“It was an ugly concrete box, which I suddenly remembered Johnny Blob had told me had the worst acoustics in the Southern Hemisphere. ‘One, two. One, two.’ God that sounds awful. Sid and Alistair tried to tune the guitars. Alistair had forgotten to tell us that ether distorts your hearing. We couldn’t afford guitar tuners; we always did it by ear – normally a five-minute job – but in that place, in our state, almost impossible. Fifteen minutes later we seemed no closer. The crowd was getting aggressive, so was the owner of the club.
‘Its half past, for fucks sake. You were meant to start at eleven. God, what’s that stink?’
‘We’ll do Suicide first,’ I suggested. This song started with an A chord, played for sixty-four bars, before dropping to G. This would give the guys the chance to tune to each other as they played. The trouble was, none of us were capable of counting to sixty-four.
It was the worse set we’d ever done, and we had two more to go. I got us a couple of bottles of bourbon. I don’t know if that helped our playing but it helped us not to care. The crowd didn’t seem too disappointed. Shit, it was only Hamilton.”
Excerpt from Going Down – THE BITS THAT DIDN’T FIT
Auckland’s Punk Scene
“It was October ‘78 when I first stumbled onto Auckland’s punk scene. I’d gone to the new disco in town, Boogie Nights, which was the bottom floor of an old two-storey warehouse in a back lane off Queen Street. The top floor, although I didn’t know it at the time, was the punk club Anarchy.”
an extract from the story Going Down, a fictionalised account of the rise and fall of Proud Scum and The Terrorways.
Going Down
Going Down charts the rise and fall of rival punk bands, Loud Scum and Rooted. Do these names sound familiar?
a story for everyone
The secret to a successful book launch…
I recently went to the launch of Us Karen – it was huge. There were over 300 people there and around 300 books were sold. Wow. And I realised that the secret to its success was largely down to the subject matter. The author, Richard Dove, had chosen to write about an oppressed ethnic minority – the Karen people of Burma. So I’ve done the same thing, only I’ve written about New Zealanders, a people forced to leave their homeland to come to Australia and live on the dole.