“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