Another Time Another Place

It’s funny how things sound so much more impressive in the anticipation and telling  than in real life. All week I had been letting people know I had ‘comps’ to the Enmore Theatre to see The Living End, that included a backstage pass for after the gig. The weird thing was that when Sunday night rolled around I had no-one to go with. But I went anyway. I had seen them five years before when State of Emergency was the biggest album in the country and White Noise the single was played in high rotation on Triple J and all the commercials.

The band were everything a rock band should be. And as if I had stepped into some time warp I found myself among the punters in the ‘mosh pit’, fists in the air, singing the anthemic choruses. It was the eighties all over.

Concert finished, I showed my ‘Access Backstage’ pass to the burly security and he walked me to the green room and told me to wait. A record company apparatchik entered, shook my hand and gestured to follow. The back corridors of old theatres are always dark, with fading paint, cables running across the floor and piles of equipment boxes pushed up against the walls. The antithesis of the flash and glitter that greeted the crowds on the other side a few minutes before.

The party room was just as tired as the back stage corridors, a bunch of trestles and an old Laminex table from the fifties. A beautiful young girl, still glowing from the adrenaline of the show, asked me what I wanted to drink. She handed me a beer, asking what my connection was.  I explained that Scott, the bass player, had been my tenant for the last six months and even though I was his landlord we got on well and he asked me to come.  She smiled a half smile and walked away to make conversation with her friends.

Everyone here is networking, the band, the media, the record company, the hangers on, I thought. Her dismissal of me was a sure sign that I was unimportant in her scheme of things. I leaned up against the wall, beer in hand, and watched the scene. It reminded me of all those parties I had gone to where everyone was desperate to have a good time but no-one really knew how.

Scott emerged from the dressing room with Chris the singer/guitarist and the drummer in tow. The crowd all milled around them and many agreed it was a better gig than Brissy. I shook his hand and said I didn’t know about Brisbane but I had been to enough major gigs to know that this one was special. For a few minutes we made music chitchat but soon enough it was obvious that being his landlord didn’t translate into something substantial here. In the end I told him how it reminded me of Punk gigs I had been to in Sydney and London, most especially ‘The Clash’.

‘You tell that to Chris, he would love to hear it.’

And so I did on my way to the door.

‘You saw The Clash?’

‘Yeah, twice in one month!’ He was suitably impressed but of course he would have been in short pants back then. ‘You were every bit as good.’ I added graciously.

I left feeling decidedly alien.