Punk's not dead

She answered our ad wanted
We had a vacancy
We didn't know what was in store
But we were soon to see
She plays records of The Foreskins
At any given hour
She turns on the hot water tap
While I'm in the shower
And at night the house is quiet
You might wonder why
But punk's not dead
She's just gone to bed
Yeah, punk's not dead
She's just gone to bed...
- Darren Hanlon, 2002

Gameday. I had cause to be thankful for Gasket’s long-standing ‘last round of drinks’ arrangement, and for the fact the Jeff came round to wake me up by throwing me into the Pacific, because if I’d been called upon to make sense on breakfast radio straight after waking, I’d probably have made even less sense than I actually did. Thursday morning’s ‘interview’ consisted of the following:

- A weather report that was almost entirely a surf report for Broken Head and surrounds, which in itself was almost entirely a technical dissection on all the things wrong with my brother’s surfing technique: paddles in too late, takes off too early, drops in like a territorial magpie, can’t get air, can’t get out of his own way, should be on a goat boat, too old, slow, ponderous and stupid

- A discussion of the similarities between Bert Newton’s head and a passing hot-air balloon on a joy flight, which led to the national publication of our band’s catchcry re badly poured beers, to wit ‘That’s got more head than Bert Newton’

- A poorly considered admission, following on from my freshly-released online reportage of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen and previewing my encounters with the punishing arsewits of Byron last night, that I did indeed both come home and wake up alone this morning, which meant my girlfriend lost our bet and owed me five bucks. Nah, not really. I wouldn’t pass that up to win a five dollar bet, are you kidding? Was she going to be pissed off at me for making stuff up about her on the radio? No, she didn’t listen to Triple J anyway, it was juvenile, cretinous, derivative, and didn’t play enough Gabriella Cilmi, whoever the hell she was

- Several not-even-veiled plugs for tonight’s Very Secret Secret Show At A Very Secret Location Somewhere In The World, but fairly obvious not too long a drive from our current base as we were and are, in fact, lazy as fuck, and which I subsequently, ‘reluctantly’ pinned down to ‘either the Bangalow Hotel in Bangalow, or the Byron Hotel in Byron. Hint: One of these locations does not actually exist’

- A lot of total bollocks which doesn’t bear repeating, given that was the highlights

The Bangalow Hotel show hadn’t actually started out as part of dB’s military-grade mission planning for our intensive Gasket rehearsals. It’d started out as a Duffer special; we’d gone there for lunch on Tuesday, he’d had a yarn to his mate behind the bar who booked the acts, one thing led to another, and suddenly we’ve got a practice gig lined up for the Thursday night. I was mildly surprised one hadn’t been mooted, but from what I understood, the Executive Director (Talent Management) didn’t believe in practice gigs. Maddy felt we – and the rest of the members of the dB management stable – were performers, and as such, we should be able to perform. I’d hate to have been in Marty’s shoes had the old brewer’s droop intervened between herself and her birthday evening’s gratification. She also felt it diluted the exclusivity of the actual name-brand gigs, which lowered their premium value, but given this was the Big Day Out, noone was actually paying to see us (since they all bought their tickets well before we’d ever been announced – notwithstanding those who were surely trying to offload theirs on eBay now they knew we were playing) and we were rustier than a very rusty thing, I couldn’t see why the global management directive couldn’t be massaged on this instance. And, of course, I was right. Then again, since this is my book, I’m always going to be right.

In any case, she was in Sydney, and Marty and Cardinal Fang were here, so dB’s northern division did the thinking on this one. It might not have been a dB concept, but dB runneth like fuck therewith. Shit got sorted. From the afternoon of the gig being organised, within hours there was a teaser advert on our website (and syndicated partners), posters were being signed-off for printing and delivery to contracted local street teams, T-Bone and T-Bag were cancelling their mid-week plans and were prepping a Transit van to drive down first thing Thursday morning and meet with us at the house, etc etc etc. Bag and Bone (later Rag and Bone, later Dog and Bone, later Telstra) were part of Marty’s regular road crew, and usually ran front-of-house, mixing and lighting for his intimate-venue shows (more hands were enlisted for his stadium extravaganzas). Even at his smaller shows he usually had a lot more than four hands on deck – they usually needed four just for the merchandise stand – so it was just as well that the rest of New Gasket weren’t used to that sort of technical support. Under normal conditions Spam Filter’s roadies were their own damn selves, and any friends or family who could be press-ganged into assistance for the offer of a beer over the bar at band prices. New Gasket at least had a merch stand, or at least a merch card table, and someone to staff it – Danno, unless Beck managed to offload the juniors on the elderlies – and we even had a guitar tech as well, though she preferred electric viola.

Speaking of which, any signs of any nascent office romance between our guitar tech and our drummer were thin on the ground this morning, which wasn’t that surprising given that their furtive ‘pash’ in the carpark had turned out to be one of Marty’s little jokes. Yeah, king of comedy, that lad. Marty’s idea of a joke: make shit up, deliver shit in completely believable deadpan, see how long you can get people to buy into your shit, then tell them much, much later that the whole thing was actually, um, shit. The ficticious lovebirds had been out pretty late – Jeff and I had encountered Phil having his ‘nightcap’ smoko on the balcony while heading out for our attack on the early this morning – but were safely in their own beds next morning. In fact they were still in their own beds well into next morning, which compelled Marty, fuelled on his mum’s biscotti and his own triple-shot espresso, to burst into her room and serenade her on the acoustic with Darren Hanlon’s Punk’s Not Dead, which probably could have been written about her; one little punk rock girl who’s dead to the world (in the nicest possible sense). He could do that, because he was her boss, and kicking in someone’s door to sing ‘Punk’s not dead, she’s just gone to bed’ into their ears at unnecessarily chirpy volume while they clamp a pillow over their head and swear vehemently, isn’t strictly speaking sexual harassment. Phil, we knew well, wouldn’t be raised with a thermonuclear warhead, so we flagged any prospects of band-related activities for the morning and went for another surf instead.

After lunch we dragged the other two out of bed, waited half an hour for Phil to finish his shower, then headed up to Firstlight, where we finalised our set list, the lads figured out how best to stack the van for transit (see what I did there?), and I talked everyone out of a final rehearsal, reminded of the old Gasket standby: never train on gameday. Rehearse the day of a gig, and one of five things can happen:

(1) You can be crap in reheasal, cruising at half-throttle, conscious of not wanting to over-extend yourself for the actual gig, worry about the fact you were crap in rehearsal, and be crap on the night;

(2) You can be great in rehearsal but overextend yourself, completely bugger yourself from already running your race before the start line, and be crap on the night;

(3) You can be great in rehearsal without overextending yourself, think you’re already over the line, get smug, and be crap on the night;

(4) You can be great in rehearsal, but use up all your best ‘spontaneous’ ideas, and be dull as crap on the night;

(5) Or you can be OK in rehearsal but not that spontaneous, lacking spark; try too hard to be off-the-cuff, overcorrect, end up taking the piss and be crap on the night.

Either way, rehearsing the day of a gig = being crap on the night. Fact. So I suggested we fuck off and play golf instead. Properly like, with beers and everything. However Marty was a bit concerned that the physical exertion in the afternoon heat would take something out of our performance this evening, though I reckoned it couldn’t be more so than a full set rehearsal – notwithstanding the fact that we were all old and reasonably shit at golf, likely to be using joints that hadn’t swung (rented) clubs in anger for a fair whack of time. I wasn’t too concerned, I hadn’t been planning to climb any lighting gantries tonight anyway; the Bangalow wasn’t that sort of establishment. But instead we sat around the beach house and burnt probably just as much energy kicking around the place in nervous anticipation of the gig that night. Yeah, that worked. I could have been drunk hitting five irons at scoring huts by now.

Bangalow is one of those few and rare small towns that’s actually been improved by being bypassed by the highway. Now that the main drag is no longer the main north-south route – and hasn’t been for many, many years, to be fair – the narrow, tree-lined streets of Bangalow are really quite appealing, lined with coffee shops, cafes and knick-knackeries. The Bangalow Hotel sits a little way up the hill, nestled into trees, hemmed in between the main street and the old railway station, now sadly disused. It’s a nice joint. We’d played there a bit in our formative years, and it seemed Spam Filter still played here occasionally, though they tended to prefer local originals acts over covers bands, which was an admirable sentiment. And we still counted as a local originals act, which was nice to hear.

We lugged in quickly, aided as much by being able to back the Transit right up to the doors as by the motivation of the perspiring lineup of cold schooners of Coopers’ Sparkling Ale waiting for us on the bar. Someone pointed out it’d be rude to let them go warm so we finished setting up single-handedly with beers in hand. Equipment count: Phil’s kit, Marty’s Fender Jag bass rig and his double-decker Roland keyboard setup, Jeff’s Gibson Les Paul, ‘my’ (Big Al’s) black SG, and the Wiggle-esque Maton MS500 and Hetfield-esque Fender Explorer from Sound Investment brought in as travelling reserves for the string section. In days past McCarthy and I had paraded several guitars on stage through a single gig, changing axes between songs, but that was largely for wank value as we’d seen other grown-up guitarists do it – we hadn’t actually written any songs that required differently tuned guitars, or at least none that we couldn’t retune for between tracks during some of that patented Gasket Time-Wasting Banter, or just transpose as we played. In any case, the lads had brought a healthy array of spares and go-faster bits in the van; it looked like the back tray of the Mount Road Monster on a motocross race weekend with Doug’s young bloke.

We soundchecked at quarter-throttle with Hayabusa’s Alpha Bitch, got the thumbs up from front-of house, then retired to the bistro for a feed and an experimentally-determined ideal number of pre-performance ales (three) as the sun began retreating over the back of the range. There were a lot of far worse places to be in the world than this, I reckoned.

“Nervous?” queried Jeffrey.

“Nah, not so much,” I replied. “Why do you say?”

“That’s the second time this arvo you’ve called Joey ‘Sophie’.”

“Ah.”

“Not counting the time you called Danno ‘Jess’,” added Marty. “Bit preoccupied then?”

“Nah, I’m good,” I maintained. “All these groupie chicks start looking the same after a while.”

Curses, I’d been rumbled. It wasn’t playing badly that seemed to be concerning me. It was whether either – or both (!) – of those two would make a sudden appearance this evening. Sophie, because I knew she was around; Jessica, because this was her home town, her folks still lived here, and hey, you just never knew…

Actually we had no idea who would turn up, full stop. We presumed we’d get some sort of crowd – for a ‘secret show’ we’d certainly promoted the arse out of it – but we had no idea who’d actually be in that crowd. Not that it really mattered much, we’d holed ourselves up in the band room for final preparations and wouldn’t actually lay eyes on the punters until we hit the stage, whereupon they’d be a sea of badly lit heads anyway. Since this was effectively a dry run for the BDO, Marty was fretting over making sure this was as close to our pre-match prep as we’d be going through on game day; he didn’t want visitors, he didn’t want interruptions. As I remembered it though, backstage at the BDO (or any other big festy) was a monumental zoo, so where he expected to find meditative Zen time in the midst of that was well beyond me, but he was driving the bus, even though I was supposed to be up the front leading the tour. Kretin buggered it up for him anyway by talking his way past our various levels of security (Cardinal Fang must have been distracted by some form of shiny object) and into the band room for his traditional pre-show salutations/unsolicited pep-talk/whinge about how dB were screwing him over on the management deal/stealing of our beer. After that we gave up on the Zen and revised our policy on receiving visitors. Which was good because if we’d barred Beck from entering the room there would have been a toy-pram dissociation moment which might have endangered Jeff’s continuing participation in the tour, if not his health.

Game time, 9pm. That sea of shiny, if badly-lit, faces. That building roar as the DJ’s pre-gig set faded out and the old-skool Wide World Of Sports cricket theme came charging in from the Randwick end. Lights up, and the original three Gasketeers strode onto stage and into position. Waheyyy. I slung Big Al’s black SG over my shoulder, switched on, and declared, “G’day Bangladesh, I hear you’re shit at cricket.” Which was ironic given we’d just lost two home tests to the Saffers ourselves.

“It’s, erm, Bangalow, Angus.”

“Is it? Fair enough. Sounded like a bizarre place to hold a warmup gig. A pub in a Muslim country. We’re Flange Gasket…” Loud acclimation. “Hold on, calm yourselves, we haven’t done anything yet.”

“A question,” piped up the Duffer.

“A question from the cheap seats.”

“Aren’t we short someone?”

“Well… you’re here aren’t you, Sir Philip the Duff, drummer by royal appointment?”

The ensuing drum solo was as explosive as it was (mercifully) brief. Still elicited a cheer but.

“By royal appointment to whom?” queried Marty.

“Royal Doulton,” I declared. “You’re here too, multimillionaire international playboy Martin di Biagini?”

“As are you, dodgy and skint bogan Andrew Young...”

“Touche, sir. So if we’re all here, I have one question, and the question is this…”

“WHERE’S JEFF?!!”

Where’s Jeff? Is he sleeping inside? Where’s Jeff? Has he gone for a ride? Where’s Jeff? Is he in the countryside? Lookie, lookie, lookie, lookie, way-ay-ay-ay…

“Hey look,” I admitted sheepishly, once Jeff had made his deliberately belated entry, and we’d stopped making idiots of ourselves, “we figured most of our old audience would be more familiar with Wiggles songs than the Triple J playlist these days…”

Marty had consented – eventually – to the idea of confining all our traditional buggerizing-about to the first part of the show, as he wanted to protect his idea of really hammering our intended BDO set in the second half, to test it for time (we only had a half-hour set at most of the BDO shows – though, because we were taking over directly from the slots booked for Hayabusa, we’d have a longer and more prominent main-stage slot in Auckland, ironically given the Kiwis hadn’t ever been that interested in us other than when we’d toured as support to Hayabusa), for how the songs ran together, energy flow, maintenance of intensity, and a bunch of other stuff I figured we should already know given we’d already played the arse off these songs in pretty much every possible combinatorial order over the past ten years. The BDO set was the weapons-grade, more-hits-than-Elvis (Dr Cletus’ old Magna, not the jumpsuit-wearing bacon aficionado of times past) lineup of all our most popular stuff; the first half of the show was a chance to play all the fun songs we loved cranking live (other than the above) and of course, to buggerize about a bit.

I think covering the Wiggles was a pretty fair declaration of intent to that end.

We also covered Motorhead’s We Are The Road Crew for our good friends Macgyver and Capt’n Snooze, who’d emerged from the woodwork to come watch us play. Macgyver was teaching English in a foreign languages school in Buenos Aires, and had been Christmas-holidaying in these parts with his Argentine wife and their young lad. Capt’n Snooze was also on a brief visit from distant shores, currently making off like a bastard working in IT in London. Other poor hapless attendees who probably could have enjoyed their evening just as much without us dragging them onstage and parading them before the punters: Marty’s drummer Ed Terry, who subbed for the Duffer on Farken Champion Maaaate; and Jen Bailey, on her very first night of freedom since her second bub, who fearlessly ignored sleep deprivation and laughed in the face of new-mum should-be-home-guilt to shimmer and pout through an incendiary reading of our ode to university hotties, Smorgasboard of Crumpet – lending it an intriguing lesbian-until-graduation overtone which, while hadn’t sprung to mind when we were writing the thing back in the day, ‘added value’ no end. Didn’t help me much with my monumental unrequited crush on her, but I was seeking treatment for that. Just add another name to that list, Doc.

“Hey folks, cheers for that. We’re still Flange Gasket and we’re still trying not to be shit because we’re supposed to be playing Big Day Out next weekend. Anyone here got tickets?”

Show of hands, with accompanying noise. A fair number, truth be told.

“Who would have bought tickets if they’d known we were playing?”

More hands. More noise. Like it.

“Who wants a refund on their ticket because we are playing?... don’t answer that. Actually you might as well. Anyone mind if we play our Big Day Out set in its entirety? Yeah?”

Lots of hands, and noise.

“Ah, what Angus means is that this might be our Big Day Out set, and you should come see us anyway just to see if we play all the same songs…”

“Uh, yeah. What he said. Shall we fuck off and come back on again?”

We’d come up with our Schoolies set on the fairly arbitrary basis of picking the dozen or so songs we most liked to play, and cranking them through in the order that worked best when we used to play them. The BDO set was arrived at through more scientific means. The Executive Director (Talent Management), being largely unfamiliar with Gasket’s early work, had directed Josephine Fang, herself not the biggest Gasket fan in the history of stuff (to put it mildly - operative quote being ‘You bastards never took yourselves seriously, so why should I have to?’) to determine Gasket’s most popular tracks in an objective, scientific manner. Cardinal Fang came up with a detailed statistical analysis which cross-referenced ARIA single sales, radio airplay (indexed through checking through royalty payment records), iTunes downloads since the catalogue went live, results of historic online voting competitions such as old Triple J Hottest 100s and Triple M whatever-the-fuck-they-called-their-dodgy-comps, and input from a voting application which had run for the past week on the Gasket website, whereby our adoring fan(s) could pick their three favourite live tracks, and which got just about enough response to be statistically significant. This then selected the ten highest ranked tracks, which fell to nine once the elapsed duration of the prospective was compared with the available time for the set, inclusive of lag time for the usual Gasket bantering, buggerizing about et al – which we were told was to be kept to a minimum thanks very much. Which gave us the following:

Learn to Swim with Harold Holt
Blip On The Gaydar
(I Wanna Be) Angus Young
Cock Rock Will Never Die (Whaddya Mean It Already Fucken Has)
The Meaning Of Life In 25 Words Or Less
Stupid People Shouldn’t Breed
Radio Friendly Chick Song
Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees
This Song Is Not Likely To Make It Onto Video Hits

It was hard to argue with that sort of logic. The only argument I had against it – and you know I had to argue against something, if only on principle – was the ordering. Marty in particular had keenly bought into the idea of the setlist running chronologically through our catalogue in line with the best-of tracklisting, and had managed to sell Phil and our dB overlords on the idea, but I couldn’t help but feel it meant we started strong and tapered off. Marty just said that was my anti-Intercom bias coming through; the stats bore out that the late-era songs were as high-scoring, if not more so, than the earlier stuff that I had more of a soft spot for. But the fact (or at least my opinion) remained that Video Hits wasn’t a set-ender; historically, it never had been. To which it was pointed out to me that anything could be a set-ender if pitched correctly, and I nodded and quietly conceded the point. At least Joey’s analyses hadn’t exhumed anything from the Scottish Album (as Marty, in uncharacteristically Shakespearean fashion, preferred to call our final album, the one that shall not be named.) Tonight, at least, there was a pretty good chance we’d be supergluing an encore onto the end of the BDO set, given we wouldn’t be allowed to at the BDO. Thirty minutes and fuck off would be the gentle instruction from the on-site crew there (except in Auckland).

In the end, as ever, the real test was to throw it at a crowd and see which of us they reckoned was talking out our arse.

The room wasn’t large at the Bangalow Hotel, but it was absolutely heaving, spilling out into the beer garden and even the tree-lined car park; we couldn’t have asked for a better turnout had we specifically advertised for one on the internet (which we had.) And, making me look the aging, over-cautious, out-of-touch clown I was, the newer Intercom stuff flew as well if not better than the older stuff, we managed to fit nine songs into a half hour (just - the fact they were all fairly shortish singles probably helped) and Video Hits worked perfectly reasonably as a set-ender, judging by the unequivocally epic wall of noise which shook the old art-deco hotel once the Big Rock Ending we’d retro-fitted onto the end of it had echoed through the room, into the beer garden and out into the tree-lined car park.

So we had a pretty good idea that this set was going to work pretty bloody well at BDO, that it’d fit the allotted time, and that it’d get the desired response. What we didn’t have such a clear idea of, was what we were going to play as an encore – not a problem we’d have at the BDO, where encores were verboten, but one we appeared to have here, as the chanting and stomping drew us out from side of stage lest the entire building collapse in on itself. We’d pretty much played everything of ours that had a live reputation, apart from our Led Zep medley, which wasn’t really ours, and in any case I was quietly a bit awkward about going there with Jen Bailey in the vicinity (presuming she hadn’t already gone home to be with her little one.) Likewise I Love To Have A Beer With Etc wasn't a goer, none of us were really ‘feeling’ that one tonight, judging by the quick straw poll at side of stage.

“Year 12 Formal?” suggested the Duffer. “We’ve played it recently at least. Schoolies gig.”

“Makes sense, Phil,” I nodded, while quietly wondering if I’d ever spoken those three words in that order in my entire life. “What else? Another cover maybe?”

“You’re in charge,” Marty said.

“Fuck off I am,” I declared. “Let’s not let that story get out shall we?”

Marty grinned, and shot me a conspiratorial look.

“You got something?” I asked.

He flicked a thumb at Phil. “You said a while back that this one was by royal appointment, but you didn’t say what sort of queen he served…”

We’d thought very carefully about this over the past few days, and had decided against it. Beef Week Queen wasn’t a Gasket song, so Gasket wasn’t going to play it. Not in the BDO set, anyway. We’d had a crack at it for entertainment purposes during a quiet moment in rehearsals – Phil and Jeff hadn’t had any problems following Marty and I through it – so it wasn’t that we couldn’t play it, it was that we didn’t really feel it was right to. But now our fearless leader, the Teenage Heartthrob, had changed his vote.

“You think so?”

“It’s a local audience. They’re both local songs. Face it, we’re not likely to be playing this close to home ever again, are we?”

He was right. This was almost definitely our last chance to play a show in the Northern Rivers, the land that bore us. These people were the reason we’d been able to go and do this for a living in the first place. They deserved to be insulted in a regionally specific way, one last time.

“In that case,” I submitted, “Joy from Lennox too?”

General assent. So we went back out, saved the building from collapse, and played a song about an overly-promiscuous lass from Lennox, a Year 12 formal at the Evans Head Bowling Club, and, to genuinely astonishing levels of public acclaim, the Queen of Casino Beef Week. Flange Gasket: rural as fuck, and proud of it.

“Pity that’s not a Gasket song,” declared Jeff pithily once we’d come off stage and began the all-important rehydration process. The best part of two hours on stage does tend to take it out of you. “Write that five years back, maybe there’d still be a Gasket.”

“You reckon?” I frowned.

“Mate, they were climbing the fuckin’ walls. They’d been hanging out for that all night. In hindsight, hate to think what they’d have done to us if we hadn’t played the bastard…”

“It’s still not a Gasket song,” I reluctantly reiterated, and Marty nodded.

“Still,” Phil said, “there’s your set-ending problem fixed. And it’s still in chronological order.”

“Yeah, but what do we drop? We’ve only got thirty minutes. Believe me, I’ve thought this through.”

“So what, are you guys going to play it during Marty’s set then?”

“Weren’t planning to,” Marty replied.

Jeff gave us a funny look.

“What?”

“Don’t mind me,” he remarked. “Just figured it’s a waste of time recording a song which is getting plenty of public support, then not playing it live because of a fuckin’ demarkation dispute…”

Any further theorising from our guest lecturer in Music Wank 101 was cut short by the arrival of his wife, to point out that sitting in a band room talking amongst oneselves was the height of rudeness when there were plenty of selfless people who’d given up their evenings to come and see us play, or even volunteer on the merch stand, and not be able to see very much of the show at all… Yes, she was blatantly fishing for sympathy, but she did it so well.

“Went well then?”

“Still going,” she reported. “Danno and Beth are there.”

“Beth?” I said. “My Beth?”

“Not sure,” Beck replied archly, “she didn’t have your nametag sewn into her collar.” Then smiled broadly and asked where the hell I’d been hiding her – the usual story – and why I hadn’t told anyone she was coming down.

“If she’d told me herself, I’d have been further ahead of the game,” I replied.

Beth had come down for the show. She’d come all the way down, unannounced, just for the show. This should have filled me with delight, but for some reason, my instantaneous reaction was that it didn’t. Well, it wasn’t ‘some’ reason. It was a pretty clear reason, much as I hated to admit it, even to myself. I liked Beth, I cared about her, I enjoyed her company. But at best, she had a fairly liberal attitude to reality, and at worst, she lived in a bubble, made shit up and smiled while she lied to people. Bluntly, I didn’t want her lying to people who mattered to me. I didn’t want her spinning out another of her perfectly tailored, perfectly artificial personalities for their benefit. I just wanted her to be herself, whatever that meant. But then again, I didn’t even know whether the version of Beth I was being allowed to get to know was the ‘real’ Beth. Maybe there was no ‘real’ Beth, just a series of layers of carefully constructed artifice, like a Babuska doll. Go through enough of them and you find yourself grasping at nothing but thin air.

And yeah, maybe I was secretly hoping to go home with a selected ex-girlfriend, if I happened to run into her. Any of the three who were currently preoccupying me would do. We’ll be generous and call Jen Bailey an ‘ex’ for the purposes of this argument, and set aside the fairly obvious counter-argument that she really wasn’t in much of a condition to be interested. Stupid, childish, self-centred. Yes. I play in a rock band, these things are in my job description.

As Beck talked, I found myself scanning through the conversation for hints as to which version of the truth Beth was telling this time, reminding myself that I’d been putting my own PR ‘spin’ on things as well; I’d told my brother, my friends and the Triple J listening audience that I had a girlfriend (albeit one with a low opinion of my constancy), and whatever Beth was, she wasn’t that. So who was the one playing games here?

I found her where Beck had left her, doing a sterling service behind the merch counter in collaboration with Daniela. The post-gig crowd had thinned out to the point where braving open territory – usually a very bad idea for the band-dude-freshly-offstage – seemed viable. Poor lighting would help. It usually did, it had before. She and Danno were both wearing black Exocet In The Worst Possible Taste promo T-shirts in suitably clingy girls’ sizes. Well to be honest they could have been NFL linebacker sizes, it was so frigging dark in here. She was still adorable. Dammit.

Quick, think of an opening line.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she replied. Good to see she’d suddenly become crap at opening lines too. Most of what I could see was the white lettering on her shirt, and those eyes of hers, feline-bright in the darkness. There were a lot of things I wanted to say, even more I wanted to ask. Beginning with, what the hell are you doing here? Without it actually sounding like what the hell are you doing here!

“Want to go outside where we can actually see each other?”

“You sure you want that?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Pretty sure.”

Her shirt wasn’t as clingy as I’d first thought, once we’d freed ourselves from the stagnant humidity of the performance space and escaped to a quiet corner outside, away from the public area. Mainly because she’d put it on over what she’d been wearing when she turned up, revealed as she tugged off the shirt; plain fitted blouse, over a long, flowery, conservative, dare I say Brethren-esque skirt (though, to be fair, the Exclusive Brethren were even loopier than Toogood’s lot of backward Christian soldiers.) Sensible shoes, sensible makeup, sensible hair. Sensible knickers, almost definitely. She’d come straight from Godcamp, she said. And by straight from there, she really meant it. She’d escaped onto the five o’clock ferry and had driven straight down the freeway to here.

“Sorry,” she said offhandedly.

“For dressing like a Scripture teacher?”

“No,” she replied with a piercing look, “I forgot the five bucks I owe you.” When I didn’t say anything, because I was preoccupied disappearing into a hole in the earth, she added, “I’m assuming I’m this girlfriend you’ve been telling people about?”

“Well, would you rather being described as the current fuck? Don’t think they’d like that on live radio.” Keep digging, brother. “It’s meant as a comedy piece. It might be as funny as an outbreak of cholera, but it’s meant as a comedy piece. Some facts were harmed in the making of this bullshit. Fuck’s sake, my life’s a standing joke as it is, if I’m not going to laugh at it then what the fuck am I going to do.” OK, stop digging now. I can see Cairo. “Anyway, you didn’t drive three hours down the highway to tell me you didn’t like a joke I said about you on the radio, did you now.”

“No,” she said evenly. “I came to see my boyfriend’s rock band play.”

Whether that was meant ironically, or genuinely, I couldn’t tell you. I was busy retro-scanning through the show trying to remember whether I’d said anything else which was going to get me in trouble. And counting the number of feet I hadn’t yet shot off. Currently the count stood (ahem) at Zero.

“Any good?” I asked hopefully.

“Yeah,” she smiled. “Didn’t think it’d be my thing, but… yeah.”

The boys had already started to lug out around us, so I reluctantly broke away to help. She was gone when I turned back. Maybe she had just come here to see us play. She’d never seen us play before – not our own stuff, anyway, just half a set of covers at Point Lookout. I was glad she’d seen us put a good set together, which I was pretty sure it was, based on the balance of opinion on getting off stage. Now, what, driving straight back home again? Maybe she was wary of being missed for too long. It fitted her usual habits.

The van was packed, with the usual dB care and precision, and I went to try and find Beck and Jeff to say farewell – it was a shorter trip back to the farm if they didn’t detour via Suffolk Park, much as we’d have liked them to stop by for a post-match drink and debrief. Anything that needed to be said could be sorted in the coming days anyway. Jeff was loading his gear into the back seats of the Rodeo’s dual-cab – a little better protected there than in the tray with all the farm detritus. He regarded me carefully over the roof of the cab.

“Met your fiancee,” he related. “Awesome girl. Funny. Hot. Tells great stories. Nothing like you said.”

“Yup.”

“Almost too good to be true.”

“Yup,” I confirmed.

He nodded solemnly, as though I’d confirmed his suspicions. “Not all there?”

“Nup.”

“Know what you’re doing?”

“Nup.”

He raised his eyebrows. It was enough to transmit his message, but that wasn’t anything I couldn’t, or hadn’t have worked out for myself.

“You love her?”

I wasn’t expecting that, not from Jeff anyway. All I managed to come up with in response was something midway between a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders. Probably looked like I had some form of motor neurone disorder. “No,” I said by way of clarification. “I’m still in love with Sophie, remember?” Hoping like hell Sophie wasn’t standing behind me to deflate my sarcasm, of course.

“Didn’t turn up tonight, did she?”

“Not that I saw,” I replied. “She was into crap music anyway. Ace of fuckin’ Base, for fuck’s sake.”

“Dunno, she might have changed her tastes in the past fifteen years…”

“Nah, women never change,” I declared unilaterally. “Probably into some Canadian band. Are there any Canadian bands? Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Bryan Adams? Nickel-fucken-back?”

“Celine Dion,” Jeff pointed out.

“Oh Jesus fuck,” I replied, accurately I felt at the time.

I found Beck not too far away from the action in the backstage loading bay, though suitably far enough away to avoid being pressed into having to carry anything. Then again she wasn’t getting paid to, so fair enough. She was deep in animated conversation with a girl in a nice Christian ankle-length dress, which I still couldn’t tell whether was black or navy blue. The dainty, precise floral print was of roses. Beck and her new friend had that whole female personal space thing going on – meaning that they didn’t seem to have any. Beth was telling a story, no idea what about, probably me, probably heavily fictionalised, but one which involved pulling a lot of faces and, I guessed, a few silly voices as well. Beck was laughing, her hand was on Beth’s forearm. They looked as at ease with each other as if they’d been friends for years. Beth was now officially close enough to do some damage, not just to me but to people I cared about, if she wanted to.

Enough of the weird thinky shit, Angus. That’s your girlfriend over there. They even said so on the radio.

“Evening, ladies,” I began.

Beth smiled with her eyes and squeezed my hand with hers. She knew her role better than I knew mine. She was a professional actress and I was a circus clown.

“Hey, rock star,” she challenged. “What’s the plan?”

“Well, I think we’re all headed back to the place on the beach… unless this lot have small people to tend to.”

“Outsourced,” Beck conceded, “but we’re pretty wrecked, we’d better get back to the farm seeing as though I’m the one who has to drive…” A few too many backstage bevvies then, Mr Jeff? “But you should definitely come down tomorrow, we’d love to have you…”

“I think Madonna Cohen-Lewis has plans for me,” I replied.

“Not you,” she said derisively. “We see enough of you as it is. I meant Beth.”

Beth smiled. “I’m meant to be back at work tomorrow morning,” she admitted. “Which could be interesting…”

“Blame him,” Beck suggested. “He led you astray. He’s a bad influence.”

“So I keep telling him,” Beth concurred. “And do you think he listens?”