Not my idea

This is not my idea of a good time.
This is not my idea.
- Garbage, 1995

Five years later, and I’m sitting on a sand dune at the mouth of the Jumpinpin Channel, that same enduro bike a few metres away, wondering why I can’t shake this clammy, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I still have the house, and I still can’t afford it, but I guess hanging onto it for another five years of capital gain, even through a flat property market, has to be some sort of win. That wonderful black Monaro CV8 (other than for its inevitable memories of Rachel) had morphed into a ludicrously yee-haa Falcon V8 ute. Granted, I hadn’t nearly killed anyone recently, and these days my drinking was down to a level where it was really only a problem for my waistline. But I’d done the grown-up thing. I’d got a haircut and got a real job. I’d cleaned my act up, and wasn’t being a slob. I’d got it together like my big brother Bob, or my little brother Jeff anyway. (Thank you George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers. Anyone who sets out to destroy Delaware gets my vote). And where had all that gotten me, exactly? Fucking nowhere. King of fucking Nowheresville, Nowhere Province.

Then again, to be fair, I had found long-term relationship happiness. Eventually. Briefly. And I’d needed to compromise, to accept Bethany’s religion, her punishingly difficult family, the fact she chose to drive around in a lemon-yellow Beetle with fake plastic flowers in the drinks holder, and the fact that part of me was never going to be willing to commit quite as wholeheartedly to being in love with her as maybe I should have. But it’d worked. At least it had worked until my old lifestyle threw a surprise party for my new one, in the guise of Lena appearing out of nowhere, serving noone’s interests but her own, wreaking unholy havoc and then quietly ducking out through a side door. As usual.

Let’s be honest. Losing Bethany - or to be less melodramatic, losing my relationship with Bethany - didn’t rank with losing Rachel. The same intensity of feeling wasn’t there, hadn’t been there for starters. And, no matter how I looked at it, or made excuses, or blamed other people for the situation I’d put us into, losing Rachel was my fault; equally, losing Bethany wasn’t. With Bethany I didn’t lie awake at night wondering if I could have done something differently, to somehow produce a better result. Then again, I didn’t lie awake thinking about Rachel, either - not any more, anyway. And if all she could remember of the night was me covered in claret at the bottom of Priddle’s stairs trying to fabricate a salad bowl out of Priddle’s face, I’m sure she doesn’t remember me with any great fondness, if at all.

I looked around. The tide was turning - quite literally. The day was clouding over; in the distance, a thunderstorm threatened. It was time to turn around and go home. At least I’d have a tailwind to chase me. I dusted off my jacket, gloves, goggles and helmet, climbed on board the R 80 G/S, and twisted the key.

Of course it didn’t start. Why would it? Not with 90 kays across desert(ed) sand to reach home, me in fairly earnest need of a drink, and Sod’s Law in effect. If this little adventure had seemed a bit childish to begin with, now it just looked fucking stupid.

(Fuel vaporization. Once it settled down again, it kicked over happily. Not that the thing actually had a kick-start; well not any more, it’d broken off years ago and I’d never bothered to fix it. Besides, to kick-start something with the inertia of an 798cc BMW boxer twin you needed to have legs like the Hulk. In terms of size at least. Colour less critical.)

Phil still had a problem, and you’re still welcome to Insert Joke Here. He called around three next (Friday) afternoon, apologising for calling so early in the morning. Put simply, Kretin wasn’t buying it. He blamed Phil for the whole deal. He’d also blame global warming, gravity, ball tampering on subcontinental pitches and the decline of religion in post-modern Western society rather than take any responsibility for booking an act on a date they specifically told him they wouldn’t be available on. What did they take him for, their agent or something?

“So cancel,” I said. “I know you don’t want to let the side down, but that’s just how it is, yeah?”

“Would you do it?” Phil asked.

“Cancel?”

“No, I mean would you play?” he clarified. “Old school, Brown Stripes styles?”

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see that coming.

“I didn’t see that coming,” I told him. “Mate, I’m long gone. One or two songs at the end of one of your gigs is one thing, but a full Gasket show… no fucking way. I’m past that. Or rather, I’m past it, and it’s passed me.”

“It wouldn’t be Gasket,” he persisted. “It’d just be like you originally suggested we do - like the Brown Stripes, plus one. You, me and Jeff. Getting paid for messing about, jamming on riffs we like.”

“I thought that was Gasket?” I replied. “I have this hazy recollection of an Anzac weekend in our garage at Chateau Dodgy about ten years ago, with several cartons of piss and a crowd of dodgy mates…”

Phil laughed. “Yeah, I know. But that’s the point, that’s what it’s meant to be like… Look, if you need to think about it for a bit and want to get back to me…”

“Can I just say no now, instead?” I asked.

“No?” he suggested.

See, now I felt bad about it. Now it was me who was letting the side down. Scotty wouldn’t have a gig for one of the surf club’s biggest nights of the year, Phil will get blamed for something that’s really all Kretin’s fault for failing to demonstrate even the initiative required to organise a root in a brothel, and I’ll look like a scared, had-it old clown who’s too punch-drunk and ring-shy to get back in for a swing.

I stewed about it for the rest of the night. I even made the mistake of channel-surfing over to the now-unfamiliar waters of Channel [V] on Foxtel, where they were having a Big Day Out retrospective given that the second announcement of bands was out (long after the event had sold out, in Sydney at least) and they were spinning bits of sets from Big Days Out past. And wouldn’t you fuckin’ know it, there we were, front and fuckin’ centre. Australia Day 2002, Sydney BDO, thousands of ecstatic (literally) punters, and a band called Flange Gasket cranking through their catchy alterna-rock anthem The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less, Triple J Hottest 100 number one of some five minutes’ standing. A song which, lightly paraphrased, declared that the meaning of life was to Have Fun, and that the other 23 words could probably be sold for advertising space to make a quick buck on the side.

Fuck me for being easily persuaded.

So I called Phil back - it was midnight where he was, eleven at mine, but I knew he’d be up, either gigging, smoking or computer-munting - and left a voicemail saying yeah, you dodgy bastard, I’ll do it. And that we should probably call Marty and see if he and Mads wanted to come along and watch the disaster unfold, I’d guess they were free that weekend given she gave Scotty a quote for Marty playing that night. Maybe we could even get him up for one or two songs at the end - presumably Maddy’s price for that wouldn’t be too exorbidant, yeah?

Half an hour later, presumably after the last set was bagged, boxed and buried, my email received a text message, or what read like one, in return:

COOL C U THAN. WIL EMAIL MADY 2 C. FIL.

Oh my God, Phil’s been kidnapped and replaced by a complete tard! Whatever will we do? Other than call him tomorrow sometime and see what the fuck he wants to do regarding, for instance, rehearsing a bit beforehand, or something…

I called him back on Saturday and left a message re logistics - when, where and how we should catch up to get some practice in (no way was I doing this without a good few decent shakedown sessions), whether people wanted to stay at mine, that sort of thing. I didn’t imagine he’d have a fucking clue about any of that, but hopefully he’d talk to The Jeff or someone who would come up with some sort of intelligent response.

And then, later on Saturday night, I got a very odd email:

TO: Duff, Philip
CC: Young, Andrew; Young, Jeffrey
FROM: dB Entertainment Pty Ltd
SENT: Saturday, 15 Nov 2008, 17:05 AEDT
SUBJECT: Ridiculous request

Dear Philip
I have just received your email message of this afternoon, requesting Martin’s services for your band’s performance of 22/11/08.
Are you totally bereft of sanity?
He fought for years to escape you bastards, and I’m not letting you drag him back in.
Forget it.
I hope you are well.
I have copied the Young Ones into this response as this has all the makings of one of their ludicrous half-witted schemes.
Yours etc
Madonna Cohen-Lewis, BCom MBA
Executive Director (Talent Management)
dB Entertainment Pty Ltd

“I think Phil’s actually asked her if Marty would play with us,” the Jeff suggested when I called him later that night. Thanks for that, Captain Obvious. As it was, he was rather personally bemused by the idea of the ‘Young Ones‘ (hadn't heard that in years, not bad really) and the Duffer up on stage together - not at all sure it’d work worth a bugger, but bemused nonetheless. “Some sort of Gasket reunion.”

“Gasket renewal?” I suggested.

“Something like that,” he nodded. I couldn't see him nod, cos it was on the phone like, but you know.

“Hey look, I’ll get in touch with Marty and sort this out,” I said. “If he’s in town, it’d be nice to at least tell him we’re playing so he can stick his head around the door if he so chooses.”

“Cool,” he replied. “Hey look, in all honesty… is this one of your bullshit schemes, or what?”

“I don’t do bullshit schemes,” I replied. “That was the other guy. Mate, seriously, I’m so not interested in playing as Gasket again - that’s why I said no in the first place.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” I confirmed. “You didn’t happen to see our last show as Gasket, did you?”

As discussed, it hadn’t started promisingly for M-One Version Two, October 2003. After the shows in Brisbane and Sydney, for which Triple M and the sponsors had to give skiploads of tickets away just to ensure a crowd, like Super League all over again, the promoters were seriously considering shitcanning the Melbourne show on the 11th. They wanted to - it made both practical and economic sense to - but they couldn’t. All the deals had been signed and all the bands had to honour their contracts, even the American bands whose huge salaries and pathetic performances had pretty much guaranteed the project's monumental failure for a second and final year. Only one band had actually quit, one of the American soft-rock outfits, Lifehouse or Shitehouse or whatever they were called. They had some excuse lined up - their mothers called or something. It was a year late to blame 9/11, but I'm sure they gave it a crack. Their lawyers would be busy.

Anyway, with the number of imports stinking up the place the promoters wanted a good, solid Australian act with plenty of Triple M appeal, and apparently The Living End told them to fuck off, so they called us. As observed previously, we were travelling like busteds ourselves, struggling manfully with the formerly-trivial exercise of recording an album’s worth of stuff, and that combined with M-One’s reputation meant most of us were pretty unkeen. These days our live show was almost better known for our onstage banter than our music, the interplay between myself and McCarthy resulting in us being described at one point by Kas Casoli, music writer for the Murdoch press, as ‘the Roy and HG of Australian rock’. It was only minorly diluted by the fact that I happened to know Kas Casoli despised Roy and HG with a passion.

“Yeah, but if we tank, seriously, who the fuck’s going to notice?” McCarthy predicted. “Everyone there will be fucked off their trol' [trolley] on tickets they didn't pay for - won't matter a fuck if we're rusty, long as we're funny."

“We’re fucked then,” I offered.

Melbourne wasn't a town that many from Team Flange thought a lot of. Clearly Melbourne didn't think much of us either, judging by the torrential downpour that greeted three-fourths of the band on scrambling out of bed on Saturday, and dialling up their missing fourth (that'd be me, in bed with Rachel in Sydney) to abuse him for not being here yet. That, and the fact Qantas had sent our foldback speakers to Perth, where they’d be reunited with my luggage later that day. None of these events surprised us much, really. For one thing, at a festival gig decent foldback is about as prevalent as unblocked portaloos or beer tents that you don’t have to queue for days to get a warm VB from; for another, Qantarse would lose their corporate knob if it wasn’t superglued on. The remainder of Flange Gasket were collected by some fairly disinterested folk attached to the promoter's office, and ferried across town to Docklands, ignoring Phil's jokes about them being late for M-One but early for Moomba. As was everyone else in the van because they weren’t at all funny.

The promoters clearly didn't care if anyone turned up today in this weather, since (a) tickets were all either pre-sold or pre-given-away, and (b) they were only going through the motions to fulfil their contractual obligations. As were all the bands, judging by some of the woeful, couldn't-give-an-eighth-of-a-shit performances that opened the show. The whole deal had a real fuck-this feel to it, it was the singularly most depressing backstage atmosphere I've ever been part of. The promoters couldn’t even be bothered closing the roof on the stadium to try and keep the weather out, probably because every time they did that it added about twenty grand to their operating costs, and they were already bleeding money out their arse.

Surprisingly, the punters who had braved the conditions were trying to get their money’s worth (i.e. nothing) and seemed in pretty good spirits - probably Cougar bourbon judging by all the green cans out there that weren't VB. But after enduring some real phoned-in performances from a couple of So Called Big Name US bands, the five or six thousand soaked idiots present were pretty much ready for someone who could actually play, and/or sing, and/or gave a shit. Cue Flange Gasket, stage left, for our allotted half-hour. Half an hour wasn’t even enough time to sweat off our hangovers.

“G'day Melbourne, how the fuck are you!” I bellowed.

“Fuckin’ wet, you stupid fuckin’ cunt,” yelled some comic genius.

“Well let's dry you poor bastards out by getting you to move around a bit, which seems to be against the fuckin’ contracts of our fellow performers!” McCarthy responded. He went to belt out a ferocious chord (preferably the opening one in Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees as it was scheduled to be our first song), but produced... nothing. Not just due to lack of foldback, either. I tried my axe, Marty bashed his hands across his keys… nothing. All that anyone could hear was the thumpings of Phil, and that was something noone wished to hear in isolation.

Clearly the mikes were still up, but power to the people wasn't.

“Well fuck me, looks like we're performing M-One Unplugged folks,” I declared sourly.

“Thought fuckin' Billy Idol wasn't playing this year?” wondered McCarthy, alluding to The Peroxided One's rather interpretive performance at the previous year’s NRL grand final - he’d apparently not been much more musical when playing M-One either, even when they HAD plugged him in. With the shit weather, shit venue, shit crowd and shit band dynamic we were enduring at present (plus the dangerous lack of Rachel-induced serotonin in my bloodstream), McCarthy’s chemically-induced hyperactive comic stylings were among the list of the last fucking things I needed today. Just after AIDS and a cerebral haemmorhage.

On stage at Docklands, event roadies (who'd won the usual snotty demarkation dispute over our crew for control of the site) were running all over the place trying to trace the power loss, eventually succeeding in dropping power to the mikes as well. Fuckin’ genius. The natives grew ever more restless in the worsening rain. McCarthy tossed his axe down and wandered off stage. Great. The prima donna's in session again... what the hell is he up to now? He returned, minutes of dead air later, with a tennis racquet and a can of balls. Christ knew where from - possibly Nickelback’s rider, they had Christ knew what else on there, everything short of a donkey, a pogo stick and a large tub of axle grease. He tossed one of the balls to me with a slightly-cocky, slightly-more-than-wasted grin, wandered back over to stage left and took middle and leg in front of his amplifier.

“What you got, bee-artch?” he challenged.

Five years ago I’d have grinned and gladly bought into this. But, like I say, now I was over it. Fuck’s sake. Are we playing a fucking gig here or are we going to fuck about?

Marty trotted over to slip in behind the ‘stumps’; Phil stayed parked on his drum stool at short mid-wicket. Clearly, we’re going to (b) Fuck about.

“Pretty packed off-side field, wouldn't you say?” observed Marty.

“Yeah,” Phil agreed. “Just the few thousand close-in fielders…”

McCarthy was marking guard, tapping down invisible imperfections in the ‘pitch’, and generally wanking on. I wandered off stage to the end of my runup, turned and rumbled back in. I’d meant to york him, to spit a quick, full one into his toes and past his ‘bat’ before he had a chance to react - to get him out as quickly and if possible make him look just a little bit stupid in front of this lot. But that smug, supercilious grin on his face induced a sudden change of plan, just as I trundled into my delivery stride. The change of plan was that I decided I wanted to hurt him. I whipped through my action sharper than my runup might have hinted. The ball, as short as it was fast, reared up off the deck and made a venomous beeline for his smirk. He fended it away with the frame of the racquet and bounced back up, smirk gone, replaced with a self-inflated ‘How dare you upstage me’ death-stare.

“Bawling, Angarse,” declared Marty carefully, starting to rethink his plans of standing up to the stumps, seeing as though this was likely to get a bit more willing than he’d envisaged.

“The fuck was that?” McCarthy spat.

“Chin music,” I responded. “It’s a fuckin’ music festival after all.”

“You wouldn’t want to try it again,” he suggested.

A suggestion I pretty much ignored. My line remained resolutely short-pitched and leg-side, with the occasional full one arrowed in at his toes, in order to further wind the buzzing, obnoxious bastard up. You could tell when he was on the powdered goods, he developed an omnipotence complex - ironic, because blow usually made you less than potent. Also ironic that he wasn’t much chop (ahem) as a batsman, then again I wasn’t exactly Lillian Thomson myself (obscure mid-70s beauty queen) but I had the advantage of (a) not being half-wasted and (b) not being very happy. Bodyline also had the advantage of stopping him from hooking the thing into the crowd and losing the ball, so as long as my line was consistent, we could keep doing this all day or until he cracked the shits properly and gave us something to watch at least.

And so it went; each ball reared up at his earhole or seared at his toes; each one being furiously fended off by a man getting increasingly livid his less-than-Bradmanesque skills were being shown up in front of a large, unfriendly audience. The crowd were getting on his back; the biggest cheer of the day came when a wild, scything hookshot to yet another bouncer caught a bottom edge and collected his wedding veg with a deflating Ohhhhh. I hardly helped by giving him the full Curtly Ambrose treatment in my follow-through, with the pitying, derogatory stare and/or a debilitating sledge or three.

“You’ve got a bat, sunshine. Use the fucker.”

Or, channelling Roosters NRL star Craig Wing:

“Not the face! Lord have mercy, not the face!”

And after a particularly effusive swipe-and-miss:

“Mate, just hold the fucking thing still, I’ll aim at it for ya.”

Before too long my deadly combination of leg theory and personal abuse had McCarthy ‘framing’ one off his hip, ballooning up to short leg for an easy catch. For anyone other than Phil, of course, who couldn't be arsed getting off his drumstool, so it fell safely. After unmercifully copping the raspberry from the few thousand close-in fielders, the Duffer was spurred into action. I tossed him the ball with one last withering stare at the ‘bunny’ down the far end, and went off to see if we couldn’t actually get some music equipment around here to work so we could get this fucking set over and done with and I could get back to the tasty serve of hotness waiting in my bed in Sydney.

Meanwhile, while I was doing that, Phil brought himself on to bowl from the Southern or Beer Fridge End. His chosen bowling style was a bucket of slop disguised as leg spin, which annoyed the mercurial McCarthy enough to back away to leg and slog it inside-out over cover, the ball sailing well into the crowd from the sweet spot of the tennis racquet. Handing the crowd a springy spherical projectile turned out to be as stupid a move as I’d imagined it would be, as shown moments later with the ball being returned forcefully by some genius at the back of my head while I was tending to my amp, on the spurious rumour that power was returning soon. Along with a bunch of flattened cans and plastic bottles by the genius' immediate inbred relatives, most of which were better aimed, i.e. at McCarthy rather than me.

McCarthy wasn't impressed. These fuckers were spoiling his buzz.

"Fucking Victorian cunts," he slurred. "You'd think imposing Jeff fucking Kennett, Eddie cunting McGuire and fuckin’ gaylord VFL faggotball on us all was enough..."

Unfortunately, the mikes were working again by this stage.

A hail of projectiles rained aluminium death onto the stage. By that stage McCarthy, in his aggravated haze, wanted to go the lot of them, but the rest of the band (and event security) made sure he was dragged safely back off stage. As the deafening calls for the lynching of Flange Gasket approached berserker warrior frenzy, McCarthy cracked a beer, signalled for some backstage underling to go chop him a line, and laughed.

“That's twenty minutes," he declared. "Give 'em five more, then out for an encore."

I lost my sense of humour round just about then.

Crowd blows a Gasket! screamed next morning’s Sunday Herald-Sun. Fading punk rock band… We’re a punk rock band? Did I miss a briefing somewhere? …Flange Gasket incited a near-riot at yesterday's disastrous M-One rock festival at Colonial Stadium. After blowing up the on-stage power supply with their poorly-maintained equipment, the band, infamous for their history of drug use, loutish behaviour and string of court appearances over their offensive and defamatory lyrics, abused paying patrons with a torrent of obscene and vulgar language before pelting them with missiles. Leader of North American headliners Nickelback, Chad Kroeger, said it was the most unprofessional and disgusting performance he'd ever… That fucking tool! We carried his lot of fuckwits out there. Fuck you, Choad. Fuck you and the donkey you rode in on. If ‘riding’ is what you were doing to it.

All was explained, though, by the byline, attributed to Staff Writer. Which meant Random Freelance Stringer We Can’t Be Arsed Crediting. (Or, more likely, just because the subbies couldn’t spell her tortuous Polish surname.)

Winding another five years onto the odometer - so anyway, I sent Marty a message (from my email, but I figured he'd probably pick it up on his phone – complicated, I realise, but this is the way of Web 2.0) along the lines of ‘Hey mate, just checking Mads realises Phil was just asking whether you two wanted to come along to his/Jeff’s/my gig next Sat on Straddie - def weren’t asking you to play or anything.’

And got one back, which said:

‘Why not?’

I stared at that for a while before it actually made any sense to me. By the time it did, I’d received a followup.

‘Have spoken to Exec Dir of Talent Mgmt & yo bro. Comms brkdwn w/EDTM fixed. See u Sat. Will bring gear, loud shirt & drinking pants. Gasket renewal FTW!’

Ah. This is where I should have just put my hand up and say look guys, sounds great, but this Flange Gasket thing has already buggered up large swathes of my life and I think I’ll just give it a miss. But I didn’t. Because, by nature, I’m a drifter. I drift in and out of things, I go with the flow. Where some would call this being rudderless, lazy, and taking the path of least resistance, I’d call it being adaptive, versatile and not set in my ways. Whereas, in point of fact, it’s really just being rudderless, lazy, and taking the path of least resistance.

But no, instead I just called up the individual identified as 'Yo Bro', seeing as though he’d been identified as the Responsible Adult among the Spam Filterers, and asked what the story was. And then asked my Bro whether he ever listened to a fucking thing I said, such as ‘I am not interested in playing in Flange Gasket again’.” He just replied I was a scared, had-it old clown who was too punch-drunk and ring-shy to get back in for a swing, and that I’d better not be such a dismal softcock when beer o’clock sounded next weekend, otherwise he’d be divorcing me. I think he was warming to the idea of a weekend at the beach without Beck and the kids, even if he’d still be babysitting a score of drunken teenagers. I knew him well enough to know that he’d be taking only an abstract interest in all those under-dressed, under-aged, under-the-weather girls who’d be inundating the place; of course, I had every plan of remaining just as objective, given that some of them could be my own students.

“So what, are we just going to shambles the whole fuckin’ thing together on the night, or are we going to actually practice at some stage?”

“Yeah, we’ll practice... All in good time, mate. I’m just waiting to hear back from Marty tomorrow, to make sure he’s on for this. When he called me, he was at someone’s album launch and just quietly, I reckon he might have been a bit pished.”

“He’ll still need security clearance you reckon?”

“Something like that.”

“Anyway what I want to know is, why’d he call you straight off, rather than Phil or Kretin or someone? How the hell did you end up organising this? You couldn’t organise your way out of a wet sleeping bag.”

It was true, he couldn’t. Proven by experiment. Then again, it’d been a very messy camping mission and The Jeff had been a bit pished at the time himself. (We were camping up at Springbrook with the Brisbane crew, Easter ‘98 - the messiness included Jessica and I sneaking away from the campsite after midnight to have al fresco back-to-nature sex under the waterfall at the bottom of the walking track around the gorge - her idea, I’d stress, and much better in concept than in reality. The water was fucking freezing.)

“What, someone else around here can?”

He had a point.

He was also wise not to move too quickly until he’d heard back from Marty. Because the more measured, definitive, Maddy-vetted response from dB Entertainment Pty Ltd, which came later on Sunday, was ‘Yeah… should be OK… so long as this stays low profile, no big promotional circus or anything … and so long as it’s understood this isn’t a proper full-scale Flange Gasket reunion show, just a bit of fun… and we probably can’t make it down to rehearse during the week, we’ve got far too much on at the moment I’m afraid… should be able to make it to Straddie Friday night… or Saturday morning… we can maybe get a rehearsal session in on Sat at Angus’ place… possibly… will have to let you know later in the week…’

To quote Noel ‘Where’s me fookin’ fruit platteh’ Gallagher, that was a Definitely Maybe from Marty then. But on the positive side, at least he’d managed to talk Maddy into letting him out to play. At least I thought it was positive. I didn’t really know any more. I’d had another 24 hours to think about it and I still wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea or not. I tended to buy Marty’s line of argument: so long as this was just a bit of fun, not meant as The Reunion Show for The Flange Gasket Rock And Roll Band, I was OK with it. And let’s face it, without McCarthy, it’d never be The Reunion Show for The Flange Gasket Rock And Roll Band. And it’d probably be a lot more fucking pleasant.

So, my dear, you’re in luck. How’d you like to be the ONLY music journalist (unless Mike X promises us beers) invited to report EXCLUSIVELY from backstage at the debut and farewell gig of rock supergroup Spam Filter & The Waterford Crystal Method: The Australian Flange Gasket Show, performing at internationally renown rock venue, Point Lookout SLSC, for ONE NIGHT ONLY this Saturday night?

Lena must have been online; my phone rang within minutes of me sending that email.

“Who or what the fuck are Spam Filter and The Waterford Crystal Method?”

“…The Australian Flange Gasket Show?” I finished. “Ah, well I can tell you that for contractual purposes, they’re definitely NOT the rock band formerly known as Flange Gasket…”

“So what, Spam Filter and… who?”

“Bits of Spam Filter,” I said. “Call it Spam Filtrate. Mo’ Than E-Nuff Duff on the skins, The Jeff on axe. Then they’ve somehow blackmailed El Martinez into showing on keys and bass, must have compromising photos of him or something…”

“Ah, so this is why it’s not ‘official’ - Maddy’s hand at work there?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” I replied. “Oh yeah, and some sad old bastard on second axe and getting the beers in. Goes by the name of Angus…”

“I had a feeling, you know,” she said, that ironic smile creasing the airwaves.

“You’ve had a feeling? Good to hear you’re getting out more,” I quipped. “Who was the lucky guy? Or girl… or inanimate object…”

“Oh fuck off,” she remarked casually. “I can’t believe you guys managed to get Marty, that’s astonishing.”

“Bugger Marty, what about the old bloke coming out of retirement? There’s your front-pager, girl…”

“Dream on, Balboa,” she retorted. “Like that was ever a news flash. You were always coming back. Christ, your face lit up like a pinball machine when you were playing with Spam Filter in Byron. Only mystery is why you’ve taken so fucking long to come out of hibernation… But seriously,” she wanted to know, “how’d you get Marty? Gotta hear the story of how someone’s finally gotten the better of Madonna Cohen-Lewis in a contract negotiation…”

“Well, Phil asked Maddy if he’d come along, she said fuck off, I sent him a text to make sure they understood it was just a social invite to watch Phil and the Young Ones go round, and he sent one back asking why he hadn’t been asked to play, since the rest of the old firm was getting back together. He was a bit off-chops we suspect, some sort of launch party or something…”

“Probably Powderfinger’s new album,” Lena suggested. “Establishment, in town. Think I saw the pair of them there. Room full of Charlied-up wankers. Surprisingly average house red...”

I continued, before she could name-drop any further: “Then I guess he and Maddy had a big barney, which he must have won on points, because we’re all having a go round on Saturday. Purely for entertainment purposes, probably just our own. But I figured it’d be something that, say, someone trying to write a liner note history of Flange Gasket might want to be present at…”

“I’m supposed to be covering the Dandy Warhols at the Metro on Saturday night,” she admitted.

“Photocopy last tour’s review,” I suggested. “They’ll be self-absorbed, self-indulgent, totally wasted, and all over the place like a mad woman’s breakfast.”

“Can I crash on your couch?” she wanted to know.

“If it’ll seal the deal,” I nodded, “though you might have to top-and-tail with Phil…”

“Ah, that’s the sort of rock debauchery I’ve missed since you bastards quit the scene,” she laughed.

“Hey hey, have I got to remind you again... it’s not Flange Gasket. It’s the Australian Flange Gasket Show…”

“Yeah, sure it is. Look, I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try to be there. Off the record, do you want me to have a quiet word with Richardson to see if we can squeeze some last-minute promo funding out of Exocet, given this will inevitably give the forthcoming best-of some media coverage?”

“I’m not sure whether us lot getting back together will promote the thing or encourage people to leave it the fuck alone,” I replied. “Officially, we’ll stay out of it, but if Exocet want to get in touch with Scott van Rous at Point Lookout surf club - he’s representing the promoter - then that’s up to them of course. Of course, it’ll need to be pretty subtle - we don’t want Maddy cracking the shits and pulling Marty out of the show on the day because we’ve gone against what we’ve promised.”

“She wouldn’t…”

“Yeah she would. If she thinks she needs to protect her product, hell yeah. If it looks like someone else is going to make money out of Marty’s involvement…”

“Shit, what am I saying, you’re right she would,” Lena muttered. “But I guess it’s a moot point, right? This isn’t The Flange Gasket, it can’t be - you’re short one. As you said to Mike Cross INSTEAD of me - no McCarthy, no Gasket.”

I grinned. “He will be Cross when he finds out we are getting back together, of course… Hey, there’s your big scoop right there, totally one-upping your man. What more do you want? Don’t say I don’t look after you, girl.”

“You don’t look after me,” she deadpanned in a monotone.

“I’ll bloody well look after you if you’re not careful,” I threatened, with deliberate vagueness.

“Angus, it’s been a long time… but not that long,” she informed me. “Hey look, um, I might have something on the McCarthy thing… I gave up and threw money at the problem, like I said I might if I could talk Richardson into chipping in.”

“Media Monitors?”

“Yeah. Hey, easier them than me,” she said, a little defensively.

Media Monitors were a media research company specialising in logging press coverage of people, places, companies, government departments, products, media incidents - you name it. They weren’t particularly cheap, but they were pretty comprehensive. Of course, you could do some of the same work yourself, in state library newspaper archives or on the interweb with Google or Near Equivalent, but you’d be trawling through so much crap it’d be a full time job for a team of heaps. Which is exactly the resources Media Monitors had at their disposal. Googling could only get you so far, after all.

“Sellout,” I said.

“Hey, does it look like I’ve got fuck-all else to do but research this fucking story, Mr Sitting At Home All Day Watching ESPN?”

“So what, they reckon they’re onto something?”

“Yeah, apparently. My personal client request manager…” I could see her miming an onanistic gesture at the poor man’s job title… “…has been giving me updates on their progress to date, primarily with the major metropolitan news sources. There’s a lot of stuff there that’s not really relevant - just mentions of McCarthy on the scene with this Chastity woman from a few years back, more recently he’s mentioned in a typically catty ‘Where are they now’ article from Kas Casoli in the Daily Terror…”

Kas Casoli’s article, in the Murdoch press which employed her as a senior music journalist, discussed the demise of the band in detail, most of which was conjecture and bullshit. Fitted well in the Daily Terror then, as well as the other News Very Ltd dailies it was syndicated through. I kinda liked Kas, even though she was a pretentious pain in the arse who couldn’t stand listening to anything played by our band, or any of our friends from similar genres of music. Come to think of it, I think I liked her because she was reasonably hot and had once been nice enough to sleep with me. That sort of gratitude tends to forgive a lot of lousy reviews. If only I’d been a trendy DJ fresh off the plane from Ibiza with tight shirt, conceptual hair and a suitcase full of dance cuts, instead of a dishevelled bogan with a penchant for recycled AC/DC riffs, we might have lasted longer than one night. Actually it wasn’t even a night, just three hours in a hotel suite after the ARIAs one year. And yes I am going to insist on telling the bloody story. It might seem as though I’m a little sex-obsessed; at this point in the story that can be blamed on not having had any in months and appearing in certain light to be steaming gently from the groinal area.

November 2001 was our Big ARIA Night. We thought we’d missed our shot at a Big ARIA Night - most emerging Aussie bands have them, an awards-strewn coming-out party as had been thrown for the likes of You Am I, Powderfinger, The Cruel Sea, Jet, and Wolfmother down the years - and while we’d been nominated for best emerging act the year before we’d only succeeded in winning the right to get spectacularly blotto at the industry body’s expense. But this year, courtesy the success of Skank Factor Nine, we’d been nominated for a swag of trinkets, and actually succeeded in scalping more than a couple. Both our management and our record company were delighted, particularly Kretin who made a big deal of publically heaping praise on us and pissing in our pockets gratuitously at any opportunity during the afterparty or parties. (Not literally, thank Christ. We’d have needed angling waders.) Luckily, Kretin found some equally vain and self-congratulatory industry types to metaphorically circle-jerk with during the evening, leaving the rest of us free to work the floor.

Well, ‘free’ notwithstanding the fact that certain girlfriends were not impressed with certain behaviours and had put certain band members on very short leashes. Or, in my case, had simply walked. I’d been with Brooke for almost two months, which for me was as long-term as I could handle. I’d met her at the Goodwill Games (remember them?) in Brisbane where we’d played the Australian team’s after-games function - she’d missed out on a medal in her chosen sport of beach volleyball (well, considering she was six-three, it had pretty much chosen her) but she did manage to win me. A dubious consolation prize I realise. But come November she’d been away on one too many overseas tournament jaunts and I was offered one too many enticing backstage propositions by one too many gorgeous doe-eyed girls… All my own fault. So I was single again. And Kas Casoli was starting to look like a terribly good idea. What was not a terribly good idea was calling her Carola, her Christian name, which she thoroughly despised. She said it made her sound like a cheap Japanese hatchback.

“How's it going, Phil?” asked Marty. It was a weighted question. Phil was going fine and was feeling no pain whatsoever. Marty was knackered and wanted to go home; he had the staying power of an asthmatic middle distance runner. But they’d headed over to Crown for the awards night straight from Phil collecting him from the airport, Marty having only flown into town that afternoon, and everyone's hotel keys were still in the boot of Phil’s RX-7. So he was obliged to wait for the Duffer - or flag a cab back to the hotel and break in through the aircon ducts, Mission Impossible style.

“Angus is a shocker, hey,” Phil said, resetting the pot-kettle nexus for all-time. “There’s getting back on the horse that threw you, and there’s just being stupid. Check him out,” he directed.

“What, over near....” Marty struggled to pick out landmarks in the swarm. “Between Kas Casoli and the kids from Hi-5?”

“No, between Kas Casoli and the wall behind her.”

Marty squinted dubiously; he knew how little Kas and I had in common, musically or otherwise.

“No way.”

“Way," Phil said. “He’s got the spade out.”

“When does he not have the spade out?”

“Well, maybe two days after his gorgeous blonde beach volleyball player girlfriend dumped him?”

“Getting the spade out was what got him dumped in the first place, as I understood it,” Marty remarked. “But Christ, Kas Casoli… that’s just asking for trouble. That laugh of hers, for one thing… I hope he brought the earplugs.”

“Oh, she's all right. She'd make the right sounds when it mattered....”

“Phil, that's very seedy.”

“I'm very seedy,” he replied.

“You're not the one picking up music journos to improve his media reviews,” Marty pointed out.

“Reckon he’s probably just doing it to wind Lena up,” Phil taunted. Lena and Kas did NOT get on. “Looks like he had set his sights a bit higher to start though. He was at least trying for the redhead from Hi-5, but when that wasn’t going well, there’s your bail-out option… Anyway, I think he needs something like this. I know that's a bit wrong to say, but... you wouldn’t credit it, but he’s looked a bit knocked around by the blonde chick [Phil showing his usual excellent grasp of names] dumping him. Take his mind off it, stop him thinking about her.”

“It’s funny, but I can't stop thinking about her, you know?” said me. (So who saw that one coming? That many of you? Jeezarse. My patter really is shit.) I don’t know why I was telling her about this. Oh yes I do. It was to seem less like a drunken, foul-mouthed rock thug and more a sensitive, modern, inner-city type guy who was in touch with my feelings, because I figured that would make me more likely to get in touch with hers. “Everywhere I go, there's some sort of trigger. Her perfume is still in my bathroom, her playing gear is still in my laundry basket, there’s still sand tracked through the house... It's just hopeless.”

“You poor baby,” cooed Kas sympathetically. She was both very, very drunk and very, very pliant by this time. We had nowt in common whatsoever, although deep down Kas was the sort of girl I was a total sucker for - dark hair, green feline eyes, two-faced, untrustworthy and manipulative. But the alcohol (and whatever else she’d encountered during the evening) was turning the tide in my favour - as was my tale of relationship woe. Them were big green eyes that was for sure. Deep green. Oceanic green. Deep, mysterious, a little overwhelming, liable to turn nasty if not treated with respect, and full of fish... well, probably not the latter, but the analogy almost held.

“Then again, of course,” proposed Phil, “he could just be playing for a sympathy fuck.”

Which was completely unfair. And completely true. Yes, folks, I am that shallow. Thankfully, so was Kas. Even if it didn’t make her any more positive towards the band I was in, either at the time or after the fact. And even if it had caused Lena to be pissed off with me...

Actually, in fact that wasn’t quite true. She wasn’t pissed off with me about it. Not at all. Probably because I hadn’t ever actually told her about it.

Lena was still talking about her personal client thingy manager from Media Monitors, apparently. “He thinks they’ve got some newspaper stuff coming in from their Kiwi affiliates which references McCarthy by name.”

“Yeah, but… his sister lives over there, she’s married to like the fourth or fifth richest man in the bloody country - surely there’s bound to be some spillover coverage just based on her maiden name, yeah?”

“We’ll see. I’m picking up their report after work Tuesday, plus copies of anything they have - hey, you going to be around if I give you a call?”

“Probably in transit,” I replied. “We’ve got Wednesday and Thursday blocked out for rehearsing down at the farm…”

“You are taking this seriously, aren’t you?” she teased.

“I’m rustier than the Titanic. Have to, otherwise we’ll suck a suckload of suck,” I admitted.

“Wasn’t that a Hayabusa song?”

“Ain’t That A Suckload Of Suck, I think it was. Might see if the boys want to play it actually, cheers for the suggestion... Look, if you give the farm a ring on Weds or Thurs, we’ll be out in the shed making hideous amounts of noise, sounding like the worst high school rock band ever.” I gave her the number, even though I figured she already had it. “And we’ll be back on Straddie on Friday, getting a nice early night for our gig on Saturday.”

“Why don’t I believe you, Angus?” she laughed.

“Uh, maybe because in every conversation I’ve had with the boys this week, they’ve emphasised they’re definitely packing their drinking pants, boots, shirt, socks, tie and matching hankie?”

“Don’t worry,” she quipped. “I’ll make sure the bad men don’t make Angy-Wangy drink the howwible alcohol. There-there little Angy-Wangy…”

“Oh fuck off,” I declared.

“Hey, that’s my line,” she responded. “See ya.”