when we were leaving. Even though the AbCom liner notes clearly say ‘Produced by Bob Rock’, his minions did everything. The guy we did get on what Team Rock called the 'Fringe Gasket project' was a total yes-man, agreeing absolutely with whatever we wanted to do, even if it was in complete disagreeance with what we’d wanted to do yesterday. At least we couldn't accuse the record company of trying to impose a particular sound or approach on us, which had been my main concern when we’d inked the contract.

To be honest a firmer, less indulgent hand wouldn’t have hurt us - by now Phil and Marty had grown tired of the guitar-led blood-and-thunder approach of our previous outings, and wanted a more textured, layered sound. When they said that, I had images of the bastard sounding like Dark Side of the Moon or something equally ponderously prog-rock - but in the end it still sounded like us, pretty much, just with huge helpings of production gravy generously ladled over our meat-and-potatoes approach.

Hmmm. Anyone else keen for a feed?



Abscessive Compulsive
Released August 2002 (Intercom)

1. Radio Friendly Chick Song
2. Max Tractor
3. Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees
4. Son Of Brown Mullet
5. Oh Thank You Captain Obvious
6. Sing, Sing Or Show Us Your Ring
7. Sup G (Word Up N Peace Out 2 Mah Homies Remix)
8. The Naked Chef Has An Unfortunate Accident With Some Hot Cooking Oil And Rather Belatedly Resolves To Be Much Less Naked In Future
9. This Is Not A Ballad
10. Freedorm Experimental Jazz Ejaculation In D
11. Selleys PolyPhilla
12. We’re A Serious Rock Band - We Know FOUR Chords
13. When Enemas Attack
14. Ode To Joy From Lennox
    
15. Upbeat Dance Number To Get The Girls In The Front Row Bouncing Up And Down
16. Put Some Pants On And Make Yourself Scarce

Of course, the point of all this spit and polish was aimed at penetrating overseas markets, and by that I really mean the US market. Unfortunately nobody thought to tell McCarthy, who kept saturating his lyrics with Australian references, such as Nimbin Weed and Ode To Joy From Lennox, which we finally let him put on a proper album (notwithstanding the old, dodgy version which had turned up on the Exocet 'Offcuts and Shite' release), fulfilling his expectations of 'our own Whole Lotta Rosie', but getting us sued again. Not by ‘Joy from Lennox’ - names changed to protect the guilty, of course - but another car company who I won't name who objected to the line 'Oh What A Feeling, Joy Odour'. They weren’t the only ones to object to it, naturally, but their lawyers objected longest and loudest. We already had the contra-deal with Volvo, so after hooning around in the likes of that turbo V70R wagon there was no way we’d be prepared to tool around in a Camry - and the ‘Oh What A Feeling’ people were more interested in relieving us of wads of folding rather than scoring promotional coups. Another reason why the royalty cheques weren't as large as would have been expected was being sued over Hey Hey We’re the Drunkees - not the song itself (which was one of my favourite all-time Gasket efforts), but the T-shirt which went along with it and which was a little too close to the original Monkees’ logo for the liking of their legal protectors.

Bit of a pity, because I liked the album. Even the instrumentals, which I figured people usually skipped over. Freeform Experimental Jazz Ejaculation was fun to play, leaping time signatures in a single bound in a way that would have even stumped Soundgarden or Faith No More. Though the title of the other one really pissed off the record company. It wasn't offensive, just too long to fit on the CD itself without winding it around the circumference a bunch of times. We present for your listening pleasure track eight, The Naked Chef Has An Unfortunate Accident With Some Hot Cooking Oil And Somewhat Belatedly Resolves To Be Much Less Naked In Future…

Personally, my abiding memory of the Abscessions, as we called our recording sessions in LA and the tours surrounding that, was when we were putting together our big intended US market rocketship, our first US single which was to be released in May, ahead of the album on which it would be track one. It was to be called Radio Friendly Chick Song. We took ages over it, a week and a half just on one song (we’d taken that long to record the Skank in its entirety up in Brisvegas, in an old warehouse in the Valley) and we absolutely drowned that bastard in irony. Surely the Americans were going to get this shit. So we've got these self-deprecating lyrics in tandem with this really catchy pop-rock number that we mostly blamed Marty for, though we all chipped in with pretty floating harmonies and ideas for stuff - and what happens? Top ten on the US singles chart. We're billed as the next Savage Garden, for fuck's sake. Rows and rows of teenage girls up the front of our concerts squealing gaily as we dirged through these lyrics about how this song was about absolutely bugger-all of worth or importance, but because it had a catchy major chord progression and was produced to within an inch of its life, it was going to get its ring played off by the cynical twunts at MTV. McCarthy almost blew a valve train when he found out the almighty American consumer had gone out and bought the record in droves and not got the joke. But he recovered in time to join us in remixing the intended final album track Upbeat Dance Number To Get The Girls In The Front Row Bouncing Up And Down, so it actually was an upbeat dance number and not a thrash-metal roarfest. Killed the irony in that, but it got the job done...

If anyone else noticed a trend towards less irony and piss-taking and more of Gimme Some Money, as Spinal Tap would have put it, then noone mentioned it at the time. We were too busy getting paid, getting drunk and getting laid, as the Dandy Warhols would have put it.

Inside two months the US market had chewed us up and spat us out. The same way they've done to a bunch of Australian bands before us, and the same way they'd do again to ones after us. By the end of our North American sojourn we’d found ourselves doing dance remixes of songs like Sing, Sing Or Show Us Your Ring - though we struck an inadvertent blow for irony when we remixed This Is Not A Ballad as a ballad - and things were getting to the point where live shows were a joke because they were packing thousands of MTV Total Request Live style teenage girls into these stadium-style venues (OK, basketball courts and the like - I’m hardly going to claim we were packing out football or baseball stadia, we weren’t doing THAT well) and their fucking screaming was drowning out our foldback. And we started fighting over solos and CD track orders and sizes of hotel rooms, stuff we said we'd never do. McCarthy was even quoted in some kiddies' music mag - Smash Hits or something, something we'd probably not even use as emergency bum fodder - that since I was lead vocalist (which I wasn't) he was lead guitarist (which he wasn't.)

So we're sitting in a bar in New York getting fucking hammered and it all starts coming out. You've been doing this. Bollocks. Have so. Have not. Suck my mule's codpiece. Anyway, the bartender turfed us out once we started throwing stuff at each other, and we're out in the cold of NYC in an allegedly unseasonable April snowstorm, ten thousand miles from home, pissed off with some of our oldest mates, hiding out from a platoon of teenage stalkers far too young to legally play with, even if our girlfriends, partners or Phil’s God didn't find out - and Marty pipes up with, “You know, I think if we're not very careful, we might be in grave danger of actually starting to take ourselves seriously…”

Naturally, I responded in the only way I believed a sensible, mature adult could or should respond. I gathered up the biggest handful of snow I could manage, moulded it into a ball, and sconed him with it. Well, it was on. Instant blizzard, snowballs flying everywhere, these hysterical white-blotched silhouettes stumbing about drunkenly in the mist. You could only tell who the person you'd sighted actually was by their laughter. Bloody Phil. I'd know that donkey hee-haw anyone. Get this up ya. Soon enough, drunken and exhausted, we all collapsed into a snowdrift that was probably someone's car, and burst into an off-colour and badly out-of-tune rendition of Don't Eat The Yellow Snow by Frank Zappa. We'd done half the Zappa catalogue, a bunch of AC/DC's fouler numbers, a few old rugby songs and the Greatest Shits of Derek and Clive (“Jump, you fucker jump... jump into this here blanket what we are holding, and you will be all right…”) by the time the friendly NYPD showed up. They let us off with a warning (to be in key next time), and we were on a flight to Sydney before the 'Flange Gasket In Drunken Rampage' headlines (in very, very small print) even broke, resolving never to tour North America again. Which pissed Intercom off no end, but whether or not stupid Americans bought our albums wasn't of a lot of concern to us at the time.

Back home, we plundered through a major centres tour of Australasia in support of AbCom through July-August, then went for a lie down, heading up to Sheraton Mirage at Port Douglas for a hearty round of doing bugger-all to the power of less, like a belated sequel to the first couple of Tours de Pants except without playing any gigs, or staying in anything other than five-star hyper-luxury. Flange Gasket needed a break, badly - this was the downside of our frenetic schedule of touring, recording, releasing, rehearsing, touring some more. The whole band went up, including our various partners and hangers-on: McCarthy and Lena were still together, though the strain was starting to show. Jeff and Rebecca were there, though Beck was pregnant and you could tell that this really wasn’t their scene any more; before too long Jeff would tender his resignation to concentrate on the farm and his new family, rather than following us lot of wankers around trying to keep our guitars in tune and our egos in check. Phil was perpetually single (not that he wasn’t getting any; more than often he went home from gigs with female company in tow, but like clockwork his Christian guilt would eviscerate him in the morning and he’d break it off straight away - the relationship I mean, not anything else) so he and Capt’n Snooze just lay around by the pool discreetly smoking rollies. Macgyver had stayed home with his wife, as he bloody well should have. Meanwhile I was currently dating the future face of Australian Fashion Week, and Marty was doing it with Madonna…

OK, that’s going to need some explanation.