Epilogue: Celebration day

My my my, I'm so happy
I'm gonna join the band
We're gonna dance and sing in celebration
In the promised land
- Led Zeppelin, 1970

So I’m writing this from a pub in Gent. I don’t know if you know Gent. I expect you don’t. It’s a fairly nondescript town in the middle of Flanders, half an hour from Brussels. It has a university, a factory that makes Ford Mondeos, a train line which goes to places more interesting than Gent, and a bunch of fuck-off-old buildings that look like the Dunedin train station. I have a half-empty glass of Jupiler (a fairly decent local beer, trust me on this) on the table next to the Mac laptop which has seen better days, having been bought for the purpose of writing this book seemingly a hundred thousand years ago. OK, fair enough, it was a bit over a year and a half ago, on the proceeds of the house-and-contents claim which my insurance agency reluctantly paid up as a result of my house-and-contents having died in a fire. Though at least they paid mine out. They didn’t pay out Roger Crittenden’s claim for Tuscany on Point, which was just as comprehensively gutted as my place - along with most of the places in between and surrounding. Then again, there was the small matter of his being found guilty of deliberately setting the motherfucker alight in the first place, which probably influenced their position. And that of the Relevant Authorities.

I suppose it wasn’t a bad plan, as far as spur-of-the-moment rushes-of-shit-to-the-brain go. Firefront bearing down on the town, so torch the place for the insurance money and claim it was a spotfire sparked by embers blown from the south. It might have gone up of its own accord, but why take the risk? And hey, he might have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids… or rather crusty old Wally from the local residents action group, ironically enough. He was helping to man the evacuation checkpoint Crittenden later attempted to charge through in his vintage Merc SL roadster, swerving to slalom between a copper in high-vis and Wally and his stop-go lollypop, and rolling into a drainage culvert. Notorious roll-oversteer on those old SLs. Exactly like my old R31 Skyline wagon... in no way whatsover apart from that. As he was pulled from the wreckage, it was the distinctive smell of Crittenden’s aftershave that gave it away: eau de BP Ultimate, which he’d managed to splash all over his slacks in the process of siphoning it out of his Lexus 4WD - left behind as it had apparently been considered more expendable, much like the houses of anyone downwind of Tuscany in Point. This was disappointing for many people, primarily the people who owned those houses, and also for Don Richardson, who was now never going to get paid for two months of effort trying to sell mine. Mount Road got him a dirt-cheap contra deal on a new Moto Guzzi California cruiser for his Noosa holiday shack as some form of compensation.

There were a couple of further ironies yet to play themselves out, of course. The towering Norfolk Island pines which Crittenden had tried to kill off many months prior because they were getting in the way of his potential investors’ views managed to survive trial by fire as well; you could even say they got their own back on him, given that their rather conspicuously un-burnt status - like the rest of the scrub between the original bushfire’s containment lines and the blackened remnants of Tuscany On Point where the ‘spotfire’ started - were a bit of a giveaway to the investigation team, if the accelerant residue liberally splashed around the premises wasn’t enough of a dibber-dobber. The other irony was that Crittenden’s own place, which he was also trying to shift now that he’d packed daughter Annalise off to NEGS in Farmadale, didn’t get so much as a burning ember tossed its way, being further along the ridgeline from my street. Bit of a hassle for him on two counts. One, it was still burning a hole in his bottom line, which is painful at the best of times. And two, all those lovely informative files which Annalise had discovered me leafing through in her old man’s study, the night she’d brought me home after the show at the SLSC - well, they remained intact. Some of which turned out to be of a great deal of interest to the local council, various government departments and a whole bunch of other folks. Like the one he and Gerald Toogood had conspired to bury from a few years ago re the independent environmental assessment on their intended site for building Stradbroke Christian College - and indeed the site they actually built the fucking place on - which indicated alarming levels of arsenic and other poisons in the soil from a long-forgotten cattle dip site in its 1950s-70s history as a grazing property. Not a site to operate a school on. And needless to say, not one on which a school has been operated since. Though the rolls at the state school are booming, so Bill Howard’s happy. Even if his golf swing’s still atrocious.

It’s worth pointing out that how said files came to the attention of said authorities still remains a mystery, publically. But one might assume - hypothetically - that if some particular private citizen was to lose all their worldly goods in a fire caused by the actions of an egregious cunt, and if said private citizen had stored certain pieces of information up their sleeve re earlier actions of said egregious cunt, archived for a rainy day let’s say, then one might assume - hypothetically, of course - that said authorities might find themselves being tipped off by said someone about said egregious cuntery on the part of said egregious cunt. Me, I’ve got NFI, obviously, but I reckon his kid dobbed him in, personally. Packing someone off to NEGS for year 12 against their will has got to have some comeback.

Now, knowledgeable financial types might consider Crittenden’s inflammatory strategy re disposing of Tuscany on Point as taking tactical advantage of local market conditions to divest himself of a non-performing investment at a critical moment, which probably explains why and how the cunts came to create the 2009/10 Global Financial Clusterfuck in the first place. Not necessarily the cleverest time to be expanding a motorcycle dealership, given the arse was to spectacularly drop out of new bike sales in 2009/10, but we were still in there when the rebound came, and we’d been clever enough to expand into the few market segments where growth was maintained, so we were still doing alright. I say we, as that was where the remainder of Suncorp’s payout went: to the family Martin, for a split share of Mount Road. For the first time in a while, I had an actual day job. And an actual boss, although both Mick and myself used the term fairly ironically, particularly when we used it on each other in equal measures. Mick handled the day-to-day business management, I looked after evangelising the brand and developing market awareness in key target demographics. A fancy term for being a total attention whore and turning up at the opening of an envelope, as washed-up former rock stars are wont to do, and in my case whenever possible in some form of relevant branded apparel. For the record, SBS’s RocKwiz is considerably more welcoming of such commercial strategems than fusty old Auntie’s Spicks and Specks, who made me change my retro ‘Vespa Servizio’ T-shirt for something of less potential commercial benefit to myself. An old Superfun T-shirt. Oh, the irony.

I was also attention-whoring it up a storm in the media, social and otherwise; writing an irreverant (and mostly irrelevant) occasional column in one of the nation’s leading motorcycle publications - until the nation’s other leading motorcycle publication offered us more cash and more freebie advertising space - and maintaining a fairly extensive online presence with Twunter and Arsebook and a bikes-and-rock blog on the Mount Road website which was getting more hits than Elvis, much to the chagrin of our competition down the road (down most roads in Brisbane, in point of fact) in the form of the van Waalens of the Action Sports Motorcycles octopus. They were bigger, sure, but we’d moved faster, captured a market they couldn’t reach (and probably wouldn’t have known how to), and owned something more value than floorspace and forecourt acreage - ascendency in market perception. The people of SEQ and surrounds, in fact right across the country, even those who didn’t ride bikes (yet) or know anything about them, knew we were the first and best people in Brisvegas to talk bikes with. See, New Media is useful for something apart from stupid internet memes and pictures of LOLcats.

None of which has much to do with what I was doing in the middle of Flanders with a MacBook in my lap. Although I was on Twitter at the time. Gently sledging my buddy Olivia Kane about her new faaahhhhshun show on Fox 8, if I remember correctly. Sort of a reheated House Of Style Australia, which I reckoned for true cultural appropriateness needed MOAR ugg boots and wifebeater singlets. To which she called me a dirty turncoat sheep-shagger and suggested there were nicer ways of asking for a guest spot on the show, since that’s what I was doing.

Yeah right. Me the Pat Smear to your Cindy Crawford?

lol wtf?

Foo Fighters guitarist. Used to be on MTV House of Style with Cindy Crawford years ago

how do you know this? closet fashionista!! ;)

Yeah that’s me. Ed Hardy is designing our Mount Road workshirts next season.

So yeah. It’s March 17, 2011. St Patrick’s Day. Where better to spend it than kicking back in the afternoon sunshine on the wooden chairs of a cobbled-street-side café-bar, among the blackstone Flemish Renaissance buildings of an anonymous Belgian uni town. And Twitter-sledging recently-repatriated supermodel exes about selling out to pay TV for a hosting gig. Still, it made our occasional onscreen catchups at Channel [V] more fun (if by ‘fun’ you mean ‘me trying to throw her off her serious interviewer beat and her trying to find the most inappropriate question to ask with a straight face on live TV’. Good times. Anyway. Today’s date explained why said Belgian uni town had more than the expected number of Belgian uni student hotties sashaying around the place half-cut in questionable green facepaint and oversized leprechaun hats. It also explained, for the one day a year he did it, what Bear was doing on the black stuff.

“You going to fuck about on that cunt of a thing all afternoon,” observed Christian ‘Bear’ Sorenson, several Guinnesses under par, “or are you going to chop that motherfucker and get your round in?”

I suppose I should explain how Bear and I got here. Would that be good?

A few weeks after our final BDO show in Perth, Bear came back from R&R exile in south-western WA full of beans, chirp, vim and vigour - hard to say whether it was playing with us which had given him his creative spark back, or whether Lena had merely fucked him back into form - either way, he flicked me a direct message on the Magical Twunterbox saying we should totally Do Something Together. I figured he didn’t mean origami or Greco-Roman wrestling, but arsing about on guitars playing music for the entertainment of others and ourselves. Or just ourselves, more probably. Given we weren’t art-school Gen Y fuckwits with interpretive hair and a fetish for ‘80s synth, not a fuck were we likely to scare the 'alternative' charts these days. As I recall it those words were pretty much how he sold the project to me, and with prospects like that, who wouldn’t be All In?

So we got together in Brisvegas (garden bar of the RE, as it happened) and sorted the detail. It was going to be loud. It was going to be fun. It was going to be stupid (most probably.) It was going to fuse all the most awesome bits of all the awesome bands we’d both rated the fuck out of over the years - AC/DC, Zeppelin, Purple, Sabbath, early Stones, the MC5, the Stooges, the Sex Pistols, whoever, whatever. An unholy fusion of blues, punk and 70’s metal, which to our way of thinking all added up to ROCK AND ROLL, MOTHERFUCKER. And hell, if that meant we ended up sounding like Motorhead, what the fuck, they were the very essence of absolute fucking awesome awesomeness anyway. Yeah we’ll have another jug of Cascade Prembo thanks love. The only bands we rated who we deliberately wouldn’t sound like - well, that we wouldn’t be playing songs of - were Flange Gasket and Hayabusa. Given the personnel involved it was a fair chance we’d sound just a tad like one or the other at any given moment. But only the AWSM parts. Which were us, obviously. It wasn’t that we didn’t think we could live up to our back catalogue, or that we were artistically ashamed or embarrassed of it, Eskimo Joe style. It was just that we didn’t want to have to carry it around with us. Excess baggage charges are a bitch at the best of times.

And there was the minor point, worth underlining now I think, that we’d somehow managed to navigate both those bands safely to shore before either had completely and irreversably transversed the shark. We’d quit while we were ahead, or not too far behind anyway. Granted, Hayabusa’s last album had been a bit Seppo-shiny even if it had sold well, and the world could have probably done entirely without the last couple of Intercom-sponsored, booze-drugs-and-ego-fuelled Gasket efforts - but Tractorfest had managed to send Hayabusa out on a high, and we’d probably managed to square the ledger with Gasket Nation (slightly smaller than Liechtenstein on a wet public holiday afternoon) with the farewell Big Day Out appearances, the live DVD/CD which came from that, and of course the In The Worst Possible Taste best-of itself which gave everyone something positive to remember us by. We’d scored a Pass Conceded for the subject of ‘Escaping with your dignity and legacy intact’.

Which is one hell of an achievement really, because, let’s face it, most bands hadn’t, and haven’t, and don’t. Even the biggest bands on the planet. Wouldn’t you rather remember the Stones before Keef discovered smack and Mick discovered his ego? If they’d released Exile On Main Street then taken the title it as a lifestyle suggestion, and quietly fucked off into suburbia to enjoy their money? What kind of hearing do you think you’d have got if you’d quietly tapped Page and Plant on the shoulder circa 1975 and told them ‘Look lads, it isn’t going to get any better than this. Every album you release after Physical Graffiti will be untrammelled shite because Jimmy will be smacked out of his head and will be best remembered for trying to stick a fish up a groupie. You’re not even two years away from becoming permanently sidelined as meandering prog-rock dinosaurs by the Sex Pistols and friends, shortly after which Bonzo will drink eleventy million vodkas and choke on his own vom. IT AIN’T WORTH IT. Go home, count your money, hug your family, be happy you’re not fucking dead yet.’

(Admittedly, they’d have told you to fuck off, we’re going on tour again, fire up the Lear Jet and corral the tame pharmacists. And fair enough. None of us do this shit because it makes sense or because it provides a stable career. We do it because we want to, as much as because we have to.)

Anyway, at some stage Bear and I sobered up - I believe it was the following Wednesday - and realised we needed a drummer. And probably another guitarist, Bear having elected to bust out his Lemmy skillset behind the bass rather than go to a six-string weapon for our New Adventures In Hi-Fi. It was time to put the feelers out. And, to be brutally honest, it was a long and arduous search.

“Fellas,” said Hollywood on Thursday morning, “I hear you’re looking for a guitarist.”

We tried to break it to him gently, which isn’t easy down a trans-Tasman phone line. Particularly on Vodafail. We explained to him through the crackle and hiss that it wasn’t Hayabusa Mk II that we were seeking to recreate here. That we weren’t looking for a showboating showpony with shinier guitars, hair and teeth than any other lead axeman in Australasia. That our Unnamed Side Project (working title: Brute Force and Ignorance, though still trying to figure out which of us was which) was wholly and solely about cranking riffs and bellowing songs and getting square with some lyrical topics which shat us both to tears, like the advent of fundamentalist religion, and anti-scientific anti-intellectualism, and the consumeristic stupidification of humanity, and the continuing existence of News Limited, and European beers being brewed badly under licence in Sydney. And that we were definitely, DEFINITELY recording Imaginary Friends, which we knew he hated because he’d vetoed it off a previous Hayabusa record, as well as our new favourite riff Second Chance Draw, which we knew he’d also hate as it also hung shit on fundamentalist fucktards who were so obsessed with nebulous prospects of the afterlife, they fucked up any shot at enjoying this life for themselves and everyone around them.

We outlined all that. And Hollywood shrugged, and traced his finger around the rim of his K-Road latte, trying to find the words to admit that for all the solo music projects he’d started and aborted in the months since the end of Hayabusa, he’d never found anyone he clicked with. And that for all the fighting, feuding and sledging, we were still the closest thing to brothers he had in the world.

“Sounds alright to me,” he replied. “I fucking hate Aussie Heineken, it’s dog’s piss.”

So he was in. Which left just a drummer. That took about as long as it took Hollywood to pay for the coffees. In other words, long enough for D to give up and do it for the stingy prick.

Youse fullahs getting the band back together?

We tried as best we could - and it’s harder via text, you lose that subtle nuance that comes with body language - to explain to D, who’d been over at the bar ordering second breakfast at the moment Hol had made his furtive phonecall across the ditch, that this wasn’t Getting The Band Back Together. That this was Something Else. Sure, it was the same (or at least a similar) bunch of cunts with the same (or at least a similar) bunch of riffs, but it wasn’t Hayabusa. That name came with baggage. It came with strings attached. It came with a legacy…

D’s response kinda cut through all that bullshit and got directly to the point.

The man said get the old bloke and go again.

I looked at Bear and Bear looked at me. Who D was looking at remains unknown, though probably not Hollywood because he’d gone for a nervous slash. Incontinent bastard.

The Old Bloke was me, all of two years older than the Hayabusa lads, which for the past decade had been cause enough to give me that tag. The Man, it probably didn’t need to be underlined, was Dan ‘Tractor’ Maxwell. He’d been unequivocal. Sick and dying, which made him even more stubborn. And sweary. Fuck fading out in sympathy or tribute or whatever the fuck. It’s bullshit. Don’t you fucking dare do that to me. We didn’t come this far to fucking give up. You get the old bloke and you fucking go again.

Then he died. Which was rude, not least of which because it made arguing with him difficult.

Noone around Team Hayabusa, playing personnel or support staff, really spoke about it as such, but it seemed everyone had decided to just quietly pretend Tractor had never actually demanded we kept the band going rather than chuck it in, like so many other bands had after losing their lead dude, or probably should have done. You could count on the fingers of one hand of a particularly careless industrial lathe operator how many established bands had enacted the lead singer swap with any measure of decorum or success. AC/DC. Maybe Deep Purple. Possibly Van Halen, the first time. Not the second. Or the third. Truth is, it never happens. And the list of palpable fails is long and compelling.

Of course the situation hadn’t really been helped by Bear or myself, to be honest. There was a certain weight of expectation out there in Hayabusaland (a population mass quite a bit larger than Gasket Nation, to be honest). That last Gasket show in early February ’09, Marty’s headlining slot at Perth BDO which ended up as Flange Gasket’s Redundancy Package, with tens of thousands of beautiful Westralians howling their joy at us under lights, and with the moment kinda getting to us, I might have pointed across stage and asked my very good friends in the crowd to “GIVE IT THE FUCK UP, PEOPLE. BEAR SORENSON. HAYABUSA.”

I was trying to make a point, you see. Get back on the horse that’s thrown you, and all that. To which he grinned, once the roar had died down, and pointed back across stage.

“ANDY YOUNG. HAYABUSA.”

So was he.

Yeah. So if you asked the general public, the die was cast then and there. Made a better story for the liner notes, in the fullness of time, but there was a wee bit of back-and-forth before we finally came out of the closet and declared to the Great Unwashed that we were, indeed, proudly and defiantly, Hayabusa. With all the baggage and back catalogue that entailed. With all the standards to live up to and all the prior-art failures which said this was a Piss Poor Concept Guaranteed To Fail. INXS. Need I say more.

Still, we had a hope. We were doing this because we wanted to play together. Because we fitted together like old mates who liked to talk bollocks over beers because, fuck it, we were. And because there was enough venal stupidity in the world already and someone had to be out there calling it out on its venal stupidityness. That said, I was pretty fucking nervous when we all finally sat down together in the rehearsal shed, the old wooden church relocated over on the sunny side of the Maxwell’s farm on Otago Peninsula, and started tossing around some of the ideas we’d come up with. Bear and I had come up with some good stuff in the Valley, in the unfinished bare-earth basement of Scooteria Italia where the old service station fuel tanks had been pulled out, which Mick had one day earmarked for Stage 2, but in the interim made a hell of an awesome makeshift studio. But Bear and I were always going to come up with good stuff - that’d been why we’d wanted to work together in the first place. The question was whether it was Hayabusa stuff. Baggage, strings, legacy.

Really, I shouldn’t have worried. Shit just worked. This wasn’t Gasket with its endless arguments about tone and style and light and shade, riven by four blokes with often irreconcilable differences over the sound, over how to capture that sound, and over whether Pink Floyd was genius or shite. D understood. D’s musical taste was the broadest church imaginable - he was into everything and anything, from reggae to funk to thrash metal - but he understood that the House of Hayabusa meant using all of his eclectic skills for one purpose, and that was to fucking rock. Fucking about could wait for one of his hundred side projects. And as for Hollywood, what could you say? He might have been more likely to be rocking the Tarocash, but truth was he was the anorak’s anorak when it came to rock and roll. He’d spent every waking moment since long before he’d had hair on his balls - which had been some time the previous Tuesday I understand - immersing himself in the history and the theology of electrified guitar. Not just how to play it, but where it came from, and where it went to. Chicago blues, Detroit punk, Seattle grunge, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal - he could tell you who originated it, who inspired the originators and who inspired them. Really HE should have been on fucking Spicks and Specks, not me. Although he’d have probably tried to pull Myf Warhurst, because he’s an inveterate manwhore. As I admitted later - it might have even been live on [V]’s late night live show with Livvy Kane around Easter 2009, which was effectively New ‘Busa’s first public unveiling, cranking stuff off our comeback EP - there was only ever one guitarist who was going to join us on this project - who had the technical brilliance, the timing, the hands, the riffs, the ability, but also the passion, the drive and the understanding of what we were trying to do. And that was Allison Robertson from the Donnas. But Hol would do in a pinch. Hol’s response was something along the lines of the exchange rate being what it was, I was the cheapest Aussie cunt which the NZ dollar could afford. Which was why I was being paid in Speights.

In the end, we picked our moment well. Hayabusa had left the scene as the biggest band on either side of the ditch, well in excess of any high-water tide mark Gasket had left around the bath after pulling the plug, so someone out there presumably liked us. And I’d been part of the furniture, playing and touring with Hayabusa for years, so even the hard-bitten rusted-on hometown Kiwi fans warmed to the Old Bloke fronting the tribe.

Eventually.

So anyway, we were talking about Gent. Or Gand. Or Ghent. In between beers myself and the boys were working on a bit for the website - crowd-sourcing, though less about the crowd and more about getting on the sauce - which looked something like this:

Hayabusa's Touring Guide to Ghent
Ghent, also known as Gent, Gant, Ghendt, Gout, Goat, Terence and Gurney Gurney Whoopie Fuck, is a regional city in East Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.

Belgium: chocolate and pedophiles
Belgium is an irrelevant country in the middle of western Europe where your grandfather's mates are buried because the English are cunts. Belgium, which gained its independence from the Dutch in the 1800s, remains split into two provinces, French-speaking Wallonia in the south and gibberish-speaking Flanders in the rest. Helpfully, and somewhat inevitably, both sides of Belgium hate each other and would rather piss on each other than communicate constructively. As a result they have a reputation for government instability rivalled only by the Italians, Papua New Guinea and the 'gramophone' republics of South America - those with 45 revolutions per minute. Just ask the current PM. Current at the time of press at least. *checks watch* *checks Wikipedia* *revises blog draft*

Aside from chocolate, pedophiles, female tennis players and fuck-off-scary race circuits, Belgium is most famous for beer. In particular, Trappist ales and lambic beers made with billion year old wild yeasts which impart into the beer delicate tastes of stonefruit, washing detergent and vaginal thrush. The only thing fruitier than the taste are the pretentious ponces who drink the stuff. In particular the highly punishing aficionados of Hoegaarden, a spicy, clove-scented witbier whose name translates rather aptly from Flemish Dutch as 'compost of the prostitute'.

Then again, there's always Wifebeater.

Is Belgium irrelevant?
Try and name three famous Belgians. Go on.

Plastic Bertrand doesn't count.

Flanders: dull as fu-diddly-uck
The capital of Flanders is F Brussels, which is also capital of Belgium, the EU, and Sprouts. Flanders is divided into five prefectures, each duller than the rest. The tortured existence of Belgian politics can be summated by the following excerpt from Flanders' Wikipedia entry:

Immediately after its establishment, the region [of Flanders] transferred all its constitutional competencies to the Flemish Community. The current Flemish authorities (Flemish parliament, Flemish government) therefore represent all the Flemish people, including those living in the Brussels-Capital Region. Hence, the Flemish Region is governed by the Flemish Community institutions. However, members of the Flemish Community parliament who were elected in Brussels-Capital Region, have no right to vote on Flemish regional affairs.

Got all that? Good. If you do, please explain it to the Flemish, they've been scratching their heads for a hundred years or more.

The largest city in Flanders, other than Brussels, which is in Flanders but isn't actually considered part of Flanders for administrative purposes, except that it's the official capital of Flanders... God my brain hurts... anyway the next biggest city in Flanders is Antwerp, site of the dullest Olympics in history in which nothing of note actually happened, largely because the sporting public of several participating nations was still buried in the surrounding countryside on account of World War I.

Fuck that, let's talk about Ghent

Need to find the Ghents?
Ghent is the third-biggest city in Belgium with some 230,000 inhabitants, less than you'd expect of whom want to top themselves. It lies at the intersection of European Highways E40 and E17 (no relation) and has the third busiest railway station in Belgium. Oh Christ, my face is falling off this is so fucking dull.

History: Pimpin' since 1775
Ghent wasn't always so face-unfasteningly dull. As early as the late Middle Ages, or indeed as late as the early Middle Ages, Ghent was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, on the back of the flourishing textile industry. Until the 13th century only Ghey Pareeee housed more peeps, perps and lo-ridas. Then a bunch of wars happened and shit began to occur and fuck me if the whole thing didn't go tits-up like Pammy Anderson outside a Gold Coast KFC. Trade with the Poms went to shit during and after the Hundred Years War. After a spate of 14th century council amalgamations the Ghentites cracked the shits with having to pay heavy taxes to some clown in Burgundy, rarked up and got smacked down. Then after the Spanish Empire rolled into Dodge, Charles V (born in Ghent, later Emperor of Spain - the European transfer market was invented long before football found a use for it) beat the snot out of his townspeeps following the Revolt of Ghent (1539) where again taxation without representation got the locals a bit peeved, figuring the high taxes were just used to fund starting wars overseas, including the controversial War on Terra (Latin for land, given they were trying to invade Italy at the time.) Chucky V personally rolled back into his hometown to suppress the rebellion and obliged the city's nobles to walk in front of him, barefoot and with a noose (Dutch: strop) around the neck. He then proceeded to rip up the town in a way that would make Amy Winehouse look like a debilitated crack whore (huh? Oh really? Oh) and basically took a massive shit in his own nest. Since this incident the people of Ghent have taken on the sobriquet Stroppendragers (noose bearers) in a desperate attempt to seem interesting. In the ensuing centuries, the city was fucked over more times than a lap dancer in an English rugby team's hotel, only regaining some dignity once the Dutch took charge after the Battle of Waterloo, gifting the city a university and restoring port access to the sea. Which lasted a whole 15 years until the Belgian Revolution...

History: reminding you that people aren't just fucked, they've always been fucked.

Things to do in Ghent

• Leave
• Drink
• Look at old buildings
• Get bored of that shit after about 5 minutes
• Laugh at fat American tourists with their matching checked shirts tucked into pastel slacks, cameras around neck and dazed Starbucks-withdrawal eyes
• Make piss-awful jokes about being 'stuck in the Ghents'
  
• Start some sort of strop (see what I did there?)
• Avoid the park after dark in case you're mistaken for a homosexual, in which case you will either have your bottom violated by another homosexual or beaten up by dickheads pretending they are not indeed latent homosexuals (note: this may not apply if you are actually a homosexual)
  
• Actually go to the festival you're meant to be attending and watch the bands on the undercard rather than sitting around on street-side cafes swilling Leffe Blonde and staring at chicks
• Try not to fall in, that looks pretty fucking rank in there

And our favoured option:

• Get back on the Eurostar ASAP and fuck off to London to sink piss with Marty and Danno and go watch the World Superbikes at Donington
  

...None of which was particularly likely to make it past the Legal Overlords at our website but hell, we had fun coming up with it.

So. It’s St Paddy’s Day 2011 in Gent (aka Ghent, Gand et al), Belgium, which means you can get a Guinness with your frites and mayonnaise from the streetside bar we’re parked at, old wooden tables and chairs laid out on the cobbles of the Old Town. Ancient Flemish Renaissance architecture looms above us, lit with glorious late-afternoon sunshine. Purdy. Spring harvest festival crowds are milling on the streets nearby - truth be told, that’s why we’re here, playing the uni hall as part of a multi-band rock and roll happening concurrent with the harvest festival. We’re four weeks into a headlining European tour, and a week away from hitting the UK and pairing up with one Martin di Biagini, troubadour-in-residence of London Town, for a brief thrash around the English south-east before we all fuck off to South By Southwest in the first week of April to represent the ANZAC contingent. And then back to Britain for another couple of weeks touring with Marty and his new (considerably louder) band. They weren’t entirely new - still had Ed Terry and Tommy Wilson, which explained a fair proportion of the loudness, particularly in the bar after the show. All in all, best get one’s drinking boots polished. I’m on the Jupilers, because I’m a firm believer in drinking the home support’s beers when you’re playing away. Bear’s on the Celtic mud, as outlined previously. D’s likewise, being a firm supporter of anything that constitutes a steak and chips in every glass. Hollywood’s drinking Stella, as he could be in fucking Auckland, of course.

“It’s quality,” he insisted. “Better than whatever the fuck that jurgen-fleurgen shit is.”

“It’s what actual Belgians drink,” I pointed out. “As distinct from the Flemish fucking Fosters you’re on.”

“Because doing what Belgians do is important to you?” Hollywood observed. “Making chocolate and pedophilia, ain’t it?”

“Hey,” I said. “You left out ‘Be shit at forming a government.’” It was nearly a year and counting already, with no particular signs of Belgium’s parliament getting its shit together. It was well-hung, and not in the sort of way Hollywood’s momma liked. Or so bathroom stall scuttlebutt would have it.

D was sitting back, contemplative, content, as Zen as Buddha (is that mixing metaphors?) Our resident philosopher was clearly deep in thought, considering his next profound observance.

“That pissed fucker’s fuckin’ pissing in that fuckin’ bus shelter, eh.”

We turned.

“Fuck. That pissed fucker IS fucking pissing in that fucking bus shelter.”

Some random Euro punter, clearly a few Jupilers under the weather, had sidled up to a bus shelter, addressed the assembly, and did what he went there to do. Swearing at the spray on his boots as he did. Splashback’s a bitch, Jean-Claude.

“That’s… not a bus shelter,” Bear recognised with a laugh. “Seen that kind of thing before. Oktoberfest in Munich…”

“Outdoor slashers?” I queried, getting the gist.

“Indeed,” nodded Bear, eyebrows raised at the flashbacks. The horror, the horror.

“Fuck the Euros are special aren’t they?” declared Hollywood. “Can just see it, you’re there trying to catch a bus, and some cunt sidles up with his dodger out…”

“Erm, when in your life have you ever had to catch a bus, Nicko?”

“We tour in a fucking bus, don’t we?”

“Eurostar’s technically not a bus, Hol.”

“Nor is the pointy end of an A380…”

The problem with Hol was that it was just too much fun to put him on the defensive. “I’m buying you cunts a bus aren’t I?”

“You mean that fuckin’ AMG Merc wagon you insisted on us hiring?”

“Fuck you lot,” he pronounced, and sipped his Flemish Fosters.

My laptop was trying to get my attention. As were the posse of astonishing leggy Euro girls sauntering past in miniskirts and tight green tops - summer was coming early - but the laptop was more successful at it. I was better at that stuff than I used to be. Didn’t hurt that the bit of the laptop which was trying to get my attention was the Skype logo, which usually foretold messages from the other side of the world. It was one or two in the morning in Brisbane - more specifically, in Marty’s pad on the river in New Farm where we’d been housesitting since he’d moved to Europe in 2009 - and my favourite girl was meant to be studying for mid-semester exams, ahead of flying over for a week to hang out at SXSW in Austin. Still, everyone needs their study breaks…

It wasn’t my favourite girl. Which was a tumbler of ice-cubes to the crotch if ever there was one.

“You look happy to see me,” smirked our Australian management.

“Yeah, well, I was hoping for someone blonder,” I admitted.

“Oh so she’s blonde this month?” jibed Lena goodnaturedly.

“Look, should I just hand the lappy over to Bear, or should I Gladwrap it first? Saves wiping it down later…”

“Might be a disappointment,” Lena replied, “but I’m actually here to talk to you. Hence the whole Skyping-you-instead-of-him thing…”

“Oooh, he’ll be jealous. You know how he gets…”

“How do I get?” remarked Bear.

“Alcoholically impotent,” I said. “So Lena’s been telling everyone.”

“You’re such a shit-stirrer,” she declared. “Makes me wonder why I bother…”

“Because we pay you,” I pointed out. “And because this is more fun than writing shit for a living, as you’ve said about a hundred million times in the past two years.”

“Yeah, there is that,” she smiled.

New Hayabusa had a tripartite management team, a unique unity of three remarkable women - Lena did Australia, Daniela di Biagini managed our Overseas Market Development out of London, and Tractor’s widow Aroha still looked after us in Hayabusa’s spiritual homeland of NZ. Actually, NZ was more than just the band’s spiritual homeland; it was still our usual rehearsal space, given we lived all over the place (Bear in particular, who shared his time between Brisbane, Sydney, Raglan and Dunedin these days) but none of us was more than a few hours from there by plane. Or, if you were Hol, a few days by Porsche. At least until he’d had it seized by the rozzers in New Plymouth for doing a burnout (sorry, ‘being criminally responsible for a sustained loss of traction’) under fairly cretinous new anti boy-racer laws. The idea of Hol-as-boy-racer just defied the mind. We’d spent most of the next three weeks - how long it took his lawyers to extricate the device from custody - describing everything he did as FULLEH SIIICK and/or providing sound effects for his everyday walkabout duties, like nipping off for a wee, along the lines of VRRAAAAAA KSSSSHHHH. It was a miracle he WAS still buying us a bus for traversing the Kiwi countryside, which probably had more to do with his hatred of regional Air NZ turboprops than genuine charitable intent. Well, when I say a bus, it was more a vintage split-windscreen VW Kombi unearthed from a barn at his late hippy uncle’s farm in the Coromandel (the existence of hippies in his family being Grammar Prefect Hol’s secret shame, and his even more secret pride and thrill) which Barry Norton was doing a few modifications to. Just minor stuff, nothing too over-the-top. Coat of paint. New seats. Aircon. Stereo. Air-cooled flat six out of a late ’80s Porsche 911 Turbo…

We also had regular rehearsal digs on the sunburnt side of the ditch, given we were over there just as often, usually in SEQ since that was where the rest of my life was centred. When in Australia, we chose to rehearse in the still-unfinished basement underneath Scooteria Italia, which seemingly added to the hipster-trendy-chic of the establishment. Come down for a coffee, buy a Vespa scooter (or handbag) and hear Hayabusa cranking through prototype tracks for their next album. Wasn’t quite what Mick had originally envisaged for Stage 2 of the development, but he seemed pretty happy about it.

The rest of the lads crowded around behind me to say hi to Auntie Lena. Wasn’t a bad connection for wireless we were nicking off the café next door. If we looked jerky, it was probably because we were jerks.

“What’s up babe? Apart from you, way past your bedtime.”

She frowned, but not at Bear’s mildly patronising jibe. “Earthquake stuff,” she laid out gently.

Yup. You could feel the air go out of our collective balloon a little. It’d been less than a month since Christchurch’s CBD had been smashed flat, and 181 people lost along with. As Kiwis - even as an adopted one - the nerve endings were pretty raw on that one. Each of the lads had mates who’d been involved, or dodged a bullet (or a falling wall or bricks), or who’d lost a home, or a relative, or knew someone who had. Our road manager Davros (David Ross to his mother), a burly Scot from the Borders who’d moved to Christchurch years ago, had flown out to Europe in early February not knowing he’d have no house to return to. His family were all OK - they’d flown over as well, and were up in Scotland visiting family when the big shake happened - but their house up on the hill above Sumner now… wasn’t, basically. I’d have understood - and in fact we gave him the green light straight up - if he wanted to fly straight back and bail on the rest of the tour. He refused, because our barrel-chested former paratrooper of a road manager was one thing above all, and that was a stubborn bastard; he was here to do a job, and he would do that job. In the end, the word coming back from Davros’ neighbours was that the city was pretty much fucking unliveable and they were all best served being as far away as possible for as long as possible. Western Europe probably wasn’t a bad start. Aroha sent some of our Dunedin-based NZ roadcrew up to help clean up the mess and salvage what they could of the contents.

Early 2011 was a pretty fucking grim time for natural disasters, of course. In January most of Queensland had flooded, with loss of life and property right across the state. Brisbane had been hit hard, the worst since 1974. We’d had to bail from New Farm to the Old Farm (i.e. staying with Jeff and Beck down in northern NSW) for a week or so, and had been lucky the makeshift studio under Scooteria Italia hadn’t turned into an even more makeshift aquarium, but me and mine had dodged the worst of it. A month later the earthquake hit Canterbury, 12.51pm local time on February 22 to be precise. Or a bit before midnight in Berlin, where we’d just gone on stage at Die Ausfahrt (a rock music club in the bohemian end of town, not an insult directed at drunk bogans with Southern Cross tatts at Oktoberfest) surrounded by the most fascinating bunch of randoms this side of King St Newtown. D, as usual, had the line on the place: “Eclectic Ladyland.” And that was barely five minutes after lugging in, by which time he’d already been bought a drink by a stunning pink-haired six-foot-three Amazon goddess, equal parts Marianne Faithful and Lady Gaga. To mangle an old Jeff-ism, those that can, do; those that can’t, have to Skype their girlfriends after the show.

Anyway somehow we started talking about earthquakes and ended up talking about homemade webcam porn. Angus brings the class as usual. Earthquakes - they’re fucking awful. An even more fucking awful one than the Canterbury tremor had hit off the coast of Japan just the previous week to St Paddy’s, creating a tsunami of biblical proportions and some profoundly sickening live TV images. We were supposed to be over there in the last week of July for Fuji Rock, which didn’t look particularly fucking likely anymore. (It did, though - it basically became a huge, internationally-simulcast benefit concert for Japan - and the amazing thing wasn’t the scale of destruction, it was the fact they could operate at any kind of level at all after that sort of a body blow, let alone at their usual astonishing complexity of civilization. But that was the story of the Japanese people: they’d done it before, post-war, post-other disasters like the Kobe earthquake, and they’d do it again. Much as the people of Christchurch, Canterbury and New Zealand would have to do over the coming weeks, months and years.)

“Earthquake stuff,” I echoed, and Lena nodded. “Not another one?”

“No,” she replied, with a hint of a smile. “Something a little more positive. Relief concert. Your old moped-racing mate Mr Grohl’s been in touch. Well, his people have anyway.”

It’s widely known Dave Grohl was arrested for DUI on the Gold Coast after Big Day Out about ten years ago, whilst drunkenly fucking about the place on a scooter. However, it’s not widely known where he got the scooter from. Or which other music identity, of a somewhat lower level of international notoriety, had narrowly managed to avoid being picked up for drunkenly fucking about the place on one of the other scooters his motorcycle dealer mate had been talked into procuring for backstage transport usage. Ahem. At least the Mount Road Yamaha link was left out of the subsequent press coverage; “Thank fuckin’ Christ for small mercies,” Uncle Doug had replied when I’d pointed that out. The Foo Fighters were touring NZ this month, at the same time we were in Europe, so it was unlikely we were going to cross paths with them before Fuji Rock. I wondered what a $150 traffic fine corrected for ten years’ CPI inflation would be worth in cold Kirins down at the Rock Rock bar.

“How is Mr Grohl? Or Mr Grohl’s people, anyway?”

“Mr Grohl’s people are fine,” Lena smirked archly. “Mr Grohl’s people are planning a couple of benefit gigs each side of the ditch - one in Brisbane for flood relief, one in Auckland for the NZ earthquake. They were inquiring as to your availability for first support…”

“Hayabusa don’t play fuckin’ undercards,” I expected to hear Hol’s voice behind me. But didn’t. Less because he’d had a change of position on the matter, more because he’d ducked off to the slashers for some flood relief of his own. Surprisingly enough he’d elected not to test out the bus shelter. And there I was thinking these overseas tours were supposed to be about trying out new cultural experiences. When in Rome, do as the Romans. When in Gent, urinate on bus shelters.

“I think our egos can cope with the imposition,” I began, “depending on the dates…”

Lena frowned. “Yeah. I’ll admit, it’s a bit tight.”

“As the actress said to the bishop,” chirped Bear, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Quiet from the cheap seats,” Lena said with a smirk.

“I offered to cling wrap the fucker,” I said, “can’t ask more than that…”

Valiantly steering the discussion back on-message, Lena threw out the dates: March 27 for the Brisbane Riverstage show, and for the EQNZ gig in the Auckland Town Hall, they were thinking a month after the big shake. So, March 22 then.

“Erm… that’s next Tuesday,” Bear noted.

“Yeah it is, a bit.”

“That’s very tight.”

“That’s what she said,” I offered. Just to stay in the spirit of things.

D scratched thick fingers through his stubble. “That’s not happening,” he assessed. One look at our schedule - which in a remarkable bout of proper prior planning and preparation put into place to prevent piss-poor performance, I’d remembered to load onto my Jesus Phone - indicated he was bang-on. Next Tuesday we were dropping the hire car back in Brussels and taking Eurostar to St Pancras (or 'Saint Pancreas' as Hollywood kept calling it), while Davros, the trucks and the boys were on the ferry from Ostend to Ramsgate in Kent. Saturday, the 27th, we were playing a two-hander with Marty and friends in Hammersmith. None of which was conducive to being on the Fooies’ undercard at the same time.

“Damn shame,” I conceded.

“I’ve been talking with Danno,” Lena said. “We could, feasibly, bin the first week in London, reschedule for after SXSW…” Her own expression suggested she wasn’t buying into what she was selling.

Neither was Bear. He contemplated the dregs of his Guinness. “What’s a nice politically correct way of saying ‘charity support gigs are fair enough but we’ve busted our arses to get traction in England and I’m fucked if I’m going to endanger that just to be on Dave Grohl’s undercard’?”

“If we’re gonna do something,” mused D, “we should be doing it on our terms. Not anyone else’s. Like we do with Tractorfest.”

“That’s the point I was trying to make,” Bear grinned. Then a spark of realisation. “Tractorfest.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely, Tractorfest,” I agreed. “Absolutely made for it.”

“We’re way ahead of you,” Lena said with a smile. “Aroha already has wheels-in-motion on that.”
Tractorfest this year was in August, at Carisbrook as per usual (scheduled to be the last ever event held there before the old ground’s decommissioning), and as usual with proceeds to the Cancer Society of NZ, though as it turned out Aroha already had in-principle support from them to switch this to the Red Cross Canterbury Earthquake Fund. I’d long ago figured out that any good idea I thought I’d had, one of the women in my life had already thought of it. But occasionally they let me take credit for it.

“Sorted,” nodded D.

“What’s sorted?” remarked Hollywood, returning from his ablutions.

“We’re not playing support to the Foo Fighters next week,” Bear said.

“No shit,” sneered Hollywood. “We’re not playing support to anyone next week. Hayabusa don’t play fuckin’ undercards. Any other breaking news about bands we’re not playing with next week?”

“So that’s all you called to say, at stupid o’clock in the morning over there… that we’re not playing the Foo Fighters support gig?”

“Just wanted to let you know the offer had been made,” Lena demurred. “It’s what management is meant to do. And it’s not quite stupid o’clock. Quarter to stupid o’clock maybe.”

“You should get to bed,” Bear suggested.

“What, so she’s well-rested when you drunkenly Skype her arse after the show tonight?”

“No comment,” Bear said with a grin.

“Speaking of not commenting… there is a bit of a shitfight about to erupt over here, which is the other thing I called to say. More of an Angus problem than anything…”

“Shitfights are my speciality.”

“My shitfights are my trademark…” giggled Hol. Some day, we’d go through an entire 24 hour period without one of us quoting Spinal Tap. At which point it’d be time to end the band, as the music and the magic would have died.

While the rest of the boys chose their moment to back gracefully out of the convo in case delicate stuff was at hand, I was busy ratcheting through my mind as to all the possible shitfights I could have instigated, past and present, which would need mopping up. I hadn’t said anything particularly libellious online recently, that I could remember. Hadn’t punched any photographers or abused any tabloid hacks. Hadn’t been photographed inappropriately with another woman since the contents of Annalise Crittenden’s cameraphone had been ‘borrowed’ by her ex a few years ago. (The photos had come out on the net to large rounds of Who Gives A Shit seeing as though you couldn’t identify either girl involved, and my only public pronouncement on the issue had been ‘And what exactly were you hoping for from your rock and roll artists, Australia - a life of celibacy and quiet fucking contemplation?’ Annalise had kept her sense of humour over the incident - well, we were following each other on Twitter anyway. She was a second year design student at Newcastle Uni, which meant our occasional gigs at the Bar on the Hill were well-staffed with pretty young design student things. Nice if you were into that sort of thing.) Couldn’t think of any other booby-traps from back in the day likely to rear up and bite me in the arse. The newsreader from Adelaide who I hadn’t slept with had settled out-of-court with her hubby and was back reading the news in Honkers for CNN or BBC Asia or whoever it’d been - unless she had a book coming out, and I’d barely warrant more than two or three paras let alone a chapter, so that was hardly going to constitute a looming tabloid shitfight. The copper with who’d I’d exchanged words, punches and nervous glances from the wrong end of a police-issue Glock was now a clean, calm and confidently queer Qld Police community worker dealing with at-risk youths in the Valley and surrounding bits of inner-city Brisbane. Which also made him very well placed to flick me the odd Twitter heads-up about new up-and-coming bands he’d seen playing on his travels. Exocet were considering putting him on retainer as their talent spotter on the ground. Even if he was a bit too into that fucking horrible ‘80s buzz synth and Casiotone drum effect shite for my liking. As was everyone at Triple J. Point remained, though, that his cousin Emma had been right all along: he was a brilliant kid.

“What’s up?” I’d asked Lena, somewhere amidst all the self-searching. Except, I belatedly realised, I wasn’t looking at Lena any more, as she’d swivelled the laptop through thirty degrees on the desk in front of her. I was looking at a bloke with a salt-and-pepper beard - more salt than pepper, admittedly - and a receding hairline of similar tone hidden behind a truckers’ cap, with all the seamless stealth of a resounding fart in a packed elevator. The truckers’ cap featured the old-school logo of Dell’Orto Carburatori - sort of like ‘Holley Equipped’ for Italian bike fans - and had last been seen flopped down over the eyes of his young bloke Andy by Your Correspondent on our last visit to his corner of the land, some months ago.

“Hello my son,” said Sam McCarthy. “How’ve you been?”

“I bin good,” I said. “How you wheelie bin?”

He groaned. “Bloody hell, that’s a Dad joke…”

“You’d know,” I pointed out.

“That’s true,” he nodded. “But your time will come soon enough.”

“Oh, fuck that. We’re having too much fun. Talk to us in five or ten years.”

“That’s Beth’s position,” Sam mused, “is it?”

“Word for word,” I grinned. “That, and also that if and when we do have kids I’m not to steal their stuff and wear it as my own.”

McCarthy laughed, tipping the brow of the Dell’Orto hat. “Won it fair and square,” he insisted. “All’s fair in love, war and Uno.”

“You’d have had to cheat to beat him, he’s pretty shit-hot.”

“He is,” McCarthy agreed with a broad smile. “Cunning as a fox. Can’t be trusted. No idea who he gets that from...”

A blonde head loomed into frame, sideways. Kate’s ironic smirk was unmistakeable, even canted over 90 degrees with her mumsy ponytail dangling below. “Can you stop encouraging him, you think? It’s bad enough this other one’s lobbed in, it’s like Tweedledum and Tweedledumber...”

“That’s my girl,” McCarthy remarked. “Always knows where the cameras are…”

Kate shot him a dirty look. The kind of dirty look I’d have liked to be fired in my direction, truth be told. Depended whether Beth was on Skype when I got off. Stage, I mean. Ahem. Kate exeunted stage left and we were back to Sam and Lena, who’d sidled into shot as he’d repositioned the laptop between them.

“Actually, truth be told, he gave it to me. Reckoned I was the only person I knew with a head as big as yours.”

“And a need to cover up his bald spot…”

“Like I say, your time will come soon enough…”

“Yeah yeah.”

“That lot don’t give contracts to washed up rock stars, only washed up cricketers.”

“I preferred him when he had a head injury,” I remarked in Lena’s direction. “You couldn’t tighten the brim on that thing and see if you can pop a few stitches from Christmas?”

McCarthy had spent his Christmas in the workshop getting a service, or so he explained it to little Maggie and Andy. By ‘workshop’ he meant the neuro ward of a discreet WA private hospital, and by ‘getting a service’ he meant having his skull cracked open (again) to scoop out a jellied slug of clotted blood, the size of your thumbnail (if you had thumbs like D’s), which had slowly built up between the frontal lobe and the pair of titanium plates holding the front of his skull together. The leaking artery had been tapped, McCarthy’s titanium inner liner had been reassembled around his wobbly grey bits, and everyone crossed fingers they’d get the old Sam McCarthy back.

And they did. Thing was, as we discovered in January when we cruised up to say hi, after our New Years show on Rottnest - in no way scheduled just to give us an excuse to be in the area when he came out of inhospitable, because he’d have chucked his toys had he known - it wasn’t the old Sam McCarthy they got back. It was the old, old Sam McCarthy who began to make himself known. Not the scrambled-but-likeable doddery old bloke we’d come to know over the past couple of years since his ghost had floated to the surface of Lake Wakatipu, and certainly not the sullen, histronic, preening egotistical cunt he’d been prior to that. No, this was the old, old, old Sam McCarthy. Sharp. Funny. Insufferable smartarse. And my best mate in the world. He was also, though Kate would have been loathe to admit it, a better functioning father to her kids. To the point where she kinda wanted him to be father to more of them, or at least get better at practicing the bit at the start of the process, judging by the increasing number of nights she was sleeping over these days. “Is this part of the approved rehab process?” I’d asked him over coffee at his place, out of Kate’s earshot. He spent quite some time just staring after her, in quiet contemplation, or maybe captivation.“Christ, I hope so,” he concluded.

We’d cruised up the WA coast in Thor The Almighty - our Barry Norton-built Hemi Pacer, which these days had its own shipping crate and was as much part of our on-tour ensemble as the lights, amps, axes or Davros’ unholy army of incredibly bad shirts from the 1972 collection of Yves St Vincent De Paul. (Though we had blanched at taking Thor to Europe, just in case he scared the locals, or blinded oncoming truckies with his fuck-off hazard-orange paintjob, or someone actually asked us to pay for filling the Bathurst-spec tank at Euro prices. Unfortunately, Davros had brought his Suitcase of Shame.) Thor proved that our Uncle Sam wasn’t quite back to the old, old, old (you get the picture) Sam McCarthy, because we let him take it for a spin on a quiet stretch of Highway 1, and he conspicuously failed to crash it into anything, or do circlework in the dirt, or even get it out of third gear. Still, it was early days in the rehab process.

“And why do I get the impression this shitfight I’m being warned about has something to do with you, Uncle Sam?”

“That’s profiling,” he insisted. “I’m always getting blamed for this stuff. Is it becoz I is grey?” He grinned. “Yeah, actually it’s probably because I’ve finally been rumbled. Been getting a bit lazy, the man’s finally onto me. Or rather Today Tonight and ACA…”

“Oh, fucking tops,” I remarked. “That’s gonna be fun.”

McCarthy shrugged. “It’s manageable. Got the bastards into a bidding war for the exclusive. Occasionally useful, this media manager of yours…”

Lena elbowed him gently, as cracking him across the recently-rewelded bonce was probably not a good look in front of his missus. “Safe to say whoever loses is going to do a total fucking smear job though, hence the warning.”

“Hmmm, poo will impact Mistral fairly shortly then.”

“I did say it was going to be a shitfight,” Lena reminded me tartly.

“Probably just as well we’re out of the country then,” I noted. “Mr Young could not be reached for comment. Or Mr di Biagini. And Mr Duff didn’t say anything that could be interpreted as coherent comment…”

Which wasn’t really fair, to be honest. Sure, Phil did still go through more drugs than the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and Keith Richards combined (given he’s backed off a bit in his dotage after his own run-in with neurosurgery fun-times) but he’d managed to get his shit together fairly impressively. He’d ploughed his renewed share of Gasket royalties (given a big kick along by In The Worst Possible Taste et al) into buying back Firstlight studios in Byron, which with the subsequent closure of other nearby studios such as Sound Investment in Brisbane - back to being a Cohen-Lewis commercial real estate office, to nobody’s particular surprise - was now getting plenty of work for itself and its chief producer/engineer-in-residence. Hell, we’d cut our statement-of-intent EP Holley Equipped (a rather nice nod from the boys to the new kid) and our late-2009 comeback album Maximum Attack there, and had a couple of weeks booked in June to work on tracks for our newie, which would have a title just as soon as we could match up suitably lurid lyrics to any or all of the blistering riffs we’d invented in the rehearsal shed in the past six months. (We did have a provisional title - Cashing Satan’s Cheques With My Dick In My Hand, based on a line from an old Monster Magnet song. Unsurprisingly, Aroha hated it. As Aroha hating stuff was traditionally Tractor’s personal measure of artistic excellence, we thought it was a good omen.) The Mess Hall and Wolfmother had been working up there late last year, and the place was also operational HQ for New Indie Sensations (trademark, patent pending) and Triple J darlings-du-jour The Fangs - because to be Triple J endorsed New Indie Sensations these days you needed to be ‘The’ somethings (we’d done a Live At The Wireless set in the Ultimo studios in mid-2010 as ‘The Hayabusas’, which had amused at least two people in the building.) The Fangs had put together their J Award winning debut album ‘Bleedthrough’, which had been played and played until its arsehole was smoking (and until pretty much every single off the thing was bothering the top half of the Hottest 100) at Firstlight. Which wasn’t that surprising given that the Fangs’ drummer - on the dusty old electronic drumkit from 1987 he’d bought from a second hand music store in Newy about ten years ago, and which we never let him play with us - was one Philip Duff. And the other member of the dubious duo, on 80’s synth, theremin and electric viola, depending on her mood? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count. The Duffer might have hated bleedthrough in the recording studio, but he and Joey seemed to cope with it on Triple J and Nova every hour...

(We loved bleedthrough, us. More the recording artefact than the album, to be honest - we usually made Duffer drag out his old 1975 eight-track desk from storage in the shed behind Firstlight and record us all in the one room thrashing everything louder than everything else and bleeding all over the place like a haemophiliacs’ convention - but after all these years, he’d grown to put up with the abject lack of purity of purpose in the recording studio shown by the likes of myself, Mr McCarthy and our Hayabusan friends.)

“The other thing you might want to think about,” McCarthy considered, “is getting a certain manuscript tidied up and packed off to Unky Dan’s publishing house…”

That was Maggie and Andy’s Unky Dan he was referring to, not Dan Murphy, in case you were wondering. The book which I wasn’t writing, and neither was Lena, ended up being written, as you may have worked out. Kinda self-fucking-evident you might have even said, given you’re reading it. It’d been written over the previous couple of years, mostly by me, partly by Lena - the bits she’d already written while claiming she wasn’t writing one…

“Yeah, it might help if a certain editor pulled finger and got his revisions back to me?”

…and edited by the one who had the most time on his hands, in between writing childrens’ songs and bringing up a couple of absolutely smashing kids. Took me aback when he offered to do it, but he wanted to. Wasn’t like he could remember, so he was happy to have someone explain it to him. And he was pretty good about the content, given quite a bit of it (as you will have by now noted) made him out to be a monumental cunt. Then again, you should have seen the shit he made me leave out. Seriously, it’d burst a blood vessel in your brain.

Erm, yeah. Sorry about that, boudreux. All for the best, yeah?

“Yup, I’m onto it,” he nodded. “More than I have been for a while, truth be told.”

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, how the fuck did you end up getting rumbled?”

“Yeah, not sure. Probably a bit of everything. Just being a bit too conspicuous, getting a bit slack with covering my tracks… being in Perth for the operation... just being more visible around town, picking the kids up from school… a certain blonde parking her car over here more often…”

“And four big-shot rock star wankers prancing around town in the General Lee for a week,” a voice off-screen shot back, “like, that was never going to attract any attention, was it?”

McCarthy laughed. “Course not. It’s not like Kalbarri’s a small country town where people would notice that sort of shit.”

Careful readers may have noted McCarthy just fucked up editing out the name of the nearest town to his WA coastal hideout, which probably has something to do with the fact we were at this point about a day and a half from tabloid journos descending on the place en masse and blowing the secret to hell anyway.

“Actually,” he went on to explain, “what it is, really, is that Anne had to let one of the girls go from Superfun, because she’d become completely unworkable - too much clubbing, too many drugs, too many tabloid headlines. And of course she’s cracked the shits royally and is demanding royalties for the songs she claims she’s contributed to writing. Which is fuck all of none, unless you count consistently singing half a tone flat as rewriting the melody.”

“If that’s the case, Phil had a hand in writing everything we ever let him sing on.”

“Anyway, she’s chucked her toys, shacked up with an ex - who’s one of Rupert’s trained attack dogs at the Australian, and we know how much he loves Gasket...”

“What, he’s not let bygones be bygones?”

“What was the song title again… ‘Gis our Bunnies back Murdoch you farken worthless carhnt?’”

“Words to that effect. So this kid has been sniffing around?”

“Not really a kid, he’s fifty-odd. More a sugar daddy. Not a surprise, ‘Daddy issues’ was her code name among the crew. They’d given them all codenames, you know what bastards crew guys are. ‘Captain Autotune’… ‘Jazz Hands’… ‘Liberace’s Revenge’… ‘Listing to Starboard’…”

“Huh?”

“Dodgy boob job,” he explained, miming the effect with his hands. “Not quite a matching set.”

Naturally, decorum and fairness (and the threat of a considerable lawsuit) prevents us from naming which member of the long-defunct Superfun ensemble matches which nickname. Best to look up an album cover on Google Image Search and have a guess. More fun for everyone that way.

“Long story short,” Lena explained, “the Oz followed the royalties, much as you and I did. Took them two years to catch up. Presumably his angle was going to be ‘why the fuck are these poor performers being ripped off by this disgusting evil media conglomerate that isn’t OUR disgusting evil media conglomerate’ but the queries he’s started to put to Fyfe’s people about who’s being paid and who actually writes the songs… he’s not far off joining the dots, put it that way.”

Sam offered a cynical smirk. “If he compares notes with the local paper editor who was doing a talk at Andy and Maggie’s school about how newspapers are made - badly, in his case - and who was asking Andy where he’d got that hat from a motorbike dealers in Brisbane, then he’ll be a lot closer to doing so.”

“What, you think a big-noting hack from the Oz would lower himself to comparing notes with someone from the semi-retarded Community Newspapers side of the Murdoch family?” Lena laughed.

“True.” It was always fun watching old bitter ex-journos sledging the fuck out of their former profession. Even from the other side of the world.

“So, basically you lot are going to pre-empt the whole thing?” I interpreted.

“Fuck yeah. If anyone’s getting to break the story, it’s not going to be fucking Rupert, it’ll be Unky Dan’s boys.” McCarthy glanced across at Lena. “Or girls…”

Lena mimed making herself sick. Three guesses, and the first two didn’t count…

“How is Kas, anyway?” I laughed.

“Fabulous, or so I’ve heard. Single again. Tell Hol he’s probably half a chance, as long as he leaves his mate and the pharma-grade blow out of the equation…”

We both knew he’d forgotten that story about Hol and Kas Casoli until he re-read it while editing an early draft of this, and proceeded to laugh until he almost went number ones in his tracksuit pants.

“She’s on her way up here. Should be a laugh. She has no idea what they’ve sent her up here for, other than supposedly to interview one of my exes for a piece on the tenth anniversary of Skank Factor Nine being released.”

“Fuck me. Is it really ten years since the Skank?”

“Next month. I think. Why the hell are you asking me, I’m the one with the hole in his head where his brain tried to ooze out…”

“So Fyfe’s magazine gets the scoop, Fyfe’s NZ papers get the syndication…”

“Pretty much. Probably come through Fairfax here, they’re as close to an ally as Unky Dan’s have in the local market...”

“And ACA and Today Tonight get in a bidding war for the exclusive interview.”

“Yup. Fuck it, it’ll all go to the earthquake appeal anyway, the more we can squeeze out of the bastards the better.”

“...And Fyfe’s publishing house gets the full story in book form...”

“Eventually. Unless a certain prima donna autobiographer decides he wants to put yet another chapter onto the bloody thing, of course...”

“And you get sent to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison,” I frowned. “For faking your own death, tax evasion and probably a bunch of other shit. Please tell me that thought’s occurred to you? Cos I don’t want to be the cunt who has to break it to you that this could all go horribly fucking wrong, mate. You sure you know what you’re doing on this”

McCarthy nodded, solemnly. “Yeah. Believe me, I’ve given it a lot of thought. As much as anything I’ve ever done... talked it through with Kate, with Anne, with Dan, with the folks. Thing is, I’ve personally not committed any crime, not in Australia anyway. And as for New Zealand… it’s complicated, yeah, but I’m pretty confident we’ll be sweet. I plan to be around for Kate and the kids long-term. I wouldn’t be rolling the dice on that.”

“Unless those dice were heavily loaded in your favour.”

He smirked, just a little. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I coughed. “Two million dollar donation to the earthquake appeal, wasn’t it?”

“Two and a half,” McCarthy corrected me. “Two-five-oh-four, I think it was. A thousand each on behalf of every one of Fyfe’s employees in New Zealand. Hand-delivered yesterday, in big-fuck-off novelty-cheque form by Unky Dan Fyfe himself, to the office of Prime Minister John Key…”

“…His old mate from primary school in Christchurch.”

“That may be the case,” McCarthy said, now sporting a lot more than just a stifled smirk, “but I couldn’t possibly comment.”

To which I could only laugh. A joyous, cathartic laugh, which confused the fuck out of most of the Belgians in the square. Fuck me, he was going to get away with it. Thank Christ. Those awesome little kids would keep their dad, and we’d still have our old mate.

“So yeah,” he continued, “about this Tractorfest gig you guys are talking about. Wanted to get your thoughts on pulling double duty?”

“What, you mean doing one in Brisbane too?” I said. “That’s actually not a bad idea…”

“Yeah actually that is a good idea,” said the guy who’d come up with it, apparently without realising it. “Play the RNA or somewhere, old-school Livid styles. Cross between Livid and the National Festival of Beers. Do they still make Kent Old Brown?”

“Don’t think so mate. Went the way of the dinosaur when CUB sold off Broadway.”

“Those cunts,” he said, channelling Peter Cook for a moment. “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Aroha and Lena are probably already onto it though.” Lena nodded slowly, with a smile on her face. “…See? And yeah, that wasn’t really what I had in mind… when I said pulling double duty, I’d kinda meant you playing in two bands. Yours… and ours.”

“Faaaarrrk.”

“No. I think that’d be unsightly. People would donate money to make you stop…”

“I mean… are you thinking what I’m thinking…”

“…B1? Might be, B2. I’m thinking we give Gasket one more go-round… or two, depending on geography. Except this time with the full complement of cunts present and correct.”

“You’re very sweary at this hour of the night.”

“I blame you. I’m not usually up at this hour of the night. Look, I might have already tapped a few on the shoulder. Daniela’s already cleared Marty’s schedule, and Phil’s told You Am I he’ll leave the keys under the mat and to help themselves to the beer fridge cos not a fuck is he going to be around when they rock up in mid-August. Just need a Young One for the string section. Don’t make me phone your bloody brother, Beck will kick my arse from here to Broadwater.”

He was up for it, which was my last remaining doubt gone. If he believed he could handle it - thirty thousand screaming punters, blazing spotlights, the lot - then I believed he could handle it. He was headed into some stormy weather as it was, with the tabloid press about to descend on his doorstep, so he was in for some interesting times anyway. His medication intake had dramatically slown since surgery, he had his old spark back, and he was a fair-to-middling chance of being able to step onto New Zealand soil without being arrested. He was backing himself. That was good enough for me. Last doubt gone.

Last but one, anyway. I was, after all and above all, a member of Hayabusa. This was my band, these were my boys. That was how it worked. One for all and all for one, the Eagles fly till the job is done. Can’t remember where I’d heard that piece of philosophy, but it was many decades old, and it still rang true. Sure, this Tractorfest thing was just a one-off (or perhaps a two-off), there was no question that Gasket were coming back from the dead permanently - we all had better things to do with our time, other people we wanted to play stuff with. In McCarthy’s case, what he wanted to play was Lego, with his kids - although I had a sneaky suspicion Sam would end up liking the spotlight again, albeit at a lower intensity of Lux. It didn’t take much of a mental leap to see him performing the sort of stuff he was into now - fun little songs for kids of Maggie and Andy’s age, like an updated Don Spencer or a Peter Combe from when we were kids. He loved doing it, there was a market for it, it was a no-brainer. Even if he was lucky not to be one himself. (That said, when the Superfun Sam album came out in July, and he went out on tour with his acoustic in hand and family in tow, I realised I should have put money on it. If only Centrebet had been running odds…)

Anyway, point being, this wasn’t going to usurp Hayabusa - it was never likely to - but I still had to say it. “Shit, mate, I dunno. I’ll have to ask the boys…”

“He’s in,” growled Bear with a grin, slapping a paw on my shoulder and another beer onto the table next to the laptop. “Just try to give him back in approximate fuckin’ working order, he’s got a shitload of new stuff to remember for later in the night…”

“So are you in?”

“Of course I’m fucking in,” I blurted. “Only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“The manuscript,” I realised. “We’ll need to add another chapter.”

Sam McCarthy thought for a bit.

“Oh, bollocks to that,” he said. “They can buy the DVD.”

The End

Postscript: Shake Appeal, the double live DVD of Flange Gasket and Hayabusa’s joint headline show at Tractorfest 2011, Carisbrook, is now available through Exocet Records, a division of FPB Music - because Richie had to chuck it in and sell up eventually or Danno’s mum would have divorced him. All proceeds go to the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal. (The proceeds of the DVD sales, not of Richie’s divorce.) Greg Richardson’s new book, ‘Five Dollar Cover Charge My Arse: My 30 Years In Australian Rock Music’ will be released through Fyfe Publishing just as soon as the hairy bastard stops gallivanting about the Whitsundays on his big fuck-off boat with his missus and gets around to writing the thing. We’re figuring sometime late 2019.