I's rather be krund

I’d rather be drunk than to be feeling this
Have you as my little thing to miss
Lonely is only a place to hide
When I’m hanging with these guys
- Tim Rogers, 2005

So we’d been playing live shows to try and put off another painful attempt at recording; but after a gig like that final M-One show, recording seemed a hell of a lot less unpleasant a prospect. The decision to install the egregious Brady Priddle of deusexmachina as producer would at least mean one thing: we had a producer. It was a start. It would mean McCarthy was re-enthused by the prospect of working with his new bestest buddy in the whole world, and not so distracted by Chastity on the basis that she didn’t do the non-metropolitan lifestyle and probably wouldn’t be seen that much, given we’d booked three weeks’ recording up at Firstlight up on the range above Byron. Likewise, I’d be motivated by the idea of doing whatever it took to get this shit finished as soon as possible, to avoid having to deal with Priddle and the band, and to hasten my return to Rachel’s tiny-but-cosy flat near main beach in Newcastle. Phil would be as dissolute as ever, probably even more so if Priddle brought his mobile chemist’s shop along with him, but given that Firstlight was at most half a mile from his house, we could at least plan on him being somewhere in the vicinity for the duration. Marty and Maddy had recently bought property at Watego’s Beach (I figured it had to be her money rather than his, as that was some of the most expensive non-metropolitan real estate in the land, and he wasn't a hell of a lot better off than we were) so they were locals now too. Hell, everyone lived nearby - even Priddle had a place up on the hillside which was within staggering distance of the studios, where McCarthy was staying, and probably Chastity as well if she could bring herself to slum it with the rurals. I planned to stay with Jeff and Rebecca down the road - I was looking forward to Rachel meeting them and the folks when she came up on the weekends, I just knew they’d love her as much as I did. And they did, of course - people just took to Rachel, she was a very likeable girl. Of course, when she wasn’t around, there was the probable likelihood that I’d be drinking quite a bit in order to blot out the frustration of dealing with these arseholes, and maybe not in a fit state to drive the sixty or so kays back to the farm. But there was a couch at the studio with my name on it, and I could always sleep in the Monaro - I’d flown back to Brisbane and had driven down to Byron from there, rather than straight to Ballina-Byron airport. Probably better that than crashing at Phil’s - that would just result in more substance abuse throughout the early hours - or, should insanity prevail and/or hell freeze over, Brady Priddle’s.

Rebecca wasn’t happy with my attitude. “Everyone has their good side,” she maintained across the breakfast table, in her well-trained ‘gentle persuasion of little dance students’ voice. “He can’t be all bad. Sam sees something in him, and he’s usually a good judge of character. You’re stuck with him for the next three weeks, so you just have to find something likeable about him, and focus on that. Right, Jeff?”

Jeff didn’t even look up from the Northern Star. “You’re kidding, right?” he remarked. “Have you met the guy, Beck? Total fuckin’ arsehole.”

To be charitable, I’d never been close enough to Priddle to get a decent measure of how he operated. We’d played gigs together - usually more antagonistically than that statement suggested, at least in years gone past - so I knew him by his music, at least enough to say that I thought his music was shit. I knew enough from the deusexmachina recordings I’d heard (McCarthy had hilariously bought their latest for me as a joke birthday present this year) to say that he liked his stuff slickly (and heavily) produced, overlaid with electronica, and layered like a twelve-tier wedding cake. These days deusexmachina had moved on slightly from their vaguely Radiohead/Live/REM-scented origins and were pushing out a sound which was more consistent with the electro-metal workings of Muse, NIN or (to a lesser extent) Filter, with a stab of Mars Volta style random dithering and arty pretention thrown in for some light relief, but still worshipping at the altar of Thom Yorke. Put it this way: they didn’t sound like Hayabusa. Which was what I wanted us to sound like, but this wasn’t my show - not for much longer, anyway. I’d already started considering that I’d stick around for the recording of this album and maybe the tour after it, but pulling stumps after that seemed an appealing idea. Everyone and their dog seemed to be working on solo albums and side projects, but I was honest enough to admit to myself that all the good songwriting ideas I was ever likely to have had already been released on earlier Gasket albums, mainly numbers one through four, so it was probably time to go do something else for a living.

So, as a producer, I pretty much expected Priddle to smear it on with a trowel, but I’d already resigned myself to that. I figured McCarthy would get the solos and the lead vocals; so be it. We’d already been told by a Big Shiny Producer who’d worked on an earlier failed attempt to record this particular album that McCarthy’s voice was much more suited to ‘carrying’ the sound we were ‘coalescing upon’, as well as being a much better guitarist - no offence intended, Andrew. (None taken, you fat cunt. By the way, you’re fired.) In his own recordings Priddle favoured big overblown pseudo-operatic vocals (think Live, Muse, the shit mid-70s lineup of Deep Purple with David Coverdale out front) and McCarthy was better equipped vocally for those sorts of games, on account of his broader range and better versatility. I liked to think mine had more character, like a Bon Scott or a Tex Perkins or the Tractor from Hayabusa. You wouldn’t ask those guys to sing La Boheme, but if you want dirty rock vocals delivered with a sly wink and a grin, you’re not going to ask Andrea fuckin’ Bocelli now are you.

So that was Priddle as a musician. As an ‘artist’ (splutter, cough, gurgle). But Priddle as a man?

I’ve said before he didn’t fit the build of a rock frontman, even in the particular niche his band occupied. He was five-nine, if that, and would have threatened the century on any set of metric scales, round-faced, portly and jowly like a prematurely-aged Paul McCartney. He dressed in black as his stage persona dictated, but usually casual black - T-shirts, walk shorts and sandals that showed off his hairy, skinny, pasty-white legs. What I’m getting to is that the man wasn’t pretty. He looked like a bullfrog, from his face right down to the mismatch of puffy body on skinny legs.

So he wasn't a looker. He wasn't a charmer, either. He affected the impression of being above everyone and anything, and being completely dismissive of anyone or anything that was below him, but could be hurt viscerally by just a simple off-hand comment. Like earlier in the year when I’d asked McCarthy, slightly bewildered by Priddle’s lack of success with women given the advantages granted to him (money, rock stardom, big fuck-off boat et al) whether he thought he might actually be gay. McCarthy thought that was completely fucking ridiculous, to the extent of telling Priddle about it, such that I was given the coldest of cold shoulders for the next three months whenever Priddle and I encountered each other. At least I now knew for sure where McCarthy’s loyalties lay. And it was secretly hilarious to watch Priddle trying to be even more overtly misogynist in his comments about women after that, as if that would prove conclusively he wasn’t just gay and trying to overcompensate. The Chubs doth protest too much, methinks. McCarthy’s claims were based on Priddle’s vocal interest in the female form, but it was a pretty dysfunctional interest. He didn’t actually like women. He liked tits, arses and pussies, but women? Not as such. The first conversation I’d ever had with him at the Manning Bar at Sydney Uni (I say ‘conversation’ when it was more like a prelude to a punchup that never quite kicked off) had been liberally punctured with phrases like ‘clueless uni bitches’ and ‘skanky ho street press sluts’. It didn’t turn out to be an isolated incident. He appreciated women physically, but that was about it. He didn’t see anything in particular unusual about spending large amounts of his downtime watching glossy Seppo porn films on his monstrous back-projection TV, as we would usually find him on Firstlight mornings when we’d come over to his house for his compulsory ‘brunch briefings’ on the day ahead - he wouldn’t be flogging himself to death, thankfully, just watching the action in abstract and making ripe comments on the attributes of the female performers. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to prove, or how his comprehensive knowledge of the porn world was meant to be impressive - whether this was some boarding school mentality where the guy who could flash the most impressive porn collection was the dorm’s alpha male. I sometimes wondered if he’d been a Chastity aficionado before she’d hooked up with McCarthy; I also wondered whether at some stage Chastity would just cut out the middleman and coke-whore herself directly onto Priddle. Even if he did I doubted he’d know what to do with her. Priddle, oddly, was an observer, not a ‘doer’. Which made me feel even more uncomfortable about the McCarthy-Chastity-Priddle triangle, and what they might be getting up to. Eeeeuuwww.

If I’d thought he was really just a bit pathetic, Lena had thought he was a total creep. She’d never thought anything of him and had just been leaving as McCarthy had begun befriending him. Rightfully, she reacted very poorly to Priddle’s habit of talking about his friends’ girlfriends in the same way that he liked to discuss his favourite porn actresses.

“That Lena’s got some fahhne [translation: fine] titties, yeah?” he’d remark out of thin air in a pseudo-Southern US accent, Eric Cartman style, for no reason whatsoever.

Yes she does, I’d think, and you’re about as likely to get to see them bare and bouncing about as you are to have a chart-topping yodelling record, so why are we having this conversation?

Basically he just liked talking about women as collections of parts which could be compared and rated, presumably as they were less scary that way. I knew he was probably talking the same smack about whoever I was dating at the time, but I didn’t give a fuck what he had to say anyway - lads, as you all know, you’ve always got one mate who has this one mate who talks total and utter bollocks and noone can stand, but you have to put up with him to save your mate’s feelings - so I could pretty much ignore any comments about how ‘poundably fahhne the aaaass’ on my girlfriend was. At least until I started dating Rachel - and started getting a little more sensitive about it, because the idea of Priddle getting his jollies imagining ‘pounding’ my girlfriend rather creeped me out. And don’t worry, he totally creeped Rachel out as well - within the first ten minutes of meeting him, on our first weekend at Firstlight. It took her a little time to explain why.

“You know,” she said, as we were settling into bed at the farm, “it’s not just that he keeps staring at my boobs…”

“And your legs, and your arse…” I added testily.

“You’ve noticed too,” she said, feeling a little reassured. “It’s his eyes. They’re dead. I mean it, they’re just totally vacant.”

I thought about this. She was right. You could look him in the eye and see straight through, but you’d still have no idea what he was really thinking. His eyes were cold and glassy like a dead tuna on ice.

“You know, you’re right. And you know what else? I’m buggered if I’m going to waste our precious bedroom time talking about that arseclown. Agreed?”

The actual progress of the recording session, I think you know about. Well, it went OK for the first couple of days, mainly because with Rachel being away, I was drunk. It played out just how I’d feared: no matter how I approached each day, I couldn’t deal with Priddle’s egregious bullshit - my bullshit filter would clog almost immediately - unless I had a bottomless beer in my hand for the duration. But that meant I was too slashed to safely escape to the sanity-preserving haven of the farm at night, so I’d inevitably end up crashing at the Duffer’s place - unless it’d been his turn for everyone in the band to turn on him, a process which seemed to circulate on a rota. They picked a sober day to try it on me, ironically taking on the topic of my drinking as their main reason for ganging up and putting the boot in. My response was to shout a bit, rather a lot actually, throw some gear around, offer some unsolicited character references where I felt they were most deservedly earned, and fuck off back to the farm. Except I just kept driving, and driving, until I reached Rachel’s place in Newcastle, where I was welcomed like a wounded hero returning from battle. It took Intercom’s Simon at his slimy, flattering, obsequious best to persuade me to go back. After that, I stuck to being drunk, and decided upon the tactic of being unbearably obnoxious and opinionated, even more so than Priddle, and to argue with him about everything he did.

There was method to this madness, honest. The band dynamic had fractured into a series of opposing camps. Obviously Marty and Maddy were one voting bloc; fellow power-couple McCarthy and Priddle were another, and it was equally unclear which was the boy and which was the girl in that relationship. Phil tended to orbit around whichever group would have him, or needed him to win the particular argument that was currently on the table for debate. I was outnumbered and outgunned, but I could out-opinionate and out-obnox (?) any man known, particularly with a gutful of beer, alienation and disaffection in me. I wasn’t sure how this was the best way to get what I wanted here, which was a speedy recording process, an album I wouldn’t be embarrassed by, and a respectable conclusion to this band which I’d put a decent chunk of my life into, given that this would effectively make the recording process as painful as possible. But at least the pain would be shared a little more equally. And if I cracked Priddle and made him storm out in disgust, then one power bloc would be rudderless, there’d be a vacuum, and either I could take charge of this motherfucker and we’d crank out an old-school mostly-live-to-tape Gasket album in four days, torpedo-punt it out into the marketplace and let the band live or die by its success; or the whole thing would implode and we could all go home.

I can’t pretend it was flawless logic, but it justified being a drunken arsehole all the time, and that was good enough for me.

Priddle wasn’t cracking, but McCarthy was. Truth be told he’d been getting increasingly erratic since Lena left - you’re telling me shacking up with a coke-addicted porn actress sounds like a normal thing for a well-brought-up guy like him to do? - and he couldn’t see why everyone couldn’t get along, or at least why I couldn’t just accept Priddle as the untrammelled genius he was. And of course Chastity was nowhere to be seen - with McCarthy heading off into the sticks for weeks, she’d returned to the States for ‘work’ reasons, which mainly comprised of getting filmed sticking foreign objects into other girls and vice versa. Given that was what made up her day job, you can imagine what she liked to do in her downtime to unwind from the stresses of work. And knowing her as he did (not that well, but well enough) he looked a bit nervous and vulnerable about the fact he had no way of knowing whether she was behaving herself, which of course she wouldn’t be. I couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid as to actually have feelings for her.

I’d like to say I respected and supported him through this difficult time, particularly as we entered his second week without her, but instead, we got into an argument about how Priddle wanted me to play a certain part and I threatened to remodel McCarthy face with the chunky end of my guitar. He responded with a fairly innocuous shove. And I actually smacked him one, not really that hard but enough to get his attention, with a roundhouse to the side of the head. It was the first time I’d hit him since primary school, when he’d thought it was a grand business venture for him and Billy Knotts to smash up my Matchbox cars for spare parts and try to sell them to other kids, like they did at Knotts’ old man’s car wreckers yard. Then, he’d run off bawling to teacher; now, he reared up, like he was suddenly ready for a brawl as though he’d been shaping for a rematch every since that day, but I looked at him with a puzzled, condescending look on my face and said, “If I were you, I’d stick to things you know how to do. Throwing ‘em ain’t one of them.” Nor was it mine, really, but half the fight is the talk. He backed off, scowling.

The atmosphere the rest of the day - the Thursday of week 2 - went from poisonous to funereal. Everyone was tiptoeing around each other like the studio floor had been mined by the Khmer Rouge. So at the end of the day I tapped McCarthy on the shoulder and said to him, look I’m sorry I clipped you one there mate, heat of the moment thing, we’re beyond this bullshit surely, can we go and talk this through like guys who’ve known each other since we were five? Without Gaylord Chubs listening in, yeah?

Surprisingly, he agreed, and we took half a carton of Teds in an esky out the back, once everyone else had pootled off to whence they came, and shot the breeze. Well, actually we just sat out on the deck looking at the craggy green hills of the Byron hinterland sinking into the dusk, and had a much more rational discussion about how we thought things were going on the album. He actually thought things were going OK, “if you concentrate on the result and not the process.” Meaning, if you ignored the fact that every day guest-starred at least one massive screaming match, that at any point at least one band member had sworn not to speak to at least one other band member again, and that people like Marty were increasingly refusing to let anyone else play on their songs at all, instead showing up to the studio with already-completed tracks which had been pieced together at home via ProTools with the songwriter handling every instrument, a la Dave Grohl on the first Foo Fighters album…

“Yeah, if you set all that aside, we’ve practically got the fucker bagged, boxed and buried,” I remarked dryly.

He half-laughed. A singular chuckle, if you can imagine that.

“How’s your solo album going?” he mused.

“How’s yours?” I replied, in the same not-entirely-sincere fashion.

“Probably at about the same stage as yours, I figure…” He shook his head. “Fuck, man, what the hell happened to us?”

I chewed over his question, not that he really wanted a sincere answer to his throwaway question. I was actually taken aback he’d thrown it out there at all. The reflective, deep-thinking, self-analysing McCarthy had died along with his relationship with Lena, I’d thought.

“This is what happens when weekend amateur musos start taking themselves seriously,” I reckoned. “You know the types. Second-rate high school teachers and hack journos from regional papers…”

He smirked. “Serves them right for sticking the rookie draft picks in the skill positions, yeah?”

Christ, NFL references. I presumed his newfound interest in the sport had something to do with Chastity’s earlier career as a San Diego Chargers cheerleader, long before she sashayed into his life and started choking his San Diego Chicken on a semi-professional basis. Either that or he’d just found ESPN on his cable remote.

“And hiding the franchise players up the back, yeah.” No surprise the trained musicians of the group - or at least the ones with tertiary music degrees - were the ones known to be focusing on their solo recordings.

A pause, which lengthened with the shadows. Were we getting anywhere? Did it matter? Who knew.

“Hey,” he said quietly, “it’s almost ten years since your brother died, isn’t it? This week?”

“Yeah,” I said in my most definite What of it? voice.

“Just saying, I’m sorry, man. If you guys are doing anything… I mean, I know we’ve been cunts to each other recently, but if there’s anything planned…”

“We’ll keep you posted,” I said.

He looked pensively at his bottle, scraping at the corner of the label with a thumbnail. A sign of sexual frustration, say some. Then again, anyone who’s peeling the label off their beer in a bar is probably doing so because they’re bored, which is probably because they’re not getting any, so I’d say that story was pretty much self-perpetuating.

“You think I’m going to turn out the same way Matt did, don’t you,” he remarked, almost out the side of his mouth.

“Dead?” I replied bluntly, to mask my uneasiness at talking about this. “We’re all going to end up dead at some stage, so yeah, probably…”

“You know what I mean,” he countered. “With the drugs, and the depression, and Chastity, and shit.”

It was the first I’d heard from him of ‘the depression’. I wondered if ‘the depression’ would result in mass layoffs, people begging in the street and a rise in the number of rabbit-trappers walking the streets of Sydney town bellowing Rabbitohhhh!!! Hey, maybe Souths would win a comp again, they won pretty much everything in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Net win I'd venture.

“You’re depressed?” I queried, with the faintest hint of a smirk creasing the corner of my mouth. “I thought you were just massively self-absorbed?”

Sure, it sounds an insane thing to say, but it was actually very carefully judged. It would either get me a smack in the mouth, or he’d laugh and call me a cunt.

“Cunt,” he scowled with another half-laugh. “Ah, fuck ya. It’s this kind of insensitivity that stigmatises mental illness in the community…”

“Yeah, but come on. If you really were depressed you’d be able to get the drugs for free, instead of having to hang out with fat cunts like your man Chubs…”

“You’re about as fuckin’ sensitive as college toilet paper, aren’t you? How the hell you got that Rachel to like you I don’t have a fucking clue. She seems like a nice girl.”

“She is,” I said. “How’d we end up with me dating the nice girl and you the porn star?”

“Change is as good as a holiday,” he suggested. “You guys are serious, though, yeah?”

“What gives you that impression?”

“Well,” he retorted with surprising bitterness, “you never fuckin’ shut up about her, do you? It’s a bit hard to miss…”

I shook my head. “Where’s that come from? That’s bollocks,” I asserted. “And what do you care anyway? You’re not exactly sitting in solitary with cobwebs forming on your dick. Fuck’s sake mate, you’re practically taking out full page ads in the gossip rags to advertise you’re nailing a lesbian porn starlet, and you’re whinging about me being too blatant?”

“I knew you’d be like this,” he muttered. “Look, I’m glad you’re happy. It’s just… you don’t have to rub everyone’s noses in it, OK?”

Who were we talking about here, him or Chubs?

“Mate,” I told him, “don’t pretend you’ve never been in a serious relationship with anyone. You had that for five years, you walked away from it. You’re not in a position to complain.”

“We’re not having that conversation,” he declared. The Lena wounds were still deep; I let it go.

Now I was the one methodically stripping the green and silver lining from my near-empty bottle of Ted. Then again, I hadn’t seen Rachel since Sunday night. I was very, um, frustrated.

“He’s got no fuckin’ excuse, you know.”

“Who?”

“Your man. I can’t see what his problem is.”

“Awww, faaaark…” McCarthy shook his head. “It’s… it’s complex. Leave him be.”

“Doesn’t look that fuckin’ complex to me. Got shitloads of money, and always has…” Priddle’s old man was a moneybags Melbourne property developer who’d retired to the North Coast; Priddle claimed his father was a ‘hobby farmer’, but that wasn’t how he’d made his money; he only ‘farmed’ (a few acres out the back of Nimbin) to support his ‘hobby’. Could be genetic, I guess. “He’s the lead singer of a popular rock band - why they’re popular I have no fucking idea, but they’re popular… and you’ve said he’s not gay, so what the fuck is it? What’s his excuse? Was he touched by the fathers at Trinity or something?”

McCarthy really didn’t like this line of argument. “Dude, you’re being totally unfair.” He sounded like Keanu on an Excellent Adventure, though this was turning out more like a Bogus Journey. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why not?”

He looked at me sourly. “Come on. When was the last time you struggled to get a girlfriend? In the last, say, ten years?”

I couldn’t answer that. A couple of weeks’ drought here and there didn’t really cut it, I figured.

“Yeah. You haven’t. Now look at someone like Marty - before Lewis the Jewess, he was batting 0 for a thousand.” Baseball references now? Maybe he did have ESPN after all. “And Phil still hasn’t got his shit together to hang onto anyone for any length of time. So be fucking grateful for what you have, and don’t go rubbing people’s noses in it. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t be so fucking insensitive.”

What was he on about? I couldn’t remember more than a few occasions when Priddle has told us to ‘Get a room’ that I’d suggested in response that he ‘Get a girlfriend’.

“Don’t be so fuckin’ sanctimonious,” I replied. “And tell Chubs that if he really wants to impress women, he should probably stop talking about them like they’re choice cuts of meat on the fuckin’ butcher’s block. And maybe stop showing porn on the big screen when they come round to visit, yeah?”

A surly silence ensued. Well, that went really well.

“That was Chastity on yesterday morning though, yeah?” I added.

McCarthy looked a bit sheepish. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “He reckoned he didn’t know she was in that one… I’m kinda hoping he’ll put that one away for the duration, it’ll be a bit hard to explain when she gets here next week, I think…”

Another silence, but this one a little lighter than before (for those with the colour-by-numbers version of this book). I looked across at him; he was trying to remain stern, but he wasn’t far away from embarrassed laughter. Finally, he broke the impasse.

“Next time,” he pronounced, “I’m dating a florist. Or a fuckin’ librarian.”

And broke up into giggles.

I grinned, plucking two fresh coldies from the Esky and handing him one.

“These professional women, huh?” I remarked. “Gotta fuckin’ hate it when their career gets in the way of your relationship…”

“I’ll drink to that,” he nodded wryly, as we clinked bottles.

Friday was an improvement. When every day is like the Somme on the morning after ammo delivery night, anything’s an improvement. But I actually won one: McCarthy backed me in over the issue of whether I’d actually get to do vocals on my own songs, should any of the fuckers actually make the cut for the final album. Priddle had pushed heavily for one consistent vocal approach for the whole album, to tie the whole thing together - that vocal being McCarthy’s quasi-operatic ProTools-enhanced histrionics. For his part, Marty hadn’t cared about many things on this album but he wasn’t budging on this - it was getting to the stage where noone else was allowed to even play on his songs, let alone sing them - so Priddle couldn’t win that argument for Marty’s songs, but he was still steadfast that my surly bogan howl wasn’t part of the sound he wanted on the album. But McCarthy begged to differ. Actually, he just straight-out differed without begging whatsoever, but he put his point forward politely and respectfully.

“Brady, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but the Gasket way is if you bring it, you sing it,” he explained, “unless the songwriter says otherwise. We don’t have a lot of traditions left in this band. We should keep that one.”

It was the first time I’d actually seen him stand up to Priddle, or at least publically contradict him. I’m not sure whether McCarthy was just more on my side after our frank, and eventually vaguely friendly, exchange of views the previous night (before tottering back to Priddle’s, he’d concluded the evening with the really rather drunken pronouncement, “Angus… you’re a cunt’s cunt. You’re fucked, right… but you’re my oldest mate… and that’s just it. Right, I’m fuckin’ off”) or whether he still genuinely believed in the ‘bring it, sing it’ ethos - that the songwriter themselves will have the clearest idea of how the vocal should be pitched. But I appreciated the support. And Priddle was OK about it, he didn’t throw the toys out of the pram like I would have expected (particularly if I’d been the one to have made the same point.) He just flipped open his PDA and noted, “Shall we sort Andy’s vocal Monday then?”

But I couldn’t quite believe that would be the end of it, somehow. Priddle historically wasn’t the type of bloke who took reversals with a philosophical grin and a shrug of the shoulders, particularly when his artistic vision had been undermined. He had a need to be right and to be seen as the one with the final call - there were probably some deep-seated issues there from childhood, not to want to Freud the place up too much. He’d claimed once that his interest in drugs had been programmed into him by being wrongly diagnosed with ADD as a child and prescribed Ritalin to control his erratic tendencies, hence setting him on a path to considering chemical correction a totally normal part of life. I didn’t know either ADD or Ritalin had existed when we were young, otherwise I’d have suggested they might have wanted to take a look at old mate McCarthy back in the day.

At the end of the day, Priddle needed to be liked, which I guess was why he talked so much bollocks. Conspicuous consumption was his mantra, and he wasn’t backward in showing off his stuff - the Byron hinterland mansion on the St Helena Road just along the road from Hoges and John Cornell, crammed with all the mod cons including that preposterous home cinema slash porn theatre… the big boat in the marina… the blower Bentley Arnage in the garage (a real one, as he said, not one of those recycled Volkswagens which Bentley made now - any newer model of any product he owned was automatically rubbish and a cheap sellout by comparison - he liked to point out that Rolls-Royce (former Bentley owners)-engined Lancaster bombers had bombed the shit out of VW’s Wolfsburg plant in WW2)… the Southbank (Melbourne) apartment with the Lamborghini Diablo in the garage (wouldn’t get up the driveway at his Byron place though - it grounded out on the kerbing)... And then there was the matter of his drug interests. Put simply, he was interested in drugs, not just as a consumer but as a retailer; this much was pretty clear. However, not to put too fine a point on it, but if I was really as big a wheel in the music industry drug scene as he continually boasted about being, I think I would have kept a bit fucking quieter about it. The James Bond approach, ‘hiding in plain sight’ (i.e. walking up to the enemy’s front door and saying ‘G’day champ, I’m your man’) only works in James Bond movies. Basically, he was talking more bollocks, just to sound impressive. It didn’t help my impression that Chubs, when it came down to it, was just a bit pathetic really - and me being me, my difficulty in disguising or sugar-coating this impression (case in point, telling our mutual friend that I thought Chubs, when it came down to it, was just a bit pathetic really) probably didn’t help much either.

But, he was letting me do vocals on my own songs. Celebrate the small victories where you can.

Of course, I managed to bugger that up. Mostly on my own, though Jeff helped. He had the amazingly clever idea of busting out the old farm bikes at sunup on Saturday morning, while I was scratching around the house waiting for Rachel to arrive, and going for a rip up the hillsides at the back of the farm, just for old times’ sake. Rachel was on the overnight XPT from Newcastle - it’d been that or driving down to Sydney to get the mid-morning Virgin flight to Ballina-Byron; at least this way she got travel and accommodation all in one - and was due into Casino around ten. Beck was kind enough to drop me at triage at Casino Base Hospital, since it was on her way. She returned with a rather sleep-deprived and ashen-faced Rachel (the XPT was late, which is like saying grass is green) shortly after I’d been bandaged up.

“What have you done to yourself?” she wanted to know.

Jeff, over in the corner, looked a little sheepish. Good, because this was HIS FAULT.

“Someone put a tree in the way of where my bike wanted to throw me,” I croaked. “Or rather, the local idiot cocky didn’t chop them all down, like a proper member of the National Party should have.”

The Jeff, who voted Labor just like the old man (it’s called ‘thinking for yourself’) said the prognosis was one or two cracked ribs, other than that I’d be fine.

“Yeah, fine. I’ll hit you with a fuckin’ tree at forty clicks, see how fuckin’ fine YOU are...”

“The doctor told you talking would just inflame everything,” he reminded me patronisingly. “So shut the hell up.”

So, no vocals for me on Monday, or the rest of the week. Since talking was bloody painful (and coughing up claret was a bit alarming) I mainly resorted to using hand signals to communicate with the others in the studio. I think you can probably figure out what most of those hand signals would have looked like. But at least I had Rachel to look after me - she’d even taken the week off to spend with me, somehow sensing I was struggling a little without her - and a more caring or sensitive nurse I couldn’t have dreamed for. Though if I’d dreamed for one she’d probably have been dressed in one of those skimpy little uniforms that nurses never actually wear, but I suspected Chastity had filed in her wardrobe under ‘work uniforms’.

So, after McCarthy’s comments on Thursday night over beers, do you think I’d taken it on board that certain people were hurt and offended by me ‘rubbing their noses in it’ that I was in a beautiful, loving, passionate relationship with an absolulely amazing girl who any man would have given an important part of his anatomy for, and they weren’t?

Well, yes. Of course I’d taken that on board.

Was I doing anything to try and prevent ‘rubbing their noses in it’ that I was in a beautiful, loving, passionate relationship with an absolulely amazing girl, who any man would have etc etc etc for, and they weren’t?

Fuck no. Are you kidding?