The Summer of ’82 Read online

  The outer western suburbs of Sydney were particularly scary in the early ’80s. We got off at Penrith Station and saw people just hanging around, but they didn’t seem to be waiting for a train. Some of them looked like they had Dave Mason’s flu. Tracksuits, moccasins, beanies, stretch jeans – it was all going on in Penrith.

  The locals weren’t exactly welcoming. We asked for directions and they told us to fuck off. Eventually, we walked into a newsagentcy, and the guy there gave us directions. It turned out Panthers was a giant RSL club. The band room was out the back and reminded me of The Manhattan, but bigger. This place was so big it had a petrol station in the car park.

  The Allniters did their sound check and disappeared. An Adelaide ska band called Just Kidding were also playing, but we would be the first band on. Just Kidding were really nice guys. They too were a bit freaked out by good old Penrith. We did our sound check and it was all good. There was no point going back to our luxurious accommodation, so we just hung out at Panthers.

  No state does a big RSL or sports club like New South Wales. They were a huge part of the music scene there; we were always hearing about the Oils playing the Dee Why RSL, or The Radiators starting a riot at the Rooty Hill RSL. So actually we were excited to be there, but we were also a little bit scared.

  And we were right to be scared, because for some reason skinheads were attracted to ska music. Its history had always included a bit of skinhead culture, and the bands were happy to have the good skinheads turn up. Yes, there were good skinheads! They were just guys who liked to shave their heads, put on jeans and braces and dance to ska music. These guys had no interest in politics at all; if anything, they were on board with the anti-racist, pro-tolerance message that bands like Strange Tenants and The Specials pushed.

  But then there were the bad skinheads, the ones most people picture when they hear the word. Just think of that movie Romper Stomper – not very bright guys who were racist and embraced Nazi insignia. And guess what? The good skinheads didn’t get along with the bad skinheads. And on this night in Penrith, they happened to meet.

  We went on stage and played a few songs. The audience seemed at least to tolerate us, and there were a few people nodding their heads up and down, getting into it. There was already quite a large contingent of skinheads, but they were the good skinheads. You could tell by the way they carried themselves, and because they had on Specials T-shirts. They were happy and joked around; they were just there for a good time.

  Then about thirty bad skinheads turned up. Rumour was they had come across from Adelaide, even though Just Kidding didn’t want anything to do with them. It was scary watching them from the stage. They all stood up the back of the room, and more and more of them poured in, forcing all the other punters closer to the stage. I could hear them talking and shouting. Some had swastikas on their shirts and tattoos on their necks. These days your average bank manager might have a neck tattoo, but in 1982 this was reserved for skinheads and … other skinheads.

  It’s fair to say the music of Captain Cocoa was not the bad skinheads’ cup of tea. Although we were doing some originals, we were still also playing covers, and at one point Glenn announced, ‘Okay, this is a James Brown song.’

  From the back of the room a voice full of hate yelled out, ‘Nigger lovers!’ Then someone threw a stubby at the stage, which smashed against my bass amp. Jesus Christ, this was a bit full-on! I couldn’t imagine how Terrence was feeling – he was of Indian Malay descent and quite dark-skinned. Evan Ong was Chinese, and Andre had a Middle Eastern background.

  All this was too much for the good skinheads, who turned around and faced the bad skinheads. Shoving turned into pushing and then fists started flying. We continued to play as the bouncers came running in and a massive brawl erupted. Anyone with sense left the room, so pretty soon we were simply playing background music for a punch-on.

  The police turned up and started dragging people out. The sound guy eventually signalled us to stop and we were happy to oblige. We threw our gear into the car as quickly as we could. Now, of course, we had to find our way back to the train.

  We walked back through the venue, where an ambulance was now in attendance. A skinhead had been thrown through a window. It was truly scary stuff. It was like we were watching Romper Stomper playing out right in front of us. We didn’t stick around to see the other bands and ran to the railway station. Guess who was waiting for us? The skinheads! Luckily, they seemed to have their own problems – many of them were nursing injuries. We kept a low profile on that train back to the city.

  We got back to the Lansdowne feeling shell-shocked. What was meant to be a great gig for the band had turned into an exercise in survival. It was a hot night in Sydney, and someone pointed out that in the park across the road from the pub there was a pool. By this stage it was past one a.m. and we were all exhausted, but the thought of a swim cheered us up. We climbed the fence, stripped down to our underwear and jumped in the pool. Finally our trip to Sydney was turning out like we’d hoped. Then the police showed up.

  Of course it was illegal to be in the pool at night. But what we were doing was obviously common enough, as the police drove their divvy van up to the fence and put their spotlight on us. They didn’t even bother to leave the car. ‘Get out of the pool and approach the vehicle,’ they shouted over their loudspeaker.

  We got out of the pool but we had no intention of giving ourselves up. Some of us were veterans when it came to evading the police. I didn’t want to add illegal bathing to my lengthy rap sheet.

  We ran towards the Lansdowne, and the police chased us through the park in their van. They used their loudspeaker again. ‘You can run but you can’t hide!’

  Soon enough we realised they were right and we stopped running. The officers finally got out of their van and approached us. They were big cops, and they looked us up and down and then both started laughing.

  Well, we were all standing there in our underpants, holding our clothes.

  ‘So you boys decided to have a swim?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a hot night,’ I said.

  ‘I assume you didn’t pay the admission fee?’

  ‘No … well, the pool wasn’t open.’

  ‘We’re authorised to collect the pool fees, lads.’

  What? Oh, right, they wanted some money. Well, this was the ’80s and we were in Sydney. These guys were probably mates of Roger Rogerson. Or maybe they were genuinely collecting money for the local pool. I pulled out a twenty-dollar note and gave it to the bigger cop.

  ‘That should cover it,’ he said. ‘Now, where are you boys from?’

  ‘Ah, we’re from Melbourne,’ I replied. ‘We’re a band and we’re on tour.’

  He didn’t look impressed. ‘So when are you leaving?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I answered.

  ‘It’d be good if you left sooner.’

  How was that going to work? We already had our bus tickets.

  ‘We might escort you down to the bus stop now,’ the cop went on. ‘Might see if we can get you trouble-makers on an early bus.’

  And that’s what they did. We collected our stuff, and our pissed-off girlfriends, and the cops got us on an earlier bus. They also told Wookey to pack up the station wagon and leave the Emerald City straight away.

  We were angry but at the same time a little bit pleased with ourselves. We had been run out of Sydney by the police. How very rock and roll.

  ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT

  It was the night before Christmas and there wasn’t a sound … Okay, it was actually the night before I got my results, and I was about to find out whether I had graduated from Year 12. And there were sounds. Liz was staying over again, and at about eleven o’clock she graduated from the floor into Glenn’s bed. I pulled my doona over my head and tried to block everything out. Tomorrow my life could change. What would I do if I failed HSC?

  Come to think of it, what would I do if I passed HSC? Up until now, my plan had been to become a rock star
, get a girlfriend and get famous. That was it. But Captain Cocoa’s recent ‘tour’ of Sydney had dampened my enthusiasm. It turned out becoming a rock star was hard work, like most things. It didn’t seem fair. I mean, Dad worked hard, but I was pretty sure he never had skinheads throwing bottles at him, nor could I ever remember him being run out of town by the police.

  And he was guaranteed an income; I couldn’t see how being a rock-star-in-training would pay for anything. Our Sydney tour had cost me at least two hundred dollars. Apart from our everyday expenses, I was also lending money to Dave Mason and paying off the police. Even the train to Penrith wasn’t cheap. What did the rock and roll gods expect me to do? Continue working in a hot dog shop? Was that how The Oils or Elvis Costello had made it? I didn’t think so.

  I had toyed with several careers while at high school. I’d always wanted to do something creative, and one idea I had was photography. A lot of people go through a photography stage – it’s a bit like the ‘I want a pony’ phase most girls at primary school have. But with photography there was always a teacher who was really into it; as you walked into his darkroom he would yell, ‘Don’t turn on the light!’ Modern photography must have killed off that teacher; people simply don’t get their photos developed anymore.

  In the 1970s and ’80s photography was a luxury that most families could indulge in, but only in a budget way. My mum would buy one roll of Kodak at the start of the year – so twelve photos was all we got for the next twelve months. Seriously, you would get two photos on your birthday: one of you with the cake, and one with your friends in the backyard.

  There were four of us boys, but with Glenn’s and my birthday on the same day, we only got two photos between us. So that was six photos used up just on our birthdays. We also had two photos at Christmas – one of all four brothers with our presents, and one of us in front of the tree. That made eight photos so far. There were also two of the summer holidays – one of Dad in the surf, and one of the kids all eating ice-cream. There’d be one photo of our first day back at school in our uniforms, and the last one would be of Dad washing the car.

  And that was it! Occasionally Mum would roll the film on and announce, ‘Oh, I got an extra photo!’ So that usually went on a nice shot of Suzie the cat in the washing basket, ruining some freshly dried clothes. Job done – 1982 summed up in twelve photos. Well, thirteen if the one of the cat came out.

  These days, the youth get into photography a lot more – sexting and all that. I’m sure, as teenagers, we would’ve loved to have snapped a few of these. But we couldn’t do any such thing because we had to take our photos to the chemist to get them developed. And who wanted to be judged by Roger from Amcal? Not me. He probably kept all the good ones anyway. Rumour was he had a board out the back where he stuck all the dodgy ones up.

  Still, I always felt a bit sorry for Roger, even though we knew he voted Liberal. He spent at least five years at uni studying pharmacy, and yet he would spend most of his days manning the photo-developing machine at his chemist. He was basically a factory worker (okay, a very wealthy factory worker), standing there watching Donna Johnson’s twenty-first birthday photos appear. Oh, look, there’s a very drunk Mr Johnson falling into Donna’s cake … There’s some people dancing to ‘Eagle Rock’. Roger must have had a little jump for joy when digital photography came in, and then he probably wept as he watched his profits drop.

  So when I was around fifteen I decided I would be a photographer. The first step was to get some ‘work experience’. This was when they sent Year 10 students into the community to ‘work’ for two weeks. Most of us got paid about fifteen bucks for the week, but there was always one kid who returned to school and triumphantly announced that he got paid two hundred bucks cash for working at the butcher’s shop. Sure, he had to cut up sheep’s heads and stick his hands in buckets of offal, but so what – he was now rich! But for most of us, ‘work’ meant photocopying or running messages.

  I had only been to one workplace before, and that was Swinburne TAFE, where Dad taught in the Machines and Materials Department. Kev would put on his grey dust jacket and walk between lathes as he told apprentice fitters and turners what to do with their bits of metal. He was strict, but still he joked around more than he did at home. One time he found condoms in the overalls of an apprentice called Tim. Dad held them up and said, ‘Too bad Tim’s parents didn’t have some of these sixteen years ago!’ Cue enormous laughter from the workshop, and Kev getting pats on the back from his fellow teachers. These days you’d get sacked for that, but he probably got a promotion.

  The one thing that stood out about Dad’s workplace was the lunchroom. It was in a sort of attic in one of the buildings: there was a small kitchen and several long tables with benches. It was a low-roofed building, and the room quickly filled with cigarette smoke. The trades teachers from plumbing, welding and Dad’s department would mix here, and they liked to stir each other up. There was one guy who berated his fellow teachers for putting lettuce on their sandwiches. ‘Real tradies don’t eat lettuce!’ he used to yell.

  Dad liked working at the TAFE. There was a certain freedom to this kind of job. He was famous for saying to his students, ‘I just have to check my car,’ and he’d leave the room and wander around and talk to other staff members.

  Anyway, I organised work experience at a photographic studio in the city called Rum Jungle. My bosses were genuine hippies, but they were hippies who had sold out. I’m sure when they started off they were planning to take photos of rainforests and waterfalls, but most days they did hardware catalogues. On my first day I had to hold lots of hammers and the occasional screwdriver for about six hours straight. This was not what I had expected.

  My guide to everything important in life was music video clips, and the photographers in the Duran Duran film clip ‘Girls on Film’ just took photos of models, before having some champagne to finish off the day. I spent my days modelling the latest chisels, screwdrivers, drills … one day we branched out and did some ladders. I was just a very cheap hand model. After a few days I started to add some character to my hand modelling: pinky extended, thumbs up while sawing. Pardon the pun, but I was nailing this hardware catalogue job.

  One day we were awaiting the arrival of a batch of new screws or nails or some kind of fastener, and there was nothing for me to do. So the bosses sent me down to Timezone for a few hours – they even gave me two dollars to use on the machines. What a great idea – encourage a fifteen-year-old boy to hang around the pinny parlour in the city in the middle of the day.

  I loved pinny parlours. The closest one to our home was at the Ringwood Bowling Alley. This is one big difference between the youth of today and the youth of 1982. If we wanted to play computer games, we had to get off our backsides and ride our bikes to the local pinny parlour, where it would cost us twenty cents for about five minutes of entertainment. And once the money ran out, that was it.

  Sure, a few of us had Pong on our TV, but that was like some kind of slow-motion torture. We wanted to play proper video games like Frogger, standing up in pinball parlours. Not like the zombie youth of today, who sit around on their leather lounge suites playing PlayStations and turning their brains into mush by playing for hours and hours. We had a time limit! Once that frog got run over by a truck and croaked it (sorry), your game was over.

  I might bag computer games now, but I loved them back in the day. The Ringwood Bowl had a selection of pinball machines and video games. We all started on pinball machines – ‘Come on, don’t tilt it!’ It took great skill not to tilt the machine while gently nudging it with your hips to steer the ball away from ‘down the guts’. If you looked in any pinny parlour, there would be rows of teenage boys pushing their groins into the machines, while grabbing the sides with both hands and yelling, ‘Yes, yes!’ or ‘No, no!’ Kind of reminds me of something.

  Calloused fingers, RSI and eye tics were the battle scars of the veteran pinny player, playing such classics as Spider-Man, The Haunt
ed House (which had eight flippers) and every young man’s favourite, The Kiss – no, seriously, the Playboy one, which had a creepy Hugh Hefner staring down at you, his arms around two bunnies. That machine got an extra workout from the pimply youth.

  And then video games were introduced. I can remember playing Space Invaders for the first time – it was so exciting. Before you knew it, every pizza shop and fish and chip shop had a machine you could play while you waited for your flake and minimum chips. First came Space Invaders, then a slew of superior games followed. One was Asteroids: you were in charge of a spaceship in a field of asteroids, which you had to shoot before they hit you. I never warmed to Pac-Man but Frogger soon became my favourite. How I cried when that frog got run over.

  But then my favourite game of all time turned up: Galaga. No one knew how to pronounce it – whatever you said, it sounded like you’d been to the dentist and were waiting for the anaesthetic to wear off. But it was a great game. It was like a more advanced (and colour) Space Invaders, where your spacecraft would sit at the bottom of the screen and shoot at enemy aliens, who would arrive in formation and try to blow you up. If you survived this stage, you would move to the next level, which was like an old-fashioned shootout.

  After the arrival of video games, the makers of pinball machines fought back with multi-ball, multi-levels and extra balls, but the game was up, so to speak. Then computer games made their ways into our homes and the rot really set in. What seemed cute when it was just a Game Boy has now mutated into the Wii, PlayStation and Xbox. Ninety-seven per cent of families in Australia now have some sort of computer game console in their home. Well, I stand proud as one of the three per cent. Sure, my kids want to kill me, but I tell them they’ll thank me one day.