The Summer of ’82 Read online

  Noddy rode down on his bike and, as expected, he had failed. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Looks like I’m getting a job.’

  We wanted to go straight to the pub but thought we should wait for Mum and Dad to call, and they rang within twenty minutes. Dad was standing in the public phone box with Mum. Apparently there was quite a queue of eager parents and grandparents who wanted to ring home and see how their beloved had fared.

  Another sign of the times – these days parents would be holding their kid’s hand as he or she got their results on a smartphone. They had invested a hundred grand in their little darling’s education, and sat up night after night supervising their homework … okay, they’d probably paid a tutor. They had to be there when their child – sorry, investment – read out that precious score that would guarantee them success in life. Back in 1982 my parents had gone on a holiday while Glenn and I got our results. ‘Don’t want to be around for that,’ they probably thought.

  The phone rang – it was Dad. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘How did you go?’

  ‘We both passed!’ I said happily.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We both passed!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ That was Mum in the background.

  ‘They both passed,’ Dad told her.

  ‘They both passed? No!’ she said. She was obviously shocked.

  ‘So you both passed?’ Dad said to me.

  I could still hear Mum saying, ‘They both passed,’ incredulously.

  ‘Yes, we both passed, and I got an A in Australian History.’

  ‘What? You got an A in Australian History?’

  ‘Glenn got an A?’ Mum asked Dad.

  ‘No, David got an A,’ he told her. ‘In Australian History.’

  Mum turned to the waiting crowd: ‘David got an A in Australian History!’ The crowd spontaneously applauded.

  ‘Well, bloody hell,’ Dad said. ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘Yeah, so you now owe me a hundred dollars, Dad.’

  ‘What? Sorry, the line’s dropping out,’ Dad said. ‘Look, there’s a whole lot of people wanting to use the phone. Tell Glenn well done, and Mum wants to say hello.’

  Then Mum came on the line. ‘Did you really get an A in Australian History?’

  ‘Yes, Mum, I did.’

  ‘How did that happen? You spent all year on that stupid bike.’

  Dad, who was now in background, was badgering her: ‘Joyce, people want to use the phone—’

  ‘Well, I’m going to keep talking till the money runs out,’ she said. ‘You know Dean across the road? You did Nippers with him. Well, his mother had an operation, and—’ Beep, beep, beep. Saved by the extreme cost of an STD phone call.

  So I had a final score of 288 – not too bad for someone who hadn’t done that much work. Relief washed over me. We all headed up to the pub as planned. As I walked in, Evan stopped me and said, ‘Mate, an A in Australian History, nice work! And Noddy, shithouse result, mate.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Me and Spass broke into the school and found the results pushed under the principal’s door. I saw everyone’s score.’ Spass was another tough kid.

  Just then Drago walked in with a big grin on his face. Evan knew why he was smiling. ‘Hey, here he is, Mr 320! The highest score in the school, guys!’ Everyone cheered for Drago. It looked like he was going to become a surgeon after all, just as he always said he would. It turned out most of our class had passed, and the ones who hadn’t were no real surprise. What was interesting was that those of us who thought we’d be on the borderline, like yours truly, had generally done okay.

  This visit to the pub seemed so different from our last one, just after we finished our exams. The publican gave us no grief; by now some of us had turned eighteen, but it was also true that even in ten weeks we had all grown up a fair bit. We sat around for ages and talked about what we were going to do next. Although I told everyone that I was sure to get into my Teaching course, I emphasised that my real focus was still the band. Most of the guys laughed; maybe they didn’t realise I was going to be a rock star.

  When the laughter subsided, I shared the news that Captain Cocoa was in fact playing a very prestigious gig that same night. We were supporting The Corpse Grinders and Finland Station at the Seaview Ballroom. These were two very cool bands – The Corpse Grinders was a rockabilly outfit with the very charismatic Arthur Matsakos on guitar, and Finland Station was a funk band. We had won this support spot in a Battle of the Bands comp.

  Now, Battle of the Bands was a bit like The X Factor or Australia’s Got Talent, except there were no TV cameras and the judges were corrupt. It was a competition in which amateur bands would compete for prizes such as recording time in a studio or a support spot in a legitimate rock and roll venue. At one point nearly every local council was running a Battle of the Bands; groups would turn up at a park or a local hall and play three songs to an audience of their friends and some judges, who always seemed to know someone in the winning band. These comps were hilarious, because all sorts of groups would enter. We might be squeezed between a KISS cover band and a synth band that only played instrumentals.

  We’d entered a number of Battle of the Bands and got nowhere. But finally one came up in our area. Think about it: local area = maximum number of friends for the applause-meter. The comp was being run at the local guitar shop, the very place where I had bought my bass from the long-haired shop assistant who had once played with James Freud. They set up a stage out the back of the shop, and it was announced that the winning band would get a support spot at a Seaview Ballroom gig.

  Well, we knew what to do, and we packed the room with our family and friends. Even Mum and Dad came down. Naturally, Dad grumbled about the trailer access (or lack thereof), and Mum brought a basket of her delicious rock cakes (they weren’t). We did our best songs and got reasonably high scores, easily beating the Twisted Sister cover band that came before us.

  The next band was announced, and on walked the shop assistant, fronting a group called The Lizard Men. He started the set with a ten-minute guitar solo and ended the same way. How could he compete in this battle? He worked at the shop that was holding the competition! The scores were given, and guess what? The Lizard Men narrowly beat us, winning the prized Seaview support spot.

  Well, there was almost a riot. Everyone could see we’d been wronged; this battle was not yet over. Our music teacher from high school, Miss Price, had come to support us, and she informed the owner of the music shop that she would never shop there again. Clearly, she had to be taken seriously: a popular music teacher has enormous sway when recommending where her students buy their recorders and the like.

  After several days of complaints, the music shop eventually gave in and we were also given a support spot at the Seaview. As it turned out, by then The Lizard Men had already broken up; the long-haired shop assistant told me that his band mates, like the members of Moving Pictures before them, had turned into ‘a bunch of wankers’. It occurred to me that maybe they had left because they felt superfluous during all his guitar solos.

  So the Seaview Ballroom gig was that night. Everyone was coming, all our mates and girlfriends. Even Cindy was coming, as she wanted to see The Corpse Grinders and I could get her name on the door. Everyone thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend – except her. Cindy seemed unimpressed that I’d passed HSC. Her mum, however, was thrilled, particularly by my A in Australian History. She really liked me; if only she could put in a good word with her daughter. Cindy just shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘You failed Geography?’ Hey, it was a miracle I passed anything, I thought.

  We loaded up our cars and drove to the Ballroom to do our sound check. It was so exciting that we were getting to play at this rock and roll institution. I even got the rock star park out the front of the venue. It was thrilling to carry our equipment up the steps and onto the stage. Only weeks ago we had stood in the audience, and n
ow were going to be performing. Okay, it would be on the downstairs stage, but who cared. That was where The Go-Betweens had played the night we went to see The Models.

  We had to wait for Finland Station to finish their sound check, and they were taking a while. They were a bunch of white guys doing funk, but they said things like ‘Cool, baby’ and called each other ‘man’; they sure were confident. By the time we got to set up our stuff, we only had about five minutes to get our levels right. The sound guy from Finland Station said that for forty bucks he would gladly mix our band. This was important, because when you’re an average band you need a good sound mixer to do their magic.

  We didn’t really get on with Finland Station – they seemed a bit up themselves. We knew some of them went to grammar schools, and they laughed at the palm tree we took along to all our gigs as our mascot. Then we found a real reason to dislike them.

  Noddy was in the toilet and overheard the singer from Finland Station talking to the sound guy. Noddy was always overhearing things – he was a bit like Agent 13 in Get Smart, who hid himself inside things. He once even snuck under a table-load of girls at a party to see if any of them were talking about us. They weren’t. But what the Finland Station guy said was scandalous.

  Singer: ‘Hey, did you say you’d mix that Captain Crap band?’

  Mixer: ‘Yeah.’

  Singer: ‘Why did you do that?’

  Mixer: ‘I need the forty bucks.’

  Singer: ‘Well, can you do a bad mix?’

  Mixer: ‘What? Why?’

  Singer: ‘I hear they’re okay, and we don’t want to be blown off stage.’

  Mixer: ‘I can’t do that – they’re paying me forty bucks.’

  Singer: ‘Yeah, and so are we!’

  Mixer: ‘I can’t do it.’

  Singer: ‘Thanks for nothing.’

  The toilet flushed, and Noddy walked out of his cubicle and washed his hands. ‘Should be good tonight, guys,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, too right,’ they said.

  Noddy came straight over and told us. We confronted the singer but of course he denied everything. The sound guy promised to give us a good mix. Now we were determined to play better than Finland Station.

  Sabotaging the support band was quite common. You’d turn up to gigs and they would only allocate you four channels on a twenty-four-channel mixing desk. The mixer would put masking tape over most of the stage light switches, leaving you with just three lights to work with. No one wanted to be shown up by a support band, not that anyone really had to worry about us. We were still very average; most of us were still learning our instruments.

  We had a while to wait before we played, so we headed to Topolino’s, the legendary St Kilda pizza joint. Many a night was spent there, as they opened late and the pizzas were cheap.

  We couldn’t wait to play the Seaview Ballroom. This was our introduction into the real Melbourne rock and roll scene, not like the crappy gigs we’d been playing. So far we had specialised in gigs that were held during the day, and where tea, coffee and cordial were the available beverages. AC/DC said it was a long way to the top … well, we had found it was a long way to the bottom. We wanted to play at the rock venues, the ones we went to. The Ballroom, the Prince of Wales, the Espy, the Corner, the Tiger Lounge, the Punters Club, the Evelyn, the Venue, Bombay Rock, the Prospect Hill, the Village Green, the Venetian room, the Users Club, the Aberdeen Hotel – these were the rock venues, not the halls of outer suburbia.

  But the gig was no good. Here we were, playing at the legendary Seaview Ballroom, and we were no good. Nothing really clicked – we couldn’t blame the mixer – and we floundered from song to song. I could see the audience was just putting up with us because we looked like children; they were waiting for The Corpse Grinders to come on. We had all decided to wear brightly coloured shirts, a different colour each. I wore yellow, Glenn wore blue, Wookey wore red, and so on. We looked like The Wiggles, except that money-making, toddler-entertaining machine had not yet been founded. Finland Station was much better than us, with their crisp funk sound.

  We were going so badly that I started making jokes between songs. ‘He wrote that,’ I’d say, pointing to someone in the audience. This got a huge response, much to the annoyance of the rest of the band, but I kept doing it because it was the only thing that was working. Being the clown had often got me out of trouble, and now it was helping save the night.

  We hung around to watch the other bands but the mood wasn’t great. Most audience members avoided us or gave us a sympathetic nod. As I went to load my gear into the Orange Rocket, it was fair to say I had come down from my high. Just a few hours earlier I had been on cloud nine: I had passed the HSC, I was going to uni (okay, teachers’ college, whatever), and I was going to be a rock star. But after seeing bands like The Corpse Grinders and The Models and INXS, I knew we didn’t really have ‘it’, and that we never would.

  I dragged my amp down the stairs, and there, sitting on my bonnet while he had a smoke, was Bohdan X, the punk rocker and MC of the gig. Bohdan X was a legend in the local rock scene. He was one of the first Melbourne punk rockers, although he was originally from England and so had an accent that gave him even more credibility. These days he was doing a radio show on Triple R. This was the coolest station to listen to, along with PBS, the other community rock station. If you had alternative tastes, these were the stations you tuned in to for the latest releases and music gossip. Glenn and I used to have a radio on the desk between our beds. We would lie there when we were supposed to be sleeping, listening to radio shows like Jex and George on a Thursday night and Bohdan X on a Friday. Bohdan X used to give his opinions on the world and play great punk and post-punk music.

  We loved Bohdan X so much that we volunteered to appear in his film clip for his latest punk anthem, ‘We Are Different’. He put the call out on his radio show for all young alternatives to meet at Richmond Station, wearing their best punk gear. Meeting your heroes is never good, and Bohdan X was unfriendly and dismissive of our attempts at a punk look. What he wanted was a gang of punks walking along the platform at Richmond Station looking like they were going to take on the world with their punk rock attitude. What he got – surprise, surprise – was twenty teenagers who looked like they were going to a dress-up day at school. Anyway, he got the twenty or so of us to line up, and he walked along and picked the ‘punkiest’ of us to be at the front; the rest had to fight to be seen at the back.

  So when I saw Bohdan X, I felt like I knew him and he knew me, but this wasn’t the case. Don’t mind me, Bohdan, I’ve just got to put my amp in the boot. Most normal people would get off a bonnet when they realised the owner of the car was nearby. But not Bohdan. As I struggled to put the heavy amp in the boot, I heard a voice with a British twang. ‘Were you in that band?’

  Was he talking to me? ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Were you in that band, supporting The Corpse Grinders?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered tentatively. One of the original punk rockers would surely not be a fan of our light pop.

  ‘The band that wore the fucking matching coloured shirts?’

  ‘Um, yeah.’

  ‘Mate, your music is shit.’

  Don’t hold back, Bohdan.

  ‘But that stuff you said between songs was fucking hilarious. You should do that.’

  And with that advice, he stubbed out his cigarette on my bonnet and slid off.

  Really? Saying funny stuff, was that a job? Well, I did seem to be good at that. Hmm, I thought. I might look into that.

  Cindy had followed me out. She knew the gig hadn’t gone well; she’d been in the audience. She embraced me and said, ‘Your band’s no good but you’re okay. You were funny up there.’ And with that she kissed me on the mouth.

  Oh my God! So the A in Australian History didn’t impress her but my smart-arse comments did? I couldn’t believe it – this summer was turning out all right.

  EPILOGUE

  I hope you enjoye
d reading my book as much as I did writing it. It’s been said that I’m obsessed by the 1980s, and it’s been great to relive the era. But it’s not just the ’80s – I love the past, and I love looking back. I suppose there was a reason I got an A in Australian History.

  The thing I feel most when I think back to this time in my life is gratitude. I’m grateful for my family, my friends, my school, my teachers and all the experiences I had. People always ask me who my heroes are (okay, someone did once), and I always say my parents. They were simply a working-class couple who raised four boys to be relatively normal and decent human beings. All four of us have gone on to have great lives and raise families of our own, and I reckon that’s a credit to Joyce and Kev, who still live in the same house in Mitcham. When this book is a massive hit, Dad will start offering tours of the local area. You’ll be able to go down to the paddock and see where the grass never grew back after our bomb.

  Speaking of which, I’m well aware how stupid we were to do things like make bombs and drive fast in our cars. I just hope my kids never read this book.

  I also realise now that passing the HSC wasn’t as big a deal as we all thought it was. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t be doing exactly what I am now if I had failed Year 12. No one in the world of stand-up comedy asks if you have a degree.

  Anyway, I got into Melbourne State Teachers’ College (now merged with Melbourne Uni) and completed my Diploma in Primary Teaching. But I had enough bad teaching rounds that I declared on the last day of my course that ‘I am never going to do this for a job, ever’. It was also a factor that, in 1985, your first teaching job was dictated by your marks. So I knew that all the smart girls would get the ‘nice’ eastern-suburbs schools and I would be sent somewhere to the left of Dubbo.

  So after getting my diploma I decided to put off full-time work by enrolling in an Arts degree at Melbourne Uni, and I then transferred to RMIT, where I completed a degree in Public Relations. Okay, it was an Arts degree. Mercifully, I only had a few years in the PR industry before I was sacked, and then I embarked on a glorious career in comedy.