“At the lights at Boundary Street, she moved to the front seat so I could massage her spine. I started at her neck. By Mona Vale Road, I’d reached the small of her back and was feeling a stirring in my loins. ‘That’s not too hard is it?’ I asked. She shook her head.
By Telegraph Road, I’d reached her coccyx and was headed for territory beyond the jurisdiction of the Chiropractic Society. My fingers slid between her buttocks as we turned off the Highway. She unzipped my fly and opened her mouth.
‘I always wondered why this road was called Bobbin Head,’ I said. She replied but I didn’t catch the words. I dropped her off, thinking maybe I’d gone too far – but it was only by a few metres.”
Excerpt from Going Places - THE BITS THAT DIDN’T FIT

On the way there, Alistair, the bass player, insisted we stop at a chemist. He came back with a 500ml brown glass bottle. He’d studied chemistry at university, so he knew all the best drugs. As soon as we got to the motel, he unscrewed the cap and a sickly smell filled the room.
‘It’s a funny drug, ether,’ he said, as we passed the bottle around and inhaled, almost to the point of blackout. ‘It has the effect of separating the hemispheres of the brain in such a way that you receive messages on one side, then about a second later get the same message on the other side.’
The news was on TV. I had the distinct feeling I’d seen this show before.”
Excerpt from Going Down – THE BITS THAT DIDN’T FIT

“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

The Bits is creeping onto bookshelves. Book and Paper in Williamstown and The Sun Bookshop in Yarraville are now stocking The Bits that Didn’t Fit. Copies are available from The Sun stall at The Williamstown Literary Festival this weekend, and I’ll be reading from the book on Sunday (some time around the middle of the day) at the Open Mike at Willy Lit Fest.

“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 charts the rise and fall of rival punk bands, Loud Scum and Rooted. Do these names sound familiar?

Hot off the press

Books are back from the printers. Get em while they’re hot.

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.