Way
up ahead of us, in front of the cognoscenti of chords, way past the bearded
singer and the other guitarists there’s this sound. There’s this huge, thumping
bass drum going boom-boom, boom-boom, bahh-boom and it sounds like the Atlantics’ Bombora that
changes down a gear into something else as Sean Sennett, the Aussie muso /
publishing legend (who remembers Time Off ?) leads his band into a bunch of
songs from his collaboration with Midnight Oil’s Rob Hirst called Crashing
the Same Car Twice.
I’m
hearing reverberations of Radio Birdman from last century, but
it could be me. My old roadie ears and post-70’s brain cells aren’t what
they used to be.
I’m imagining Iggy Pop on a road trip with The
Triffids while somebody’s grandkids are break dancing beside us on
the Turbine Stage at Brisbane’s re-purposed Powerhouse across the dirty, snaking river
from the mega-rich’s pristine motorboats, private jetties and
rendered faux-Romanesque palaces.
Meanwhile
Sean sings evocative, surreal lines that only an Aussie who’s been on a long, hot
road trip could conjure - lines like: “Sunshine burns itself across my
treeless plain”.
It takes me back 1972. I’m a teenager in the back of
the Holden Belmont as we rattle across three hundred miles of dead straight,
dusty, dirt highway and the Nullarbor Plain following the old
telegraph line westwards towards Perth, where my brother was supposed to be,
but wasn’t. (He’d probably tell me this song reminded him of that old movie Wake
in Fright.)
Fast
forward four days and that same Aussie sunshine is hammering my temples at the
speed of light as I wait for the new water jug to filter properly. I’ve been
awake for 24 minutes and can’t get focused on photo editing until I get
that caffeine in the system. And I ain’t using the water out of the
tap connected by shiny copper to the 90+ year old water main out in the
street. Not after being a plumber’s laborer. I’ve seen the inside of water
pipes and it’s not pretty.
A
strange pinging noise reminds me that the garbo truck is outside. I tell myself
to rescue the empty plastic wheelie bin off the footpath before some pesky dog
walker chucks their stinking dog poo in to incubate in the hot sun.
I whack
on my noise cancelling headphones as the coffee pot gurgles on the gas
stove. These tunes of Sean’s are so good. Despite seeing his collaborator and
The Oils a heap of times, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even know which of
his four albums to buy after the gig last weekend. $10 each, I shoulda got them
all! They are sonic nuggets.
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