The gambler

You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away, and know when to run
You never count your money when you're sitting at the table
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.
- Kenny Rogers, 1978

The audience had grown perceptibly larger, younger and drunker in the half-hour since The Australian Flange Gasket Show had vacated front-of-stage. In the interim DJ Scotty had been cranking the recent and decent, most of which I found about as recognisable as Di and Dodi after the accident, but they kept the kids jumping. How long they'd remain in motion would be a matter for the Headline Act. Which, allegedly, was us.

I had no idea how a band long dead and largely forgotten would play to an audience of kids who were in year seven when we’d last bothered the ARIA charts, but any sensible prediction would have been Poorly. When I'd been in year seven, the coolest album in the charts was the Gunners’ Appetite for Destruction; by my last year of high school, the Gunners as a band were if not dead and buried with the rest of the sunset strip hair farmers (as Kurt Cobain called them), were definitely coughing up blood. By 1993 it was all about Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Chili Peppers and Rage Against The Machine - who were all pretty much irrelevant by the time the kids who started school in ’93 reached Schoolies age at the turn of the century, and our contemporaries took the spotlight. Sure, the Chilis have kept releasing shit, but that’s what it’s largely been: shit. Boys, never thought I’d say this, but for the love of God, either stop recording, or go back on the smack.

The point being: random retro-fangirls like Annalise aside - and I’d still not sighted her this evening, so her status as such was questionable - the kids probably didn’t dig the Gasket. Which you could take either as a dissuasion, or as a challenge. Me, with a good few beers on board, my trusty Ibanez slung over my shoulder, and my mojo surging back after some good tunes and some good banter - tonight, I chose to see it as a challenge. I wanted to see these kids blown three feet backwards by what these swaggering old bastards were capable of cranking. I wanted to see queues outside CD stores the moment the shops opened tomorrow with dazzled looking school leavers, confused by their unfamiliar non-iTunes surroundings, rifling dementedly through the ‘F’s (or possibly, even more confusedly, the ‘G’s) in search of whatever the fuck it was Flange Gasket had assaulted them with out on the island the night before. I wanted to see explosions, casualties and post-traumatic stress disorder among the survivors.

Unfortunately I hadn’t picked our set opener though, which being Would The Last Spice Girl To Leave Please Turn Out The Lights wasn’t exactly the most destructive, ear-splitting weapon in our arsenal, being inherently early-90s Chili-Peppers-on-smack style funk, driven by a slap-bass-and-wah-wah-guitar-infused remake of the chord progression from the start of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. And if that wasn’t enough wanton plagiarism, the live version usually started with wholesale theft of the Chili Peppers’ Give It Away, just in case any folks were likely to miss the subtle stylistic similarities. It wasn’t a favourite of mine lyrically, but I can always forgive a song for anything so long as it has a kick-arse riff, and this fucker did. Hell, I even forgave Magic Dirt for recording Vulcanella, which saw Adelita dribble through the most cringeworthy collection of piss-poor teenage emo angst poetry in the history of spotty hormonal girliness, but the riff kicked like a mule with Tabasco on its gronniks, so that was all OK in the Book of Angus.

The Last Spice Girl was also the only song we let Phil sing on, basically because he only had to talk loudly rather than sing, with vague instructions to aim somewhere between Anthony Kiedis’ ‘What I got I got to get it put it in you’ and Scary Spice’s ‘I’ll tell you what I want what I really really want’ (though usually ending up just sounding like Henry Rollins on an incoherent shouting binge, i.e. as per programme.) He also had the honour of kicking the bastard off: snare-snare-kick-localised explosion as everyone else chimed into the first eight bars of Give It Away. Then, cue Phil on vocals for his call and response about what he liked, what he really really liked (so tell us what you like, what you really really like), which as the lyrics would go on to indicate, was for the Spice Girls to just fuck off already, except for the ginger one ‘cos she had a fab rack. Crass, yes, but deliberately, subversively, ironically so. Or so we tried to maintain.

Except Phil had other ideas. Sure, he leant over his mike at the right time, and sure he started to ‘sing’ on cue, and sure he offered to tell us what he liked, what he really really liked, to which we responded in duplicate, as per program. Which read something like this:

Phil: I’ll tell you what I like, what I really really like…
Us: So tell us what you like, what you really really like.
Phil: I’ll TELL you what I like, what I REALLY REALLY LIKE…
Us: [Spoken] Well fuckin’ get on and tell us what you like, what you really really like, Phil, for Chrissake.
Phil: I’d really… I’d really… I’d really really really really like the Spice Girls to get run over by a truck (etc).

But Phil, bless him, decided to diverge from the script at his last line, and instead to declare that what he really, really liked was the following:

I LIKE… BIG… BUTTS and I can not LIE!
You other brothers can’t DENY!
That when a girl walks in with an itty-bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get SPRUNG!

He went on a bit longer (and major props to the lad for remembering so many of the words to Baby Got Back) but by that point I was laughing so hard I could barely stay upright, let alone play the goddamn guitar. I think Scotty was in on it, because he’d left his desk well-up in the mix such that he was able to throw in dodgy scratching effects at what seemed appropriate intervals. And because he was about the only person I could see in the vicinity who wasn't pissing themselves laughing.

Anyway, I got my shit together, Phil eventually found the plot again, and we plundered through to the end of the song. To a remarkably positive crowd response, considering half the band had been in hysterics and one of the guitarists had almost managed to wet himself in the process.

“Yeah yo yo yo, we is kickin’ it eastside with all you playas in the motherfuckin’ house… lemme hear you give it up for my man MC Duff Muff freestylin phat rhymes off tha mike and smackin’ down tha perpetrators, G's…” My God, they’re actually cheering. Not throwing stuff, but cheering. How much piss have these people downed? “That be MC Five…” I indicated Jeff, who pulled some disinterested Ali G-style gang-sign. Or maybe it was a Vulcan greeting. “Mah main man MC Escher on Tha Bayyyse… and ah be yo’ boy MC… um… Hammer?”

Bad time to run out of ideas.

“Angus, please stop, you’re scaring the children.”

“Ah fuck it, I never wanted to be a MC anyway. I wanted to be…”

I paused for dramatic effect. Pity there was none.

“A lumberjack?” deadpanned the Jeff.

“Not quite,” I replied, “but near enough.”

After ripping everyone’s heads off with probably the greatest performance of I Wanna Be Angus Young every unleashed (perhaps an understatement), we outlined our promise to stop talking quite so much bollocks and actually play some songs this set, which was met with rapture and delirium. Mind you, playing show tunes dressed as the Village People probably would have been met with rapture and delirium. The kids were more than all right, they were Garn Orfff. Who said ADD and inferior-grade spirits don’t mix.

Your set list for the evening, brought to you by Me in association with a crumpled sheet of lined A4 notepaper taped to the foldback with words such as ‘Gaydar’, ‘Tractor’ and ‘Drunkees’ chicken-scrawled on it in texta:

Would The Last Spice Girl To Leave Please Turn Out The Lights
(I Wanna Be) Angus Young
Scientology Is Bullshit
Blip On The Gaydar
Sketchy At Best
Stupid People Shouldn’t Breed
Max Tractor
Drum Phil [with variations]
(I’d Be A Vegan But) Dead Animal Product Tastes Fucken Tops
Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees
The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less
Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo
It’s Not Technically Plagiarism If Led Zep Ripped It Off Someone Else Before We Ripped It Off Them

As promised, not always our biggest, but certainly our favourites. And as expected, The Meaning Of Life still had the power to scoop up a crowd in its big friendly paws, grab hold and shake them like a set of maracas; our biggest hit still managed to generate tidal waves of magical crowd love which you could surf all the way to the end of the set, which from there wasn’t too far, by design. Late in Gasket’s career, I’d started to resent that song - let’s be honest, I hated the fucker - because it seemed to be the only thing anyone would remember us for as we hurtled into oblivion. But even if we were going to be remembered one-hit wonders, which would be a fairly uncharitable way to define our career, thanks very much Kas Casoli - and not really accurate, judging by the astonishing numbers of people here who seemed to know the words to most of our shite - I belatedly admitted to myself that The Meaning Of Life wasn’t a bad song to be remembered by.

The cheering for Marty’s masterpiece (Monsterpiece?) was just subsiding as I approached the mike, still not quite sure how I was going to approach the next song.

Because I’d had an epiphony. I’d been struck by a sharp, piercing realisation, like shards from a broken plate-glass window, and I was kicking myself for not realising it before. It’s funny - McCarthy, in a way, had been all around us all night, but I’d not actually spent any time thinking about him; he’d been on the periphery, but never front-and-centre. Maybe it was because Jeff fitted like he’d been installed as part of the plumbing from day one; maybe because I was solely focused on doing a decent job myself and not fucking things up, maybe because I still resented the bastard deeply, but I hadn’t had time to reflect, let alone interest in doing so. I had shit to concentrate on. But the immediate prospect of having to play Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo brought McCarthy’s ghost out of the ether. It was his song; the lyrics were inescapably personal, more so than almost anything else he’d written, and it’d been the one we'd been least sure about playing when we were bashing potential setlists about, but decided we kinda had to.

And that was the shard of realisation: I’d finally put Lena’s awkward request, not to slag him off on stage in case we find out he’s come to some grief, into context. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, thought she was just being a bit delicate about things, this being her first Gasket show since he disappeared (and ours, to be fair.) But there was something else, something I only twigged to just now; what she'd said in her phone call earlier in the week. She was supposed to get that report from Media Monitors on Wednesday, wasn’t she? Hadn’t mentioned it since. But had been very subdued since, and then there was that slightly bizarre request, ‘in case we find out something bad’s happened to him…’

Something bad has happened to him all right. He’s fuckin’ dead, that’s what’s happened to him.

The conclusion hit me like a punch to the guts, like being in a lift that’s suddenly dropped three floors without warning; stomach inverting itself, head spinning, hoping like hell that what you’re slowly realising is going on, isn’t. But it made sense; scientifically, it was the explanation that fitted the data. McCarthy’s dead. Sam McCarthy is fucking dead. Lena knows it, and she’s not telling. Maybe to prevent it undermining the show, maybe because she doesn’t know for sure, maybe she hasn’t figured out how to deal with it.

All of that was racing through my head as the wave of audience love slowly subsided, the last melodic chords of The Meaning Of Life had resounded through the room. Perfect fucking timing for the arse to drop out of your evening, I agree. Get it together, Angus.

“Can I get you to thank my friend Martin di Biagini, ladies and gentlemen, for his lovely work on that song?” Marty, now in front of his decommissioned keyboard stack with his bass slung over his shoulder, took a stage bow, as the assembled ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, did as they were bid. “And for deciding to give up an otherwise profitable performance evening to come play some old shit with us lot of bogans for beer money. You can always plead temporary insanity, without which we wouldn’t be here tonight.”

“And thanks to Phil for not being able to read a calendar,” the Jeff added, “without which we wouldn’t be here tonight either…”

“Can you tell we’re padding?” I quipped. “Yeah, sorry. We promised to stop talking bollocks this set didn’t we?”

I idly tinkered with a few progressions. Fuck it, this wasn’t supposed to be so difficult.

“We’ve got two more songs to go,” I announced. “This next one is very, very old. I think it’s old enough to vote. It was written by a friend of mine called Sam. You might remember him. He used to stand over there,” I said off-handedly, flicking a thumb towards where Jeff had been deployed. “He was a lovely bloke. Knew him since we were both five years old. Five years old. Good company. Funny as buggery. Could write a tune too. Turned into an absolute cunt in the end. He’s dead now. I miss him.”

I think I sensed the collective intake of breath in the room rather than hearing it. Given the sweat and skankiness pervading the place, I hoped everyone was breathing through their mouths. Of course some little bastard chose that particular moment to scream ‘Play a song you cunt’ at the top of his pubescent lungs, but we’ll gloss over that. I glanced over at Jeff, whose furrowed brow conveyed a pensive question mark. I caught his eye, and nodded gently. He raised an eyebrow, acknowledging receipt of my clarification. Funny how sometimes you don’t need actual words to complete entire conversations.

“This is a song Sam and I wrote when all you lot were in primary school, about how he couldn’t get laid in Sydney because he didn’t come from a North Shore private school. Funny how Sam not being able to get laid is a recurring theme in the history of this band…” Funny too how confessional the spotlight can be. “Though ironically the reason why he couldn’t get laid was that he was hopelessly in love with a girl in his course at uni which meant he couldn’t actually see any other women let alone engage them in fucking conversation, but that’s another story. Anyway, he wrote a white man’s blues about it - the white man’s blues is usually about not getting laid, the black man’s blues is about how much of a cunt the white man is… Of course I managed to fuck up his white man’s blues by supergluing an old-school punk-rock riff onto it, and then the girl from his uni course managed to top that by dating him for five years… kinda buggered up his blues completely. Even so, I give you Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo. Lyrics by Sam McCarthy, swearing by Andy Young, riff stolen from the Sex Pistols.”

Moved to Sydney, met some people, pampered kids of well-off folk
Private school at vast expenses, rural schooling seems a joke
Private schoolgirls say we’re yee-haas, we ain’t got that North Shore style
Play the banjo with our toenails all the fuckin’ day-long while.
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Can’t get no cred
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Been living in Sin City for four long years
Without so much as head…

It was somehow cathartic to crank through Evans Head Bowlo, maybe because rather than sidestepping the McCarthy issue, we were turning and bearing head-first into the teeth of it. It was his song, bearing his trademark clearly and indisputably; the last time any of us had played it live was me, with him, at our ten-year school reunion; and of course it was all about being young and dateless (or, to be more accurate, rootless) which a decent wedge of our audience would inevitably have to relate to, even if they were pretending not to.

It seemed to make for a more free-spirited, enthusiastically ad-libbed reading of our set-closer, the ‘Jive Bunny mastermix’ (as Phil called it) of all those bloozey Led Zep numbers from the late 60s/early 70s. Dammit, I channelled Robert Plant like a demon, the Jeff WAS Jimmy Page, Marty made John Paul Jones look like some faded, washed-up old clown responsible for producing the Datsuns’ fairly average second album, and if Phil’s performance had been more Bonzo-esque he’d have fallen off his drum riser on the back of thirty-seven vodka screwdrivers. We ripped it up, tore it down, stacked it deep and sold it cheap, and by the last ‘Hunnay puhlease come howwwme’ of How Many More Times, had flattened every punter on his arse, made love to every girl in the room, and left them dazed and confused for so long, it’s not true. We left them swooning, dizzy and screaming for more.

Thank you, good night.

Well someone was screaming for more, even if their ecstatic delirium spoke more to early-evening goon laybacks in the campground rather than the hallucinogenic intensity of our performance. Even so, it saved us looking stupid because we’d been vain enough to predict we might need something in reserve for an encore. Which turned out to be necessary as of around two minutes past midnight; the band room shook with the resonant pounding of hands, feet and floorboards out front, in time with the calls for an encore. A group of drunken teenage tragics had been calling for Kenny Rogers’ old standard The Gambler all night - for some reason that’s completely beyond me, groups of pissed lads of a certain age in every generation seem to get some kind of cult infatuation with the fucker and insist on bellowing loudly in public about knowing how to hold ‘em, fold ‘em, walk away and/or run - and their chants of ‘GAM-BER-LER’ were just about audible beneath the rest of the crowd’s ‘WE-WANT-MORE’. Points for persistence, if not for taste, lads. Now fuck off.

I broke the backstage silence, most of which was still probably attributable to my unexpected eulogy for McCarthy, with “So what are we going to play lads?”

“Not the fuckin’ Gambler, that’s for sure,” the Jeff declared.

Luckily we’d foreseen this eventuality and had parked our man Harry Holt around the back with the motor running for when we needed it. Like we were getting out of here without cranking that bit of modern art. After a few minutes’ break we strolled back out like Grand Final winners on our lap of honour, to a similarly epic response. Ab-so-lutely deafening. I’d missed this. I’d fucking missed this soooo much. If there was ever a question about what I was best qualified to earn a living by, this answered it and then some.

“Hello!” I said. “You still here then?”

YEAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

“Seems so,” the Jeff noted.

I nodded. “That’s good, we’ll stick around for a bit. Not long though, because we’ve got to do the bolt…”

Crowd noise begins to swell. Here comes the next wave. My God, these folks have long memories.

“Angus… there’s no need to go and do the bolt,” Marty explained patiently.

“Why not, he asked awkwardly as though part of some piss-poor segue?”

“Funny you should say that,” Marty quipped.

I’d long since ripped seven shades of shite out of my voice, so as the second set had gone on, Marty had volunteered to take more of McCarthy’s vocal parts off mine and Jeff’s shoulders. Made sense, he was the one most of the kids had paid to see, we'd parked him up front for a reason. So even though Harold Holt was actually one of mine in terms of vocals, he took lead role on pipes and I was glad for the break. It meant I could focus my adrenalized energies on doing justice to McCarthy’s hyperactive, high-voltage lead guitar part. I ripped off every move of his I could remember, or that my aching, ageing bones could manage: stagediving, duckwalking, soloing from atop the front-of-house desk, running around stage like the real Angus Young after nine Red Bulls and a fistful of No-Doze, vaulting onto and scissor-kicking off my amp (mildly spraining an ankle, not that I noticed until the adrenalin wore off sometime on Sunday afternoon), and finally, scaling the lighting gantry, hanging off by one arm and playing the fucker with my teeth (really just my left hand - cheers Hendrix). Imitation, the sincerest form of flattery, and in this case, of tribute. OK, so the lighting-gantry stunt was actually ripped off Dion from the D4, but McCarthy did try it once. The Arena, Brisbane, late 2002. Put his back out for two weeks.

So after giving blood, sweat, tears and prospective chiropractor bills for the cause in our extended curtain-call rendition of Learn To Swim With Harold Holt, the last thing on God’s green Earth which this thoroughly bruised and buggered little black duck wanted to hear, emerging from the eruptive, industrial-deafness-inducing cheers at the end of the song, was that bloody chant again: We want more. We want more. We want more. Gam-ber-ler. And, as that childrens’ book points out, they never once said PLEASE. The youth of today have no manners. I’m writing a letter to the newspaper, etc.

The pained expression on my face must have told the boys the story, because the Jeff simply cracked up, Marty bowed to me as though I was Mecca and he wasn’t worthy, he wasn’t worthy, while Phil fished around for a ciggy lighter which he lit and held aloft along with the most metal of metal salutes.

“Scotty, save me,” I barked off-stage.

He knew what I was hoping for - rescue by noise pollution watershed - but he wasn’t about to help me out. “Got until quarter past before the cops are going to have any problem. Sorry big fellah…”

Where the fuck was Toogood’s white-anting bastardry when it was actually needed? Scotty did at least did sling me a pitying Powerade from the Esky in the front-of-house enclosure, which I took with an ironic glare. Not so ironic though that I didn’t rip the cap off it and drain half the contents in the fifteen seconds it took the lads to confer on-stage over what to play next. We still had the rockabilly thrash Yee Haw Billy Bob up our sleeves, a staple of our live show for years, but that would need two functional guitarists of the ability of Chris Cheney or better, which we were currently short by two. We only had one and a half functional guitarists full stop. We hadn’t touched a thing off our final album, but that was because it was shit. And given this was the encore, Marty had boxed the keyboards for the night, which meant anything needing ivories tinkled was out…

Basically, we really wanted something that would clear the room so we could fuck off and have a beer.

There’s an idea.

“I got one,” I nodded, as the a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ reached fever pitch. And explained.

“Oh God no,” Marty groaned, but he doth protest too much; he, like the rest of them returned to First Positions with big stupid grins on their faces. If this didn’t kill the night off, nothing would.

“Hey folks… before I manage to fuckin’ kill myself, this better be our last one…”

I spotted Chris Kurtin’s shiny head, watching with some of the other pass-holder industry types at the foot of stage, this side of the security cordon.

“Hey has anyone bought Kretin a beer yet?”

Appeared not, judging by the gesture he was flashing me.

“Trust me, you’d love to have a beer with Kretin…”

I grinned, as the realisation dawned on the clued-up audience members as to what was coming next. Someone bought the B-sides and rarities album, or maybe even was with us from the start.

“As for me, I’d love to have a beer with just about anyone.”

More of other people’s songs; sorry Kas, turns out I’m even more of a liar than I thought. Then again, she was an inveterate liar too; she was still here, and loving it as much as anyone else in the room.

So, we had a beer with a whole bunch of people, including but not limited to Kretin, Razorslash (who maybe one other person in the room would have remembered, namely their manager), James Blunt (no guesses as to what his surname might have rhymed with), the Thorpedo (though he was said to have preferred a cocktail), John Laws (primarily in order to punch him in the head), David Blaine (ditto), Slim Dusty, Aunty Jack and the Brand Power lady. Finally we had a beer with DJ Scotty, for being the magnificent bastard that he was, busted out the biggest of Big Rock Endings in the history thereof, bellowed a heartfelt ‘THANK YOU GOOD NIGHT!’ and collapsed into a heap.

We’d killed off the last bastions of resistance. Huge, dam-bursting, mountain-shaking volumes of cheers, but not one word of wanting more. They’d had their fill. Their ears were bleeding, their brains were echoing in their skulls. Their senses had suffered enough. Surely.

Apparently not. Because here it came. That fucking chant. No. Not again. Make them stop… Make the miserable little bastards stop… And then I realised the full, horrifying hideousness of what we were faced with. It’s even worse than before…. That’s not WE-WANT-MORE. That’s GAM-BER-LER. Not just that bunch of pissed teenage bogans, but now others are drunk, desperate and stupid enough to be join in.

Oh for fuck’s sake…

The Jeff turned away from his mike. “In the immortal words of Super Dave,” he declared, “cunt my ringhole.”

“Not sure that’s physically possible is it?”

I was about to privately suggest we should just down tools and fuck off; if there was a riot, that was security’s problem, not ours.

But then Phil had to go and fuck it up for us by actually acknowledging the chant.

“So, you want us to play a gambling song, huh?” Phil mused.

At that moment, a little part of me died inside.

“Marty, do we know any gambling songs?” our idiot drummer asked of our bass player.

GAM-BER-LER, GAM-BER-LER, GAM-BER-LER…

“I know a gambling song,” Marty said, a little glint of steel in his voice. He turned, and met my pained expression with a sly grin and a wink. And mouthed the word ‘Arse’.

Whafuck?

Any further thoughts were vetoed by Marty turning his bass amp up to blow-the-fuckers-up levels of distortion, producing one of Jeff’s picks which he’d thefted for the purpose, and proceeding to channel gentleman and scholar, one Mr Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilminster, in his pomp.

Two bars into Marty’s face-peeling bass intro I realised he hadn’t been saying ‘Arse’. He’d been saying ‘Ace’. Which was good because eight bars into the intro the rest of us had to start playing along too. Vacuous Pommy music rag Q once declared of Ace Of Spades, ‘This song has an intro which wouldn't be out of place ushering in the end of the world’. Q were and are a bunch of wankers, granted, but they got that right.

Marty must have already had a word in Phil’s shell-like, as he was in on the conspiracy; he wheeled into his namesake Philthy Phil Taylor’s hundred-mile-an-hour drum part like a whirling dervish. Jeff and I had about five seconds and counting to figure out who would play lead and who would play rhythm. I pointed at him and mouthed “Lead,” then at me and mouthed “Fucked.” He grinned, took his cue, and blazed away into that frantic, vitriolic guitar part, underscoring Marty’s gutteral, distorted bassline.

My mind’s eye captured an image in that instant of Marty so removed from his cutesy singer-songwriter persona I hoped the photographers below had their cameras firing: pure testosterone incarnate, menacing the mike as though he was about to kick off the haka, veins bulging, legs wide apart Metallica-style, bass slung low over his thigh, eyes shut, teeth gritted, grimacing. He was either channelling Lemmy or was very badly constipated.

Nope, he was definitely channelling Lemmy.

He opened his mouth and a sound unlike anything I’d heard from him before, like a harpooned rhino in its death throes or Satan throwing up after too many mango daiquiries, poured out of him like a volcanic eruption:

IF YOU LIKE TO GAMBLE, I TELL YOU I’M YOUR MAN
YOU WIN SOME, LOSE SOME, IT’S ALL THE SAME TO ME…

That was the call; Jeff provided the response, flicking a short, sharp, arrogant solo away off his hip like Viv Richards in his heyday.

THE PLEASURE IS TO PLAY, MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHAT YOU SAY…
I DON’T SHARE YOUR GREED, THE ONLY CARD I NEED IS THE ACE OF SPADES…
THE ACE OF SPADES, YEAAAHH!

The front four rows looked like their faces were about to melt off. Was this really the guy who wrote Byron Sunrise, Love is Cruel, Mesmerising and Angel’s Wings? Yes, ladies, it was. But he’d also been the guy who’d flatted with us lot of bastards for years and was known to crank the loud obnoxious rock and roll first thing with his morning coffee. When it came to the heavy shit, the lad had chops. He just hid them remarkably well.

PLAYING FOR THE HIGH ONE, DANCING WITH THE DEVIL
GOING WITH THE FLOW, IT'S ALL THE SAME TO ME…
SEVEN OR ELEVEN, SNAKE EYES WATCHING YOU,
DOUBLE UP OR QUIT, DOUBLE STAKE OR SPLIT,
THE ACE OF SPADES, THE ACE OF SPADES… ROIGHT!!!

The Lemmy-esque ‘Roight’ was a lovely touch, I thought.

YOU KNOW I'M BORN TO LOSE
AND GAMBLING'S FOR FOOLS,
BUT THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT BABY
I DON'T WANNA LIVE FOR EVER!
…AND DON'T FORGET THE JOKER!

Insert face-melting solo here courtesy Jeff Young and his note-perfect assimilation of Fast Eddie Clarke’s finest hour. Well, two minutes fifty or thereabouts.

PUSHING UP THE ANTE, I KNOW YOU WANNA SEE ME,
READ 'EM AND WEEP, THE DEAD MAN'S HAND AGAIN…
I SEE IT IN YOUR EYES, TAKE ONE LOOK AND DIE,
THE ONLY THING YOU SEE, YOU KNOW IT'S GONNA BE,
THE ACE OF SPADES, THE ACE OF SPADES!!

As the aftershock from that last, explosive power chord reverberated through the room like the percussive comprssion wave from a nuclear test, Marty growled throatily:
“See you again some day. If you play your cards right.”

A moment of stunned silence, before the crowd returned fire with just about as much noise as they could possibly muster. We were outnumbered, but in the end, they were outgunned. And by the time those little fuckers with the Kenny Rogers complex found their voices again, we were long gone - back in the band room, feet up, grins on faces, coldies in hand. That's WIN, ladies and gentlemen. In excelsius deo.

I don’t think anyone knew what to say - that had been just about the best show I could remember us every putting on, despite it being years and years since we’d played together. And even so, it was almost definitely the last time we’d play together; comeback and farewell in one. The reverie was broken by Marty, spilling his beer as he coughed and spluttered profusely. Coincidentally, the love of his life had just entered the band room. For his sake I hope it was coincidental or he was due a world of hurt.

“Torn the shit out of my throat,” Marty groaned cheerily. “How the fuck does Lemmy do that?”

“He has no throat,” I replied. “It’s titanium.” He knew, without me needing to add, that I thought that was the most fucking awesome rock vocal performance I’d ever shared a stage with.

“So,” said Maddy, sizing up her spent-looking life partner as he slumped in a ragged looking chair and rehydrated with an Uncle Ted, “have you got all that out of your system now?”

He looked around the room. “Yeah,” he sighed with a tired grin, “I reckon so. We can go home now.”

And as if on cue, Scotty started piping Marty’s reigning Hottest 100 titleholder, Mesmerising, through the building, to soothe the savage beasts as they slowly began filing out. A little unfair to characterise Mesmerising as ugly-lights music, but that seemed to be the use it was being put to. The calming, melodic strains of Marty’s alternative pop finery would hopefully go some way to defusing the inevitable shitfight of adrenalised, alcohol-fuelled aggression which would be exploding outside as soon as that lot of boozed up kiddies hit the streets. Any responsible adults with cars which they actually liked would be well served to get out of Dodge and make for the ferry as soon as possible, as I tried to tell them when they dropped by backstage to offer their post-gig big-ups (and not at all to see if they could plunder our dwindling rider now that the bar wasn’t serving any more). Soon the band room seemed almost as crowded as it had been during set break. Kretin stole one of my beers and loudly declared I’d lost nothing in my time away and should really consider performing more regularly.

“What, in a band?”

“Fuck no. The way you climbed that lighting stack, I was thinking more Cirque de Soleil,” he remarked leerily.

God he was a funny, funny man. “You mixing beers and antidepressants again, Chris?” I queried.

But it was nice - I’d forgotten how nice - just sitting around with some old friends, sharing a few yarns and beers in the afterglow of playing a great show. I’d missed this almost as much as I’d missed melting people’s faces off by playing the guitar really, really loud. Everything was relaxed, I was surrounded by happy shining faces, and I was at peace with the world, despite the ringing in my ears that even industrial strength earplugs hadn’t protected me from. At least I was at peace until the Jeff cleared his throat and asked the question I was hoping we could shelve for a bit:

“So, you reckon Sam’s dead then?”

It was like a scene from one of those old westerns, when the baddie strides through the saloon doors, the piano player stops in his tracks and everyone suddenly shuts up. You could almost hear tumbleweeds blowing down the street, it went that quiet.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, he is.”

A lengthening pause.

“How?” was his one-word query.

Of all the wrong times to walk into a room, Lena picked the wrongest of all most absolutely wrong times to walk into this one, finding every set of eyes in the room suddenly trained on her. Probably something to do with me replying to Jeff with, “Ask her,” and pointing to Lena as she walked through the door.

Lena froze. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to say anything at all. And then the moment passed, and she composed herself.

“Motorbike accident,” she explained evenly. “South Island of NZ, near Queenstown. About four years ago, apparently.”

Fucking hell. He is dead.

“I only found out this week,” she went on, treading water. “I don’t really have all the details yet, figured it’d just cast a shadow over the whole show if I said anything…”

Well that’s fucked the atmosphere now hasn’t it? I contemplated my beer, took a swig to finish it, and grabbed one last one from the backstage fridge.

“Told him he’d fucking kill himself on one of those things one day.”