Southern man

Cos I'm a Southern Man
Well I'm Southern bred
I got the South in my blood
And I'll be here till I'm damn well dead.
- Speights ad campaign, late '80s to present

Even New Zealand Customs were taking the piss. Name, date of birth, passport number - OK, that was fair enough. Within expected parameters. But ‘usual occupation’? How the fuck should I know? It’d been a long time since I’d put ‘Musician’ on one of these forms – it’d been a long time since I’d even seen one of these forms, I hadn’t flown this route since the days of Freedom Air, a low-cost offshoot of Air New Zealand (a bit too low-cost as things turned out) – and I didn’t really think it was time to start again. ‘Unemployed’ was tantamount to writing ‘Detain me for hours asking me fucking stupid questions all afternoon’ so I winced and wrote ‘Teacher’. I still was, technically, and it was likely to raise fewer questions. Not having to answer questions was my ambition for this morning, given that I’d slept very bloody poorly – across the bench seat of the ute – and was in chronic need of a sense-of-humour transplant.

I’d slept in the ute because the only way I could reach the 8am Thursday morning flight to Dunedin, an e-ticket for which had turned up in my email inbox courtesy Hayabusa’s super-efficient management, i.e. Aroha Maxwell, was to get the last ferry of the night to the mainland on Wednesday night, camp out in the carpark in Cleveland overnight, sleep very bloody poorly, then drive over to the airport and check in at dawn. And having beaten it into my conscious that I needed to bring a lot of Important Stuff – my iPod shuffle, full of all the Hayabusa tracks I could cram onto it; some stage-friendly clothes, my drinking boots, and, oh yeah, my guitar – I of course managed to check in, board the plane and get half way across the Tasman before the penny woozily dropped that the Atomic Mandarin II was still in its case, in the back of the ute, under a very insecure tonneau cover, in the open-air carpark at Brisbane Airport. I sucked. As did the mid-flight meal.

On a clear day, like today, the last twenty minutes of the flight into Dunedin, crossing the South Island, was a thing to behold. It sucked the breath out of you like a sharp punch to the solar plexus, in truth. You approach over the West Coast, and are immediately assailed by the sheer monochrome pointyness of the snow-capped Southern Alps. You fly over Queenstown, following the Kawarau Valley away from Lake Wakatipu, and suddenly black-and-white gives way to shades of golden brown; you’re over the parched vineyards and Middle Earth plains of Central Otago, the blue fingers of the hydro-lake systems snaking between the valleys. Then the brown gives way to green as the coastal hills emerge from the east, you’re sweeping over the city of Dunedin southwards to the only bit of flat land available within 30 kays for building an airport, the Taieri Plain. It might have been clear but it sure as hell wasn’t still; it had been bumpier than the Olgas on the way over and there was a serious crosswind against which old mate was trying to bring down an Air New Zealand Airbus A320. He threw it down like a Shaq slam-dunk, but we appeared to be alive.

“Teacher?” queried the Customs official. “I understood you were in town to play a music festival, Mr Young?”

“That’s gotten out fast,” I muttered, “I only said yes yesterday evening.”

That bit of news was in today’s paper already, as I discovered on landing; testament to the efficiency of the organisers as much as it was the lack of news in Dunedin once the students had fucked off home for the year, as was the case by December. Since the last time I’d been here, the old fibro shed which had laughingly been described as Dunedin International Airport had been razed and replaced by a proper, modern looking facility, though they still only had one international flight a day and all the shiny bling hardly seemed proportional to the amount of use the place had to be getting. A couple of Air NZ domestic flights arrived around the same time as my Brisbane flight – which had been scheduled to get in around three-ish but, as with most eastbound trans-Tasman flights, landed about twenty minutes early – and there seemed to be a lot of student-age people arriving, rather than departing as I figured would have been the case around this time of year. Then again it was graduation season, and most of them seemed to have their folks with them. The chances of any massive student invasion of D-Town being on the premise of the kids being desperate to see one A. Young out front of hometown heroes Hayabusa seemed distinctly remote.

I had no idea where I was going, or who was supposed to be meeting me, but I was becoming quite happy to put blind, mindless faith in whatever arrangements Mrs Tractor and her small-but-superlative team had put in place. I wandered out of the main terminal, blinking into the light, and grimacing against the chilly breeze off the Alps (which I’d typically not catered for with my choice of clothing), and was nearly run over by a scruffy-looking Outback wagon festooned with ski racks and coated liberally with half an inch of gravel and grit.

Hollywood bounded out of the passenger side, looked me up and down with a smug grin, called me a very rude word, and grabbed me in a big hug. He still looked a flash bastard, though the reflective aviator sunnies didn’t look quite as twattish as they used to, now that the ‘80s had made a roaring comeback. The driver, a Viking marauder of our acquaintance, left the ignition rumbling as he ambled out of his side of the car, with a wink to a fairly cranky looking parking officer.

“Where’s the weapon?” Bear grinned, after the requisite Bear hug.

“In the boot of my car, at the airport, because I’m a fuckwit.”

Hollywood roared with laugher. “Fuck it,” he declared, “just use one of mine, sweet as.”

Bewildered stare. Who was this man and what had he done with Nick Holland from Hayabusa?

“Just get in the bloody car, eh,” called a round brown ‘froed head from the open rear window, who reached out an arm for an appropriately yo-bro-homey-gangsta greeting, most of which I fucked up because I'm whiter than a ream of photocopy A4. “Priorities, bro,” he pointed out. “Beers are getting warm.”

The stereo in Bundy Bear’s Subaru Outback didn’t believe in MP3s, but was prepared to discuss terms with CD-Rs. The Stooges’ Search And Destroy, track one of what turned out to be an epic early ‘70s punk compilation of Bear’s construction, exploded like a firestorm in the confines of the Outback, as Bear toed the throttle and Hollywood fished cans of Speights out of the glovebox chiller – judging by the squashed cans in the footwell, the non-driving members of the navigation team had been getting their eye in on the way here.

“Get that up ya,” Hollywood instructed. I decided to drink it instead. Because it was Speights, and it was good, and I’d been living in the land of XXXX for far too long. And, after all, it was the sponsor’s product.

Speights Tractorfest, announced the flyer I’d grabbed from the airport, same as the full-page ad in today’s ODT.

Yeah, conceded the Bear, the old man’s contacts had been handy in sorting that out, though the Pride of the South had been supporting Hayabusa tours and gigs since back in the day and by now their marketing department were on their managements' speed-dial.

In association with the Cancer Society of NZ.

Self explanatory, really. Proceeds would go to them, it was basically the point of the exercise.

Carisbrook, Sunday December 7, 11am.

Had to be the Brook, Tractor had insisted. It just had to be. It was his only non-negotiable. Which meant they couldn’t wait until O-Week next year, as they’d originally planned in order to get more punters, because the Otago Rugby Union would be using the joint again for their core business, the one which paid the bills. And, on the quiet, they weren’t entirely sure the Tractor would hold out that long. So December it was. Exams had finished last month, so the usual student exodus had occurred, but at least it was a graduation weekend – the town was booked to the rafters, every hotel full, graduation parade through the main street on Saturday, the works. The Southern Amp festival had been the previous week in Christchurch, which had brought a few bands southwards, though it probably had done them no favours. Bigger problem was the date clash with Homebake, meant a couple of big Kiwi acts were off the table. No Evermore, for instance, which just left the likes of Opshop to cater to the girlie-pop end of the speculum. Um, spectrum.

Hayabusa, Shihad, The Mint Chicks, The Datsuns, Supergroove (old skool!), Opshop, The Checks, Luger Boa, The Have, Deja Voodoo, Cut Off Your Hands…

What, no Finn Brothers?

Luger Boa were Jimmy from the D4’s new band, and sounded good on the two minutes of MySpace sampling I’d had a chance to listen to last night. The Mint Chicks were kinda old-school Gurge, the Datsuns were mates, funk-metallurgists Supergroove were one of the Duffer's old faves, the Checks were the Next Big Thing of NZ blues-rock, The Have their immediate predecessors, and fellow Dunedinites Deja Voodoo were the dodgy bastards from cult NZ TV show Back Of The Y, playing filthy-dirty rock and having a blast. Which was the overarching theme, to be honest. No sign of any Wellington trumpet bands, despite D’s allegances thereto; Tractor had called for Kiwi rock goodness and had got it, from the look of it. Apart from one ring-in Strayan guitarist who was yet to play any of the songs live AT ALL, let alone with the rest of the band. If the lack of rehearsals for Spam Filter and the Waterford Crystal Method had been a bit brave, this was flat-out delusional.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Bear, “you’re just there to look pretty anyway. Bat your eyelashes at the pretty girls and try not to fuck the changes up more than every second or third time.”

“I can probably manage that,” I suggested. “Just about.”

Easy to say. Professional musicians. Amateur me. Fuck this up and I stood to disappoint a lot of innocent people. And how I could fail to fuck this up, I really wasn’t sure.

The set list, as proposed for Hayabusa’s hour-and-a-bit show-closing slot was a bit more reassuring. At least I’d heard all of the songs before and knew vaguely which way they went.

We Are Hayabusa (And You’re Not)
Alpha Bitch
Scandinavian Flick
This was Bear’s theme song, an ode to both his Viking roots and his ‘enthusiastic’ driving style. Though it was women he liked who ended up giving him the Scandinavian Flick more often than not, which inspired a third, not-entirely-Bear-approved verse.
Skunk Works
Exit Strategy
My favourite breakup song of all time. Probably a poor indictment on me than I go through enough of them to have one.
Reverse Midas
Cold Shower
Plan B
Wookies Don’t Live On Endor
Which tells the tale of how our protagonist tried to pretend to be a Star Wars uber-nerd in order to pick up a superhot geek chick at a convention, but was uncovered as a fraud because he wasn't aware that [insert title here]. In the end, our hero opts to reinvent himself for the better good - and heads for the next Star Trek convention instead.
Sticky Wicket
Designated Wingman
Off Chops
Key lyric: ‘I’m not a vegetarian but I’m fairly…’
Transvision Tramp
Last of the Recognised Batsmen
-----------------------------------------
Encore:
We Are Still Hayabusa (reprise)
Heat Exchanger
Ain’t That A Suckload Of Suck

Despite originating from the furtherest point from any of the band members - having being born in Cairns hospital - the Bear was the only one of the Hayabusa lads who actually still lived in Dunedin. He had a distinctly fucking awesome place up on the ridge at St Clair, overlooking the beach. He also had a place in Raglan, on the west coast of the North Island, which was sort of a Kiwi Byron Bay with (marginally) less pretenders, and alternated between them depending on the season and whether he felt like surfing or snowboarding that weekend. Hollywood and D lived in Auckland most of the time; Hollywood had a flash apartment in Ponsonby and played in a record industry five-a-side football team with various munters including Jimmy from the D4 and the lads from Deja Voodoo called the Axe Ministers. They played in butchers’ stripes, and had their own personal liability insurance. Tractor and Aroha had a farm out on the Otago Peninsula, countryside so starkly beautiful it'd make your face melt off. And pretty much the most expensive lifestyle-farm real estate in the South Island, short of a Queenstown winery.

Statement of the bleeding obvious: they’d all done a lot better than we in Gasket had, save maybe Marty, and he’d married well so it was harder to judge. Hollywood had pretty much doubled his money playing the stock market over many years, so was rivalling Marty and Maddy in the ‘toy collection’ department. Hollywood saw Marty’s Bell Ranger and raised him a Eurocopter EC120; and as for Marty’s impressive collection of motors, Hollywood replied with a couple of Porsches (a 911 Turbo and a Cayenne GTS) which might not have trumped Marty’s collection, unless you threw the Central Otago winery and the big fuck-off boat in the Marlborough Sounds into it. Then he won on points.

D, the militant socialist, had given large swathes of his cash away to his community, setting up trusts for disadvantaged Pacific communities both out on the islands and in his ‘hood of Mangere, South Auckland. But he’d looked after himself and his family too, as well as setting up his own independent record label to encourage new bands. I had a lot of time for D. I might have have two fifths of fuck all in common with him, me being a bogan Skippy from a cane farm, but I had a lot of time for him. He was a thinker, not a talker, which made him the perfect foil for the fast-talking (i.e. bollocks-talking) Hollywood.

Bear had done what I’d probably have done. Bought a few bolt-holes in nice parts of the country, spent a little bit on cars and toys - nothing too stupid, just enough for entertainment purposes - invested a bit more to see him right for the future, then chucked the rest onto his Visa card, slung his swag over his shoulder, his surfboard under his arm, and went off to see the world. In fact that was what I’d tried to do myself when Gasket had imploded, but hadn’t made it much further than the city he’d been born in. The reasoning behind it was the same, though. Keep moving forward, and your future is always in front of you, your past behind. That seemed more profound when D said it, but then again it could have been the half-dozen Speights before sundown, out on the deck at Bear’s place watching the surf roll into St Clair.

“Got a spare board if you’re keen for the early tomorrow,” he suggested. Despite being a big, burly, bronzed Aussie from Where-Else-But-Queensland, Bear hadn’t actually spent five minutes on a surfboard until he moved to New Zealand, largely because the bits of Queensland he’d lived in hadn’t had any surf. He’d taken to it like a duck to water, or some sort of aquatic bear at least.

“You got a hollowed-out seal I can wear as a wetsuit?” I quipped. That there peeling off the headland in lovely phosphorescent arcs was the Southern Ocean, next stop Antartica.

“Tractor’s left his here,” he said. “Low mileage, only used by a little old lady on Sundays.”

“Only pissed in by a little old lady on Sundays,” corrected Hollywood slyly.

“What, does he get her in specially?” I wondered. “Yeah, fuck it, I’ll give it a bash. Hypothermia’s overrated.”

Even so, I was relieved next morning dawned grey and pancake-flat, with an onshore wind ironing out what little swell was there. I was feeling less positive that we’d spent the night drinking yet more piss and ordering pizza – the Hayabusa lads slumming it? Egads – but my mood improved after Bear and I wandered down to one of the cafés at St Clair and grabbed a coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon. Hollywood and Tenacious D joined us at length, they were staying at the Esplanade apartments a short stroll along the beachfront. The fact they knew their beds were within staggering distance probably hadn’t helped keeping last night’s festivities to a minimum. It wasn’t anything too lairy, just the taking of bevs and the talking of bollocks with a bunch of good bastards I hadn’t seen in a lot of years. But I’d be a lot less anxious when I was in that rehearsal room with a guitar in my hand, crunching through some big fuck-off rock songs with them.

Even on a grey old day like today, the Peninsula was a spectacular piece of geography, rolling green hills plunging down to the sea. We piled into Bear’s Outback and headed out along Highcliff Road, which wound along the spine of the hills along the length of the Peninsula, ascending up into the low-hanging clouds and out the other side. Bear peeled off the main road onto a gravel track, which headed down towards a bay on the southern side of the Peninsula. Around a bend, through a gate and… almost head-on into a mud-spattered Ford Territory. Aroha was heading into the venue to oversee Tractorfest Day Minus Two preparations firsthand, once she’d dropped by and visited Dan at the palliative care facility. The mention of ‘palliative care facility’ made me wince. Tractor had called me, almost literally, from his deathbed. She enfolded me in a big hug with her long wing-attack arms (there’s some unwritten law of New Zealand sport that says rugby players are obliged to breed with netballers for the future good of the nation; originally of Southland Maori stock, Aroha had played for the dominant Southern Sting in the national comp, as well as having loitered on the fringes of selection for the NZ Silver Ferns for several years) and thanked me for coming over at such short notice. Aroha's angular features looked tired and drawn, but she still surviving on the adrenalized intensity of it all. I wondered whether throwing herself into organising Tractorfest had been a means of dealing with his condition – at least she could make a contribution here and have it matter, whereas terminal cancer doesn’t generally care whether you try or not. I wondered too whether she might one day regret not spending this time with Dan, but it wasn’t my place to be thinking things like that. This was Tractor’s baby, his one final grand gesture – if he couldn’t beat cancer, he’d at least draw as much attention to it as possible and throw himself a hell of a wake in the process. She’d been his hands and eyes throughout, and while it’d taken her away from him and the kids, the family, hers and his, had been fantastic, looking after the kids, helping out with the organisation. And he was very much looking forward to seeing me after the show on Monday, Aroha said. I got the impression he wasn’t really in much of a state to see anyone right now, and in any case we needed to be focusing on the show itself.

“Is he going to get a chance to come along on Sunday… or is it a bit much for him?”

She nodded, reluctantly. “He’ll see it all right. There’s a TV in his room, C4 are broadcasting the last couple of hours on delay. It’ll be late into the night but he’s not sleeping that well anyway.”

Two thoughts: one, not sleeping’s usually not a good sign. And two… C4 were a national free-to-air music TV channel, the sister channel to the major commercial network TV3. National free-to-air TV. This was a much bigger deal than I’d figured. Ticket presales were huge, even given the supposed lack of students in town; but national TV as well…

Time to get the fuck on with learning these songs, yeah?

They weren’t asking that much of me. Backing vocals, rhythm guitar, stand around and throw rock moves at the punters (as distinct from throwing rocks at the punters, which sounded a bit too old-skool English punk for our liking). It was still plenty enough to fuck up if I wasn’t on my game, so I resolved to pull finger. Hollywood had sourced a nice gloss-black Gibson SG for me to play, shinier and pointier than the old Mandarin, and his spare Marshall floor unit, which I was under instruction not to blow the fuck up. Unlikely in rehearsal, as we were at half-power on account of not wanting to deafen ourselves or rattle the old church off its foundations. (Tractor and Aroha had rescued a hundred-year-old wooden church from a long-abandoned rural community somewhere out in the sticks and trucked it out to the farm as Hayabusa’s dedicated rehearsal studio. It was a lovely old building, beautiful acoustics, and parked in the middle of a fairly remote, heavily wooded part of the farm, so the neighbours couldn’t complain about the noise.) And I wasn’t even needed for all the songs – at various intervals I was to be subbed out, replaced by guests from other bands performing on the day – Shihad’s Jon Toogood (no relation to Bethany AFAIK) was supposed to be joining us for Heat Exchanger in the encore, for instance.

To borrow a line from the Top Gear boys… how hard could it be?

As it turned out, not really at all. In fact, it was one of the least painful and most enjoyable festival shows I’d ever been at, as a performer, skiving guest or even as a paying punter. The weather held out and was intermittently glorious, everyone was supremely nice, the punters were massive in number (people had to have come back to town just for this, I couldn’t believe this was just a graduation crowd) and enthusiasm, Carisbrook looked a fantastic sight – why exactly was the council talking about building some new fuck-off-shiny glass box stadium down by the harbour instead? – and all I had to remember was when to sing, what chords to play, and which songs to get out of the way for. I didn’t even have to fret over what T-shirt to wear, having appropriated one from the merch tent on the way into the compound. The official Tractorfest shirt was a tribute to Tractor’s 1999 Otago jersey – blue with yellow sleeve stripes, big number 8 on the back, Speights and Tractorfest logos (the latter in place of the copyrighted ORFU ‘O’ logo) on the front, along with all the band names and playing times across the day. People were so nice they didn’t even point out how try-hard I looked wearing Tractor’s old shirt on his big day. And Hayabusa songs were seriously fun to play, particularly when you’re a frustrated punk rock guitarist from way back and just like bashing seven shades of shit out of a couple of well-chosen chords for a couple of minutes.

Yeah. I fucking loved playing that gig. As per usual for me, I can tell how much fun it was by the fact I can remember next to none of it.

I’d forgotten how late the evenings actually fell in summer here. It was still light when we’d come on at half-nine at night, that lovely golden light you get in summer evenings at low latitudes. I’d been surprised by a few things today – for one, I’d been surprised by how subdued Shihad’s set had been, though it sounded like their new material was on the softer side of their ledger – but the sheer mass of the crowd had surprised me most. The ORFU couldn’t get more than a few thousand heads to provincial rugby games here, and yet we’d managed to fill the terraces, the field and half the stands, with the student year long since over, and with the guts of the event being repeated on TV later tonight? Put it down to better marketing, better ticketing, better organisation, and a better product. And the fact it was for Tractor, and it was for charity, and it was the best lineup of bands south of the 45th parallel in generations.

Put it this way. It was a pretty safe bet we’d need to use that material we’d set aside for the encore.

We cranked through the double-time reprise of We’re (Still) Hayabusa (And You’re Not), before Jon Toogood came out and gave a really lovely, heart-felt shout-out to Tractor, before howling through a highly technical description of his favourite girl’s thermal conductive properties in Heat Exchanger. Not really in line with Shihad's core values, given that it was piss-taking cock rock lyrics with a garage punk riff behind it, but he Ripped The Fucker UP.

Meanwhile, I was looking forward to becoming the second least popular person in the entire ground, and all over a canary yellow T-shirt which Aroha had decided I had to wear. If it was any consolation, Bear was going to be the least popular, and Aroha claimed it was Bear’s idea in the first place.

“Now,” he began once the spotlight was his again, “as you may know, me and that bloke over there are, in fact, Australian…”

Never a popular sentiment at the House of Pain. It was the first boo we’d had all night, but it was a big ‘un. Mind you the Wobbilies had given the AB’s a touch-up the last time they’d played them here, back in 2001 or something. I'd kept that in my back pocket in case I needed it.

“Cheers… and while we’ve always felt very welcome in your lovely country, we’ve always had people asking us about our underarms, for some reason.”

Boooooooo. Probably hadn’t helped that the Black Caps had just been touched up themselves in a two-test series in Australia. They were playing the Windies next week at the supercool little University Oval here in D-Town, and from the way Bear and the lads described the village-green vibe of the place, it was a pity I wasn’t staying long enough to kick back on the grass hills, sup a few Speights and watch Chris Gayle arse a few ludicrous sixes into the adjoining scenery.

“Anyway it was explained to us recently that this is not because we have debilitating body odour but because of a game of cricket about a hundred years ago when a dickhead from Adelaide told his fucken useless brother to play lawn bowls on the middle of the MCG. That about right Angus?”

I answered in the affirmative, or as much as I was able with an overly tight retro Australian cricket shirt pulled over my head. Basically, I nodded vigorously, while continuing to try and dress myself. I’d always wanted one of these retro Aussie World Series Cup cricket shirts actually. A place in Christchurch did them, apparently. Charged more for the Aussie one than the beige of course... not a forgiving lot, the Kiwis.

“Anyway folks, we’d like to reenact that incident for you tonight, and we’ve found a gentleman called Mr Brian McKechnie to help us do just that…”

Now, Brian McKechnie occupies an interesting place in New Zealand sports history. As often happens when your popupation is two men and a dog, you end up with a lot of dual internationals, even in sports as diverse as cricket and rugby – most recently with Otago legend Jeff Wilson. Not only was Brian McKechnie responsible for kicking a bunch of penalties which delivered the All Blacks victory over the Welsh on their legendary Grand Slam winning tour of 1977, he was also the recipient of the infamous underarm delivery from Trevor Chappell at the MCG in 1981. Quite how Aroha had convinved him to be part of this, I had no idea – given the guy was clad head-to-toe in beige cricketing attire, including a retro full-face helmet, there hardly seemed any point, she could have just lined up one of the roadies to do it (and possibly even had, for all I knew.) But Bear had decided he wanted to give back to his new home country and unilaterally apologising on behalf of Australia for the Underarm Incident seemed to be the way he wanted to do it.

For the purposes of this demonstration, Bear would be playing the role of Gregory Stephen Chappell, Australian cricket captain and borderline basket-case (go read the book he wrote about that season, come back and tell me he was in any way in charge of his faculties that day), while I would be emoting through the difficult and challenging role of Trevor, Greg’s slightly rubbish brother, torn between his duty to his country and his sense of right and decency within the boundaries (see what I did there?) of the game he played and the traditions it represented. The part of Brian McKechnie would be played by Brian McKechnie. Someone had even unearthed a retro-looking County bat for him to wield. Could have even been Model’s Own.

We were on stage, under lights, and the sense of occasion – completely artificial of course, but a sense of occasion nonetheless – was palpable. Even though we knew exactly what would happen, had even practiced with one of the roadies standing in for McKechnie before the gates had opened this morning – overacted mime-argument between ‘Trevor’ and ‘Greg’; the latter bowls an underarm half-tracker that McKechnie hoicks lustily into row H; New Zealand win, get over it, and the rest of us can finally get some sleep. Or at least kick on and play our final song, Ain’t That A Suckload Of Suck, then go home. The end. My only real concern was lofting the painted tennis ball into the hitting zone for the right-hander to really get hold of, particularly since the old fullah in beige didn’t look the sturdiest of peeps at this later stage in life. Tossed-up, well-flighted and on the pads would be as much as I could provide, the rest of it was up to him.

So Bear and I had our little argument – overacted heinously, with more gesturing, posturing and poncing about than an Italian traffic accident – and I turned, went down on one knee (twice in a lifetime is enough – hopefully with a more positive result this time) and underarmed the ball across the stage to where the beige figure was waiting patiently, tapping his bat on the stage. I knew it was too full the moment I let it go – on the pads, but too full to cross-bat. Didn’t seem to matter. McKechnie pivoted on his front pad and swayed across it, flicking it contemptuously over square in an impressive photocopy of Mark Waugh in his swashbuckling heyday, the ball scything out of the illuminated mist above the punters, into the darkness. As the southern crowd roared, we joined McKechnie in the middle of the stage, raising his arms in triumph. A bit silly, really, but it made Bear happy, as well as this lot.

At least it was just a bit silly until McKechnie took off his helmet, and turned out to be a terminal cancer patient called Daniel Maxwell. And then the crowd went abso-lutely fucking ballistic.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious. I’d played enough beach, backyard and backstage cricket against Tractor to know he only had two shots – a superbly elegant Mark Waugh flick-off-the-pads and a supremely agricultural off-side drive/cut/slice/fuck-up with the bat at 45 degrees to horizontal, well away from the body and often quite some way away from the actual ball. Everything else was one or the other, applied differently (i.e. wrongly.)

We tried not to squeeze the life out of him – I guessed by Bear’s reaction that he’d also had no fucking idea Tractor and Aroha were planning this – but it was tricky, there wasn’t a lot left. He looked gaunt and drawn, his beige brigade uniform hanging off him, his eyes sunken, but still sparkling. The cancer was near victory, but it would be a Pyrrhic one. How he’d coordinated himself to swing at the fucking thing I had no idea whatsoever, but he was now officially my all-time hero.

“Shouldn’t you be home in bed?” I shouted. It was hard to hear yourself think, let alone talk, with that ferocious crowd.

He thought for a bit.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he rasped.

“Figured something must be going on in town, came down for a look?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“Not much though?”

He thought for a bit.

“Nah,” he grinned. He’d never been much for unnecessary chat.

“What d’ya reckon we should play then?”

He thought for a bit.

“Back in Black,” he nodded.

So we did.

I don’t know how the Tractor found the energy to get out of his bed and come to Carisbrook that night, let alone swing a cricket bat at a tennis ball, or appropriate my (Hollywood’s) guitar and crank through the rhythm part, leaning against an amp (or alternately the Bear) for support, while I annihilated my larynx screaming my way through Brian Johnson’s titanium-throated lead vocal. I do know he had very little time left, and that he was well aware of that. And what I know, without any shadow of a doubt, was that no problems of mine amounted to more than a pimple of horseshit compared to the ones that bloke dealt with in life, and the fortitude and dignity with which he faced death. And if I’m a tenth as brave when my time comes, I’ll be glad of it.