In memory of Chrissy Amphlett...

Dear Chrissy,


For a long time there, whenever your name came up in conversation, people would say "Is it true she pissed on stage once?"

This would infuriate me.

I understand every great rock star must have a surrounding mythology. But it seems unfair that Bob Dylan gets to be the eternal rambler and Jimmy Page the dark master of witchcraft while you got to be the woman who peed in public.

But that apocryphal widdle is unimportant, always was. It's an annoying example of how our brains remember the sensational. It's not their fault, it's in the wiring.

When people would say that (and thankfully I think that era passed long ago), I would answer in different ways:

"Is it true she pissed on stage once?"
What's true is that she fronted a hard rock band in the early 80s when it was almost unheard of for a woman to do so. They did rough-as-guts pub gigs in venues bikies were afraid of making a scene in. And she owned those rooms.

"Is it true she pissed on stage once?"
I don't know but she is one of the greatest singers to front a band in history. Bon Scott, Robert Plant, Mick Jagger, Chrissie Amphlett. She's right there on the list.

"Is it true she pissed on stage once?"
Shut up. Her voice is incredible. Theatrical but not melodramatic, a perfect mix of chaos and control.  She is one of the greats. Don't you get it?  It's irrelevant. STOP IT!!!

I  first heard your voice when I was about eight.  My family was living in the residency of a tiny country school at a place called "Clintonvale." There were 19 students in total, and one teacher who was my Dad.

It was a sheltered Catholic community.  When my classmate Danny Ramsey brought a Gene Simmons KISS mask to school, a group of the school's leading personalities announced it was the work of the devil and buried it under the library.

I remember being home one lunchtime and Dad blasting "Boys In Town" on the stereo. He was pacing up and down and rhapsodising about  the simple, punchy lyrics of "Boys In Town." About how a stream of mostly one syllable words perfectly tell the singer's story: "Get this bus in top gear / get me out of here…"

To me a perfect song is one where the singer's persona and the lyrics of a  create and strengthen each other.  "Boys In Town" and all of the other songs on the "Monkey Grip" EP are brilliant examples of this. After listening to the album you come away with a sense of a person who is using a tough exterior to cover an incredible vulnerability. Someone who is at once innocent and world weary. Fearless and damaged.

The world that these lyrics spoke of was one of inner-city excess and desperation. Of drugs and sex and heartbreak. All adult stuff, all fascinating and mysterious and a universe away from Clintonvale.

I loved the Monkey Grip record, and above all the others I loved the song "Elsie". It is a hypnotic portrait of a desperate woman living in a seedy flat in Melbourne. Obviously you know this, having written it...

"She just sleeps all day in her squalid little slum
and takes little white pills to make her body feel all numb
and it's dark and dirty and there's nothing left to eat
And in her heart there's a feeling of defeat
Smells of bugs and fornication
And a bottle of cheap scent"

In the nightmarish reprise, you scream over and over, "Open the door, Wally! Open the fucking door!" I had no idea who Wally was or why he was opening the door but it scared the living shit out of me.

A few years later we moved to the regional town of Toowoomba. Puberty hit me and turned everything upside down. I was being crushed by an ocean of horniness. I forgot about your music for a while. Iron Maiden seemed to voice more accurately my concerns - things like the ancient Egyptians, samurais and the problems facing a WWII flying ace.

Then one day I was home sick  from school and saw that the movie of Monkey Grip was on TV. I hadn't realised your Monkey Grip EP was a soundtrack of a movie that was an adaptation of a book. Imagine my surprise when I saw Noni Hazelhurst off Play School was playing the lead role. Imagine my surprise when Noni took all her clothes off. I vigorously and repeatedly reevaluated my ideas about Noni and then, afterwards, renewed my acquaintance with the appropriately titled Monkey Grip album.

Late one night on Rage the "Boys In Town" music video came on. You were everything a fourteen year old boy dreamed of. You posed and pouted and jeered and played with your skirt.

Around the time I was sixteen you released the single "I Touch Myself." It wasn't as hard edged as your previous material, and so I didn't like it as much, despite being able to relate to the lyrics.

One night I was reading George Orwell's 1984 and found the line "bugs and fornication" in it. It's a memorable pairing of words and I recognised it instantly as being out of the song "Elsie." I suddenly had this weird feeling of seeing one of your songs before it was written.

Fast forward twelve years or so and I had become a musician, dropped out of Uni, played in pubs and lived a lot closer to the urban squalor the Monkey Grip soundtrack paints. Through the whole time I remained a fan.

I had been seeing a girl for a couple of years, Kate, and was shocked to learn that she would be performing with you in a show called Women In Voice.

As soon as I found out you were on the bill I began to fret because I knew the day was coming when I would have to meet you. I was terrified. I began to plot ways to avoid it happening, I knew nothing good could come if it, and I would just clam up and embarrass myself and stain my whole concept of Divinyls and ruin the chance of ever enjoying your music again for the rest of my life unless it was in some masochistic way.

Anyway, one night, Kate rang me. She sounded very drunk and needed a lift home from an impromptu Women In Voice cast party. I agreed on the condition that I didn't have to come inside, as I was not yet mentally prepared to meet you.

After sitting out the front of the party with my car engine running for twenty minutes, ringing Kate over and over I realised I was going to have to go in and get her.

Inside, the members of the cast were taking turns singing unaccompanied songs to each other. The show's Director was singing a broadway tune and doing high kicks while everyone clapped along. Someone handed me a joint and without thinking I frantically smoked half of it in long, deep inhalations.

As soon as I passed the joint on, I realised I had made a terrible mistake.
A familiar panic rose in me. Everyone appeared strangely caricatured, the broadway song suddenly sinister. Fight or flight kicked in. I had to leave.

And then I looked up and you were walking towards me. You glowed. I thought meeting famous people was supposed to be surprising for how human they looked in real life. You didn't look human. Your fierce eyes. Your flaming red hair. You looked like a god.

Kate said, "This is Keir, my boyfriend. He has thousands of questions to ask you."
My mind screamed, "Not now! Not now! I am not ready!"

"Well how about you start with one," you said. You waited.
My mind went blank.

"Um. Well, now that you're actually here I can't actually think of anything." I said.

You rolled your eyes and turned to leave. Kate, seeing my big chance to meet one of my heroes was about to be lost, said the first thing that popped into her mind. She said, "Is it true you that you did a shit on stage once?"

Instead of answering Kate, you spun on your heel and fixed me with a ten thousand watt stare. "Is that all you care about?"

You walked away.

I stood there, my mind racing, trying to think of something to salvage the moment in some small way.

"Were you reading 1984 when you wrote the song 'Elsie'?"

 "What?"

"Um, I just, I was reading George Orwell, 1984 and I ah..-noticed the phrase "bugs and fornication" in it I was wondering if it was, er if you…"

I realised I was accusing you of plagiarism, "Er sorry, sorry."

But when you turned around, your expression had softened. "That song must mean a great deal to you."

What followed was like a bizarre dream, you told me all about recording the Monkey Grip record, and  Divinyls early career. When it was your turn to sing a song to the room, you chose to sing "Elsie."

You were so generous of spirit. And yes, you seemed vulnerable under a tough exterior.

Today I heard that you died, and like thousands of people around the world I am thinking about you.

I feel sad, and look to the cliches for comfort. One cliche is that you'll live on in your recordings, through all the people who listen to them. I find I believe that.

Woven through all the music that has been playing behind my life so far on car stereos, at parties, in bedrooms, smoky lounge rooms, in hateful bars and clubs and battles of the bands, by choice or just randomly, woven through all of that is your voice. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Keir

Men of Letters

Women/Men of Letters is an ongoing charity event run by Michaela Mcguire and Marieke Hardy. It raises money to support an animal shelter. It involves the lost art of letter writing. You read your letter out to a room full of nice people.

The theme for the day I participated was "A letter to the woman who changed my life."

Dear St Columba of Rieti,

I am writing to you in the hope you may be able to help me out of a bind.
I read on Wikipedia that you are the Patron Saint to turn to in matters of sorcery and witchcraft, and frankly, I hope that you will be the second woman to change my life. I will tell you about the first later.

I know it's a bit rich asking for your help, given I am not a Catholic or even baptised. 

In my defence though, I did grow up surrounded by Catholics. The country school I attended, Clintonvale State Primary, had 19 students and one teacher who was my Dad.  My family were one of three in the entire district that wasn't Catholic so I absorbed a lot of Catholicism by osmosis. For example, I still love to get drunk and feel guilty about it afterwards.

I am sure you would have approved of the pious atmosphere at Clintonvale Primary. One day my classmate Danny Ramsey brought a Gene Simmons KISS mask to school. All the other students said that KISS were devil worshippers, and that their band name stood for Knights In Satan's Service. They confiscated the mask and buried it under the library.
When Danny Ramsey protested that it was a birthday gift from his mum, we hurled large pieces of cactus at him. 

Around this time (grade three) my best friend Lawrence Ryan told me that a lady who was a devil worshipper had been jogging in the park in Warwick and one of her boobs had fallen off. When the ambulance came, they found it on the ground, full of maggots.  This definitely happened, and if you don't believe me, just ask Lawrence's Aunty, who doesn't have a phone.  

Of course St Columba, you have seen way weirder stuff than this, having raised the dead and toured the Holy Lands without your body, so I'm sure you totally get it. My point is that I was not without spiritual guidance. And I can't say I wasn't warned about the devil. 

My parents, one Atheist and one Agnostic were unaware that in Clintonvale I had started praying. I mainly prayed for Donna Cootes to love me, but I also prayed for selfless things like having a spaceship land in the school grounds and take us all for a ride.  I see that just recently the Vatican has announced it's okay to believe in aliens, so I think you'd have to agree I was way ahead of you guys on that one. 

When I was in grade six we moved to Toowoomba. I could tell it was a big city because it had a McDonalds. 

For high school my parents sent me to Toowoomba Grammar.  You'll be pleased to know that my grade eight science teacher, Mr Rudolph, was a very devout man. During one lesson on physics he told us that there was no such thing as perpetual motion - it was impossible.  Despite this, he said, two of his friends once drove all the way across the Nullabor with no petrol in their tank, just by using the power of prayer. Mr Rudolph said if we were interested in hearing more of this sort of thing, or even if we weren't but liked free pancakes, we should come to the Inter School Christian Fellowship meetings held every Tuesday lunch.
While ISCF was no where near as cool an acronym as KISS, the pancakes were a real drawcard.

At the meeting , Mr Rudolph told us the story of one of the members of his youth group. She had been walking around, smoking lots of marijuana and didn't know why. "Why are you doing that?" they asked her. "I just don't know," she would say, "I don't know why I'm doing it." 
Nobody at the youth group could work it out. Then one day they realised she had been listening to  "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen on her walkman. Hidden under the music was a backwards message that said "it's fun to smoke marijuana".

Mr Rudolph played us a video which seemed to feature my entire music collection. 
It turned out Iron Maiden, Twisted Sister, even XTC were in league with the devil. They confirmed that KISS was indeed an acronym for Knights In Satan's Service, AC/DC for Anti Christ Devil's Child and  WASP for We Are Satan's People. 

Overnight my albums had become dark and fascinating. I could feel them luring me towards evil. 

At another ISCF meeting, a mysterious guest from outside the school came. He stood at the front of the room and looked at us all. After a moment, he announced he had the power to see demons, and that he could see them right now. They were hanging off our backs and sitting on our shoulders, whispering in our ears, telling us to sin. Demons of pride and hatred and lust. 
Lust!  No wonder I was so horny! It all made perfect sense. I ate my free pancake.

Columba, I know you can relate when I say there was an internal battle going on between good and evil inside me. Throughout this time I had become obsessed with the guitar, in particular, trying to play the guitar as fast as humanly possible, with no regard for timing, dynamics or taste. The pivotal moment came when I saw the movie "Crossroads". Not that travesty starring Britney Spears. This Crossroads was all class. It was the Karate Kid with guitars.

In the movie Steve Vai plays a guitarist who has signed his soul over to the devil in exchange for the ability to shred heinously on his axe. That means "play guitar well".  I saw him and I wanted to be him. 

And here is where I got myself into a pickle, St Columba, please forgive me in advance.

I prepared a contract  between myself and the devil. In exchange for my eternal soul, I would become the best guitarist in the world in a famous rock band. I cut my finger open and signed my name in blood, then burned the contract and scattered the ashes. I had learned the finer details on how to do this from my ISCF friends.

Within months my guitar chops were blazing. Sure, I practised a lot, but it was obvious to me it was mostly the devil making good on his end of the bargain. I stopped attending the ISCF meetings and started sinning in earnest.

St Columba, I confess that I smoked a lot of cigarettes, got drunk for the first time and had sex with a post pack. I won't go into details here. 

I bought remaindered Penthouse and Playboy magazines off my friend whose parents owned a news agency and sold them at an outrageous profit  to the boarders at school. Now I could eat all the pancakes I wanted.

I must have been listening to a lot of Queen too, because pretty soon I was smoking heaps of marijuana and I didn't know why. One day the Gideons visited our school and handed out pocket sized Bibles. Me and my friend Dave discovered that their pages were the perfect size for rolling joints.
That summer I worked my way through nearly the entire Book of Revelations. 

The ISCF had made it very clear to us that sex before marriage was a big no no, but I knew those rules no longer applied to me.
Still, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop being a virgin.  

Then I met Tammy LeStrange.

I saw her after school at McDonalds hanging out with Harry Delbrige and his girlfriend. I called him up, asked him who that girl in the pink miniskirt was and could I have her number. He said he'd ask. Two hours later my phone rang. It was Tammy herself.

"So, Harry says you think I'm hot?" she said.
"Um yeah." 
"Well," she said "Do you want to have a root then?" 
 "Oh...Yes please."

I don't know why I told you that Columba. I guess I thought you might be curious, seeing as you went to your grave a virgin and all. No offence.
Please watch over Tammy.

I didn't worry too much about school, safe in the knowledge that my contract with you-know-who would soon pay off and I'd be set for life. I know what you're thinking St Columba, and you're right. They call him the devil for a reason! 
But I've always been pretty slow on the uptake. For example,  I never saw my own face in profile until I was nineteen. It was a real shock.  Similarly, I didn't realise that the devil wasn't living up to his end of the bargain until I was thirty. 

I was already three years older than Hendrix, Joplin, and Kurt Cobain had been when they died.

The bands I had played in over the years: Uncle Stinky, More, Funk Me Dead, Cradle, Seethe, Eat Biscuits, GACK, Dogmachine, Earthfish and Complicated Game had all either broken up, failed or no longer required my services. 

Now I was in a band called Transport. We were all ageing, and saw it as our last shot at the big time. To show our dedication we got band tattoos.Transport had gotten further than any other band I'd been in:  we had a song on high rotation on Triple J and a real manager. She got me a meeting with the music publisher and ex-member of Icehouse Keith Welsh. I was pretty excited, thinking it might lead to a big break for us. Keith shook my hand, looked me in the eye and said "You're past your use-by date."  

I didn't know it at the time but I had already fallen in love with the woman who would completely change my life. Katie was also a struggling musician. After much debate about mixing business and pleasure, I started playing guitar for Katie and writing some songs with her. When she needed a whole new backing band, Transport stepped in. Over the next couple of years her success grew and grew.

Often, Transport would play an early show backing Kate in front of a sold out crowd and then go to another venue and play our own show to five bored punters. Kate got a record deal while Transport maxed out our drummer's credit card touring the country playing to nobody. The day Kate was presented with her first gold record, I watched all my dreams come true, but not for me.  

Look,  I'm not complaining in any way.  I 'm extremely grateful. If it wasn't going to happen for me, having it happen for the person I love most in the world is the next best thing. And I still get to play guitar and write songs for a living, which, let's face it, is like having won the lotto. 

But as I get older, my own certain death has become less of a concept, and more of a feeling in my spinal column.
St Columba,  I'm not sure if I believe that lady's boob fell off in Warwick, or if prayer can run a car as well as petrol or if there are demons hanging off all of us making us sin. I don't know if there really is someone called the devil, and I'm not sure you can even read this letter. But, for some reason, it's not hard for me to believe I might have a soul. Please can you help me get it back ?

I've reviewed the small print in my contract with the devil, and I think I have a good case. It said and I quote "I will become the best guitarist in the world" unquote , and quote "in a famous rock band" unquote. My wife Katie has attained a B grade level of fame at best and plays pop music, not rock. And Steve Vai is still the best guitarist in the world. I think you'll agree, the devil didn't honour his contract.

I'm sorry, no, I don't have a copy, I burned it.

Yours faithfully,

Keir

The Solemn and The Epic

Two contrasting Flaming Lips performances of the same song.

When I Was A Boy...

When I was a boy the idea that you could ever print your own t-shirt at home was unimaginable. You could get your own shirt printed by a screen printers but it was prohibitively expensive. The most affordable option was t-shirts with felt lettering.

When I was a boy, pre-email, we wrote letters by hand, with a pen and posted them to our grandmothers. In one of my letters I mentioned that I admired the fretwork of a Swedish guitarist named Yngwie J. Malmsteen. 

I liked Malmsteen's playing for one reason: he played really, really fast. As a fourteen year old boy, that is all I wanted to do. Play the guitar really, really fast.

My grandmother, as thoughtful then as she is now, had a t-shirt made for me. It was blue with white felt lettering and it said "YNGWIE J MALMSTEEN." 

The first band I was ever in band was called Black Perspective. This now strikes me as being an odd name for a group of middle class white boys attending a Grammar school. But when I was a boy that kind of thing never occurred to us. I am from a pre-Simpsons generation, very earnest by modern standards.

When I was a boy Simpsons were washing machines

The other members of Black Perspective used to get very annoyed with me because I didn't care about playing chords or even making music. All I wanted to do was jump around and play really, really fast. And very loud.

This was pre-Jack Black style semi-ironic rock'n'roll celebration. This was before "...like a rockstar" became a commonplace feature of every second advertising campaign.  Rock was a tangible, knee-weakeningly cool force of nature.

Dave, the other guitarist in the band was a more refined player. He was a multi-instrumentalist and had great stylish and musical technique. His older sister was a fucking pain in the arse. 

At some point Dave had started inviting her to our band rehearsals.  She didn't even go to school. She was an adult. 

She would sit there with her silly face and make all sorts of dumb comments like, "Keir, you should stop playing guitar solos over the whole song", and "Keir, why don't you turn your amp down? I can't hear the drums." Yeah. yeah, whatever, Yoko. Way to kill the magic.

We had recruited one of the boarding school housemasters to be our singer. Colin was an athletic, straight-laced guy of about twenty. He was in the Inter-School-Christian-Fellowship. He was taking classical voice lessons. He was taking them very seriously. Especially the bit where his teacher told him,  "open the back of your throat like you are yawning." 

Colin opened his throat so wide he always had a strange look on his face when he sang - like he'd accidently swallowed a whole pickled onion. His technique also made him sound almost exactly like Fozzy Bear. And he seemed to not like pronouncing the letter "t". His delivery of Queen's "I Want it All" for example: "I wonn-id all, I won-id all, I won-id all and I won-id now."

We were entered in Toowoomba's radio 4GR Battle of the Bands. Dave's sister was of the opinion we needed a band uniform, just like The Beatles. We should all wear blue jeans and have matching band shirts. She volunteered to organise it. All we had to do was give her a white collared shirt and $7. 

On our last rehearsal before the competition Dave's sister came with our shirts. They were all adorned with the same felt lettering as my Yngwie J  Malmsteen shirt.  Big block letters across the back saying "Black Perspective." Except on mine. It said "BLACK PERPECTIVE." It was too late to change the shirt, so I just wore it.

The 4GR Battle of the Bands seemed to be nearly all old guys with long hair drinking rum and playing hard rock.  

I wonder what they made of us. Four middle class schoolboys and a fully grown man singing Jimmy Barnes' "Working Class Man" in a Fozzy Bear voice. I ran around playing loud solos on top of everything, duckwalking and sliding across the stage. I got carpet burn. On the final chord of the song, Colin attempted a theatrical jump in the air and miscalculated his landing, rolling hard on his ankle and spraining it badly, crying out in pain.

Well, when I was a boy, that's what we called rock'n'roll.

"Woah, he's a working class man. Isn't he chaps?"

The "Thing Thing"

Last year in Vancouver we played in a bar that had a chap working behind that bar and that chap had a tattooed scrotum. 

This didn't come out immediately of course. We had to get to know him first. After our show, as sometimes happens, we hung around and drank until the early hours of the morning. That was when the tattoo came up. It's probably in bad taste to post it here, but, what the hey, it's the sort of thing you just can't describe so:

(I REMOVED IT)

Anyway, it turns out that the guy with the tattoo plays in a band and they are on Nickelback's label. 

On their first meeting with Chad from Nickelback he sat them down at a big conference table. They were talking music, Chad was leaning back in his chair and the conversation is flowing. Chad says all of a sudden, "You guys hungry? Who's hungry? Who feels like eating?"

"Oh..yeah, sure, why not," they say politely.

Chad more or less snaps his fingers and his assistant comes in. Chad hands him a one hundred dollar note and says, "Hey, go and get us...twenty cheeseburgers." That's right, twenty.

"Ah, we're vegetarians," says one of the band.

Chad pays no heed and continues talking music. In no time the assistant is back and Chad upends the bag and pours all the cheeseburgers on the table and instructs the band to just go for it. That's just the way Chad rolls. 

Chad

You see, Chad likes his fast food. Actually, it's sort of a badge of honour, because before he ever made it he used to work behind the counter in McDonalds. Now Chad has made it he can buy as much of that shit as he wants.

In fact, sometimes Chad is hanging out with friends having a good time he'll say

"Anyone hungry? Whose hungry? Who feels like eating?

Then he'll say "Who wants to do the Thing Thing?"

Him and his friends will get in Chad's car and drive down to McDonalds - the same McDonalds where he used to work before he hit the big time. Chad will waltz into that McDonalds and say, "Gimme The Thing Thing"

The "Thing Thing" is what Chad calls it when you order one of every single item on the McDonalds menu. Every single thing. A small coke, A medium coke, A large coke. A small fries, A medium fries, A large fries. Et cetera. The whole menu.

Yep. Chad orders the Thing Thing, pays for it all and then him and his friends eat it. 

Keep your overpriced watches, Maseratis and champagne. Keep your bullshit status symbols.

When it comes to celebrating your success, Chad from Nickelback is the king. The king with The Thing Thing. 

Why Rebecca Black Is Better Than Your Band

The question of authenticity is a curly one. A lot of criticism leveled at any band or artist is that they're not authentic. That their motivations are suspect. That their intention is not to express themselves, but to sell records. 

Fair enough.

I demand the same from any musician I listen to. I want to know what I'm hearing is expression, not a sales pitch. Otherwise what's the point? 

I think it was Brian Eno who said that the last challenge a modern artist has is to convince the audience that his or her art is genuine. 

This is certainly true in music currently labelled "alternative".  When I watch this music I see an overwhelming amount of energy spent on appearing authentic. Guitar just messy enough to appear unplanned. Drums engineered painstakingly to sound like a lounge room recording while still having all the ballsy kick of a  Black Eyed Peas dance floor hit.

Don't get me wrong...I love these guys, they just look the part.

Much of this alternative music is just as sales-driven as any mainstream pop. The difference is pop doesn't try and disguise its motives. It earnestly strives to connect with as many people as possible. It doesn't hold itself up as high art. 

Both are constructed in the same way, framed in identical three and a half minute song structures. In other words, it's all just pop music. The difference is, one branch of pop is preoccupied with proving how totally not-pop it is. 

Which brings me to Rebecca Black and her viral hit "Friday."

Rebecca Black is a thirteen year old girl who like many other thirteen year olds dreams of being a pop star. Her song "Friday,"  is so transparent it may as well be about a thirteen year old girl who dreams of being a pop star, rather than ...partying, partying, fun, fun, fun, fun.  

"I'm a negative creep! I'm a negative creep! I'm a negative creep and I'm stoned!"

Millions of people around the world are sharing this tune (73 million (?!) at last count). They are sneering at it, ridiculing it and comparing it to the "authentic" artists they listen to. 

But when I watch "Friday" I see something that is so lacking in self-consciousness that it is refreshing. It's clumsy, it's pure, it's naive, and it's joyful. It's the kind of music people make when they don't know any better. It reminds me of making music when I was thirteen years old. In a word it's authentic. Not even the vanity label her parents paid to produce it could disguise the truth of it.

One thing is for sure: it's way more authentic than the work of a lot of musicians currently shitting on it.

Do I think it's clever or insightful or relevant to me? Fuck no. I never need to hear it again. But I'm not thirteen.  

And there is not a single shot of a laundromat in the whole clip.

"It's like...you know...we're hot but we have to still do our own washing?"

Brooksy's First Gig

Our 80s covers band, Space Invaders had been working up a version of one of my favourite pop songs: "Counting The Beat" by The Swingers. For sheer joyous, knee knocking, angular rickenbacker guitar pop abandon you just can't beat it. 

We'd never played in Caboolture, but we'd heard about it. Years later I was lucky enough to work with a brilliant session drummer from LA called Pete Macneal (he played on our Fatty Gets A Stylist record.) When he was touring once he landed in Australia and was whisked straight to Caboolture. The first thing he saw upon arriving there was a giant billboard with somebody's mangled face, telling people not to glass each other whilst at the pub. "Where am I?" he asked himself.

Pete MacNeal (from Mike Doughty's blog)

Later, Pete went out for a walk and within no time was followed by three angry young drunks with bottles. They announced that he was going to get the fuck punched out of him.

Now, Pete Macneal is from LA.  LA doesn't have a reputation for being the friendliest or most crime free place in the world. But Pete Macneal had never encountered a situation like this.  

Not knowing what to do, he turned around, looked the alpha of the three males squarely in the eye and said firmly, "Where I come from, when someone wants to fight you with a bottle it means they want to kill you. So while I am not the biggest or strongest guy in the world , if we're going to fight, I'm going to fight you to the death."

The Caboolturans were suitably impressed by Pete's balls and the situation was disarmed.

So Space Invaders were booked to play the Caboolture RSL. Backstage before we went on the director of security said, "Any trouble I'm right here." Both reassuring and somehow unsettling.  There were about eighty people in a wooden room that could probably fit 800 people at a Noiseworks reunion show.

Wickety Wack kill it at the Caboolture RSL

We took to the stage and the DJ faded the break music. A couple of people made sounds of disappointment at their Pearl Jam being removed.  Most people just kept talking.

A giant lumberjack looking man near the front stood up, arms folded. His head was huge, red, hairy and scowling.

We decided to open with our freshly prepared rendition of "Counting The Beat." Halfway through the song I could feel us riding along on top of the music. With the repeat of the outro the whole band sang the tune joyously as one: "La Da-Di Dah! La Da-Di Dah! "

We sounded huge. We peaked, yelling the tune."LA DA-DI DAH! LA DA-DI DAH!! " We hit the final, tight power chord stab we'd rehearsed to end the song. Pow! Take that, audience! 

Silence.

"Faggots!" someone yelled from the back. 

Then, the sound of three polite people clapping. Then silence again. The lumberjack was furious.

There is a running joke among bands that audience members will call out "Play Khe Sanh!" or "Play some Barnsey!" the same way people in the U.S. call out "Play Freebird!"  But in all the years I'd been playing I'd never heard anyone actually yell that (unless they were being ironic.) Not so in Caboolture.

Lumberjack man, literally, I mean he literally shook his fist and screamed "Play fucking Cold Chisel! You fucking play some fucking Cold Chisel NOW!"  His face went from red to maroon. He looked as if something might prolapse. "You hear me? You fucking hear me? Play some FUCKING COLD CHISEL!!!"

I couldn't see the security guy anywhere. We had to play something, just to drown him out. We tentatively went into our version of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy"

"Here's a little song I wrote, you might like to sing it note for note, Don't Worry, Be Happy"

The man continued yelling something. Luckily the stage was about one and a half metres off the ground and that would slow him down if he tried to come after us.

It was then I saw movement from the other side of the room. A woman of 40 or so, wearing a tiny little dress was shuffling slowly towards us across the huge empty dance floor. Her skin was so tanned and dry she looked as if she had been embalmed.

She shuffled the way a little kid playing dress up walks in high heels. This was because she was so drunk she could barely walk at all. Her lips were moving and she was shaking her head and making "cut" gestures with her hands.

"Landlord says your rent is late..and he might have to litigate..."

Over the next minute or so she slowly made it to the front of the room. She was close enough now that we could hear what she was saying: "No! No! Stop it! Stop that!" 

She shuffled right up to the stage. She threw one leg up over the edge of the stage, all the time saying "Stop it! Enough!"  She clambered onto the stage, climbed onto all fours and stood up shakily. 

"Stop it! Enough! Stop!"

She shuffled up to Scotty and pressed her hands over the strings on his bass trying to make the music sounds stop. A choked noise came out.

Scotty without an embalmed woman disrupting his work.

We played on: "Don't Worry, Be Happy Woo-ooh..oohh"

The security guard had arrived was reaching up from the dance floor and trying to pull the woman away from Scotty. Scotty, the true professional just kept trying to play the song. The woman kept saying "No! No! Stop it!"

After some wrestling back and forth, the security guy managed to pull her toward him, but she lost her balance and fell forward. He half caught her as she tumbled head first of the stage and they both tumbled onto the empty dance floor.

The guy had landed on his back and was dazed for a moment.  She tried to escape. She stood for a moment, swayed and then toppled onto her knees, her head on the floor like a praying Muslim. Her skirt flew up over her shoulders. A barely concealed set of genitals peered out at us from behind the grill of a shiny black g-string. The bouncer regained his composure and rolled over to be confronted with a graphic close up.

Later while having a cigarette, he told me that image would be burned on his retinas for the rest of his life.

And that was Brooksy's first gig.