Tabloid magazine

Picture hungry journalists searching for some action
Running all the stories like it's going out of fashion
Yeah, it's too late
- The Living End, 2004

Like all great ideas, and most terrible ones too, it might have involved alcohol. Actually, no ‘might’ about it. It did. Quite a lot, actually. It was somewhere south of 2am and Marty was very stridently attempting to make some sort of point. Actually he was just stridently attempting to stop poking me in the nose when he pointed at me, in the thrust of whatever point he was trying to make. Point. You see what I did there.

“We… are a bit fucked,” he pronounced.

He was right on several counts, but the one he was referring to was the one relating to the media shitstorm that was going to descend upon us come Monday morning. Which on a technicality it already was, in whatever this little CBD bar was that we’d ended up in with some assorted fragment of the BDO afterparty, now distributed randomly across the pubs, clubs and gutters of the city of Perth. I had no real idea where we were, other than we were closer to the end than the beginning of the evening’s shenanigans. We had to be, really, if tonight was going to be survivable by humans.

Even in my munted state I realised that by ‘we are a bit fucked’ Marty was probably using the Royal ‘we’, meaning him. The mob had spoken; put simply, noone had fronted me tonight with interweb pics of my naked arse in the company of two gorgeous women, but there’d been a higher-than-reasonably-predicted number of industry contacts and acquaintances who’d happened to ask after Maddy, where she was, how things were and all. Why? Oh, just because… Bullplop, thought we. They have a saying in Chicago, Mr Bond; once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times it’s enemy action. Multiple times, it’s break out the emergency brown underpants. Marty was under no illusions. Well, he was under the illusion that yet another Pilsner Urquell was a Good Idea, as was I, but he was under no illusions that the end-of-dB, end-of-Marty-and-Maddy story was going to blow up deluxe in the entertainment, social and business pages as soon as the sun creased the horizon on the eastern seaboard Monday AM. Which was what, a couple of hours away? And with things being at the delicate state they were in terms of exit strategy negotiations between he and her - i.e. lawyers drawn at ten paces - Marty really, really didn’t feel like fronting the media to answer questions. Plus, given the number of Czech pilsners he’d monstered since getting off-stage earlier in the evening, he was still going to be half-cut until well into Tuesday afternoon. By which stage he was hoping to be lying low at his folks’ farm up in the hinterland behind Lismore, not returning calls from journalists. It was just the small matter of figuring out how to get across the entire width of Australia through a series of very busy airports without anyone noticing that was the sticking point in the plan.

“Don’t worry mate,” I said, ill-advisedly. “I’ve got your back.”

So we came up with a plan of action, hand-drafted on the back of a tapas menu with a Keno pencil. I say plan. It was really just a fairly loose mind-map, given that loose was our default mind-state, and included such pearls of wisdom as ‘Phil has the clap’, ‘No I fucken donut’ (in a third, even less legible hand), a bunch of lurid Derek and Clive lyrics and a series of badly-rhyming couplets intended as the first draft of the lyrics to an unwritten di Biagini-McCarthy composition of working title ‘Tits or GTFO’, which to this date, thankfully, remains unwritten. The gist of the plan was to get the hell out of Dodge as early as possible, while the leading lights of the nation’s music press (who would be the first-responders of the media circus, we figured) were (a) in Perth and (b) still sleeping off their hangovers. That meant the 5.45am flight. Which meant going straight to the airport rather than back to the hotel. Which meant time for a good few more Pilsner Urquells, which I felt at the time was the hidden genius of the plan.

The other facet of the plan, if you could call it that, was decoys. Most of Former Team dB - the Gasket and Vanity Project cast, crew and associated hangers-on - would fly out as per plan, mid-morning, headed for dB’s operations base in Brisbane, along with the freight. My lovely, shiny guitars would soon be handed back to their traditional owners, i.e Big Al and the team at River City Rock Centre. Lena and Bear weren’t flying back with us, they were planning to disappear down to Margaret River for a few days’ R&R, and I didn’t blame them in the slightest. Danno was taking the Marty strategy, lying low with the folks for a bit - they were headed down to south-west WA wine country for a few days, and Danno had been guilt-tripped into spending time with her mum and stepdad before she buggered off to the other side of the world and they never saw her again etc etc etc. Having someone sober to drive the hire car, of course, had nothing to do with it. However, the rest of Former Team dB (which we were still calling Team dB, on the basis that they were still Marty’s fucking initials, even if Maddy apparently owned the rights to them somehow) were on the Brisbane flight. The crew because they lived there or thereabouts, the Vanity Project guys likewise, Phil because his Skyline was still in long-term parking at Brisbane airport and had been since early January (might be staying there a little longer given Phil’s licence status), and Kretin because he’d driven up from Lismore and flown out from Brisbane.

That Brisbane flight, and the ones most of the BDO survivors were taking back to the eastern capitals, left kinda mid-late-morning, so the assembled industry throng would all be reconvening around the same time whether they were headed to Melbourne, Sydney or Brisvegas. Which meant an unholy scrum of hungover, off-duty, off-message music industry types, the media representatives among the most off-duty and off-message. Hopefully our absence from the melee would take some time to be uncovered. And by the time it was, we’d already be thirty-thousand feet over South Australia, on our way to Sydney Airport. Which was another problem, given that Sydney Airport arrivals had its own permanent media scrum these days, but… one thing at a time.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Genius, yeah I know. Just put it on.”

“I am not getting dressed up like a pair of fucking elderly Japanese tourists…”

Marty was holding a pair of matching green-and-gold ‘Australia’ emblazoned tracksuits, made from the finest synthetics. Deeply fucking horrible things. Made Hawkey’s flag-pattern jacket from the America’s Cup look like haute couture.

“I was thinking more a drunken bucks party motif,” he said. He’d also grabbed some seriously 80s gold-rimmed Aviators and a pair of terry-towelling hats. “Who’s gonna bother a pair of trashed bogan fuckwits sleeping off a big night on the way back to Sydney?”

“And one long-suffering girlfriend.”

“Yeah, sorry Beth, don’t think they make these fuckin’ things in your size,” I interpreted. “Unless you’re keen on looking like a green and gold tent.”

“Thanks, babe. It’s the sweet little things you say that keep me coming back.”

“I thought it was my unfeasibly large penis?”

In my defence, I might have had a few drinks by this stage.

“That too,” she said. “Shall we?”

Timezone differences make the flight from Perth to the eastern seaboard into an all-day affair. End-of-term-afterparty hangovers just reinforce it. I can’t sleep on planes - while Marty simply pulled his terry-towelling hat down over his aviators and racked zeds like a champ, and Beth curled up like a cat and dozed gently in her Business Class armchair, I just stared out the window as the unholy army of hangover gorillas marched ever closer. I had less than no idea about what to do next, so I’d stolen Marty’s idea; the family farm on the Northern Rivers sounded as good a place as any to chill for a bit. At least until I figured out whether I was legally welcome on the northern side of the Tweed. And until I figured out what to do about my house. And figured out a way to get Mick’s Ducati Monster streetfighter back to his shop. And figured out what I was actually going to do for a living this week. Uncertainty never used to bother me; what happened, happened. I’d spent fifteen years since high school content to drift along without any sort of master plan. Now, though, it worried me. A fair bit, actually, even if it was just the hangover gorillas talking. It was funny, Marty and I had kind of switched world views - he’d always been the control freak, the architect, the look-before-you-leap type of guy. Now, he was happy to offer a dismissive shrug as he balled up seven or eight years of his life with Maddy and chucked it in the skip, before leaping into some great unknown adventure on the other side of the planet with Danno.

This was certainly a lot more comfy than the last flying conveyance I’d spent several hours in, but the same sense of vague discomfort - mind-numbing boredom spliced with incessant self-inflicted nausea - persisted. You’d have thought I’d have used the hours of relaxation to think things through, reflect on where I was, where I’d been, where I was going. Two problems with that: one, thinking hurt my brain, and two, this is me we’re talking about. So yeah. Staring out the window, sipping very slowly on a drink (black Aspro) and reading motorcycle magazines was about all I was up to doing. I needed a shower, and a change of clothes, and a couple of Panadol to deal with the hangover I was developing, but was going to have to face up to this one unmedicated. As was Beth. I did wonder how she was getting on - her pharmaceutical needs were a little more advanced than mine. She’d crossed the country to find me, only to end up thirty-three thousand feed over the Nullarbor, out of meds, hungover, sleep-deprived, and without any clean underwear. Exactly the sort of thing her mother had warned her about. Sort of. Still, half the BDO had signed her cast, which was pretty awesome. And the blue went with her eyes.

We landed at Kingsford-Smith just before 1pm AEST. Preparing to disembark from the big bird, the three of us - the two hungover bogans in the matching ‘80s tracksuits and the long-suffering girlfriend in the BDO merch top, denim shorts and heavily graffiti’d fibreglass wrist cast - knew this was where the stunt was likely to go horribly wrong. By now, the story would have broken; by now, the living dead of the music press shambling around Perth airport would have gotten the word out to their eastern-states editorial offices that Marty and me had flown the coop at first light.

“There’ll be fuck all interest,” I predicted. “You and your overdeveloped sense of self-importance…”

“You go first then,” Marty suggested, indicating the gated through-way to the terminal.

“Fuck that,” I said. “It’s your funeral, you go first.”

“I’ll go first,” Beth sighed, rolling her eyes. She swept through the security gates and out into the terminal proper. Sure as hell, there looked like there was a bit of a scrum out there - photographers, journos, camera crews. A veritable feeding frenzy of media sharks. And here were two juicy, fragrant slabs of burley about to be tossed into the midst of all. Too fucking early in the morning for this. OK, so it was 1pm local, but the point remained.

Photographers, generally, are seedy bastards. A striking black-haired cutie wandering their way was always going to get their attention. She smiled apologetically.

“Hi… um, what’s all this for?” she asked, with a little giggle.

“Erm, yeah,” said one of the paps. Pommie accent. Yet another fucking overstayer, probably. THOSE were the cunts who needed to be on Christmas Island, not the Afghanis. And I’m not just saying that because of the Ashes. I’m mostly just saying that because of the Ashes. “Big shot rock star’s fucked off from his missus. Bit of a to-do.”

The second, equally English, sweaty and unshaven was staring at her tits. Suddenly he figured out they had words on them. “Big Day Out… I’ve a feeling you know who we’re on about, yeah? Marty Biaggi.”

“Di Biagini?” she smiled. “Yeah, he signed my cast at Perth Airport.” She pointed out Marty’s autograph on her wrist. “Real nice guy. You guys aren’t waiting for him here though? He got on a plane to Brisbane…”

“You sure?”

“I should think so, I was there...”

Hubbub amongst the assembled masses. Discussion, debate. Distraction. As good a chance as any. We dived through the gates, in amongst a crowd of high school kids in matching green-and-gold sports tracksuits - none of which were anything like as appalling as ours, but we were going to take any opportunity we could get. Past the scrum, breaking into a sprint - as a few of the sharper on the uptake media types started clocking the unusual display - and out into open ground, heading for the cover of the food court. Of course, we had to be booked onto a Deathstar flight for the next leg, in an entirely different terminal to Virgin arrivals; just had to be. Not very well thought through. Neither were other elements of the Great Escape, as I twigged dodging between fat fanny-pack-and-pastel-slacks Seppo tourists somewhere between Krispy Kreme and Maccas:

“Bags.”

“Fuck,” noted Marty, propping on the spot. He was immediately hit up the arse by a large Samoan with an even larger baggage trolley. Discussion ensued, much of which was Marty assuring him he wouldn’t ever find himself in the gentleman’s way again, and thanks for his time.

Struggling out of the melee behind appeared Beth with Marty’s expensive Pierre Cardin overnight bag and the dodgy $10 hold-all she and I had bought to carry our meagre possessions over her shoulder. Her only saving grace was that her pursuers were weighed down with Handycams and big fuck-off digital SLRs. And she was small and lithe, rather than being a sweaty pie-fed mass of unshaven blubber. And she was pissed off, which also helped her monster her way around slow-moving bovine tourists.

“It’s fine, I’ll get the bags,” she issued through gritted teeth.

“Fuck you’re sexy when you’re angry,” I said.

Further small talk was curtailed by the horizon being filled by the marching army of tabloid cuntery, like an advancing zombie horde. One fuelled by Mrs Macs sausage rolls rather than BRAAAAIIINNNZZZ, admittedly. Marty let out a fairly Murray Walkeresque “GO, GO, GO!” as he grabbed his bag from where Beth had reasonably petulantly tossed it on the polished tiles of the terminal floor, and stumbled off into the Monday lunchtime rabble in the vague direction of Jetstar departures. We followed. I graciously offered to carry Beth’s bag. She graciously offered me the option of going and intercoursing myself. Someone hadn’t taken her meds today, clearly.

Flying Deathstar at least meant we could hide out in the Qantas Club. Which had its own problems, of course.

“This place isn’t exactly paparazzi-proof, I’ve heard,” Marty observed.

Cue awkward glances between myself and Beth. She was scoping the place out, putting together the grainy after-dark images of Selena and myself with the lie of the land here in the building.

“Erm, yeah,” I said. “Reckon that was more of an opportunistic deal though.”

Beth pointed back through the frosted glass. There was an angle through which, if the doors were open and everything lined up, you could see out into the terminal proper.

“There’s yer problem,” I nodded. “Someone’s switched this thing to evil.”

Random Simpsons quotes never seem to get me out of trouble, no matter how inaptly (or ineptly) I use them. Save me Jebus! I don’t even believe in Jebus.

“You’re in about the worst place to stand,” she noted, indicating the far corner would be better in terms of concealment from lines of fire. “Might be useful to remember in future,” she said. “For the next time you’re in here cracking onto a newsreader.”

“Mary K doesn’t usually fly Qantas,” Marty quipped. It didn’t help.

We ordered drinks and retreated to the far corner, as the advance patrols for the unholy zombie army of sweaty media cunts reached the door bitch out the front of the Qantas Club and were politely offered the option of going and intercoursing themselves. Our defences would hold, but God knew for how long.

For at least the duration of this Boags Premium, I hoped.

Another set-to at the door, but this time the door bitch was relenting. She had to. They had membership cards. Out of the scrum sashayed a leggy blonde with chiselled features, in a tight-fitting singlet and short shorts. It wasn’t, was it? Yup, it was. Shane Watson. Followed by Pup Clarke, Dick Poontang, Dull Hussey, Spare Hussey and the rest of the world-beating Australian ODI team. Make that the world-beaten Australian ODI team, sorry. They were in the process of trying not to lose a series at home to New Zealand, and were scheduled to head up to Brisbane to play the last game of that series at the Gabba. They were swearing amongst themselves about all the media attention focused on themselves and how it was all a bit too much and how dare the public who paid their salary actually complain about the performance of those whose self-indulgent professional sporting failures they funded. Or something. That bit might have been entirely made the fuck up. Except for the bit about the Australian one-day team and their associated hangers-on entering the room, that totes happened.

I glanced up at the departures screen. Next Qantarse flight to Brisvegas left just on two. Our Deathstar bird to Ballina-Byron… near as dammit the same, give or take five minutes. I glanced at Marty, whose eyeline had followed mine, and whose fuzzy brain had made the same slow but inexorable conclusion. The current Australian cricket team, I decided, were finally going to prove themselves useful. As decoys.

“Should probably head over and say hi,” Marty suggested. “Shall we?”

“Let’s,” I nodded.

So it was that the Australian team, staff and hangers-on muttered darkly at the boarding call, set aside their drinks and assembled for departure. One by one, they filed out of the Qantas Club and through the massed media emplacements, dodging and fighting like salmon swimming upstream, trying to evade large cumbersome bears swatting at them from waterfalls. This metaphor has now become more overstretched than La Cicciolina’s implants so I’ll stop. Somewhere between the Qantas Club and the Qantas gate, however, they lost a few hangers-on. The two in the non-compliant team tracksuits, and the dark brooding hottie that was with them. We suddenly broke left, through a gap in the scrum. It’d be a truck-and-trailer penalty in Super Dooper Rugby, but we got through. We’d been clocked, again, but we’d gone at just the right time. Out of the confusion and shouting we were off and away, headed for the gate.

“‘Fuck me, isn’t that Justin Bieber’… that’s seriously the best you could come up with?” Marty clearly didn’t think much of my distraction technique, after the fact.

“Ah, get a dog up ya,” I replied.

Deathstar were boarding. We were going through. Past the bright orange women on the gate scanner. (Bright orange in all respects. Fake tan is fake.) Through the airbridge. Onto the silver bird. Fuck me, we’re going to get away with this. We sat. Waiting. Dodging the looks from the punters filing past our pointy-end seats, hats down and shades on, about as inconspicuous as the Bananas in Pyjamas at a funeral directors convention. Seats taken. Doors armed and crosschecked. Tyres kicked. Fires lit. Rolling. Backwards. Watching bright orange women doing safety demonstration. While somewhere in that terminal, Rupert’s goons, Seven’s scum and Fairfax’s failures were arguing the toss with security.

Fuck me, we had gotten away with it.

“I say,” Marty declared, “nice one, brother.”

“Done and done,” I concurred.

Beth rolled her eyes, and went back to her very second hand copy of the Deathstar inflight mag.
As good an idea as any, I figured. My copy already had the crossword filled in. Wrongly. Very, very wrongly. That wasn’t how you spelt Sandilands. Well, it wasn’t how most people spelt it. Personally, I spelt it C-U-N-T, but that wouldn’t have fitted the space either. The Sudoku added up to 11. And someone had drawn a penis on celebrity chef Neil Perry’s face, which was one of the more concise reviews of the food at Rockpool, if one of the least useful. Marty was staring in wonder at the aircraft stats in the back, presumably figuring out which of the Deathstar fleet would be the most suitable for conversion to private jet status. Me, I just flicked to the beer section, which appeared to have been invaded by wine wankers. Piquant floral notes and an intriquing astringency of cloves, grapeseeds and sun-kissed summer wheat. Translation: tastes like arse frosted with thrush, like every other fucking wheat beer. $10 a stubbie at the shiniest bar in your locality. Fuck. That.

Probably not likely to be an issue at the Broadwater bowlo, anyway.

The flight dragged. We’d been on planes, getting on planes, getting off planes or waiting to do all of the above all day, since before sunrise - a day which for me had begun about 36 hours before in a hotel room in Perth, after a slightly busy couple of days preceding. Beth was fading. You could see the shutters coming down, the shields going up. Partly for her own protection, maybe partly for mine too. No idea how she was going to be when we got to the farm. At least she’d be with family then. Admittedly, they were my family, but she seemed to like them more than her own. Fair enough too. Her family were fucking impossible.

The cloud cover lifted somewhere north of Kempsey, and the coastline and countryside started revealing itself in recognisable forms. That had to be Urunga down there - the river, the big bridge over the bypass, the caravan park just specks on the ground. Hi, Emma. North of there was Coffs, and the headlands and beaches of the Coffs Coast. The highway carved inland towards Grafton, but we flew on, over the Clarence Valley and lining up our approach over the Richmond River, pretty much directly over the farm outside Broadwater.

Touchdown. Bounce, screech, stabilise, brake. Taxiing to a halt. Down the stairs. Into the glorified shed of Ballina-Byron. Baggage on a conveyer belt, rental car reservations behind a white Laminex bench on the far wall. And Mrs Rebecca Young in all her smileyest smiley glory over by the Arrivals baggage desk, chatting away with someone or other. Beck could start a conversation in an empty room.

“Hi guys, good flight?”

Grunted rounds of No Comment from the gentlemen. Beth and Beck exchanged looks.

“That good, huh?” she said.

“Fucked,” I observed. “On the run from the mob.”

“The mob?” queried Beck. “Mafia?”

“Close. Media,” Marty muttered, scanning the faces on the periphery. Possibly for trouble, more probably for his sister. She’d been delegated to come and collect him. “Seems I’m a bit of a hot story at the moment…”

“Really,” said the woman Beck had been talking to. “And why would that be, Marty?”

And that was when I realised the woman Beck had been talking to was, in fact, Andrea Kerr, nee Barnard. Beck’s old friend from the maternity ward at Lismore Base Hospital. And, more pertinently, our old friend from the Northern Star. Who still worked for the Northern Star, of course.

“Erm, hi Andrea…”

So, Marty fans, if you’d ever been wondering how the only exclusive interview with Martin di Biagini the day the biggest music industry story of 2009 broke was claimed by the entertainment reporter at a small regional newspaper from northern NSW…