Scandinavian flick

Scandy flick, hammer of Thor
Swedish girls for bonus score
Goddess blonde, she's just the trick
Until you get the Scandy flick.
- Hayabusa, 2002

As it happened, our new mates from Q-PAC were heading to the biggest 24 hour copying place in South Brisbane, the Snap Printing joint next to Lena’s hotel; the silver Falcon rental had been hastily abandoned in the loading bay outside. Phil let his juvenile delinquent side out to play as he unflipped the pocket knife attachment on his mini-Leatherman keyring, ducked behind the Falcon out of sight of the CCTV camera standing sentinel, and quietly eviscerated the offside rear tyre before skulking a few yards further down the street and slipping into the passenger side of the waiting Skyline. He offered a silent nod, which I returned.

From my lookout position behind the wheel, I watched the trio of the driver, his offsider and the nervous QSO gopher buzzing around inside the piercingly brightly lit copying place, frantically flitting between machines, swearing over paper jams, trying to collate the copies as they spewed forth, and generally reminding me of the morning at uni when the main printer for all the labs in the building decided to pack it in - that morning being the morning of honours thesis submission day, naturally - and watching a group of otherwise sane, highly intelligent young proto-researchers turn into headless chooks. Yes, even the usually unflappable Dr Cletus was bricking it large. Me, I’d already pulled an all-nighter, had already handed-in that morning and was hassling people to join me down the RE. I wasn’t about to let all that good drinking time go to waste now was I?

Lena serenely glided out of the front doors of the hotel like nothing on Earth was going on. Appearances were deceiving. To my plainly furrowed brow, she responded: “Don’t worry. Wireless network in the hotel allows you to send jobs straight down here - it’s printing directly to their high-throughput laser, should be done in a matter of minutes.”

“I love you. Will you marry me?”

“Sorry babe, I’m already married to my work,” she quipped demurely. “That’s my cue.” She ducked into the shop, completely unnoticed by the three panicking men by the humming bank of photocopiers, picked up her printing from the huge laser (already collated and packaged up in a neat Snap Printing box), paid the very bored looking kid on the desk, and slipped out again. I popped the boot; Lena swiftly hid our evening’s work under an old towel, and shut the bootlid.

With that, we left the car, and returned to the hotel lobby to wait.

We didn’t need to wait long. The three headless chooks in black sprinted out of the shop, a box of paper slung under the gopher’s arm. The trio piled into the Falcon and the driver gunned the engine. The Falcon slewed away from the loading zone, into the turning lane where he’d planned a vigorous Scandinavian flick to U-turn them back towards Q-PAC. Unfortunately the outside rear tyre, on which much of the physics of the manoeuver depended, was courtesy the Duffer now flatter than Holland after a steamroller convention. The Falcon's tail slewed waywardly out of the arc of the turn, ESP arguing impotently against physics, clattering the deflated outside rear wheel against the kerb with impressive force - enough to buckle it under the car and render the thing pretty much undriveable. More than we could ever have asked for, to be honest. Cue more panic, as the three of them burst from the car and raced around it. In hindsight headless chooks did them no justice. Which meant it was time for the grand entrance onto the scene of Philip, Magdalena and myself, still resplendent in our designer outfits (our designer of choice being Yves St Vincent de Paul.)

“Hey, are you guys OK?” I asked.

“Bloody flat tyre!” cried the driver. Redundantly, as it was perfectly bloody obvious they had a bloody flat tyre.

“Do you need us to call the RACQ?” Lena asked helpfully.

“No, we need… Fuck. Sorry, ladies present. We need,” the gopher gasped, “to get this up to Q-PAC as soon as possible.”

“Q-PAC? Not for the Martin di Biagini command performance with the QSO?” I asked.

“…Yes?”

“Oh look, that’s no problem, we’re headed there ourselves! We’re just a little late, that’s all. But we can give one of you guys a lift, if that would help. Can only fit one of you, I’m afraid…”

You’d have thought we’d have offered them the last spot on the liferaft, considering how thankful they were. The other two almost threw the gopher and his precious printery box into our arms. I popped the boot again with Phil’s remote keyfob and the gopher hurriedly flung the box into the dark expanse. He might have noticed another box-shaped object draped in a towel, he might not. In any case, it didn’t register as something worth considering on anything more than a fleeting basis. He scrambled into the back of the GT-R, followed by Phil; Lena had the excuse that her frock wouldn’t stand up to clambering into the back seat of a two-door coupe, so finally she’d secured the legroom her legs warranted.

“All buckled in?” I asked. Affirmative. I flicked the ignition and punched the throttle, destination Q-PAC.

Minutes later we pulled up smartly outside the main entrance. Lena began to extricate herself from the seat in front; not easy to do with elegance or style, which was what she was determined to do.

“Look, I’ll grab the box out of the back while you folks untangle yourselves,” I proposed. Gopher Boy, watching desperate seconds slip by, seemed very relieved at the idea. By the time he’d managed to clamber out, I was by his side handing him a box full of The Precious with much love from the Snap Printing peeps. He took it with such gratitude, it almost broke my heart, knowing what it actually contained. I hoped he would find alternative employment after Maddy had finished with him. With his free hand, he shook our hands with enthusiasm, then raced away up the stairs.

“Cheap bastards,” Phil remarked when he’d left. “Didn’t even offer us backstage passes as a thank-you.”

Maestro di Biagini aficionados - of which there must have been some, judging by the sparse turnout of interpretively-dressed arts wankers in the front rows - knew to expect certain elements from this, the Maestro’s third performance with the QSO. Although convention is conformity and conformity is death, certain conventions were to be respected, even by the convention-defying tossers with the black square-rimmed glasses (with no fucking lenses in them, mind) stroking their Che goatees and looking thoughtful, in the hope of impressing their (usually first, usually last) dates enough to be in with a shot of a shag at the close of play. The Maestro would begin his conceptual installation (occasionally referred to as a ‘gig’) by outlining his artistic vision for the performance, because there were always some intellectual midgets and knuckledraggers who needed the subtleties of avant-garde composing explained to them in big print, to wit the several carloads of year 12 elective music students who typically got dragged to these things by their teachers, hid up the back and giggled or slept through most of it. This, apart from the installation itself, was the Maestro’s only communication with the audience for the duration of the often several-hour performance. And he didn’t take requests. Not even show tunes. He was an artist dammit.

So it was this evening. Maestro di Biagini stood before the audience, a slight, shadowy, intense figure standing in front of his starkly lit black synthesizer stack upon its grand black pedestal, the very dimly lit orchestra buried below and behind. Black was the new, old and only black when it came to set décor at a Marty’s-being-a-serious-composer show. Henry Ford was apparently consulting on the colour scheme.

I still didn’t think he looked well, and Lena’s throwaway comment about him 'going to bits upstairs' had me regretting some of the verbal hand-grenades I’d thrown his way earlier, whether in his presence or otherwise. He looked bleak and pale.

“Tonight,” he began quietly, his voice reinforced with stage bombast, “you will experience the latest evolution of music. You will experience sounds so cutting-edge, so very 21st century, that lesser mortals would not comprehend even as music.”

“Lesser mortals such as anyone who listens to it,” whispered one orchestra member to another.

Maestro di Biagini heard this not, and continued, trying not to stumble over his lines, wondering when Maddy’s people might write him some that weren’t quite so punishing. “Remember where you were when you heard this first. For you will be the first to have ever heard music such as this. And then, once all is done, you may tell others of what you have experienced. And you will know yourselves to truly be the lucky few to have seen the dawn of a brave new musical civilization...”

First violin coughed ‘Wanker’ into a clenched fist.

“This installation is titled ‘Dissertation in Black.’ The decorated composer (at the time, he was decorated in black with black highlights) strode purposefully back to his stool and nodded to the conductor to begin. He nodded in assent, sniffed, and raised his baton.

All concerned were in for a bit of a shock.

Of the few dozen QSO regulars in the orchestra pit, the crew back of stage, or the audience watching them, only three people in the building knew what was about to happen next. The others in the building weren’t to know, at first at least, that the music flung under the noses of the QSO performers (at the last possible minute before curtain-up, of course) wasn’t actually ‘Dissertation In Black’. It was, in fact, hastily downloaded sheet music for ‘Back In Black’.

At first, Marty didn’t quite pick up what the tune was, other than that it wasn’t his. However he began to develop an idea as to what had happened to his original sheet music when the spotlight over his piano was killed, and another brought up on stage right, illuminating the expected quartet of tenors, dressed as Gregorian monks as per their stage direction - but flanked by two other figures in cheap suits, like racecourse heavies flanking a dodgy SP bookie. With a chill of horror, the realisation of where he'd seen that pair before, who they were, and what was about to happen, shivered through his soul. A stomach knotted with fear and loathing from three days of apprehension and composer’s block, finally fought back. The Maestro took one look at the pair in the dodgy suits, one at the conductor (still oblivious to his attempts to stop the trainwreck), and threw up a little in his mouth.

And with that, in our most operatic tenor voices, Phil and I raised our faces to the light and began to sing with the others (from the same song sheet, as it were):

Back in black…
I hit the sack…
I’ve been too long and it’s time to be back, I’ve been…
Let loose…
From the noose…
That’s kept me hanging around…

From between his fingers, like watching a horror film - and he never watched horror films - Marty watched as his precious, cultivated audience of scenesters, critics and art-school tossers began to realise what Maestro di Biagini’s ‘brave new musical civilization’ actually entailed. Almost as one, they stood and stormed for the exits and the carpark in disgust, to retrieve their Priuses and Vespas and fuck off home. Which accounted for the front couple of rows; while the hideously bored elective music students who were obliged to make up the bulk of the audience did, to their credit, get into it, that wasn’t much solace to Marty, as he went and was properly sick under his keyboard.

His credibility! His artistic standing! All gone! Destroyed by these BASTARDS! And Phil, fuck him, still didn’t even have the common decency to sing in key!

Martin di Biagini, former avant-garde composer and darling of the intelligencia, sat a broken man at his keys as his old mates went to town on the shattered remains of his professional career. To the tune of…

Baa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aack…
Baa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aack…
Baa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aack…
Baa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aack…
Well I’m back in black…
Yeah I’m BACK! IN! BLAAACK!!!

One overriding thought dominated Marty’s conscious, though. And to his surprise, it wasn’t Phil is fucking DEAD. Indeed, to his abject horror, and his developing delight, it was…

Fuck it.

Fuck this, fuck all of this. Fuck it with a big stick. With pointy sharp bits on it. It’s all a horrendous fucking WANK, all of it. None of those tossers out there gave two good shits for your music, buddy. They’re all here to be SEEN. And the moment your performances stop being the place to be seen, the dust cloud on the horizon will be all that is left of your ‘artistic integrity’. Priuses can churn up a surprising amount of dust…

So (probably) ran Maestro di Biagini’s train of thought. With one carriage parked in a particular siding: Wonder if that cute blonde bouncing up and down a few rows back is with a school group… and if so, does that mean she isn’t legal?

Vaguely considering whether he should endeavour to find out after the show, unless Maddy managed to stop him first, he signalled his tech for Maximum Stonk and brought his hands down on the keys with a cacophonic chord. And then another, and another, to go along with the song, preferably. And when, a little later, he kicked over his synth stack, grabbed a free-standing mike and bellowed along with us that he too was Back In Black, well, he fuckin’ meant it, folks.

“To the end of artistic integrity,” Marty proposed.

“I’ll drink to that,” I resolved, and the four of us clinked bottles. It was Marty’s round, so it was Coronas with lime. We were parked at the Fox, not far from Q-PAC, which we'd played years ago as the Terminus (prior to its inevitable gentrification, this being a Brisbane pub we were talking about after all.) Reasonably trendy, near enough to be handy, but far enough away that it served as a decent place for Marty to hide from Maddy, as we were. Even if the art-deco theme threatened to make me spontaneously vomit. Art-deco has that affect on me. The age that taste forgot.

“Okay,” he said in his most resigned ‘You got me’ voice, “how’d you pull it off?”

“Better ask this one,” I replied, slapping a hand on Lena’s shoulder and giving her a gentle squeeze.

“Me?” she queried incredulously. “I had nothing to do with it. Sounds like a simple mixup at the printery to me…”

Marty sipped his beer cautiously. “I think setting off the fire alarm at the end was the best touch of all,” he offered. “Managed to give us an excuse for cancelling the rest of the performance at least.”

“Ah… we didn’t actually have anything to do with that,” I noted.

“Really?”

“Scout’s honour.”

“The only one of you lot who was a scout was Phil, and he’s about as honourable as John Howard,” Marty remarked. “Seriously, that wasn’t part of the plan? Sheesh. Must have been a fire in the kitchen after all.”

Lena’s brow furrowed. “I think it might have actually been your management trying a damage limitation exercise. After all, the announcement on the PA as we were bolting for the door definitely stated the performance was cancelled and refunds would be issued, not that you’d come back and try again in half an hour…”

Marty nodded, a little ashen-faced. I figured he was in for a world of hurt once ‘his management’ caught up with him.

“Hey man, sorry we’ve cost your management large sums of money over this,” Phil offered. “And the whole ‘destroying your artistic integrity thing’ too, that was probably a bit excessive.”

“Hey, it’s OK,” Marty said. “What’s a completely fucked career between mates eh?” He laughed. “It wasn’t Maddy,” he admitted. “Major H’s your man. Spotted him through the melee. Saw Mads about to charge the stage with a bunch of coppers, cranked the alarm and gave me a big thumbs up. Loves his Acca Dacca of course, the Major. He’s currently covering my arse back at Q-PAC…” Marty held up his flip-top phone, the display of which was reading some sort of text message all in caps FULL OF FKN SHOUTIN AT FERALLS. Most of which detailed how much fun he wasn’t having covering for Marty back at base. The latter, suddenly realising that a phone switched on is a phone potentially contactable by one's missus, quickly shut the thing down – but not before we’d proposed a toast to the Major. The dodgy old bastard had come through for us in the end. We’d buy him a beer, but he was a bit busy at the mo, and anyway he’d call us a bunch of Sydney poofters for drinking fucken poofter premium beers and propose we should be capped.

“To Major Rude Havock,” I declared, raising my bottle. “As the man says, IF IT'S FERAL...”

“IT'S IN PERIL,” bellowed the lads with a laugh, and supped heartily.

Once the laughter had died down, Marty looked sheepish, staring down the rim of his beer. “I was beginning to get sick of the whole bloody thing anyway, if you want to know the truth…" It was a throwaway line, but he wasn't getting away with just throwing it out there. The silence pressed him further. “Not beginning. Had. It’d turned into something I really didn’t believe in,” he confessed. “Kept trying to out-do myself, make everything bigger, more dramatic, more self-indulgent, always pushing the boundaries one step further all the time.... To be honest,” he shrugged, “I was out of ideas. It was killing me. Not sleeping properly, not eating properly… I mean literally, fucking killing me. I wanted to kill it, but just didn’t know how.” Then laughed. “I don’t know, maybe throwing the toys out of the pram with a subversive, ironic performance of Back In Black is the ultimate post-modernist statement…”

“What about Maddy, how do you think she’ll take it?”

“Oh, she’ll sue,” he said, matter-of-factly. “But don’t take it personally.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied. “You going to turn your phone back on any time soon?”

“Hell no,” Marty grinned. “Do I look crazy to you?”

No, he didn’t. He looked… relieved. I could believe he’d begun to feel uncomfortable in the method-acted persona of the great avant-garde composer, darling of the contemporary arts community. He'd certainly looked uncomfortable. All Marty ever wanted was for people to like him, and the music he made, not just the dude with acoustic stuff but the electronica which he used to knock up on Protracker on the Amiga as a teenager, which evolved into the instrumentals he did with us and into Departure Lounge, which somehow turned into monumentally overblown shitfights like tonight - and to like it as the music that it was, not for anything else that went along with it. The irony was as sad as it was sickening. Literally. Someone had to clean up the puddle under his synth stack back on stage and it wasn’t gonna be any of us, cos we'd already fucked off down the pub.

Even so, even though we’d saved his arse – not that he’d ever admit it – I still felt pretty shit about all we’d said to each other earlier in the evening.

“Back in the dressing room,” I began reluctantly, “when I said ‘Gasket made you’…”

Marty guessed where I was going with this, and tried to wave off the potential conflict with a “Don’t worry about it.” He hated conflict almost as much as he hated creases in his ironing.

“I also should have said, ‘you made Gasket’. Your girl isn’t entirely right about the whole deal there, but she’s not entirely wrong. It bothers me that we did bulldoze you a bit. We didn’t really give you a voice as much as we could have.”

“You know,” he said after a reflective pause, “that wasn’t really the problem. It was…” He shrugged, trying to figure out whether he wanted to go there. “I just felt like the designated writer-of-girly-pop-songs. Like that’s all I was good for. ‘Marty’ll write us some poppy schtick that’ll get us airplay while me and Angus can get on and write the real stuff…’”

I could almost hear McCarthy’s voice offering the throwaway line. He may have even done so, verbatim.

“Old mate wasn’t one for subtlety, was he,” I nodded.

“It wasn’t just Sam,” Marty continued. “Let’s face it, Angus, the list of music you can’t stand is miles longer than the stuff you like. If you’re not into something, you don’t exactly sugar-coat it much... Sometimes on stage you looked as though you were either bored to tears or in actual physical pain at the prospect of having to play my stuff. Not really very reassuring.”

That was the most strident I’d heard Marty in years.

“Whereas my stuff, I suppose, was too stupid and derivative to deserve any response at all,” I mused sourly.

“I didn’t say that,” he said.

“Hey, come on guys,” interceded Phil. “Nice social drink, just to catch up. Off-side rule is in play.”

“Well, I don’t know,” suggested Lena. “I think you need to talk about issues like this, otherwise they fester.”

“And otherwise you don’t have anything to write about,” I added, tongue only partially in cheek.

“Hey…”

Silence weighed heavily on our nice social drink, just to catch up, after we’d ruined his career and artistic integrity and stuff. I’d been flagged off-side more times than Filippo Inzaghi, and he was BORN off-side. The way I was brought up, if you create a problem, you fix a problem. “Lena’s right,” I said, astounding myself that I’d actually chosen to say those words in that order. “Let’s talk. Marty, I’m sorry I didn’t enjoy playing some of your stuff, because my taste in music is narrower than Kate Moss. It was without exception, intelligent and beautifully crafted and much cleverer than anything I could come up with, but I happen to like big stupid power chords played very loudly on fuzzy guitars, and that’s the cross I have to bear.”

I let those ripples settle into the surface of the conversation.

“Thanks, man,” Marty nodded magnanimously.

Wow. Cathartic.

“And you know what?” he added after a time. “I’ve been trying to write a song full of big stupid power chords played very loudly on fuzzy guitars for five years now. I can’t do it. I suck at it. It takes fuckin’ talent and don’t you forget that. Every time I try it just comes out sounding like Collective Soul.”

I grinned. “You mean, trying to be, like, really hard and shit, and just ending up sounding like a Christian rock band who are really pissed off because Dad won’t let them borrow the Volvo?”

“That’s it,” Marty said. “And I can’t do the vocal either. I try to be angry or scary like Lemmy, or Hetfield, and all I get is fucking Rob Thomas.”

“Noone deserves Rob Thomas,” Phil quipped. To general assent.

“Anyway, that’s my big confession,” Marty admitted. “I couldn’t write a decent hairy-arsed rock song to save myself, whereas I don’t remember you writing a bad one in five or six years.”

“Sackful O’ Kittens?” I reminded him.

“We’re not counting anything off the Album That Shall Not Be Named,” Lena replied, to more general assent.

“Where are you going wrong, do you reckon?” I asked him. “Have you tried scientifically breaking all your equipment?”

Marty shook his head. “But I’ve tried switching on the ‘make everything sound old and busted’ function on Pro Tools…”

“Nah mate, you can’t do it digitally, you have to get out there and bust shit up... put the boot into your amplifier, hit the amp lead with a hammer, drive over the bass with a truck, drive over the bass player with a truck… make it all sound ever so slightly fucked up. Then drink large volumes of cheap vodka mixed with Draino, and stay up for three days. Hey presto, you’ll rock out like a motherfucker.”

“I’ll have to give that a try,” Marty giggled. “Might have to call you in as our specialist rocking-out skills coach for the band.”

According to Lena and Phil, Marty’s backing outfit, Vanity Project (originally ‘Marty di Biagini and his Vanity Project’ - Maddy hated the name, but it’d stuck before she’d had a chance to have him change it) were staffed with some very useful musos who’d developed good reputations around the traps, quite a few of whom he’d recruited from our home territories - Tommy Wilson on bass and Ed Terry on drums were both ex-Three By Three, our mates from the first North Queensland tour, plus a slew of other North Coast bands in the interim, while on woodwind (yes, he needed a woodwind section, it was that sort of act) he’d drafted Imogen Ciocek from Sagittaria. Rather to Maddy’s chagrin, of course, given their (very) brief romantic history - even though that stuff was all history, Imogen was happily married and had been for eight or nine years now.

“Your man Bruce Reid can throw a shape or two can’t he?” I suggested, trying to be charitable.

“Nah, not really,” Marty shrugged. “His lot were never one for the big rock moves, were they?”

The Vanity Project’s second guitarist, who stepped up to lead duties on occasions when Marty set aside the axe and sat down at the keys, was a guy from Melbourne called Burton Reid. Or Reid Burton, I could never remember which. Never trust anyone with two surnames and no first name. Particularly when his CV includes the line ‘1997-2004: Guitarist, deusexmachina.’ Reid Burton (as his Wikipedia entry refers to him so we'll run with that) had been Brady Priddle’s second banana for the duration of that band’s existence. People more charitable than me took pity on his lack of first names and called him Bruce. I don’t know if he’d ever snapped in half and been stuck back together with sticky tape, but his resemblance to the former WA left-arm quick began and ended with his name; he was neither tall nor a leftie. I personally thought the man a drug-addled tool, but then again, that remained my opinion of anyone and everyone associated with deusexmachina. If anyone in Marty’s backing band needed running over with a truck…

Anyway, others had clearly moved on in the five-year interim. Allegedly he’d cleaned up, lost the attitude, stopped dressing like someone’s dad trying to fit in at an emo concert, and was quite a useful guitarist - he always had been, as far as he was able to show off his chops on the turgid rubbish Chubs Priddle made him play.

“Not so much,” I recalled. “Generally stood around looking professionally bored. Staring at his shoes a lot.” And not being able to think of anything else nice to say, I didn’t say anything. Your mother was right, you know.

A few beers later, with Marty getting fairly wobbly and protesting he really had to get moving after this one, the topic had turned to toys. Flange Gasket had always been into toys. From McCarthy’s fixation with blood-red Italian superbikes (or more aptly, his fixation with throwing blood-red Italian superbikes at bits of the scenery), to Phil’s Jap-import sportscar obsession, to my contra-deal Yamaha R6s and that awesome graphite-black Monaro, we'd been a bunch of moderately cashed-up young fellahs who liked our toys. Marty, given the last five years of consistent success building upon success, was dramatically more cashed-up off than all of us combined then or now, comfortably trumping our fulleh siiick R34 Skyline and AWD Magna respectively with his BMW M5 (family runabout) and supercharged Lotus Exige (weekend plaything) - and that was just for his Brisbane pad; there was a new Mini Cooper JCW (to commute to the office) and a Range Rover Sport (to tow the boat and/or the jetski) in their garage in Pittwater. Needless to say he and Maddy had quality property here, there and everywhere, and in the last few years he’d also begun indulging his childhood fantasy of becoming a pilot. It wasn’t quite the RAAF F/A-18 Hornet he’d had on his bedroom wall, but a glossy black Bell Ranger helicopter seemed to fit the bill - at least until he could score a seat in a Hornet, of course. Marty was midway through eulogising the specs of the Bell - he was an aviation trainspotter from years back - before remembering something and digging out his flash fliptop Motorola cameraphone to switch it on.

“Finally opening the channels of communication with the boss?”

“Not on purpose,” he remarked sardonically. “Check this out,” he said, scanning through the image library. He clicked on an image and brought it up full screen. It was his pride and joy, parked on a headland, gleaming in the sunlight.

“Nice,” I remarked, because it was, and passed the phone around for the others to see. Somehow I didn’t think digging out a Polaroid of my partially rebuilt R 80 G/S would compare that favourably.

“Why the streamers?” asked Lena.

“Ah, it was for a wedding. Waste of time really, the things blew off in the downdraft from the rotors as soon as we started the bloody thing up, but it looked good for the photos they had taken beforehand, which is half the point I’m told. Next image along is the bridal party in front of the chopper, I think… yeah.”

Lena nodded at the image. “Whose wedding? Not yours?”

“Oh God no. Maddy and I are still arguing details, haven’t even been game to ask the question formally. She refuses to have a Catholic ceremony, and there’s no bloody way I’m converting to Judaism, so we haven’t even been ring shopping. Nah, I was just dragged in as chauffeur for the bridal party… and yeah, they got me to play at the ceremony as well. The usual deal…”

“What is it about people thinking that just because you can hold a tune you’ll automatically want to play at peoples’ weddings for them?” Phil wanted to know.

“Phil, how would that affect you anyway?” I quipped.

“Ah get stuffed. Hey, isn’t that your sister, Marty? I didn’t know she was getting married?” he remarked, passing me the phone so I could have a look.

“It wasn’t her wedding, Gina was just bridesmaid - and responsible for ringing-in this little black duck of course,” Marty explained. “Nah, not a di Biagini wedding. But I think Angus will recognise the bride though…”

I did. Not at first, I had to squint a bit. But the name rattled free from the image archives soon enough.

“It’s Jessica,” I said, slightly bemused by my own reaction.

“Who?” Lena queried.

“Jessica,” I repeated. “The girl who started Flange Gasket.” If you really thought about it, it was all her fault.

Lena urgently wanted another look. “This is Jessica?” she asked. “Wow. I mean… wow. Fuck me. Angus, what the hell were you thinking when you broke up with her, boyo…”

Good question.

“So, what, you flew them to the venue?” I queried.

“Yeah. It was at a golf course on the Gold Coast, which has this little chapel on the lake. Had to circle around the back nine for a while because we were early - can’t be early on the big day of course. Unfortunately though one of the other bridesmaids started getting a bit airsick so we had to land a bit sooner than expected so she could regain her colour before walking down the aisle…”

Lena had passed me the phone again, which now had a shot of the happy couple, flanked by Marty’s sister Gina and the best man, outside the chapel. Decent image quality these little cameraphones could pull these days, I figured. You could see every golden strand of the bride’s elaborately set hair, the curve of her body in that unbelievable bridal gown, the unmistakeable sparkle in her eye. You could see, basically, that she was probably the most beautiful girl in the world, in that moment in time.

“So who’s the lucky lad?” I asked. I think I managed to sound disinterested.

“Ben Scott,” Marty replied. At my frown of slight recollection, he further explained that Ben Scott played a bit of Super 14 for the Reds, which was maybe where I’d seen him before. He had the usual granite jaw and product-set hair of your typical GPS rugby graduate - your archetypal Matt Burke/Dan Herbert style head. He was better looking than me, and these days probably much closer to his fighting weight. Bastard.

“They met in hospital, apparently.”

So she was still a nurse, presumably. “Injury?”

“Med student,” Marty explained. “He’s graduated now, I’d have thought.”

“Cool,” I nodded, feeling vaguely like I was being tested. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll go with the same plan for our wedding in March,” I offered. “If anything, Bethany’s a worse flyer than me, and as you probably remember, I fly like a brick.”

“So it’s still on?” queried Lena.

“Of course it’s still on,” I responded. And shot her a dirty look when Marty wasn’t looking.

The phone exploded into life in my hands. Marty beckoned me to hand it over, dismissing the image menu and pressing the green button. “Hey there princess,” he said.

Princess wasn’t happy. Princess was, in the parlance of rugby league commentators, abso-lutely blowing up de-luxe. Thanks Rabs.

“Hey, hey, no need for that. I’m with them now… no, just a few drinks, we’re catching up. No… no, you’re not calling the police, Maddy. Or your lawyers. I’m here of my own free will. No, listen here, sweetie…”

I pulled a concerned face. Marty let half a grin sneak out the side of his mouth, which was vaguely reassuring. Indicated he had it in hand, or at the very least, thought he had.

“No, listen for a moment. Why did you have Mr Hardwick evacuate the building midway through my opening number? Seriously… of course that was all planned! It was Back in Black! Why do you think I called it ‘Dissertation in Black’?... Of course it was the same sheet music… I don’t care what the kid thinks was in the envelope, I know what I handed him. What do you mean, why the hell would I want to do that? For impact, of course! Any credible post-modern performance artist should always challenge his audience, and what could be more challenging than… Well OK, I agree challenging them so much that they leave is a bit over the top…”

I laughed. “Tell her you were subverting the dominant paradigm,” I suggested.

“But Maddy, I was dominating the subversive paradigm….” The lad probably hadn’t had this many ales for a while. Or he was just taking the piss as well as sinking it. “OK… okay. Yes, it’s cost us a lot of money. And reputation. And credibility, yes. Now listen for a moment. Here’s why I don’t actually give a flying toss. I might actually get to sleep tonight, and that’d be pretty bloody novel.”

Could I stop giggling? Could I bollocks.

“Have I been drinking? Christ, I don’t know. I’ve been down the pub with my mates for the past two hours… no, listen. LISTEN. The composing stuff is done. Maybe the electronica, but the performances - no more, end of, run down the curtain and join the choir indivisible. Run out of ideas. Back In Black was my big ironic farewell, but someone had to go and bugger that up for me didn’t she… What do you mean, what was the rest of the show supposed to be?”

He winced, looking around at us for inspiration.

“Show tunes,” Lena offered with a big consipiratorial smile.

“Show tunes,” Marty responded. “Busby Berkeley musicals. We were going to do an all-star tribute to Bye Bye Birdie,” he rambled. “Then some Rogers and Hammerstein magic!” He began to warble in a poncy English accent: “We’ve got sunlight on the sand, we’ve got moonlight on the sea, we’ve got mangoes and bananas…”

“You can pick right off the treeeee…” Phil and I chorused in the background, dissolving in laughter.

“…Yes, we do think we’re funny. We made a bloody good career out of being funny, my dear, it was what we used to do for a living.” I’d never heard Marty so confident. Either the Dutch courage was getting through a mountain of work, or I had a very skewed view of the Marty-Maddy relationship dynamic; seemingly he wasn’t getting bent over and reamed on a regular basis, literally or figuratively. Or if he did, it was only because she asked nicely and it was a special occasion or something. “Well, I think our record stands for itself… our number one record that is… how many number one records have YOU had, little Miss… that’s not really very many. One is more than that. Yes, we’ve done better since, but that’s not the point… look, for the last time, we’re not fucking getting the band back together!” Wow, profanity. He turned to us. “Are we!”

Phil shrugged. “I’m easy.”

Everyone was looking at me. I smirked and said, “Could be a window in my scheduling. Have your people talk to my people. We’ll do lunch, workshop the primary concept, get buy-in from stakeholders, see if we can leverage positive outcomes, get some synergistic confluences on the table...”

Marty grinned, turning back to the phone. “Ah. Turns out we are putting the band back together. Sorry about that…”

“Cancel that huge solo contract,” I called out, “we’re booked on the RSL circuit supporting Mental As Anything...” General amusement in excelsius deo.

“What’s that? Yeah, I know. It’s my last one. I’ve got…” He gauged his beer bottle carefully. “Approximately 195 millilitres left. But some’s probably soaked into the lime as well… I’ll get a cab. I’ll GET a CAB. Seriously, don’t worry about it, head on back to the apartment. I’ve got keys. Don’t worry, we’ll stay out of trouble. OK? Yeah, I know I’m in trouble when I get home. I’m looking forward to it… OK then. Bye bye baby. Bye bye birdie… love you. Bye.”

Defused. Like a bomb squad instructor. What a masterclass. I could but stand and applaud. “Fucking Lord,” I remarked, “can you teach me how the hell you do that?”

Needless to say, it wasn’t Marty’s last. We were there until closing, somewhere south of midnight, briefly (unwisely) considering kicking on before the sensible consensus to retire for the evening was reached. We poured Marty into a cab headed for his Brisbane pad (an apartment on the waterfront at New Farm, thanks very much) and stumbled back up the street towards Lena’s hotel. She’d kindly volunteered her suite for the purposes of crash landings for the evening, at least until check-out time tomorrow morning. She’d organised a late checkout as well, bless her. I offered to marry her again but she said it’d be bigamy. “I know it’d be big of you,” I quipped brilliantly, after which she hit me repeatedly with a throw cushion until I promised to stop.

Normally on evenings like this, Phil’s invariably keen to stay up all evening talking rubbish over yet more grogs. In the twilight years of Flange Gasket we’d often find ourselves up at dawn, me still knocking back beers, him pulling a few cones. Common interests, like I said. Thankfully however he’d pulled an all-nighter the evening before, over at a muso mate’s place in Casino rebuilding the guy’s computer (i.e. trying to put it back together after completely fucking it up beforehand) over bourbons and weed, before he’d headed up here yesterday afternoon. He barely managed to get out ‘See you in the muhhh’ before faceplanting into the couch and settling into a rich, methodical program of snoring.

“Where am I sleeping?” I wondered aloud.

“With me, if you like,” she suggested with more overt coquettishness than I was strictly comfortable with. Then pushed open the bedroom door for the punchline: two beds, a single and a double, the latter closest to the door.

“Shotgun the double,” I proposed.

“Bollocks to that,” she retorted.

“Was a pretty shit album,” I replied, diving headlong onto the double. Unfortunately I bounced straight off and was spat unceremoniously into the gap between the two beds. Could someone please stop the room from spinning?

I picked myself up, staggered off to the kitchen to hydro-load as much skanky Brisbane water as I could stomach, then fled from the sight of Phil, mired in the oblivion of half-dream-land, jeans around his ankles as he tried to wrestle them off over his boots. Lena in bra and panties, which I encountered on returning to the bedroom, was a more appetising prospect. If you were into that sort of thing, of course. It wasn’t half obvious it’d been a frighteningly long time since I’d shared bedroom time with a girl in her intimates.

“Sleepover, huh?” she mused. “So are we going to plait each other’s hair, eat icecream, talk about boys?”

“Not really my thuhhh,” I said, as I faceplanted onto the single bed, channelling the Duffer for the first and last time in my existence.

“What, you don’t like icecream?” was the last words I remember hearing.