Protection

I'll stand in front of you
Take the force of the blow.
- Massive Attack, 1994

You can tell the difference between a base model Hyundai and a higher-end model just by a quick glance at the interior. In the base model the cheap shitty plastic that’s swathed every-fuckin’-where is a neutral grey colour; in the luxury models, the cheap shitty plastic is beige and marginally less cheap and shitty. This being a base model rental, it was the grey stuff which stretched out towards the horizon in front of me, ending only where the windscreen intercepted it and the car’s snout descended towards the road. We’d just refuelled at Tweed Heads - I still wasn’t OK to drive (proving that it had been a long-arse time since my last thermonuclear hangover) but there was only so much of my analytical dissection of Lena’s musical tastes (quoted example: ‘Fuck this is shit, who are these cunts?’) that either of us could put up with, so Lena had tried to shut me up by giving me the original draft of her Gasket Best-Of liner notes to read through and make sarcastic scribbled notes in the margin. Hey, I’m a teacher, it’s what I do.

Flange Gasket didn’t set out to change the world… which was probably just as well in the end. They didn’t set out to be bigger than Jesus; being bigger than Fred Nile would have done. They had no delusions of grandeur, no pretentions of their own artistic or cultural significance - at least to begin with. They wrote no-bullshit rock and roll songs about sex, booze and misbehaviour, like their heroes had done, and in the process became heroes themselves… only to lose the plot and self-destruct courtesy the same sex, booze and misbehaviour issues which were the source of their best material. This, then is the story, and the Least Worst, of Flange Gasket.

Bands are started for all manner of reasons - to explore common musical interests, to give the participants something to do, to make shitloads of money for some faceless producer. Flange Gasket started for two reasons: to get Sam McCarthy laid, and to enable Marty di Biagini and Phil Duff to pass an assessment task for their third year audio engineering subject at Southern Cross Uni. It failed on all counts. Their lecturer, local promotions agent and former Velvet Curtains alumnus Chris Kurtin….

Kretin, despite all his apparent bullshit about having been part of the Sydney rock scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, actually HAD been part of the Sydney rock scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Specifically he was in a band called Velvet Curtains which was basically a glam rock act - ludicrous costumes, boys in makeup, sequins and Spandex, sexually ambiguous carryings-on, the whole bit - in the mould of Skyhooks or Sherbet or the likes. Unfortunately for the Velvets (as their fans would have called them had they had any), those other bands came from the glam rock stronghold of Melbourne; whereas in Sydney in the late ‘70s, the scene was much more hard-edged, with garage-punk outfits like Radio Birdman and the Saints (having moved down from Brisbane) leading the vanguard. So in Sydney the Velvets were viewed politely as Skyhooks wannabes who couldn’t cut it in Melbourne, and less politely as a pack of fucken poofters; in Melbourne they were seen as latecoming arrivistes, as well as a pack of fucken Sydney poofters.

So the Velvets gigged for a couple of years, releasing a couple of albums and going through a few lineup changes, but they never really amounted to much more than a handful of top 40 singles and the band not surprisingly decided to call it quits in late ‘81. That final lineup of the band saw them try to shake off the androgynous glam image in favour of a crunchier punk-flavoured approach more in line with the post-Birdman Sydney sound, with founding guitarist Pretty Boy Dick (now reverting to his given name of Don Richardson) bringing a second axeman in the form of his younger brother Greg into the fold. This initiative, though meritable, amounted to not much at all, and Greg soon quit the band of ‘geriatric queers’ (as one Sydney music identity memorably labelled them) to start his own outfit - a straight-ahead garage-punk three-piece called the Ballistic Missiles. Their manager was one Christopher N. Kurtin, having hung up his trademark sequinned jumpsuit with the holes cut out of the arse cheeks for good.

“Velvet Curtains,” I thought aloud. “Fuckin’ hell. Is it worth going over Chris Kurtin’s background with ref to this or do you think it’d be counterproductive… or just that noone would give a shit?

“Noone would give a shit,” she opted. “Besides, it’s probably a bit counterproductive… emphasises the nepotism angle a bit more than is probably fair. It’s not as though you guys only got a contract because Kretin used to manage Greg’s band - probably more in spite of than because...”

“Nah,” I replied. “It’s because his most promising young journo had a crush on the lead guitarist and wouldn’t stop sulking until he went and saw them rip it the fuck up at the Annandale…”

“Piss off,” she said. “And no, that’s not going in there either, so don’t suggest it.”

I returned to her prose:

Their lecturer, local promotions agent and former Velvet Curtains alumnus Chris Kurtin, soon signed the boys up and they headed out to seek their fortune as that most hardy and ubiquitous of collectives: the pub covers band. When the balloon goes up, there will be three forms of life left on the planet: cockroaches, parking officers, and pub covers bands.

“Jesus Christ, how much further up our arse does this dickhead in the Falcon want to get?”

Flange Gasket may well still be a pub covers band today, if not for one man. His name was Bob Cunliffe. He wasn’t a record label executive, or an A&R guy, or an agent. He was the local National Party MP, and he took a dislike to the boys’ first single Learn To Swim With Harold Holt, off their garage-recorded EP Insert Title Here. The ensuing controversy put him out of office and Flange Gasket on the road to becoming known for their originals far more than their inventive take on other peoples’ songs…

Yeah, we know all that. Move on, woman. Local radio play builds on platform that relentless gigging provides, both boosting following and refining ‘twin-guitar assault’ - sounds better than it actually was, so cheers for that… Second EP, El Spurioso, first commercial release, provided material for tours into Brisbane and Sydney. ‘Chance meeting’ - nicely put, Lena - with Exocet records boss Greg Richardson sees El Spurioso picked up by the label for distribution. Touring continues apace, supporting some of the finest acts in the land, as well as some of the shit ones. Moved to Sydney. Managed to finally kill the postie van. Not sure why she hasn’t noted that here. ‘Managed to kill postie van,’ I noted in the margin, and carried on.

I can’t say it was a clear or conscious decision to move the band to Sydney - it just happened by degrees. All of a sudden, we were there - not exactly sure how it’d happened, but we were there. Following on from our first Sydney trip around O-Week, we headed down in the Easter break in April to sign the deal with Exocet - only a one-album deal, but with an option for five, and yes we did get my ‘personal legal counsel’ Disco Stu to have a look at it, even though (a) this was getting well out of his area of expertise and (b) his Crown Lager carton charge-out rate was starting to get prohibitive - and to play a week’s worth of shows. However we ended up staying and playing for three, crashing at Lena’s place in Clovelly. Beck was spending her week off uni with Jeff up on the North Coast, and in any case she wasn’t planning on coming back any time soon; her many-times-delayed plans to move back in with her parents for financial reasons had finally, unfortunately had to come to fruition, so we basically became Lena’s new short-term flatmates. An interesting trade - one small blonde person for four sweaty blokes with a penchant for late nights, loud music and vast amounts of alcohol.

“But at least one of us puts out for the landlady,” McCarthy noted.

He could afford to be smug - he was sharing Lena’s vast, warm, soft, queen-sized bed (replete with her vast, warm, soft, queen-sized boobies) while we three other bastards were in sleeping bags on seedy old single mattresses on the floor of Beck’s old room. The close quarters didn’t exactly bode well for, shall we say, post-gig entertainment options. The time-honoured proposal of ‘Your place or mine?’ basically ended up defaulting to ‘Your place?’

At the end of the three weeks, as we began packing up the FLANDGE CRUISER (someone, not me honest, had added an ‘F’ and a ‘GE’ to the badge on the back door with black texta) to head back home to Lismore, McCarthy made his announcement. “I’m staying,” he declared, his arm around Lena’s shoulder. He cited the fact that we were due back here in not much more than a couple of weeks for our first proper recording session under Exocet, that the ‘buzz’ surrounding our performances (particularly the fact that we’d picked up an extra two weeks of bookings just on the hard-won momentum of our developing reputation from the first week) was such that we really needed to be here, that Richardson had made it pretty clear he wanted us based here more permanently, and that Lena needed a flatmate, and that he couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone even for one moment. Actually he left the last reason out entirely but we took it as a given. The rest of us had assignments, practicals and other commitments to maintain, so we had no option but to head back - but his point was well-made.

We learned pretty quickly that like most self-made men, particularly those men still immersed in the process of self-making, Greg Richardson was a very driven, focused individual who knew what he needed to do to get where he wanted to go, and pushed everything else out to the margins. Sure, he liked a beer and a laugh (even at the expense of his own hairy self), but when it was time to do business he got very serious very quickly - as we learned very quickly once we’d seen the contract Exocet wanted us to sign. Legally, it was perfectly fair and reasonable (no Kretin Specials claiming rights to our first-borns or other dodgy clauses in there) but it was equally pretty plain there was fuck-all of fuck-all in it for us upfront, or even down the road unless shit went Quite Well. Though did we have a lot of better options at the time? That would be a No.

Precisely because Exocet were so small and under-resourced, and because there was the potential for massive conflict of interest issues with his ‘day job’, Richardson was obsessed with projecting an image for Exocet Records Pty Ltd of professionalism and integrity (and home of some of the hardest rocking new bands in the land, including ourselves). He took a very hands-on role with us, on account of being not only Exocet’s director, founder and chief executive officer, but the sole representative of its A&R division as well - not counting the unofficial scouting potential of editing a street paper whose handful of writers reviewed records and live shows from every up and coming band who managed to score a gig in Australia’s largest city. As a cost-effective model of how a small, independent record label can productively scout for new talent, it was brilliant, if vaguely unethical. In the late ‘90s Richardson managed to sign some very promising and highly talented young bands. As well as us. (And deusexmachina. But we all make mistakes. Like Brady Priddle’s parents thirty-odd years ago.) Like his former manager Kretin, he pushed us hard and was always demanding more from us - more professionalism, more dedication, more consistency, more artistry, more flair. The difference with Kretin was that Richie Richardson did so in a way that inspired all of the above, rather than bloody-minded obstinance just to spite the insufferable whinging bastard.

Richardson’s role as A&R guy (looking after us in terms of organising recording sessions, general day-to-day management from the company standpoint, and increasingly finding us gigs and doing other bits and pieces which Kretin would have considered his territory) unsurprisingly created conflict between the pair of them, and to a lesser extent within the rest of us. We split along company lines: Marty and Phil predominantly took Kretin’s side, probably for historical reasons (and possibly because he still had the power to fail them on their final subjects at uni); McCarthy and I usually sided with Richie, because he wasn’t Kretin. These allegiances were otherwise called the Floyd Rupture, as they were echoed by each party’s respective opinion of Pink Floyd; Marty and Phil considered them awesome prog-rock visionaries, while McCarthy and myself thought they were turgid, overblown, vastly overrated toss-mongers (see also deuxexmachina.)

In the end, attrition won out. A few months of tension would eventually show that Kretin couldn’t micro-manage us on a daily basis, AND run the rest of Seek’s business, AND do a half-decent job of lecturing at SCU (then again why would he bother to start now?) if we were living a nomadic lifestyle on the road - a few weeks in Sydney, a few weeks in Brisvegas and south-east Queensland, back to Sydney to record, back to the North Coast for a string of gigs - rather than permanently based in Lismore where he could turn up at any moment. He was still our manager, and he still carved off his fifteen percent off the top, but he wasn’t in our faces every day. Granted, he saved up all his best (or worst) material for when he did catch up with us (the two-hour catch-up meetings back in the dingy Seek offices in Lismore were seriously painful), but to be fair, he was far more reasonable to deal with in small doses.

That's getting slightly ahead of things though. In Kretin-style buzzword-speak, what happened the next occasion we returned to Sydney at the start of June was an opportune instance of convergence, a moment of synergy that would leverage beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders. That is to say, a bunch of random shit happened which worked out fairly decent ay.

We knew that we needed to be based in Sydney. We also knew that we couldn’t afford to be based in Sydney - not with having to pay rent at Chateau Dodgy through to the end of our lease at end of the year, nor with Sydney rents being what they were. So we were screwed. There was only so long we’d be able to crash on Lena’s floor (oh, OK, Lena and McCarthy’s floor) given that their lease was up in mid-year and the landlord had signalled his intent to massively bump up the rent forthwith, as it was the trendy thing to do in these parts. So they were screwed too. As it was McCarthy was struggling to square his half of the rent - Cunterlink weren’t interested in him, since he’d moved from a high-unemployment area to an even higher-unemployment area, and while Lena had scored him a bit of casual writing at the Drum Media (Richardson hadn’t been keen at all on the idea, not wishing to be seen turning the place into a halfway-house for unemployed members of Exocet-signed bands) he was still right on his uppers with the arse out of his trousers. A mental picture for the ages if there ever was one. Of course if he hadn’t spent all that lovely money on that early-80s Ducati 900SS which he was too scared to ride in Sydney traffic he’d have been probably a lot less screwed, but he who casts the first stone is probably something of a tosser.

Our old mate Super Dave was also in some bother in a residential sense, with both his flatmates finishing up at uni and planning to get out of Dodge - Mike the marine geologist was off to James Cook Uni in Townsville for his PhD on reef geochemistry; Jason the doctor was off to his new permanent placement at Wagga Hospital. Pick which of those realities you'd have rather been airdropped into. Meanwhile, not very far away, Super Dave’s ex-girlfriend Melitta was living in a shabby old apartment block on Marine Parade in Maroubra, not far from the north end of the beach. Melitta, whose parents were Maltese (which presumably made her a Malteser) comprehensively broke the mould for Super Dave’s exes - she was still actually on good terms with him. Not only that, she liked our band, was nice to us, AND she was nice to her parents, even though they had chosen to name her after a brand of drip-filter coffee. Anyway Melitta and her flatmates were also screwed because their apartment block, along with the house next door, had just been sold to some property developers who intended to knock both places down in order to build a bigger, uglier and flimsier apartment block with more units crammed into less space, as is the way of the real estate world. However they weren’t as screwed as all of the rest of the people in this paragraph because they just went off and found another flat to rent in the local vicinity.

But herein lies the happenstance. On our first free afternoon after getting into town, McCarthy and I decided to head down to Maroubra to think about a surf. Keep in mind this was early June so (a) the water was going to be fucking freezing, but (b) there would be no crowds, on account of (a), and (c) there was every chance the winter swells would generate some decent waves, regardless of (a) and/or (b). So it was probably still worth thinking about. Super Dave came for the drive, backing the probability that we’d flag the surfing and just go to the pub. As usual when Super Dave came down to the beach, he parked outside Melitta’s place as parking wasn't great around the 'Bra - her car wasn’t around, so presumably she wasn’t home. We took one look at the howling onshore wind and the bucket of slop that constituted the breaks on offer, and decided that the pub looked a bloody good option. Which was when we noticed the real estate signs up outside her crumbling block of flats as well as the shabby old brick bungalow next door.

Super Dave nodded laconically and filled us in - the bastards had sold the place from under them, and the new owners were ripping it down. The girls were sorted for a new place by now, but wouldn’t the fucking cunt-arsed bastards shit you to fucking tears. We gathered he meant the real estate agents and/or the developers and/or and the industry in general, by the way he waved in the vague direction of the red and blue First National ‘Sold’ signs. More specifically, the red and blue Don Richardson First National ‘Sold’ signs with Don Richardson’s beaming, balding mug shot plastered front and centre. I’d vaguely heard of Don Richardson of Don Richardson First National Real Estate, Anzac Parade, Maroubra Junction. Except I’d heard of him as Don Richardson a.k.a. ‘Pretty Boy Dick’, former lead guitarist for the Velvet Curtains.

“He’s lacking one thing which his brother has in abundance,” McCarthy remarked.

I knew what he meant. “Yeah. But our man Richie is thinning a bit…”

“Thinning where exactly? The man’s hairier than a… hairy… thing.”

“On top, he’s getting a bit sparse, I reckon. Nothing to compare with Pretty Boy Dick here thought…”

“A sure sign of an overabundance of testosterone,” declared Super Dave. “Proves he’s a true man.” This had nothing to do with the fact that Super Dave’s own hairline was starting to recede at pace.

“I thought he was a fucking cunt-arsed bastard who shat you to fucking tears?” I mused.

“Figure of speech,” he replied with a grin.

After that, things moved surprisingly quickly. The next time we drove past later in the week, demolition crews had moved in and started taking to the old apartment block - not that it needed much more than a decent prod and some rude words at its expense to knock it over. In the background, however, there were problems. Big problems. Despite having already sent in the demo crews, the developers hadn’t actually managed to get their DA through council. There were public submissions and rounds of consultation and heritage this and sightlines that. So pretty soon the demo crews disappeared again - leaving a very moth-eaten looking block of flats, looking like something out of suburban Sarajevo circa 1992, and an endearingly downbeat five bedroom sort-of-beachfront brick-and-tile home on Marine Parade at the northernmost end of North Maroubra Point, as yet untouched. Quiet words were exchanged between Richardson G and Richardson D, then between the estate agent and owners, and back again. Apparently it was likely to take at least a year to get the revised plans drawn up, another environmental impact study done (this time by someone who hadn’t just been investigated by the fraud squad), the submissions put through council, certain large cheques to be cleared, and so on. In which time a perfectly functional, if rather questionably retro-decorated, five bedroom house would be sitting around unoccupied, not attracting any money whatsoever for its poor, unfortunate, put-upon owners.

Aha, we said. Here’s an idea.

It was a bit like Chinese whispers through the various middle-men who formed the line of communication, most of which were called Richardson. In the end, Hairy Richardson told us that Baldy Richardson had spoken to his clients the developers, and they’d agreed to a year’s lease at the bargain basement rate of $240 a week. Between Lena and McCarthy, Phil, Marty, Super Dave and myself, that was a whopping forty bucks a week - less than the cost of two cartons of beer each, unless you’re drinking really, REALLY cheap beer, in which case I’m not having you as my flatmate, you tight-arsed bastard. The owners agreed to fix absolutely nothing if it broke, we were completely on our own on that count - but then again they didn’t really give an arse about us doing a condition report or keeping the place in perfect nick because it was going to be levelled in 12 months. It had power and water but other than that it was basically a bare shell - no whitegoods, curtains or furniture, other than anything nailed to the walls or the floor. We filled it with shabby, second-hand whitegoods, curtains and furniture, and shortly after with our shabby, second-hand bodies. After extensive deliberation we failed to reach a consensus on who would get the honour of securing their car in the single-car garage – the bikes got the old besser-block woodshed up the back of the yard - so we decided to put Flange Gasket in there instead, the band’s first ever dedicated rehearsal space. Thankfully for the neighbours, the garage, like the rest of the house, was also brick and tile and as such kept most of the noise inside. Maroubra, unique among Sydney’s eastern suburbs, was pretty rough - almost like part of Blacktown had been unearthed and deposited along a prime stretch of beachfront - but the less pretentious atmosphere suited us rurals quite nicely thanks v. much.

So was born Flange Gasket’s Southern Operations Divisional Office. Better known as SOD-Off.

The actual Sydney trip went pretty well also, even though our planned three days at Studio 301 got squeezed to two for budget reasons. I reckon studio time is probably a bit like off-season track testing for big race teams, F1 or V8s or whatever. You spend more time buggering around optimising the setup on your gear than you actually do having a go, the amount of money you’re spending per minute just standing around is frightening, and for rookies it’s pretty fucking daunting, particularly because the team doesn’t really want you there wasting their time or money, or worst of all, breaking anything. As a newbie you have to get to know your team, and communicate with them to get the set-up right - for chief mechanic, suspension engineer et al read producer, audio engineer etc. The house producer at 301 was a very second-hand looking gent who had appeared to have spent at least the last year and a half continuously fucked off his gourd. He didn’t know us and didn’t really want to, and basically communicated with us solely through hand signals (‘thumbs down’ predominating) or by barking surly instructions at the audio engineer. The audio engineer was the complete opposite - enthusiastic, welcoming, keen to hear what we had to say and play, and just as keen to guide us through the plethora of audio setup options to try and bring out the sound we were hoping for. We liked him. Phil in particular thought he was awesome - he worshipped him as a God, even though he already had a God which he was supposed to be worshipping. His name was Adam, though he admitted most people called him Macgyver, and we discovered why pretty quickly - McCarthy’s ability to break instrumentation seemingly at random was matched by Macgyver’s ability to fix them with blinding speed and using the most basic of tools. Put it this way - he didn’t get the name because he had a killer mullet and would go on to appear in Stargate SG-1.

So the first day was fairly unproductive - we’d gone in with the intent of re-recording a couple of our older tracks and some new ones we’d been working up, but by the end of day one we’d only put down a fairly anaemic version of Harold Holt, and half of Angus Young that sounded like it was recorded under an upturned aluminium dinghy. We went home (at that stage to Lena’s place) in pretty disconsolate mood, and got drunk on the cheapest beer Liquorland sold. As you do.

Day two dawned much brighter: Captain Cranky Pants couldn’t make it, for ‘health’ reasons apparently. The look on the faces of the team at 301 indicated this wasn’t an uncommon event. Macgyver knew the drill; by now he’d become quite adept at jumping up to the big chair to drive the desk on days like these, and Phil slotted in keenly beside him, eager to learn anything he could.

“All right Phil,” declared McCarthy, “time to show Macgyver and the boys how we do things Gasket-style.”

“Shoddily,” I added by way of clarification.

Guided by Phil’s suggestions, Macgyver set the desk and the gear up for the sound we wanted; basically, if it sounded like half the gear in the room was old and busted, we’d hit paydirt. The Black Keys, who developed their own ‘medium-fidelity’ sound which sounded even more old and busted than ours, later characterised their system as ‘equal parts broke-ass shit and hot-ass shit’; our approach used a similar method. Having established a decent baseline setup, we went out and hot-lapped it around the track a few times. We finished off Angus Young, even though together it sounded like the sonic equivalent of the front half of a horse and the back half of a camel, and put down two new tracks - Fifteen’ll Get You Twenty and I’d Be A Vegan But Dead Animal Product Tastes Fucken Tops, written last year in the Chateau Dodgy garage in Lismore (inspired by our touring experiences with Sagittaria on the inaugural Tour de Pants) - but never actually performed in our local area as we were concerned it would probably mean that we wouldn’t get laid in Byron Bay ever again, or anywhere else where the daughters of Aquarius gathered in number.

We did do one other song, recorded under the title Protection Racket - it was basically a spur-of-the-moment reinvention of Massive Attack’s mid-90s trip-hop single Protection with a large amount of Racket. We went loud and funky on this one - we amped up the wah-wah guitar part, Phil laid down some enormous beats (aiming for John Bonham levels of sonic boom a la Led Zep’s When The Levee Breaks) and McCarthy offered up his most angelic-sounding vocal, doing his best to emulate the girl who did the original vocal - I think it might have been the chick from Everything But The Girl. However, he did so under protest as by the end of recording he’d finally twigged this was really just a thinly-veiled pisstake at his and Lena’s expense. Seemingly, Massive Attack was a favourite on her bedroom CD player when the mood was right for a little lovin’. Yes, the walls were thin at Lena’s place as well, like they always are in share houses... We hadn’t actually said anything to the pair of them, but had taken to randomly humming or singing “Stand in front of you, take the force of the blow…” in their company. Of course when they weren’t around, you could pretty much predict the lines which were rolled out: ‘Well at least they’re using Protection...’

Richie Richardson (not that we actually called him that to his face) dropped by at the end of the second day after his working day in the office, while we were easing our way through Protection Racket. He seemed vaguely satisfied with what he was hearing. We had to bail by half-five as we needed to get across town (WAYYY across town) to the Uni of Western Sydney union bar to play their end-of-semester show, supporting the Bait of the Spider (touring to promote their Grand Slam album), but Richie stayed on with Macgyver to listen to the rough cuts from the two days’ sessions. At the UWS gig we insisted on playing Protection Racket again, but this time McCarthy signalled his displeasure by bellowing his vocal in a disaffected James Hetfield growl and stomping on his Big Muff pedal instead of his wah-wah. He succeeded in (a) amusing the rest of us immensely and (b) ripping the shit out of his voice to such a degree that I had to sing the last half-dozen tracks in the set. Good times.

We should have been more understanding, I realise. At least they had the decency to try and offer some audio camouflage to proceedings, for the good of their slumbering flatmates. I was pointedly reminded that I of all people was in no position to comment, given that several of my ex-girlfriends had been rather vocal to the point of being operatic. And in truth, I was empathetic. I’d been on both sides of the equation before, and I’d certainly suffered at the hands of dubious share house acoustics. Most notably - and I sense a lengthy Random Aside coming on - up in Brisbane in the house Dr Cletus and I shared with Karen/Desparia the sketchy goth from second year on.

It didn’t have a nickname. We failed on that account. Casa del Cerveza was the best we came up with, but that never stuck. Andy and Mark’s place was usually what it was known as. It was a big old Queenslander on Hawken Drive in St Lucia with polished wood floors and a back verandah that opened out into the backyard - great for entertaining (and for Karen/Desparia and her fruity mates to do their weird Burning Man-style fire-twirling shit and send sparks into the leaves in the neighbours’ guttering.) It was an awesome place - sitting out on the verandah, cracking a few beers (there was a bottle shop within a couple of hundred metres which always had cheap cartons of drinkable produce - score!) and watching the summer thunderstorms was a great way to finish off the day. Or just sitting out on the verandah, cracking a few beers and watching the hot late-twenties blonde exhibitionist who lived next door and liked to get changed with the French doors open. Depended on what sort of natural wonders you were into really.

But noise travelled in that place. It wasn’t that the walls were particularly thin, but that the whole place consipred against its occupants on an acoustic level - the floor was like a big sounding board, basically, and without carpets to deaden the sound (other than some cheap rugs or carpet offcuts used as hall runners) you really needed to be a heavy sleeper. It didn’t help that we had the noisest-flushing toilet, the loudest tap shudder and the whiniest hot water service in the local suburb, of course. Getting up for a stealthy slash in the middle of the night would invariably wake the whole house, unless you went off the back deck into the shrubs.

Anyway that wasn’t the main problem with the house; the main problem was Karen/Desparia, who as we’ve previously noted was not only flakier than a flaky piece of battered flake with a large flake of Cadbury Flake on top, but was also less use than a busted arse when it came to covering her share of the bills. Anyway we finally managed to get her to move out, after a very grim couple of weeks over the summer holidays playing ‘chicken’ over the overdue power and phone bills - we weren’t going to pay if she didn’t. Given the time of year, the cold showers weren’t that much of an imposition (and the hot water service was mercifully silent as well) but eventually she got tired of sitting in the dark not getting any phone calls from her circle of fruit loop mates, so instead of paying her share and getting everything reconnected, she decided to do a runner in the middle of the night. With the good Doctor’s TV.

So we needed a new flatmate AND a new TV for third year, The Year of our Landlord 1996. We vaguely thought about roping in Mad Mick Martin, but the Mad One was already onto a decent wicket - he was staying with his uncle up in Ashgrove, renting the basement of his house for next to nowt while helping finish off the fit-out for the Mount Road bike shop, opening soon with me and him working therein. None of our other mates were in a position to shift, or if they were they came with conditions attached, usually long-term female ones of a punishing nature. In the end our problems were solved, albeit reluctantly, by Dr Cletus and the Rockvegas Mafia. An old buddy who he’d played rugby with at school had a younger sister who was coming down to the Big Smoke to start uni in '96. Their family were long-standing friends of the Cleavers’ (that’s Dr Cletus’ lot of familials in case you’d forgotten) and Mark Cleaver (as his mother persisted in calling him) had known her since she was a youngster.

By the amount of ‘now you take good care of Lauren’ blackmail which I was overhearing coming down the phone line to him from parts north, I figured she must be a very sheltered little girl who would probably be better off starting out in a college, preferably a quiet one with lots of Godbothering study freaks. Or at least somewhere, anywhere, where two seedy bastards and their reprobate circle of yob mates wouldn’t lead her astray into a world of drinking large quantities of piss, not studying particularly hard, and generally acting up.

I needn’t have worried.

Dr Cletus’ dusty Magna wagon rolled into the driveway, packed to the gunwales with our new flatmate’s personal effects - ever the gentleman, our family Doctor had been roped into helping her move down by his folks, and had headed up the weekend prior to O-Week to collect her - and out bounded young Lauren, all five foot nothing of her, in an old Sea Eagles jersey (Fatty bloody Vautin’s old number), boardshorts and thongs, wrestling a carton of cold beer out of the back seat.

“G’day,” she said, sticking out her right paw, her left struggling to cradle the Precious. (XXXX Draught, so not THAT Precious. But cold at least.) “You’d be the poof from Sydney then?”

I shook her hand. “Not Sydney,” I corrected, too taken aback to correct the rest of her statement.

“Sydney or not, anyone from New South Wales is a poof,” she replied. “What the fuck are you doing up here in God’s country anyway,” she jabbed me in the chest with a fingernail chewed to the quick, “if NSW is so fucking good?”

I was beginning to suspect I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick with Lauren - and that wearing my old Blues Origin jersey had been seen as an act of war. I could also see Dr Cletus looking a bit uncomfortable in the background - as though his big, deep, dark secret had just been revealed, like the second-hand car he’d just sold his mate was about to turn into an almighty lemon.

“So you back Manly?” I replied.

“Yeah?” she said in her best ‘And what of it?’ tone.

“Why don’t you fucking live there, you skank, if it’s so fucking great?” I offered. “Personally I back Souths, but I ain’t fucking living in Redfern for you or anyone else, sweetheart.”

“Fair point,” she conceded. “Anywhere I can stick these?” She indicated the carton of XXXX under her arm.

“Up your fucking arse?” I suggested pleasantly.

“Maybe later,” she smirked, ripping the lid off the box and handing me one, cracking it one-handed as she did. “C’mon, I hardly know you...”