Holy grail

Started out seeking fortune and glory
It's a short song, but it's a hell of a story.
- Hunters and Collectors, 1992

The Duffer scratched well-chewed fingernails through his infamous shaggy hair. As it turned out Phil did have a bit to add to the Gasket story, which I was impressed by. I was impressed he could remember anything that happened last week, let alone ten years ago. Granted, his recollection didn’t seem to match mine, but that was Lena’s job to sort out.

"So by third year at uni, I was in a covers band called Funship, pretty successful, but just a covers band, no originals. I wanted to do some new stuff, and Dave and Sean, the other guys in the band, also wanted to do some new stuff, except just not with me. So they went off to do their thing and we were left with a big hole in our wall of sound... all the sounds other than drums, really," he said, taking a careful puff of the between-cones cigarette he'd blagged off Lena. "So we went looking. We being me and Marty, since I’d been able to finally talk him into come out of his bedroom and actually perform in public. It was a real mission, hey. We looked all over the North Coast, searching for those couple of unique people with the unique sound who could most ideally complement our artistic ideals in the most... um, ideal way."

"Didn't you just get your flatmates to join?" interjected Lena.

"Well, yeah, but we did audition them. Down in Byron at the Great Northern."

"The Back Room?"

"Nah, the front bar. We got them ratso and talked them into it. Mind you, neither of you lot needed much encouragement… particularly given there was something else going on, something about Chris and assignments and something about..." Here the Duffer trailed off, brow furrowed. "Weren’t we trying to get Sam laid because he was so bloody miserable all the time?"

Lena looked vaguely uncomfortable. I grinned. "Don’t ask her," I nodded, "this one was the reason he was so bloody miserable all the time."

Phil nodded in recognition. "So yeah, then we got together in the garage at the old place to... yeah there was some assignment thing involved, now I remember. Failed it in the end I think... We had him [Phil at this point waved his Alpine in my general direction, scattering ash over his deck] and Sam on guitar, and me on drums. Funnily enough. Then Marty joined in, once we’d gotten him drunk enough to agree to it."

I tapped her on the shoulder. "That’s Martin di Biagini," I corrected her notes, "the noted avant-garde composer of conceptual electronica."

"I thought he was the James Blunt of the Northern Rivers?" replied Phil with a grin. "Sorry, I must be thinking of someone else..."

Lena noted, "So you had yourself on drums, Sam on lead guitar..."

"Not lead," the Duffer insisted. "He and old mate here shared the guitar and vocal parts, but McCarthy didn't want to be sole front man, not then anyway. They shared the lead guitar role and the solos between themselves, only difference being Sam could solo and he can’t."

I wasn't in a position to disagree, not after last night's debacle anyway. "We nicked Pearl Jam's idea of calling them 'left' and 'right' guitar instead of 'lead' and 'rhythm'," I added. "In the early days, you know, we went out of our way to avoid big-hair-rock pretentions."

"And Marty played bass, but on the keyboards… How did that come about?"

"He misread the email we sent around on the morning of first rehearsal. Thought we said 'brass player.' So he shows up with his old trombone case from high school..." Phil's laughter trailed off.

"Yeah, good," Lena observed. "How'd it really come about, Phil?"

"Gave him somewhere to hide up the back in case things went pear-shaped," I offered.

"Yeah, that was about it," nodded Phil. "Happy to hide up the back behind his keyboards, happy to have the general public paying for his beer and gear for a change. Just happy to be part of the fun. Much more so when he was drunk, of course. Chipped in the occasional U2-esque song, scrawled the odd lyric on a beer coaster for us to work into a song somewhere. "

"We all wrote songs," I began, "though Marty's usually turned up pre-fabbed - and usually pretty fab, give him his due - whereas the rest of us used to smash shit together in rehearsal from riffs we were jamming on. Not to say Marty was precious about his songs though, not at that stage though. More than happy for us to suggest a few tweaks, or for McCarthy or I to come up with lyrics, which he was always awkward about..."

Phil piped up at that stage. "Fair to say McCarthy and Angus wrote most of the lyrics. I can't fuckin' write lyrics, got no problem admitting it, and yeah, Marty was usually too embarrassed about his lyrics, reckoned they were just shitty teen-angst poetry."

"Ironic," I remarked. "He's done all right out of that 'shitty teen-angst poetry' in the recent past, yeah?"

"Marty didn't feel his lyrical direction was welcome in the band?"

"No, no. Come on girl, don't be pinning that shit on us so early in proceedings. We'd have loved him to give us something like Byron Sunrise to play with. Could have done with being really fuckin' successful rather than just..." I didn't know what to call what we'd been, in terms of overall popularity. Moderately? Kinda? Not nearly fuckin' enough?

"Sufficiently successful," Phil suggested.

"Yeah. Rather than an elegant sufficiency of success. Successfulness. Whatever." I redirected my attentions on Lena. "Point is," I said, "McCarthy could write ironic, pisstaking lyrics about some fairly stupid shit, and so could I, so that was the direction we went in."

"Sam was very much a subscriber to the Frank Zappa school of writing obscure lyrics but he did have one great advantage over the rest of us in that respect. He could spell."

"Not really a problem when you're singing aloud, I'd have thought..."

"True," Phil accepted, stubbing out his ciggy in an old mosquito coil dish-cum-ashtray, "but Chris Kurtin and the record company used to get pissed off when the liner notes looked like they were gameshow clues from Wheel of Dyslexia."

Lena nodded. She could get a gig on a current affairs show with interviewing sincerity like that. I made a mental note to start calling her Jana, because I'd just remembered winding her up was one of my favouritest things to do in the entire world. "The songwriting process," Lena continued. "How was that organised?"

"Badly," the Duffer quipped, badly. "Basically, we all just wrote stuff in the vein of what we were into at the time. His thing," he said, pointing vaguely at my thing, "was always old-school, dirty, grubby, big-chords-and-dodgy-lyrics rock and roll. Acca Dacca, Led Zep, lots of old bluesy stuff, garage punk stuff like the Stooges, Radio Birdman and that. Wore it on his sleeve." I’d accept that, I conceded. "McCarthy had similar tastes in a lot of respects - I remember you two co-wrote a lot of stuff. But he was also more into the 80s hair-metal stuff, so his solo stuff had different elements, I guess you'd call them..."

"...Hair extensions?" I suggested. Come on you bastards, that was comedy GOLD.

"So what were you into, Phil?" she wanted to know, for the record.

"Anything. Stylistic groupie, me. Metal, industrial, funk, punk, blues, soul, R&B, prog rock, hard rock, soft rock, rockabilly, psychobilly... could do with a billy right about now, come to think of it..." Phil wrestled his mind back on-topic, reminding himself that weed wasn't addictive. "So my stuff tended to be a bit eclectic, multitextural, Zappa-esque, call it what you will..."

"A total dog's breakfast?" Lena suggested.

"You sure you haven’t been talking to Marty?" he wanted to know. "Anyway, my stuff was stylistically and thematically very varied."

"Apart from the drum solos."

"I didn't do that many drum solos," he responded.

"At least one per album," she contested. "Drum Phil, Licenced To Phil, Selleys PolyPhilla... not to mention your solo album, which was exactly that - an album of solos."

"Glad to hear you're not going to mention it," he winced.

"Marty's material was also somewhat of a mixed bag, particularly in view of his current musical directions?"

"Ah yeah, Marty and his bipolar approach. It was evident from the beginning, I guess, the carefully crafted pop songs and the ambient electronic instrumentals, all very wall-of-sound... there was someone who spent a bit too long in the Pink Floyd section of HMV. It's not as if there wasn't other good stuff in the P's. Parliament, Paul Kelly, Pantera... Don't get me wrong, I really like Pink Floyd, and Marty wrote a lot of good stuff - but you don't know how many times we wanted to crank the metronome up to double speed just to stop from falling asleep in the studio. Mind you, he seems to have made a tidy career out of it these days..."

"Do I detect a hint of jealousy and bitterness there, Phil?"

"You should, I'm practically marinating in it here."

"Thought that was Lynx Africa and bong water," I interjected.

"Touche," the Duffer conceded, repacking his cone. "Anyway, good luck to him. He always felt his 'art' was more important than commercial success, he always stuck by that despite the hammering we gave him. Maybe he turned out to be right."

"I’d have suggested that he’s in a position to say whatever the fuck he likes about his art," said I, "considering his poppy stuff has been so successful that he can afford to be as self-indulgent as he likes with his other compositions."

"Yeah, he’s got both now hasn’t he? And let’s be fair, his poppy stuff was pretty bloody good. Kept us in clover. The girls liked it. Lots of soaring harmonies and pretty melodies. You could see his influences like dog's balls on a goldfish - Crowded House, Matchbox 20, and U2 by the boatload - but it got us played on pop radio, which the record company tended to appreciate."

Phil, having energetically talked himself to a standstill, ducked back into the kitchen to fix another round of drinks. Good man. Just not that fucking ouzo shit again mate.

"So, one hungover morning in a garage in Lismore later, Flange Gasket emerges?"

"Not quite," he called, his voice resonating into the fridge. "We didn't have a name yet. We brainstormed it for a few days. Someone came up with Flange Gasket - might have been Angus here, talking about some muffler problem on his car - and it just stuck. It was like, 'What on Earth is a flange gasket?' And then it was like, 'Well, what on Earth are we?' And then we realised, like, 'A flange gasket can be anything you want it to be. Ergo, we're a flange gasket.' It was so, like, trippy."

"Did the other lads mind you smoking in the house?"

"Oh, I wasn't on this stuff back then. We were just hallucinating after a weekend of drinking Tooheys Red - it was on special that week, and we were cheap arsed uni students. That stuff is neurotoxic, I swear. On a par with ecstacy."

"I’m not sure that it is, actually..."

"No you’re probably right Angus, E is pretty dicey shit, or so the research says. Reckon I wouldn't touch the stuff again," Phil insisted. "Gives you Alzheimer’s." Saying that, he patted his pockets in search of his pipe, yet to remember it was sitting on the table in front of him.

"Actually I was gonna say there's no fucking way ecstacy is as neurotoxic as Tooheys Red..."

"So, since this is supposed to be an Exocet best-of, how did you come to get signed by them?"

"Basically, some crazy music journo with dodgy tastes in music and men pestered her boss to come and see us, and he happened to run a small record label, so yeah, total nepotism," he outlined with a grin, knowing full well there was no way that would get published. "Exocet offered us a one-album deal with an option for another four, making… um, five in total. So if the first album did well, they had the 'option' to screw another bunch albums out of us, at the same bargain basement rate as the first one. It wasn’t a particularly good deal, but it was all we had on the table."

Which triggered my own recollection. "We did vaguely think about getting around our commitments, should another offer come along, by releasing some pile of old dog's bollocks - literally, Some Pile Of Old Dog's Bollocks the album was gonna be called - which wouldn’t sell a copy, thus getting us out of our contract. But of course that would have made us about as attractive a proposition as a bikini clad Madeleine Albright covered in baby oil."

Phil nodded. "Anyway we weighed up the pros and cons and said screw it, let's just record whatever we want - the chances of the thing getting anywhere are none to bugger-all anyway. Noone wants to hear an old covers band's originals, right?"

"Famous last words," said Lena, swiftly changing tapes and checking her recorder's batteries. About time to trade-up to digital, girl. Though given how long she’d been single, I was pretty sure certain processes were exclusively digital these days.

For reference purposes I dug out the copy of Lena’s album notes on which I’d proposed a few improvements on the drive down yesterday, and pushed it out onto the table to prime the discussion. I personally felt as regards the fun, exciting bit of the story - the buildup to the first big album, and the times that followed - there was so much there that Lena could have written about, so many firsts, so many rich experiences, most of which she’d been part of. But in her draft of the liner notes, all she’d said was the following:

And then, towards the end of ’99, the big break. Or at least the latest in a series of moderately large breaks. Triple J, in their infinite wisdom, decided to start spinning the odd track off El Spurioso - possibly Kingsmill finally got around to listening the copy the band had sent him twelve months before. And whaddya know, the kids liked the Gasket’s unofficial theme song, (I Wanna Be) Angus Young. Liked it enough to vote it into the Hottest 100, in fact. Only just into it, granted - number 99 - but it was enough to spark wild celebrations at Chateau Dodgy, the band’s infamous Goonellabah headquarters. Particularly as the Hottest 100 was the Holy Grail for Triple J kids like Gasket, and particularly as number 100 was Tori Amos with Professional Widow. "Thank Christ for that," remarked ‘Angus’ Young on live radio when Triple J called on Australia Day. "Tori Amos shits me to fucking tears."

Which was wrong on two counts, as I pointed out. "We weren’t actually at Chateau Dodgy that Australia Day - Phil, Super Dave and I were all up in Queensland, having gone to Gold Coast BDO, then the day-nighter against the Pakis at the Gabba on the Sunday with Dr Cletus and the Brisvegas tribe." [And, erm, Lauren again - making it two-from-two for Lauren and I vis-a-vis drunken hookups following Gabba one-dayers, just a bunch of years apart. But that could do without finding its way into the liner notes.] "Australia Day was a couple of days later, I think we ended up having a barbeque at Dr Cletus’ place in St Lucia, cranking the Hundred and watching the following one-dayer from the Adelaide Oval. Right Phil?"

"I’ll say yes," he replied cautiously, clearly not remembering a thing about it.

"And secondly, what I actually said was that I used to have a flatmate in Brisbane - actually it was Hutcho, Arts first year who lived across the corridor from me at college, decent bloke, though still yet to admit to the world he was gay as the day was long - he played her stuff on permanent repeat at all hours of the day, and that if I was subjected to Boys for Pele one more time, I’d do someone a permanent injury. To which Super Dave declared, loud enough to be heard down the line, ‘Basically, what Angus is trying to fuckin’ say is that Tori Amos shits him to fuckin’ tears.’"

"And I care?" Lena quipped sardonically. "It’s a colour piece, not a Wikipedia entry. Facts are optional."

"Thought you said it wasn’t a Wikipedia entry?" remarked Phil.

At the time McCarthy, Lena, Jeff and Beck were double-dating at the Sydney Big Day Out, which is probably why Lena’s recollection was faulty. Then again, I didn’t mind being misquoted given that there was no suggestion from the writer that my/Super Dave’s position wasn’t justified.

So, in February 2000, on the back of their Triple J success, Flange Gasket released Self Titled Debut Album. This was the band’s first ‘official’ recording with Exocet, in a proper studio and everything. Sure, they were too cheap to get a real producer in - Phil Duff and Marty di Biagini drove the desk once more, as they’d done for all their previous recordings - but the rough-edged sound was a near-perfect capture of what they sounded like live. Which was why it worked.

"Actually it was me, Marty, Macgyver [Adam Mackay] and Capt’n Snooze [Craig Barrett] who handled production on Selfy [Self Titled Debut Album], with the occasional gentle steer from Richie [Greg Richardson] and the odd largely-ignored suggestion from Kretin [Chris Kurtin. I’ll stop now I promise.] And it wasn’t our first official studio recording either…"

"I’m trying to create drama here, for Christ’s sake."

"…But what it was, was an awesome experience," continued Phil. "We’d passed up 301 for another famous Sydney studio - the Alberts Studios in Neutral Bay, where AC/DC laid down most of their legendary 70’s albums with Bon Scott. No coincidence that big, dirty 70’s sound ended up infusing its way throughout Selfy."



Self-Titled Debut Album
Released February 2000 (Exocet)

1. Title Track
2. Flange Gasket Users Manual
3. (I Wanna Be) Angus Young
4. Brown Mullet
5. My Snotty Little Brother Gets More Skirt Than I Do
6. Nude Run
7. Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo
8. Blip On The Gaydar
9. Now Please Welcome Mr Brian Warner And His Drum Machine
10. Jenny Taylia
11. Rocky 5 Man United 2
12. Learn To Swim With Harold Holt
13. Where’s Our Bloody ARIA
14. Never Cut Goey With Ajax
15. Drum Phil
16. It’s Not Technically Plagiarism If Led Zep Ripped It Off Someone Else Before We Ripped It Off Them

In the pantheon of great Australian debut rock albums, ‘Selfy’ compares with any you could name - the Gurus’ Stoneage Romeos, Jet’s Get Born…

"That’s a bit of a wank," I suggested. I’d even written ‘This is a bit of a wank’ in the margin along side it. Lena pulled a face and continued skimming through the text aloud, as was quickly becoming the method to our madness.

The album’s self-referential title was courtesy chief lyricist and beer taster, Sam McCarthy; likewise the first single, Title Track. Wherever McCarthy is, and he steadfastly refused to make himself available for comment for this history, he’d probably still be sniggering every time someone back-announces ‘the Title Track off the Self Titled Debut Album by Flange Gasket’… if it still gets played anywhere, that is, given that they managed to comprehensively burn a groove in every copy of the album in the autumn of 2000.

"True," I nodded. "Get any copy of Selfy, dial up track one and I'm sure the CD player will go 'For fuck's sake matey, haven't we heard this one enough already?’ I remember talking to you about it at the time and you reckoned your stereo had done it just the other day... after about nine cones, granted, but I think your point stood."

"Funny ha ha," declared Phil. "You’re at least as funny as the clap, and almost as persistent."

Selfy also contained a summation of Flange Gasket’s best efforts from when they were poor and homeless, at least in a record deal sense - Angus Young and Harold Holt, as well as Blip On The Gaydar, Marty’s first shot at writing a pop-rock single with what Chris Kurtin called ‘crossover potential’ and what everyone else called ‘chick appeal’. It sounded like Melbourne trio Even at the very top of their game, a la Black Umbrella, and fittingly, it got picked up and played on the 2DayFMs, Fox FMs and B105s of this world. Before too long, Flange Gasket were being played in trendy clothes shops and aerobics classes, as well as the tyre shops who had superglued their FM dials to Triple M - commercial rock stations just lapped up the hairy-arsed rock sound the Gasket belted out, giving them a chance to supplement the token Living End or Powderfinger offerings which made up their meagre local content efforts.

In terms of guilty parties, however, Triple J were mostly culpable. They played everything. Even Never Cut Goey With Ajax, Phil’s shot at Spiderbait-style thrash-punk, and McCarthy and Young’s bid for guitar-god immortality, Rocky 5 Man United 2 - their take on the Joe Satriani/Steve Vai ludicrous guitar instrumentals which used to get played as intros, outros and montage music on Wide World Of Sports in their childhood.

"We knew we’d made it," I remarked, "irrespective of Angus Young’s success in the Hundred or Title Track getting played on every station going, the first time Ten used Rocky 5 Man United 2 for a montage on RPM."

Selfy even picked up the odd piece of critical acclaim. "An album full of spurious lyrics and old-fashioned parent-scaring nasty-bastard rock music," declared the Rolling Stone. "More power to Flange Gasket. Four stars."

"Are you going to point out it was your byline on that review, by the way?" I asked her.

"Come on, I did say it was odd critical acclaim, what more do you want?"

Lena had jumped ship from the Drum Media about the same time Richie Richardson had - he to focus full-time on Exocet, she to take up a position with Another Publication. So went most of the tensions over conflict of interest, which was a relief.

Within a month of release, both the single [Title Track] and the album had gone platinum, and Exocet had taken up their option to turn their one-album deal into five. Before the year was out, the boys already had another of those albums ready for Exocet. After touring the nation, they headed back to the studio with a fresh batch of songs, most of which had been written impulsively in the last six months as on-stage jams or rehearsal-session ad-libs, with trademark dodgy lyrics retro-fitted soon after.

Phil stretched back into his chair, giving everyone the benefit of a good look at his armpit hair. Choice. "We had a bloody awesome time over 2000, didn’t we?"

"Yeah," I concurred, "though we were busier than a one legged man in an arse-kicking contest… permanently sleep-deprived, physically knackered and nursing hungovers… adrenalin got us through. We were also broke most of the time, but at least our sweet deal on the place at Maroubra was extended until the end of the year, the developers still having no success getting their plans through council. We might have been living on Mi-Goreng noodles and Tasman Bitter, but we were getting somewhere."

"And or course somehow we [Marty, him and me] managed to graduate in mid-year."

"Probably not relevant to her version of events," I conceded, "but at least it meant we were vaguely employable when the merry-go-round stopped, which we figured had to happen anytime soon..."

"After doing shows all around the place throughout the year," Sam McCarthy told Rolling Stone at the time…

Out of Phil and me, I’m not sure which of us was quicker to cough ‘Bullshit’ into closed fists; fairest to call it a draw.

"…We had all these riffs and melodies that we'd just made up on stage. As a matter of course we used to have a tape running on all our live shows, because we'd often be making up stuff on stage just through improvisation. Or wanking, as our old music teacher used to call it. So we had most of a full album there already, all we needed to do was glue the bits together and write some lyrics. Marty had some stuff he'd been working on between gigs on his computer setup at home - that was his favourite way to work, ours was just to jam in rehearsal on riffs which we basically plucked out of our arse on the spot - which he polished off and buffed up for public consumption. We recorded the album in six days in Sydney [Alberts again, self-produced again] - we always wrote heaps and recorded quickly, so our albums were full of short punchy songs that hadn't been thought through. More often than not we wanted to get something down and off for pressing before we could think twice about the content… Thus was born More Arse Than Class, our second album. Effort obviously isn't propotional to success, because it debuted at number three and stayed in the top twenty albums for a good couple of months."

"Was that an actual interview with him, or did you just make that shit up?"

"A respectable journalist never reveals her sources," Lena lectured me.

"When exactly did you become…"

"Yeah, yeah. Fuck off." She returned to her new-found calling of narrator.

More Arse Than Class hit the shops just after the Gasket’s festival debut at Livid in October [yes, the same Livid where the Cure wobbled about on stage and all those poor misguided Goths wilted with mascara running in the forty degree heat.] The Cure, Lou Reed, Green Day, No Doubt, the Dandy Warhols, Regurgitator, the Living End… and Flange Gasket, over on the Zoo stage just after lunch, up against Boss Hog on the main stage.

"John Spencer and his missus were doing everything but each other onstage, apparently," Phil recalled. "And yet people still came over to see us instead…"

"Livid 2000 wasn’t really our festival debut," I corrected, keen to wind up our ‘respectable journalist’ over her continuing habit of bollocksing up facts. "What about Homebake?"

"Journalistic licence?" she suggested. "Look, back then Livid was an international festival of some standing, while Homebake had only been going for a couple of years then and was still fairly small-scale. Of course things have changed now…"

Too right they had. Now there was no Livid at all, and hadn’t been for some years, sadly. RIP one hell of a good festival.

"That first Livid, though… there’s a lot of stories you can tell just there," Phil recalled. "Wish I could remember any of them to help you out…"

I tried to summate the experience, and failed. "Look, I can’t begin to explain how much fun that was. We’d been as spectators, sure, but as participants, it was something else. And that was pretty much the biggest Livid of them all - that lineup, and that crowd, were basically unprecedented. It was also basically the live-set launch for the new material off More Arse Than Class - a lot of which stayed in the set until the very end of the band. Basically, that show was the shit."

"Was that the show where Duncan and Jeff joined us on stage for My Snotty Little Brother?"

I nodded. "Think so. As written by Phil and myself on the inaugural Tour de Pants," I added for the record. Or for the liner notes for the record, to be pedantic.

"And I seem to remember you hooking up with that hot little thing from that Perth band, what was her name? What was their name?"

"Her name was… probably irrelevant to the story at hand, Phil," I concluded.

"True," Lena quipped. "If I had to provide name, rank and serial number for every vaguely famous girl this little slut here has dragged off to bed with him, we’d need a telephone book, not a set of liner notes."

"Those that can, do. Those that can’t…"

"In case you’ve forgotten, Angus," Lena pointed out, "you can’t anymore either…"

"Yeah," said Phil, "that’s what you get for quoting my dodgy brother like he’s some kind of philosopher."



More Arse Than Class
Released October 2000 (Exocet)

1. Cock Rock Will Never Die (Whaddya Mean It Already Bloody Has)
2. Return Of Brown Mullet
3. Bon Scott Was A Very Seedy Individual
4. Volvo Man
5. Smorgasboard Of Crumpet
6. I Only Act That Way To Get Chicks Dumbass
7. Phil Harmonic
8. Vodka Martinis Are Actually Pretty Foul
9. Poontang Express
10. Get Him Drunk And Set Fire To His Pubes
11. Christina Aguilera Has A More Accomplished Vocal Range, But Britney Has Better Tits
12. A Streetcar Named Jeff
13. The Man With The Golden Penis Compensation Apparatus
14. Seventies Porno Music
15. The Title Of ‘The Stupid Schumacher Brother’ Has Always Been Hotly Contested

By now, Flange Gasket had started a few traditions. The Brown Mullet series continued through a few albums, each based on a common fusion-funk-rockabilly riff which just screamed to be played loud and lively. Likewise, Phil Duff basically pestered his way into his own reserved performance space on each album, usually an instrumental driven by a monumental drum-slash-percussion solo; More Arse’s effort Phil Harmonic followed Selfy’s Drum Phil and preceded Licenced To Phil, Selleys PolyPhilla, You Philthy Animal etc. The whole Arsey enterprise was dragged along by the singles Smorgasboard Of Crumpet, which in the words of its author, Angus, "was titled after the old man’s single decent reason why [younger brother/guitar tech extraordinaire] Jeff and I should go to university rather than hang around the farm, i.e. ‘University is a dot dot dot’", and Cock Rock Will Never Die (Whaddya Mean It Already Bloody Has), proving once and for all that despite the claims of his Year 12 English teachers, Sam McCarthy did understand the concept of irony… although Marty was a bit put out when the band finally gave in and released his instrumental electronic track The Man With The Golden Penis Compensation Apparatus as a single, to deafening silence. ‘Stick to releasing singles with words the kids can actually sing along to’ was the general consensus from that experience.

However, the band did encounter their first taste of legal trouble with this album, and not for the last time either. Volvo Man, a day in the life of your typically oblivious hat-wearing Volvo pilot, didn't go down too well with a certain Swedish car maker who will remain nameless. [Luckily we now had actual lawyers, given that we were with an actual record label, rather than just Disco Stu the budding patent attorney.] In the end it was all settled out of court in a rather ingenious way - Volvo’s damages were awarded as 'product placement compensation', which meant the band had to be seen in public driving Volvos around the place for the next two years - the exact young, vibrant and edgy demographic Volvo’s marketeers were spending millions to reach, in an effort to break the very stereotypes of Volvo drivers that the band were taking advantage of. At the very least, being surrounded by airbags and restrained by ABS meant the band were relatively safe from McCarthy's driving. McCarthy being McCarthy however, the week after the arrangement finished he wrote The Day Volvo Won Bathurst (End Of Civilization Remix) as one last stab at them; luckily he kept the content non-actionable when it was released on 2003’s Bollocks To This. Officially, this was released in the context of a subtle parody of the Holden versus Ford neanderthalism that dominates Australian motorsport, through the eyes of an individual 'tribal loyalist' fan - when in point of fact he was just really pissed off about Volvo winning Bathurst.

"Actually most people were blissfully unaware that Volvo HAD won Bathurst," I observed - I think it was one of the super touring races of the late 90s, Jim Richards might have been driving - "so Volvo should have been thanking us for the publicity rather than sic'ing lawyers onto us."

"We did all right out of it though. What did they give us again?"

"V70R wagon," I recalled with a grin. "Turbo, all-wheel-drive, awesome. Like a big WRX without the fulleh siiiick overtones - and you could fit a lot of shit in the back as well, quite the touring weapon. Got two years out of that deal, fucking sweet. It was just a hassle trying not to be seen in our real cars, as per terms of the deal. Which was difficult for the Duffer here because he had a ridiculously fulleh siiiick bright yellow second-gen Mazda RX7 with a towel rack carbon-fibre rear wing and a massive turbo on it that went VRAAAAAA KSSSHHHH everywhere he drove the bloody thing. Looked like an extra from Fast And The Furious: Kyogle Drift."

Phil grinned a faraway grin. "Rotors, man. Rotors are where it’s at."

"I thought cowbells were where it was at?" This from a bizarre conversation, probably one of the first I’d ever recalled having with Phil back in the day, when he was describing his new drumkit and how enthusiastic he was about playing it.

"You guys weren’t averse to the odd marketing sellout though were you? Not just guitars and amps, either…"

"Well, Grinners started all that off when they got that Volcom clothing deal - we just figured we’d take it to the furthest logical extent." Phil scratched his stubble. "Obviously we had various ‘contra’ deals for the essentials - me for skins and sticks, Marty for his keys, the boys for their guitars, Kretin for his hair replacement surgery…"

"Angus’ Yamaha deal was pretty unique, though," she pointed out.

"Yeah, it was a bit special. I had Mick and Doug Martin at Mount Road Yamaha to thank for that, it was their idea in the first place." Thought I should give them a shout-out just in case this made it into print. "They talked to their head office marketing people, they got their guitar reps talking to their motorbike guys, a package was put together, win frosted with awesomeness. Not too many musical instrument makers who make fucking awesome bikes as well. Sorted for guitars, AND had something cool to ride on the weekend, like a new R6 every six months. Gots to love the tuning fork boys. What more could a man ask for?"

"Comprehensive health insurance?" she quipped.

"Hey, I only had a handful of minor ‘offs’ on the Yamaha contract - I liked the deal, and I didn’t think it would help by returning the bikes in the back of a skip. I only ever dropped it when trying to keep up with your lunatic boy, the ghost of Barry Sheene, on those ballistic Italian superbikes he burnt his cash on - particularly that MV Agusta he ended up with. What the fuck he was doing on a bike like that I have no idea."

"No pillion seat on any of them, either," Lena reluctantly added, her attention fixed on the view over the balcony rail. "That was my major complaint. Selfish bastard."

"Believe me," I replied, "the way he rode, be thankful for small mercies…"

Smorgasboard of Crumpet and Cock Rock Will Never Die both got plenty of airplay and made into mid-table on the 2001 Hottest 100 the following January, along with Title Track off our previous - proving at least that Angus Young scoring last year hadn’t been a fluke - but there were two tracks I had a bit of a soft spot for, because they were more personal than the others. One, to be completely juvenile just for a moment (!) was Get Him Drunk And Set Fire To His Pubes, for which we gave a writing credit to our man Super Dave, the inspiration for the track, and before you ask - yes, he actually has, and the unfortunate victim was most put out (once he’d been put out, of course). The other was A Streetcar Named Jeff, mainly because Jeff and Beck had become engaged on Christmas Eve at the end of 2000, and we wrote it as an ode to the pair of them, an engagement present. Since we were far too fucking cheap to actually buy them anything.

The pattern had been set after Beck and Lena’s roadtrip up to see us in early ’99, while we were still based in Lismore. Jeff would head down to Sydney from Gatton whenever the chance offered itself, or she’d fly up to Lismore on one of those fuck-off tiny flying-washing-machine planes, or she and Lena would drive up - Lena and Sam were doing the long-distance thing too, but not for much longer, given he and we weren’t too far away from moving down there. Anyway Jeff and Beck would inevitably meet up at Chateau Dodgy, and I basically let them have the run of the place and went to hide at Kirsten’s or somewhere, since I couldn’t get a bloody word in edgeways when they were around. Then, after about a year of that, once Jeff had finished his uni course and Beck had finally bailed on hers, she shocked and bewildered her family and friends, and abandoned Sydney altogether in favour of a life with Jeff on the farm. Crazy, crazy girl. It shouldn’t have worked. She’d never lived anywhere but Sydney, she’d spend five years not getting a uni degree and was largely unemployable (in the end McCarthy’s ex Angie, who was still friendly with us and had become great mates with Beck ever since she’d first come up to visit, got her a job with Mrs D’s outfit teaching dance and drama classes, which she took to like a duck to water) ...and, to be completely frank, Jeff and Rebecca barely knew each other, in the big-picture sense. The only thing in their favour was that they loved each other just about as much as anyone has loved anyone else in the history of the universe. Awwww. Judging by the last eight or so years, that minor detail seems to have been sufficient. Theirs is the only real love story I’ve ever seen last beyond the Cinderella story.

The amazing thing, the thing that still smacks me about the head thinking about it today, is the transformation in Jeff himself. I’d never seen anyone change their ways so dramatically, from being a dodgy, carefree, skirt-chasing bogan pisshead - and I mean that in the most charitable sense possible - to a responsible, dependable, grounded man of integrity. Who turned back into a bogan pisshead when he was guitar-teching on tour with us, of course, but never lost sight of what made his life important, and never, EVER, strayed. He basically grew the fuck up, and I was so proud of him.

Which leads to the perennial hope that one day maybe, just maybe, I might follow his lead and grow the fuck up as well.