Good times

Gonna have a good time tonight
Rock ‘n’ roll music gonna play all night.
C’mon baby it won’t take long
Only take a minute just to sing my song.
- Easybeats, 1968

“Come on,” Beck demanded, with the single-minded persistence of a three year old who didn’t agree that it was bedtime. She kept tugging at my arm. “Come and have a dance, they’re starting the last set.”

“Dance with your husband,” I said, shooing her away. “The grownups are having a discussion.” The grownups were myself, Dave and Andrea’s husband Tim, McCarthy’s love rival in a previous life, who’d just arrived after getting the kids to bed. We had next to nothing to discuss, having next to nothing in common, but it was better than me making a further arse of myself talking to either of their wives.

“Jeff’s a little busy,” she reminded me. “You’re the best I can do at short notice. Like you’ve never heard that from a girl before…”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, sister,” I said. “Go shake your booty with Lena, it’ll give the rest of us something to watch. May even draw a crowd…”

“You’re so crass,” she pouted. “I’m not your friend anymore.” Spend your days hanging out with little kids and see if you don't up with the same mindset.

Anyway, there was enough of a teeming mass on the floor as it was, they were doing well. Didn’t need rent-a-crowd ring-ins to supplement the audience, in my opinion. Even so, Andrea appeared and wrestled Tim into the throng, just as the Jeff chimed into the intro from Day Tripper to open the closing set. Sounded more like the Hendrix-at-the-BBC version than the Beatles original, I would have told Lena, had she not been out the front, loyally shaking her groove thang. She danced like I did: infrequently and only under duress. Thing was though, she could actually dance, as could Beck, who was a dance teacher, for God’s sake. Historically, I could only kick it with a bit of a lead guitarist’s strut, and even then I needed a prop to carry it off, like perhaps a guitar. Looking forward, my bridal waltz with Bethany was likely to be a box-step cuddle set to music. More importantly, I still couldn’t figure out whether it was supposed to be ‘Day Tripper… she’s a big teaser’ or ‘she’s a prickteaser’. I could have sworn it was the latter, but that was probably just the company I kept. The song ran out before a definitive ruling could be made either way.

“Cheers,” declared Jeff, in his usual understated way. A big bunch of people you don’t know personally (well, mostly) have just gone Woooooo!!! and applauded your last three minutes’ work, and the best the Jeff could come up with was “Cheers.” Yeah good. And then they annoyed their audience (OK, just me) by playing that craphole song from that gormless teenybopper MTV reality show with the stupid lyrics - Forever young, I wanna be forever young, do you wanna be forever, forever young, forever young. (They were up all night coming up with those lyrics.) I'm gonna go out on a limb and have a guess the song’s called Forever Young. Just a wild stab in the dark. Melodically it was a dirge and lyrically it was cretinous, and they were only playing it for the benefit of the gormless teenybopper eejits in the crowd, of which there were next to fuck-all. And it so didn’t belong as track two, final set. Far too downbeat, for Christ’s sake. Momentum killer. Even Kretin could have told you that. Covers Bands 101. Did I have to do all the thinking for everyone around here?

“That was Forever Young,” back-announced Jen.

“As is our guitarist,” Jack pointed out, in possibly the most stilted piece of intra-band banter ever heard.

“That’s right, Jack. Forever Jeff Young, ladies and gentlemen.”

The Jeff performed a mock stage bow to much love from the audience. “I prefer Forever Malcolm Young,” he added.

“Don’t reference obscure Frenzal Rhomb albums without proper warning,” Jen admonished him.

“Sorry,” he replied.

“What about Angus Young?” she mused. Uh-oh. “Actually folks, we have Angus Young in the audience tonight…”

Christ, Jen, I’d rather you didn’t.

“No, not the real one,” declared the Jeff. “We’d get sued for false advertising. Nah, it’s just my dodgy brother Andrew. You may remember him from such local musical groups as Flange Gasket. Angus, get off your arse and say hello to the nice people.”

Not a chance, I thought, as rows of eyes burned into me. Get a fucking dog up ya. I quietly sipped my beer, like an old drunk in front of the TAB screens in the main bar.

“Ah well,” Jen said. “Don’t worry folks, Angus has promised to get up later and do a number with us,” she announced, to a disturbingly large cheer. These people would cheer anything. Fucking cretins.

“When did you agree to that?” Dave asked.

“I haven’t,” I muttered. “Your wife has a lot to answer for.”

“Good, so it’s not just me who things so,” he quipped.

They were saving their most upbeat, populist numbers for the last set, as they should have been - re-inventions of Jackson Five disco funk, sing-along thrashes like Calypso by Spiderbait, swaggering rockers like Powderfinger’s On My Mind. Plus something that sounded really cool in a kick-arse garage punk vein, which someone told me was a recent single from our old mates Hayabusa. And something that sounded like the combined works of Zeppelin, Purple and Sabbath distilled into a three minute edited highlights package, which I presumed to be Wolfmother.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned. To find my personal space being invaded by Lena, Rebecca and Andrea, surrounding me like Mafia heavies.

“Mr Young,” began Lena, “we’ve come for you.”

“Nice to hear my technique is still up to scratch,” I replied, “but have to decline, I’m getting married in March.”

My crassness wasn’t getting me off the hook, though. I was given an ultimatum. Either get my arse out on the dancefloor and gyrate like a moron… or get my arse up on stage and sing the nice people a song. I considered my options, and chose the former. I can’t dance. (Nor can I talk. Only thing about me is the way that I walk.)

I was marched around to the side of stage by my captors, and presented to the Jeff, who was swigging from a bottle of water as Jen and Jack strung things out with witty audience banter, including listing the three best reasons why they weren’t going to play Khe Sahn that night. My favourite was always ‘Sorry, we don’t play ballads.’

“I see you haff seen sense und given yourself up, Meester Bond,” he said in a truly dodgy Cherman accent. Either that or Pakistani. “Resistance ist futile.”

“How many left?” I asked, wearily. I figured wearily sounded better than scared-as-fuck-edly, so I hid one with the other.

“Just the one. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you. Anything particular you want to do?”

“Run?” I suggested.

“By Pacifier or by Spiderbait?” Lena asked, tongue in cheek. Smartarse.

“No, by Frenzal Rhomb,” I replied tersely, deciding to really test the lad's knowledge of obscure Frenzal recordings.

“Let’s see…” recalled Jeff. “I’m not a coward I’ve got sense, when it comes to self defence… I’d rather leave the scene than fight, and you can try and you just might, you can succeed to make me bleed… daant daa daa daant… RUN!”

Oh yeah, that was right. ACME used to do a lot of early Frenzal. Thanks Jeff.

There was no time for further stalling tactics. Jeff dragged me onstage and planted me in front of his mike, to an appreciative roar from the well-sozzled audience (I’m telling you, this lot would cheer a parking ticket.) I felt naked up here without a guitar - both as a prop, and as something to hide behind. What the hell are lead singers supposed to do with their hands? Now I knew why Liam Gallagher from Oasis always used to pull that stupid pose where he’d link his arms way behind his back and lean forward into the mike like a demented Olympic speed-skater. I went the Phil Jamieson option: grab hold of the bastard and throttle it with both mitts.

“Thanks folks, this is most, um, unexpected. Spam Filter have one more song…” Booo! “And I’m going to sing it…” Hooray! “Uh, you were supposed to boo there. Missed your cue… never mind...”

Care to revist that most-stilted-banter-ever thing, Angus?

At which point Jen asked whether I’d like to stop padding and tell the lovely people what we were going to play. “Telling me would probably be an idea, too.”

“Certainly, Jen. Any folks remember Led Zeppelin?” Hurrah, again. “Anyone? They were an early Wolfmother covers band, I’m told... Anyway, as scientific studies have shown the more obscure the last song a band plays, the less likely they are to be asked for an encore, this is a very obscure old Led Zeppelin blues called The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair…”

Jeff looked at me like I’d just said, “Hey Jeff, I’m very gay, please call me a taxi to Brokeback Mountain,” i.e. vaguely horrified. I put my hand over the mike and told him it was the Moby Dick riff, or near enough, played as a 12 bar blues progression. It wasn’t that which had troubled him, but he forged on regardless. Jen collared me as Jeff cranked into the riff, pursued by Phil and Jack.

“Angus… what’s going on?” she said carefully.

“Remember that U2 live version of Helter Skelter?” She looked at me like I was from Roswell. “You know… ‘Charlie Manson stole this song from the Beatles, now we’re stealing it back…’”

“…Yeah?”

“Let’s just say, Airlie Beach stole this song from me,” I said. “Now I’m stealing it back.”

She thought about that for a moment, not that we really had a moment to think. And a broad smile spread across her face. “You go, boy.”

I grabbed the mike, and declared that the girl I loved had long, black wavy hair. And then a bunch of ensuing blues rubbish in line with Robert Plant’s original comments, stuff about going back to my baby, ah said ah would not lie, never saw that sweet woman for five long years gone by, etc. Meanwhile, Jen Bailey shook her nice round ass like a good girl should, in a professional context such as this at least. And Jeff channelled Jimmy Page as well as one could ever expect. The Duffer, for his part, was probably just disappointed to hear ‘Moby Dick’ mentioned without any prospect of him being let loose for a preposterous drum solo.

At least, that’s what happened in my little momentary daydream. In which I had guts, bravery and/or balls; in which turn-of-the-century-vintage swashbuckling Angus Young was air-dropped onto the stage, instead of the washed-up thirty-something relic who’d been dragged blinking into the spotlight.

Let’s try that again from where Jen politely asks what the hell we were actually going to play.

I didn’t suggest The Girl I Love Etc. Instead I said let’s play Kick Out The Jams, the old MC5 proto-punk standard, because it was the shortest, simplest, stupidest riff I could think of. Surely we couldn’t fuck that up. Surely. And yet I still managed to fuck it up lyrics-wise – the only responsibility I actually had - by swapping randomly between the MC5 and the Presidents versions almost line-by-line because I couldn’t remember either properly, but I guess noone noticed, or cared, as the band crashed through the Big Rock Ending and I curled up with humiliation. Can I go home now please?

Crowd says no. Crowd says one more. Crowd says still time before curfew, and venue agree. You people are scum. You people deserve Cherry Pie by Warrant, that’s what you deserve. But I’m better than that.

And why are you guys looking at me like I know what we should play next?

“Whatever,” I suggested helpfully.

“You start,” the Jeff said, handing me his guitar. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was overly excited with the idea of his antisocial recluse of a brother finally re-entering society, and had decided he wanted his band to never get another gig ever again, it would seem.

“What does that thing do?” I asked him, hoping he’d get the point. He thought it was a very good joke. I’d show him. Unfortunately.

So here I was, well past my bedtime, on a sweaty stage in front of a bunch of strangers, hundreds of miles from home, with a hangover, and my brother’s expensive, unfamiliar guitar hanging around my neck. Over the anticipatory din of the audience he was barking into my ear some details of how he’d tuned it, which would have made sense to me had I been paying attention, or could remember how to tune a guitar. Do I even remember how to play a guitar? Pretty sure. In my new job it was a good emergency reserve plan if called upon as casual cover for last minute teaching absences, particularly at primary schools – you could spin ‘singalong time’ out for quite a decent swag of a morning while you figured out what to do with the rest of the day.

I tried a few chords. A, E, B. That’ll do. The opening chords of Good Times. An emergency reserve plan in itself: one chorus, two repeated verses, plenty of sing-along schtick for the crowd and the rest of the band to carry the song with. The last respite of a dying covers band, maybe, but it was going to save me here. I hoped.

Gonna have a good time tonight
Rock ‘n’ roll music gonna play all night.
C’mon baby it won’t take long
Only take a minute just to sing my song.

I fucking hope so anyway.

It began, it progressed. I didn’t fuck anything up. The Jeff, who’d produced another guitar – presumably a spare in case the Les Paul became Les than optimal (sorry) – was dispatched on Solo Duty after the second chorus, and returned unscathed. I felt a little less self-conscious the second time through, leaning a bit more heavily into some of the vocal call-and-response with Jen. But we stumbled out of the repeated run, everyone thinking I was going to launch into a duck-walking, bar-vaulting, McCarthy-esque solo, and me thinking Big Rock Ending, Thank You Good Night, I’m Off To Bed. I regathered it and limped into a solo that wouldn’t have scared rookie Guitar Hero players, but it got us from A to B (via E, and G, and a couple of other chords). Or from the bridge back to the chorus.

Except Jen had been having a conspiratorial word in Jeff’s ear off-mike during my solo (for want of a more accurate term to describe it) and Jeff had declared, “Why not?” and laughed. Then, as he was supposed to be joining me in reactivating the riff from the chorus, he punched into another riff, not dissimilar but definitely not the same. That riff that was somewhere between Rocks, Shoot To Thrill, Good Times and Kickstart My Heart. That one which underpinned my previous band’s theme song. My previous life’s theme song.

Don’t do this to me, mate.

At least I wasn’t called upon to do much other than keep playing what I was playing, while Jeff overlaid his overdriven riffage on top of the Easybeats’ progression, pointing out once and for all just how fucking derivative McCarthy and I had been when we’d written it; and Jen howled about wanting to be Angus Young, guitar hero/alpha male. “I wanna be Angus Young…”

“Although he only plays one scale?” I suggested, not exactly unprompted.

She carried it well, though. And Jeff even peeled off some of those ‘borrowed’ fills that McCarthy had slotted into our live version, as well as cranking out another very ‘Angus’ sounding solo (the real one, not me) over the top of the ‘victory lap’ run through the chorus progression. He’s got the skills; took a lot of pills; played better on smack; he’s back in black. Although his last album sounded a bit tired.

Thank you good night.

And an embarrassingly large roar, my part of which I’d only earned by reputation, not by performance, and didn’t deserve. I’d lived off my wits, off the capacities of ancient synapses that hadn’t fired in anger for years. It hadn’t been conscious effort that had rescued me, just long term muscle memory.

Next thing I knew, I was standing in a near-empty room squinting into the unnecessarily bright house lights and some guy who’d taken possession of my vocal and motor functions was discussing with the others how well the finale had gone, i.e. not very. He was correctly pointing out that I had been utterly, utterly shit and everyone else was wrongly assuming he was just being self-deprecating.

“Fuck off, you were fine. Now put it away, rock star, and put your back into shifting some of this shit would you?”

Thanks for your support. Jen put an arm around me and said how thrilled she was that I’d come on stage and played with them, and how great it’d turned out, but that just left me starting to develop another stupid crush on her, and I wondered where Dave was, and whether he was watching. And lady, you might think you want to be Angus Young, but that’s biologically unlikely. And as for me, I think I’m better off as a casual school teacher.

Farms are a good place to do bugger-all, if you can get away with it. I’d managed to do so this morning, sleeping off my second hangover in two days, at least until I was set upon by a crack team of insurgents hell-bent on terminating my peace and quiet with extreme prejudice. That would be young Claire and Josh, egged on by their irresponsible father. Evidently Jeff was spending his Saturday morning looking after the little ‘uns while Beck headed into Lismore to do the shopping, and had figured that sending everyone in to beat up on Uncle Andrew was a great form of entertainment. Come outside and play, Uncle Andrew!

I scowled at Jeff with bleary eyes and a look that said ‘One day, mate, you will pay for this.’

“What are we going to play?” I asked.

Josh had a bit of a think. Josh was the ringleader, at six years old; Claire was four.

“Aussie Rules!” he declared confidently.

I looked at Jeff, as if to ask ‘What the hell are you teaching these kids, for Christ’s sake?’

He winced. “Look, he saw it on TV last weekend, and it’s his new favourite sport… I think he liked the idea of getting a point just for having a go and not missing by much.”

“Okay,” I said wearily, “lets go! What teams are we playing for?”

“The Swannies!” said Josh, and Claire agreed. Oh good. We’re training them to be chardy-sipping bandwagoneers already. Presumably this also had something to do with them sharing a colour scheme with Jeff’s beloved St George-Dapto Dragons.

“I only play for the Rabbitohs,” I said.

“They’re not a Aussie Rules team!” challenged Josh, racing off to find his football.

“They’re not a NRL side either,” deadpanned their father.

“How many comps have your lot won since 1980, Jeffrey?” I muttered as we headed outside into the painfully dazzling sunlight.

“Same number as yours,” he replied.

“Exactly.” I was happy to call that a victory: being just as shit as the other guy.

I’d slept in a T-shirt and an old pair of boardshorts which Beck had dug out of the ‘Too Many Pies’ section of Jeff’s wardrobe (or so he called it). Any more of this and I’d start to have body-image issues. This was the minor issue arising from not actually bringing a change of clothes with me on this half-arsed mission. Where my clothes of the previous day had ended up was a mystery, solved by finding them drying on the line in the backyard, freshly laundered. Thank the Lord for Mrs Rebecca Young and her maternal tendencies. “Not everyone’s been in bed all morning,” the Jeff had quipped.

So we ran around madly kicking the footy around - unsurprisingly enough, a kid-sized Dragons supporters’ Steeden - and pretended to be Swans players. I did my usual running commentary for the kids, trying to remember any names I knew of who actually played for the Swans, or any AFL players full stop. Most of them probably dated from the ‘05 premiership side or earlier, and had retired long ago. Lena was watching from the verandah, but I didn’t notice her until terminal dehydration set in and I had to venture off for a glass of water.

“You’ll make a great father one day,” she suggested with a smirk.

“Fuck off,” I suggested in turn. I returned from the kitchen to find Josh enthusiastically telling Auntie Lena that Uncle Andrew knew everything about sports because he watched it on TV all the time instead of going outside and playing like they did.

“Hey,” she said, “I’m heading over to Phil’s place later to talk to him about the band - did you want to tag along?”

“Look…” I scratched my head. “I really don’t know. Surely me being there is going to affect what gets talked about - you’d get a better interview without me being there, surely?”

“Don’t call me Shirley,” she replied. “To be honest, I was hoping you’d come. I’m not expecting his recollection to be that accurate…” She left that hang. “Having you around to jog his memory would be much appreciated. We can play bad cop, worse cop. And besides, I haven’t really finished interrogating you either.”

“Look, I’ll need a shower, some breakfast… a coffee… and I’m buggered if I’m wearing Jeff’s clothes so that lot needs to dry…”

“Angus,” she replied patiently, “this is the Duffer we’re talking about. If he’s out of bed before midday, I’ll personally hand-wash your clothes for the next month.”

“Whatever gets you excited, girl,” I said.

She pulled a face. “So there’s plenty of time for you to go out and win the Brownlow,” she added, slapping me on the back and pushing me back into the field of play.

“Fucking Victorians,” I muttered.

“The correct answer,” she began, “when I say ‘Angus, you’ll make a great father one day,’ is ‘Yes Lena, I will, and I’m very much looking forward to it.’” She was driving, because we’d belatedly realised I wasn’t down as a nominated driver on her rental policy, and all shit could have occurred had I planted the device into the shrubbery. Not to mention Extreme Hangover II: The Revenge, now screening at selected locations, namely the inside of my head. Those after-show beers back at Jeff’s had been very poorly thought-out. “Bethany wants kids, surely?”

“I thought you were Shirley?” I said. It was a tired old joke, but I was a tired old man. “Yeah, I think she’d like that. But not this week, so no pressure. She’s still young, still wants to further her career… What about you?”

“I’m not the story,” she maintained, which was her way of saying ‘Don’t remind me I’m 32 and childless, you insensitive bastard.’

“How is Bethany the story?” I responded, a little tensely. “She’s not relevant to the band at all.”

“Not for the liner notes,” she admitted, “but I was vaguely thinking about mentioning it in the profile article I was kinda putting together in my head to go with… that the band might have gone to hell but at least you’d found happiness. Let’s face it, it’s not a happy ending for too many of you so far. At least let me marry you off to a gorgeous blonde Pilates instructor in the final act.”

“You’re really focusing on this gorgeous-blonde-Pilates-instructor thing, aren’t you?”

I could see her point though. Along with the liner note history which Greg Richardson had contracted her to compile, she’d intended to put together an article outlining the last days of Flange Gasket and her ‘Whatever Happened To…’ interviews with the members thereof, potentially for submission to her old employers Rolling Stone (now they were back up and running in Straya as an offshoot of ACP) or similar. It didn’t look good for a happy ending. So far, we had myself, hiding out on an island with PTSD; Marty di Biagini, successful solo artist but apparently now so middle of the road he needed lines painted on him, and still presumably being run by remote control by his surrogate mother Ms Cohen-Lewis; Sam McCarthy, MIA; and Phil Duff, wasted and washed-up. Then again, tilt it sideways and we have Marty, an acclaimed success by any measure (commercial, critical, financial or otherwise); the Duffer, running his own studio like he always wanted to do; me, living on Straddie, gorgeous blonde Pilates instructor and all; and McCarthy… well as long as he wasn’t dead, you could put some kind of positive spin on his being nowhere in particular.

“How did you meet?” Still with the blonde Pilates instructor.

“Like I said, it was a work thing,” I replied. “I was teaching at the high school, so was she. We hit it off. End of story.”

“Come on, Angus. You’ve got to give me more than that…”

“Not if it’s going to end up in fucking print, thanks very much,” I replied.

“Oh, Angus… you don’t seriously think I’d do that, do you? How long have we known each other?”

“And how long has it been since we last saw each other?” I countered. “What I know about you, Lena, is that you don’t do anything without some motivation behind it. Your motivation for being here is to generate column inches. The end.”

A silence fell over the car. I’d overstepped the mark there. No-ball.

“Look, just forget I said anything,” she said.

We drove in silence the rest of the way to the Duffer’s place, up on the ridge overlooking Byron, just around the corner and down the road from Firstlight. He’d moved there around the same time I’d bought the place at Point Lookout. Seemingly, we’d all diversified into real estate after signing with Intercom. I wondered if he was having similar problems to me trying to hang onto his aforementioned real estate portfolio, given that he was now making considerably less than he was when he’d signed the deeds to the place. Judging by the rundown, overgrown look of the place, it seemed that the general maintenance budget had long since been diverted to mortgage repayments. I remembered his place as being nestled in among the bush in true Byron-hippie fashion; now the bush hid the place completely, and you could barely make out the faded psychedelic paint scheme of the place even from the driveway. He still had ocean views, so long as he was prepared to climb into the rainforest canopy to get them.

The place was a sty, but there was no change there; he’d always been a keen disciple of the ‘Entropy’ school of organisation. I wondered if a woman’s touch had been anywhere near the place in months, and recalled the Jeff’s comments of late the previous night (or early this morning, to be correct): he seems to collect other lost souls. Women with drug or drinking problems, with abusive partners, with depression or psychosis, or combinations of the above. Maybe they made him feel less fucked-up by comparison.

The Duffer appeared from out the back and regarded us with his usual warm, faraway smile. “G’day,” he said. He always reminded me of Peter Russell Clarke when he said that - I kept half-expecting him to follow it up with ‘Where’s the cheese?’ or at the very least a barrage of salty sailor talk. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you guys roll up, I was having a bit of a kip. Bit too early in the morning for me I’m afraid.”

“Phil, it’s one-thirty in the afternoon.”

"Can't be that late," he scratched his head, "only just knocked off me breakfast bong. Still, if you say so... now, what was I doing again?"

"Inviting us in?"

"Oh, yeah. Just go on through to the balcony," he directed, pointing to the kitchen. "Anything to drink?"

Lena and I stepped very lightly through the debris and offcuts that littered the loungeroom - broken drumsticks, empty bottles, discarded audio and computer gear, full ashtrays and the like. The smell of freshly expended Smoko hung damply in the air. There’d been a time when he’d preferred the more refined chemical stimulants available in the city, but the rural music life had its own stimulants of choice, and he was working to a budget now. Fresh air was obtained by manhandling the scungy glass balcony doors along their mostly-seized roller tracks and squeezing out onto the fairly precarious looking balcony. Structurally unsound perhaps, but it did afford ‘ocean glimpses’ through the canopy down across Byron Bay.

"Anything to drink?" he asked again, having forgotten whether we’d answered or not.

"Oh, only if you're having something," we replied politely.

"Fair enough," he nodded, and instantly produced three schooner glasses brimming with ouzo and Coke, the Duffer's tipple of choice for as long as I could remember. To say we were a little taken aback would have been an understatement. But a free drink was a free drink, on the job or not. "What brings you to my humble abode?"

“Ah Phil, you remember last night when we organised to come over and talk about the band for the liner notes for this best-of album Greg Richardson is releasing?” She paused, hoping the mention of this likely-to-be-touchy subject matter wouldn't turn our host against her. Then she glanced up, to see Phil slapping his empty schooner glass down on the armrest of his deckchair.

"That hit the spot," he grinned lopsidedly. "Sorry, you were saying?”

“The band,” I said. “Lena’s writing an article about how it all went pear-shaped, and since she’d long since fucked off by that stage, she wants to hear if from you.”

“Uh… So what are you doing here?”

“Making sure you don’t blame me for everything,” I grinned. “There’s plenty of other soft targets we can implicate, like McCarthy.”

“Yeah, but that’s how we got into this situation in the first…” She lost her train of thought, distracted by her host's intricate fiddlings with a small pipe. He realised she'd suffered a train derailment courtesy distraction.

"Oh, sorry," the Captain said. "But I always have a bit of smoko while I'm drinking. So, there’s a Gasket best-of coming out?"

"Yeah, and Richie’s asked me to write the liner notes. Not on my own, of course, because then we really would be blaming Sam for everything.”

“So we’re travelling ‘round the countryside like the Leyland Brothers, except we haven’t gone broke yet from building a massive red turd north of Newcastle,” I quipped. “Basically, Lena’s asking all of us what our impressions and opinions were of our years together in the band.”

"Why ask me?" he challenged sniffily. "I was just the drummer. And there’s none dumber than the drummer..."

One of the tracks off our final album. The last thing McCarthy and I ever wrote together, as it happened. Hmmm, guilt is rewarding.

"Because," she began gently, "you and Angus are the only bastards who’ll talk to me."

"Good old Last Choice Phil strikes again," he observed bitterly.

"No... it means that you get your side of the story told."

"You mean we get to tell our side of the story and they others don't?" he queried.

“Not if McCarthy stays underground and Marty’s spokeswoman doesn’t let us talk to him,” she replied somewhat testily, fishing around in her bag for her hand-held tape recorder. Interesting, if that was indeed true, that Marty had been formally prevented from speaking.

"Great," he grinned. "Or should that be, Farken Champion Maaaate... off our fourth album, you know. Or maybe it was our fifth. Sorry, I'm a terrible host..." He proffered the pipe, now lit and smoking happily. She shook her head, but couldn't help smiling. There was something about this infuriating bastard you couldn't help but liking, no matter how you tried not to. As I often had, and continued to.

"By the way, it was off Skank Factor Nine, your third album, if memory serves me correctly."

"Wow," he coughed mid-inhale. "You've done your research..."

"It's what they pay me for," she offered ironically. "Helps of course that I'm a bit of a fan of you guys. You know how it is, followed your career from day one…”

“Kick-started our career from day one,” I corrected. “You and Miss Megan Lane have a lot to answer for.”

“Hey, I thought I was knew what I was doing. More than anything, even the music itself, you guys had the right attitude. Zero pretention, fuck the lot of them..."

"Zero pretention?” I shook my head. “Not by the end, it was like Pink Floyd with bigger egos."

"That’s not theoretically possible,” she responded. Subliminal message, delivered with her eyes: Shut up Angus, we’re not here to talk to you. Unfortunately for her I wasn’t fluent in Samagda, the nonverbal/nonsensical language which she and McCarthy used to communicate in.

“Well, I don’t know about going back to those heady days of so many years ago,” Phil observed, “wading through all that nostalgia…”

“We only broke up five years ago.”

“Almost six,” Phil corrected, and I was impressed he had that right.

“And music these days happens at such a rapid rate of turnover,” Lena pointed out, with digital recording and downloading and the market forces that dictate instant obselescence, that a month these days is like a year's worth of music two decades ago. Flange Gasket have been gone for almost as long as you were around to start with - start to finish, it wasn't much more than five years, after all.”

“Just felt like a hell of a lot longer,” I muttered.