Fashion and fame

They're taking photographs of you
And the style of things you do...
That's the shifting, changing, shattering world of fame
Fashion and fame
- The Angels, 1981

Big Brother isn't watching. Big Brother's ignoring you.
Frenzal Rhomb, 1996

Me first. I’d spent my share of the Intercom signing bonus on the deposit for the place at Point Lookout - the idea of living on an island with its own little beach village, attractively isolated from the real world but just a short ferry ride from Brisbane, appealed to me a lot. Disappointingly for my rock star cred, I’d actually been relatively responsible with my money. Not that I'd actually had much, at least until Intercom came along - the money was adequate (barely), then sufficient, then comfortable, then vaguely ridiculous. Even so it made for a reasonably comfortable living, rather than an extravagant one, given we had debts (and increasingly legal bills) to pay. However, given that I didn’t have to pay for my guitars or my bikes courtesy that ingenious Yamaha contra-deal, my only real extravagances were premium beers, girls with expensive tastes and a black V8 Monaro CV8-R, which I’d picked up in the aftermath of Skank Factor Nine going ballistic. By comparison, McCarthy had spent a wedge of Intercom’s blood money on forty grand’s worth of MV Agusta F4 750 ‘Ago’, the latest in a long line of extravagant Italian machinery which he’d thrashed and trashed since his first heart-over-head bike purchase, that cantankerous ’82 Ducati 900SS with the Hailwood replica paint job. Since then he’d had a series of Ducati superbikes, getting younger as he went, like Bill Wyman’s girlfriends - a second-hand 851, a near-new 916 - though the craftsman-built MV Agusta was from another planet altogether, like handmade Italian loafers compared to Dunlop Volley OCs.

He claimed, through, that he was actually being financially sensible and/or responsible, in that bikes gave him the most bang for his buck compared to other things he could throw his cash at, like Phil and his Jap import speedsters. McCarthy preferred to spend his coin on flash bikes rather than any other sorts of toys, even cars - his motors of choice throughout Gasket’s golden era were generally old second-hand Porsches, originally a late-80s 944 Turbo followed by one of the last of the Porsche 928s, a black ‘92 928 GTS, a big V8 battlecruiser with an arse like the Millennium Falcon. Oddly, he rated Porsches but hated 911s, the most iconic of all Porsches, because he reckoned they were yuppy stockbroker wanker cars - possibly because Nick 'Hollywood' Holland of Hayabusa was a 911 man through and through, and he was even more fun to wind up than McCarthy. I couldn’t really see how the rest of the range deserved avoiding being tarred with the same brush. Irrespective, old Porsches have pretty average resale (bar the 911s) but legendary reliability, unless you’re Jeremy Clarkson on that awesome ep of Top Gear. Either of the ones McCarthy owned would have cost comfortably less than his annual bike expenditure (including parts and labour), so he was probably right.

Anyway, I was kinda glad to be out of Sydney, and equally glad to be out of shabby share-house living - by this stage we’d all outgrown it to the point that SOD-Off in Maroubra was only used as standby accommodation for any of us who happened to be visiting Sin City at the time, apart from Lena and Super Dave who had real jobs to hold down of course (when they weren't following us about the place). The fatigue of big-city living was taking years off my life, I reckoned, and being a bit over an hour from the centre of Brisbane (a much more preferable ‘big city’, largely because it isn't one) but still in a little beachside village with a couple of awesome breaks, did me fine.

I still had non-muso mates in town, which was good for my sanity to hang around with people who did something other than play instruments in dingy clubs for a living. Mad Mick, of course. He was always up for a scratch up Mount Glorious, so long as it didn't clash with his physio rehab for his latest bout of motorcycle dropsy. Dr Cletus was still in Brisbane, but not for much longer. He’d just finished his PhD, working as a post-doc in the same lab while he wrote up a couple of papers coming from results out of his thesis, and was flying out at the end of the year to take up a post-doc research position he’d lined up with a gun in the field at the University of Washington in Seattle, home of those hardcore vanguards of serrated-edged grunge rock, the Presidents of the United States of America. He was a good fella to catch up with because he had an excellent bullshit detector and knew pretentious wankery when he saw it. Given that the industry I worked in was packed to the rafters with pretentious wankery, it was handy having him in town to catch up with and commisserate about the crap I was witnessing on a daily basis. Fucked if I was going to turn into one of these head-up-arse delusional poseurs with no concept of reality.

Anyway, on one rare Saturday night off (somewhere in August between flying back into Australia from our comical US sojourn and heading off on our headlining Abscessive Compulsive tour) I managed to make it over to his place for his house-cooling. He was sharing a three bedroom place on Hiron St, St Lucia overlooking the river, with a couple of fellow PhD students from other labs at the big-new-fuck-off-shiny Institute for Molecular Biosciences Bond-villain hideout - it could have been the nerdiest house in the suburb, had the three of them not all been massive pissheads and genuinely good company. I knew them and a lot of their other mates from overlapping with Dr Cletus back in the day. Like Dr Cletus, Josh and Craig had submitted their theses, sorted their corrections, done the silly walk with the cow-pat hat and gotten unfathomably drunk – THAT was an interesting night, if only any of us could remember it in detail - and now, newly PhD’d up, were also moving on to new pastures, Josh in to a postdoc in Sheffield, Craig at Cambridge. So a house-cooling was in order. And a jolly time was had by all. Particularly me. I can’t begin to explain how fucking awesome it was, how after all the high-level wanker parties and industry functions and choad-warrior-fests I’d endured over the past few months, just to go to a casual pissup at a mate’s place like old times, with a kilo of decent snags for the BBQ and a carton of Tooheys Old slung under the arm, was the most astonishing relief. Or, as Dr Cletus remarked, “Mate, you look like you’ve just hung the most massive shit in your life.”

Anyway I ended up knocking off most of the carton - apart from the ones Mad Mick pinched while he was waiting for his Jimmy and coke (in the Big Cans, no less - everyone loves getting their hands on a rack full of Big Cans, and Mad Mick was no exception) to chill in the ice-filled bath - and crashing out on the couch, which was not the wisest move (although it meant I avoided ending up going home with Lauren again) because (a) the couch was designed as the physiotherapist’s Antichrist, and (b) Dr Cletus was still bloody-mindedly insistent on his plan to run the Bridge to Brisbane 10km road-race the next morning, which kicked off at sunrise out on the Gateway Bridge. And I’d agreed to drive his car around from the drop-off point at the Gateway and pick him up at the finish line, which was at New Farm Park.

Motorists of Queensland, my sincerest back-dated apologies.

I was almost definitely still half-cut when Dr Cletus handed me the keys of his Magna (a newer one than the old bucket of crap he had when I lived with him) at the start line, and said he’d catch me in an hour in New Farm. Given that the really quick guys would take that long, and that he was still as off-chops as I was, I factored in a bit more time than that. The only thing that saved me was that there weren’t any RBT units hanging around the traffic filing in and out of the carpark at News Very Limited’s big printery in Lytton next to the Gateway, which was the marshalling point for the start line.

I had no particular plan to fill in the time - I figured it’d take about twenty minutes on a Sunday to drive over to New Farm from where I was, though parking would probably suck balls with B2B traffic around New Farm Park, so I had around an hour to kill. Still feeling fairly shabby, I made for the water - some sort of reverse evolutionary impulse, I figured. I headed eastwards over to the bayside at Wynnum, grabbed a Hangover-Be-Gone kit from a nearby bakery (a steak, cheese and potato pie and a 600mL ‘Black Aspro’, known to its maker as Coca-Cola) and parked over by the water’s edge, watching the sunrise over the back of Stradbroke Island with not a little envy, given I could have been curled up in my bed over on the far side of that island right about now. A morning person I ain’t, or at least wasn’t any more. It’d been a long time since I’d worked on the farm. I vaguely thought about having a nap, but figured I’d probably oversleep and miss the pickup time at New Farm, which would be received poorly by the car’s owner, so I put some tunes on the stereo to keep me awake (Hayabusa’s latest album, which I was happy to see Dr Cletus had gone out and bought as I’d strongly encouraged him to), wound down the windows to let in the gentle sea breeze off the mangroves, and rested my eyelids. Just for a moment.
I was awoken by a girl’s voice. A voice that, while it could have sounded very pleasant under normal circumstances, put me very much on edge. Mainly because she was screaming at me. Something about me being a bastard and having followed her and some other stuff with swearing in it which I didn’t follow terribly well, given my delicate condition.

“Um, excuse me?”

“You know what the hell I’m talking about,” she snarled. She was strikingly beautiful, even when she was immensely and intensely angry, maybe even because of it - glossy black hair in a ponytail, slender and athletic figure wrapped tightly in jogging top and gym pants. Very, very pretty face, with almond-shaped eyes, almost Roswell-like. She was an uberbabe. I kinda wanted her to like me all of a sudden, but there didn’t seem any chance of that. She kicked the door of the Magna with a resounding thump, leaving one dusty running-shoe-imprint. Or rather, one clean running-shoe-imprint in the thick crust of dirt which covered Dr Cletus’ mode of transport.

“Not so fucking entertaining is it now, you creep?”

“Um, please don’t do that,” I said. “It’s not actually my car.”

“Not your car?” she retorted, lucid hazel eyes afire. A bit of Sophie there, which I liked. “Don’t play games with me. Why do I always see you parked outside my house then, you disgusting…”

Two sounds ripped the morning air open at that very moment: the howling intake noise of a multi-valve, double-overhead-cam V6 being hurriedly redlined, and the scrabbling noise of a set of front tyres making a desperate and sustained bid for traction on a bed of blue metal. A silver late-90’s Magna slewed out of the carpark in front of us, and took off into the streets of Wynnum like an unguided missile, torque-steering viciously as the driver made his clearly distressed exeunt, stage left.

I put two and two together, as the girl stared off after the departing cloud of dust that contained the silver late-90’s Magna. A silver late-90’s Magna that looked very much like the silver late-90’s Magna which I was sitting in right about now. The girl put two and two together at right about the same time, reddening by the second as the world's most sheepish grin formed on her lips.

“I think I’ve just made the biggest fool of myself,” she observed wryly.

The story told itself from there, particularly after I’d taken advantage of her hugely apologetic embarrassment to insist on taking her somewhere for a coffee (rather bloody difficult at 8am on a Sunday morning in Wynnum, but we managed.) Her name was Olivia, she lived locally, she was 19, she modelled for Elite part-time, waited on tables part-time, went to Griffuith uni part-time, and got stalked by losers in silver late-90’s Magnas in whatever spare time she had left after that. I was impressed she’d been brave enough to confront her tormentor, and said so. She smiled - a knockout smile - and while I was still reeling, asked me why I seemed so familiar. I admitted to being a cheap, seedy, hungover and unshaven knockoff of that guy from Flange Gasket. I didn't usually rely on my B-grade (if that) celeb status to impress girls, but I really, really wanted this one to come off. And suddenly, remarkably, I was on like Donkey Kong. I liked her spirit, her sense of humour and the fact she was a total and utter uber-babe. God alone knows what she saw in me, but we hit it off straight away. It was the single strangest place I’ve met a girl in my life. And I was only 45 minutes late in collecting Dr Cletus from the finish line, so everyone was a winner that morning.

Olivia and I dated for a few months, and good months they were, but things eventually petered out, more because we saw very bloody little of each other (probably about four weeks' actual togetherness in those months) than a loss of interest or me fucking things up by shagging someone else, as per one’s established SOP - as the year progressed her modelling career just took off and she was flying all over the country on assignments, up to Japan, off to Europe, you name it - to the point where a year or so later she was the ‘face’ of Australian Fashion Week, long after we’d amicably went our separates. But for now she was the face I was waking up to each morning in our beachside villa at Port Douglas, and I can’t say it was a painful experience.

Oh yeah, and the stalker dude - well, we dealt with him reasonably effectively. He followed her to our Brisbane gig at Festival Hall, where I made a point of getting her up on stage and introducing her to the audience. And then I told them, “By the way, somewhere here tonight is a creepy little fucker who’s been following her around in his car when she goes out jogging in the morning. His name is [name deleted for legal reasons] and he looks like this.” A grainy surveillance CCTV still from the carpark in Olivia’s apartment block, which we’d managed to theft courtesy the combined audio-visual engineering nous of Phil and the Gasket back three. “So, if he happens to be standing next to you tonight, can you do me a favour, and please beat the living snot out of him. Thank you.”

Funnily enough, he didn’t see the funny side of having the living snot beaten out of him. It's all fun and games until someone gets sued for having the living snot beaten out of him. Still, I got three months with the future face of Australian Fashion Week and he got a broken nose, so I think I finished ahead on points.

So that was me and Olivia. Marty and Madonna, now that was something else…

In July, Marty made a very silly decision. Actually, he made it some time before July, probably in March or something - shortly after we signed the Intercom deal - but didn’t admit it he'd made it until we got back to Australia after our rollercoaster US stint, marked by our rapid ascent and equally rapid decline into obscurity once more. Channel Ten were planning a crime against humanity called Celebrity Big Brother, which was going to be like normal Big Brother, but instead of filling the house with desperate losers who were craving B-grade celebrity status, they cut out the middleman and just got a bunch of B-grade celebrities instead - something along the lines of ‘Here’s some we prepared earlier’. And Marty had put his hand up. Or rather his hand had been put up for him by Simon Anastopoulos, our aforementioned slimy new A&R guy who’d come straight into the music business from the ad game (and you couldn’t half tell).

Simon’s argument, apparently persuasive to some, was that CBB was the perfect means by which we could broaden Marty’s profile, and target Big Brother’s 18-35 female demographic which we were a bit weak at attracting (as a group rather than as individuals – we went all right on that respect I reckoned) on account of continually offending them by writing songs about having or wanting to have hot sweaty sex with them. Furthermore, and most importantly, it was for charity! How could you possibly object to it when it was for charity! Which just made me recall an old line from Alexei Sayle’s TV show: you can do what the bloody hell you like if it’s for charity. If Hitler had invaded Poland for spina bifida, it would have been all right!

So Marty got roped into the abject farce that was Celebrity Big Brother 2002, which meant we were obliged to watch the entire slow-motion trainwreck as moral support - not that he would have known we were watching, but the daily pop-quizzes from Simon ref. what Marty had been up to, in case any bottom-feeding media types sought our opinion, weren't multiple-choice or phone-a-friend. The first couple of weeks were scripted, at least in terms of which celebrities would enter and which would exit and when, then whoever the fans wanted would stick around to fight out the title. Kinda like Celebrity Deathmatch, but far, far less watchable. Marty went in with the first attack wave, a star-studded array of publicity-hungry oxygen thieves including washed-up Hey Hey alumnus Red Symons, washed-up VJ Dylan Lewis (who ended up winning the fucker), not quite washed-up bikini hottie Imogen Bailey (decorative, if not exactly functional) and, shamefully, boxer/footballer/activist/wanker Anthony ‘The Man’ Mundine. The Jeff almost burned his old St George jersey in disgust. Then again, given that the Saints had made four grand finals in the last decade, had lost every last one of the bastards and now were reliant on Wollongong’s bogan populace for home support, the Jeff was often on the verge of burning his old St George jersey in disgust. It was on permanent standby next to the incinerator at the farm these days.

It began. And fuck me if our little curly-haired mate didn’t steal the show. His particular brand of self-deprecatory humour, sensitivity, kindness, humanity and genuine care and respect for others (versus a room full of painfully self-obsessed wankers) really won over the vacuous, brain-dead reality TV addicts of Australia. Particularly when he began getting friendly with self-made cosmetics queen (or, given her tender age, princess) Madonna Cohen-Lewis. Madonna was from an affluent Jewish family in Sydney’s east; she’d been a model in her teens, and in her twenties had gone into business designing and making her own range of cosmetics with her old man’s money behind her. It’d been a massive success, particularly after they’d succeeded in having the range picked up by Myer (after a bidding war with David Jones). At twenty-five she was a millionaire in her own right. She was minted. At twenty-five we were more often munted. (Though McCarthy and I had already turned 26 by this stage. Our birthdays were a couple of weeks apart in March-April, which made me the eldest Gasket and hence the responsible adult [who needed] supervision.)

Madonna had the profile to go with the money, too. She was a highly-visible socialite on the Sydney scene as well as seeming to be on TV more often than Bert Newton - primarily on panel shows like The Panel, The Glasshouse and Good News Week, where she could give vent to her outspoken opinions and her acerbic and cutting brand of wit, daaahhling. In the business papers as much as the public eye, though, she had the reputation of an iron fist in a velvet glove, a superhot mid-twenties version of Maggie Thatcher. A hard case. A ballbreaker. Clearly her publicists, like ours, thought she was in need of an image makeover as well as a houseload of cheap publicity, which was why she’d ended up in the celeb BB house as well, and looked to be enjoying it about as much as root canal therapy.

That was, at least, until she and Marty hit it off - despite being from two backgrounds as polar-opposite as any two you could find in the country, and despite being polar opposites in terms of personality, there was a spark. No, scratch that, a big fuck-off bolt of lightning. As the circus dragged on and the days turned to weeks (well, week anyway, just felt a lot longer) they'd be sitting Up Late (as the wee-small-hours televised live feed from the house was called) into the early hours, drinking red wine and talking about one another - surprisingly deep-and-meaningful stuff, which of course was edited to suit the CBB production team’s mission of desperately trying to find half an hour of watchable vision out of 24 hours of footage per day; of course there were plenty of sad cases who sat up with the pair of them watching the live feed from the house at stupid o’clock in the morning. Simon claimed it was his job to, but he was just another CBB tragic.

So the TV-watching populace of Australia learned about how Madonna wasn’t really a fearsome, fire-breathing dragon-bitch, but just a sweet, gentle, lost little girl who was just misunderstood, and who was hurting inside because she couldn’t hold onto anyone special. She’d always had boyfriends who had a lot of female friends, and who were into fashion and music, not football and cars, which was why she’d liked them in the first place… which meant, more than once, she’d been the last girl they’d dated before they’d come out. It seemed, she admitted sadly, she was just an enabler, a halfway house for latent gay guys, and she might never be happy. Likewise they learned that Marty was the youngest in his family, the only son in a family full of daughters, and how he actually felt more comfortable in the company of girls when he was growing up. And how he sometimes felt outgunned and marginalised by the two loud beer-swilling bastards up the front. This emerging theme wasn’t helped by host Gretel Fucking Killeen (as many would be aware, she has a double-barrelled surname) dragging us onto their hideous set full of screaming fuckwits (thanks Simon Fucking Anastopoulos, another twunt with a double-barrelled surname) and ‘interviewing’ us about our relationship with little Marty, and why we felt necessary to be always picking on him. Nor was it helped by the pair of us, having guessed what was coming at us, getting bloody-mindedly several over par in the green room before coming on, and making blatantly inflammatory statements like, “We’ve always been very comfortable by Marty’s sexuality, it’s never been an issue in the band…” Or: “Look, Marty's got some things he wants to get off his chest, but we wouldn’t want us to pre-empt anything which he’s putting in his autobiography. It’s coming out next year, it’s all about how he was brought up in a family full of girls, and it’s called The Only Pair Of Testicles In Spotlight.” Or even: “Fuck you’re a scary mole Gretel, I wouldn’t root you for practice.”

OK, so we didn’t actually say the last one, but by fuck we were thinking it.

Anyway, all of that resulted in Serious Questions Being Asked in the media about Marty’s sexuality – if you’re prepared to define the media as including Channel Ten’s family of crap shows, the God-awful morning shows on the Austereo pop FM stations and the gossip rags that had cross-promotion deals with the CBB producers. As soon as it blew up - the morning after, in fact, after having dodged print interview after radio appearance after TV show - we knew we'd fucked up, thoroughly regretted stirring the pot, and decided to shut up and make no further comment on the issue. Simon Fucking Anastopoulos from Intercom put out a statement with our names on it saying that we refuted any suggestion that Marty was gay and any such inferences were scurrilous - just like we’d told him NOT to do, because just like we knew it would, our Official Denial just fanned the bullshit firestorm, like a football manager getting the Dreaded Vote Of Confidence from the club board immediately prior to being sacked. We thought that the strenuous nature of the language used in the press statement was particularly ironic - and fucking hypocritical - given that Simon himself was as gay as the day was long, and here he was making Marty's sexuality into some sort of 'controversial' issue. It wasn't. If he was gay, he was gay. If he wasn't, he wasn't. To be completely honest, we didn't really know definitively ourselves - we'll say 80:20 or maybe even 90:10 confident he wasn't - but that girl-drought he was stuck in, at least in terms of apparent bedroom action, had lasted pretty much as long as we'd known him.

Meanwhile, in the house, Marty sat up night after night with Madonna, getting closer and closer to her spiritually, if not physically. Not too fucking likely with more dodgy camera positions than a Seven Network Bathurst telecast littered around the place. Night after night, that was, until the night before the night he was due to ‘escape’ - not that the audience knew it at the time, but Maddy sure as hell did, because she’d read the script, and so did we, because we were playing a show at the Box (Concrete Box in the Valley, still managed by our old mate and serial NSW-baiter Jono Brownlee - 'How about those Lions, boys?') the night after his escape, and could probably use him back. Despite ourselves, Team Flange Gasket found ourselves at the Surfers Beergarden near where we were staying watching the live Up Late feed on the big screen with a depressingly large number of other CBB tragics. Not that we counted as such. We were just waiting for the midweek Premier League game to come on at midnight, honest. I really like those Manchester United Gunners, they're the best team in the League Premiership.

“I’m going to ask you a question,” Maddy (he got to call her Maddy, whereas anyone else who tried it got a twelve thousand watt deathstare) began gently, “and I don’t want you to get offended… but I want you to answer truthfully, OK? You think you can do that for me?”

“Not sure I like where this is going,” he replied, “but OK.”

Maddy traced her finger around the rim of her wine glass. “You know how I said every guy who gets close to me turns out to be gay…”

“OK, now I’m sure I don’t like where this is going,” he quipped nervously. We didn't either.

“Marty,” she asked hesitantly, “are you gay?”

He looked at her quizzically, somewhere between being vaguely amused and deeply offended. I could almost hear the cognitively-challenged 18-35 females of Australia trying to second-guess his answer. ‘Yes he is, Sheryl!’ ‘Nah Charlene, he’s just sensitive!’ The excited murmurings behind us at the Beergarden were at least partly quelled by a sharply-delivered 'He's not fucking gay you fucktards' from McCarthy, who'd knocked off two ice buckets of Coronas on his lonesome since the beginning of play that afternoon, and was beginning to attract the attention of the seccies. Super Dave had taught him well.

“Fuck no,” he declared pithily. “You mad, girl?”

“Well, no… It’s just that… every time...”

He touched his finger to her lips, then kissed her firmly on the mouth. She reciprocated, shutting the cameras out of her mind as she surrendered to the kiss. Hey, that lipstick of hers really IS non-smear. Talk about standing behind the product you sell.

“Okay,” she breathed, on resurfacing. “You’re NOT gay.”

He grinned boyishly. “And if you behave yourself, once we get out of here, I might just prove it to you.”

At which point a resounding cheer went up from the massed drunks of the Beergarden, and a series of stingingly exuberant high-fives circulated around our posse. My colleague in league Sam McCarthy stood up on a pool table and bellowed to the crowd, “That’s our boy, motherfuckers! MARTY FUCKEN MONSTER! You GO, son! CAMPIONE, CAMPIONE, OLE OLE OLE…”

At which point we were asked to leave, as you’d expect. Probably just as well as we had a gig next evening. At the Big Brother house, as it happened.

We were flown in by Blackhawk helicopter - the CBB production team had brought our gear in at sunset, under the careful supervison of Macgyver and Capt’n Snooze (read ‘ignoring the careful supervison of Macgyver and Capt’n Snooze’) and the boys had set everything up the way we liked it - just as well as there was no time or opportunity for a soundcheck, and we'd threatened to break every finger on the assistant producer's wanking hand rather than consent to lip-synching on national television. The regular prime-time Thursday evening live broadcast was suddenly punctuated by something out of Apocalypse Now, as the Blackhawk burst out of the night and hovered menacingly over the garden of the walled compound, with three figures scrambling down the rope ladder and dropping cat-like to the grass (and you can’t imagine how hard that was to train for that morning at the Canungra army camp when Phil, McCarthy and I were all still off-chops and blowing fumes from the previous evening at the Beergarden.) The figures weren’t really dressed with stealth in mind, though - one was in a red skivvie, another in yellow, and the last in blue. The spotlights came up on us as the Blackhawk began to ascend into the night sky.

“Wake up, Marty!” we bellowed, trying not to feel self-consiously cretinous.

Marty emerged in a purple skivvie, which he’d hurriedly donned in the slashers out of camera range, and the four of us strode towards the cameras like the heroes of a Jerry Bruckheimer special (in that one ubiquitous scene with everyone marching bravely through the heat haze towards the cameras with dramatic music swelling in the background, as he uses in every bloody one of them - Top Gun, Armageddon, Days of Thunder, Con Air… even Gone in 60 Fuckin’ Seconds for Christ’s sake.) We picked up our instruments, declared we were ‘The Squiggles’ (with a wink to the camera), and proceeded to vault into a remarkably presentable version of Radio Friendly Chick Song, while the resident B-grade celebs milled around and moshed rather unconvincingly. I’m told it looked much better on screen - camera viewlines, cutting between shots etc - but it would have needed to. From my perspective it looked tres poxy, but at least there was some payoff for Marty ending up on this fucking horrible excuse for television for a week or so - excellent coverage for the single and the new album, tracks from which they were using heavily in segment production on the various CBB telecasts. Everyone’s a winner baby, that’s the truth. You play the game, you get your quid pro qro. Or at least your thirty pieces of silver, inflation-adjusted for 2002.

So it was time for Marty’s big exit - he was scheduled to escape with us in the Blackhawk, just as soon as the wobbly old crate touched down again so we could scramble aboard. I was pushing the Blackhawk’s reputation for face-planting into the horizon just as far our of my mind as I could; Marty, who was far more of an aviation tragic than any of us, looked even paler. Or maybe he was just facing the idea of leaving Maddy - sure they’d see each other again soon, but never again in this context, in which things had been said and stuff had been shared.

Phil, McCarthy and I climbed into the Blackhawk, and signalled Marty to join us. For some reason, we’d been told to take our instruments - even though we hadn’t come with them - presumably this made sense to the production team, because it seemed stupendously half-arsed to us. As did the whole embarrassing farrago of insubstantial gloss and peripheral wank.

Marty started to go; Maddy put her hand on his shoulder, and squeezed gently. He turned.

“Come with me,” he told her.

Not asked. Told. There was confidence there I’d never seen before.

You could see her about to say, “I’m supposed to be here for another week, that’s what the script says,” but she held it. And instead replied, “Yeah, why not.”

So the pair of them raced across the grass and jumped into the waiting chopper, which lifted off the grass to the cheers of the B-grade celebs and the probable apoplexy of the production team - but fuck them. Marty was in love, or on the highway to same, and we were fucking proud of him. And the flight over the walls back to the carpark didn’t kill us either, so again, everyone was a winner baby that night as well.

So yeah, I had Future Miss Australian Fashion Week and Marty was doing it with Madonna. And we were still fucking proud of him. The fact that she really WAS a fearsome, fire-breathing dragon-bitch, and the misunderstood little girl thing was just for between her and Marty, only took a bit of a shine off things. I could see why she attracted effeminate males one step from closet evacuation: I wasn’t entirely convinced she didn't have a penis herself. If she did, though, she hid it well. Fantastic body, very athletic. Which she used very successfully to pound him right up the… erm, pound him into submission and pretty much take control of his life.

The other issue brewing was that Marty’s solo work was finally coming to the forefront, buoyed by the success of Radio Friendly Chick Song, which was entirely his creation from a musical perspective (dodgy lyrics ours, as usual). All well and good, but Simon had dangled the carrot of a potential solo album in front of him. And he’d done it within Maddy’s earshot, which meant it was Going To Happen, if she had anything to do with it, and those bullying thugs up the front weren’t going to have any say in the matter.

So, band retreat, September. We're sitting around the pool at Port Douglas - McCarthy and Lena were chilling on shaded banana lounges conversing in Samagda, the language they communicated in that nobody else could understand (mostly comprised of shared one-word in-jokes older than the Ark and a lot of equally impenetrable body language). Olivia and I were playing around in the shallow end like a pair of lust-crazed hormonal teenagers. She was flying out of Cairns to Hong Kong in a few days for a fashion show, so we were making the most of what time we had. Marty and Maddy were over by the picnic tables, soberly dressed (at least compared to Olivia's postage-stamp bikini, which I expect would have looked pretty shit on Marty) with a smorgasboard of spreadsheets and stock portfolios splayed out before them - she was trying to reorganise his finances and educate him about the stock market, even though he was pretty much the only one of us who had a clue about money in the first place; and Phil was lying back in the sunshine sucking on a great big spliff, mon. And presumably thinking hey, wow, isn't it like amazing that such different personalities can so seamlessly mould into one musical consciousness on stage, like some great... amorphous... multiply conscious... gooey... thing.

Anyway, we were there two weeks before we all started getting itchy feet. Once the tinea outbreak in the showers was sorted out (and yes, I’m aware we’ve done that joke before) we found ourselves humming these new, unheard-of riffs in the elevator, scribbling chord progressions on coasters, fragments of lyrics on hotel napkins, towels, bathmats, walls... Finally we couldn't stand it any longer and sent an emergency signal to SFA (as he'd become known) at Intercom for as much mobile recording equipment as he could muster. He was also kind enough to pack our guitars, drums, keyboards and amps. Thoughtful bugger. By that I mean he was both thoughtful and a bugger, but like we said in that press release he took the liberty of writing for us, sexuality wasn’t an issue with our band. We didn’t think any less of him because of that; we thought less of him because he was a slimy little bastard who couldn’t be trusted to sit the right way on a toilet seat. We thought a whole lot less of him in the years afterwards when it became obvious he and his then partner, our Intercom-supplied accountant, were embezzling large sums of money out of the band’s accounts into their own pockets, to the point when Flange Gasket Pty Ltd was declared insolvent and SOD-Off and all the contents within sold off to cover our debts and our unpaid tax bill. Yes, thoughtful bugger. I believe our former A&R manager is currently being thoughtfully buggered by Big Sione, enormous Polynesian ex-bouncer, in the showers at Long Bay.

So the month off only lasted a couple of weeks before recording started again - and we must have been like some starving mosquito hitting some great vein of creativity, because by God did we suck. Erm, I mean we just... we produced a lot of material. Enough to fill two albums, in fact. It took us four months on and off to record all of it, in studios all around the place - wherever we happened to be at the time, in between promotional, playing and partying commitments.

So, in light of our sworn oath to keep taking the piss out of the pretentions inherent in our line of work, we made clear to Intercom our intention to release our next two albums, Bollocks To That and Bollocks to This simultaneously as 'a double concept album in two stand-alone installations'. Were they happy about it? Not really. Did they let us do it? Reluctantly. And most important of all, did it actually work out for us?

Hell no. It backfired like a Kombi van on Avgas. And you thought Use Your Illusion was shit.