My mind drifts away with the sublime guitars and complementary vocals. The song unfolds gradually but confidently, like the highway I’m driving on...past Tutye, Boinka, Linga, Underbool...
This isn’t a song for Grafton, or Australia, it’s a song for the human condition. The sublime execution is what sets it apart.
Like footy fans at finals time, we queued at the local Bass outlet for tickets. Revelling in the early morning banter with the diehards, who were lucky enough to have witnessed the band at full tilt in the ‘early days’ of the late 1970’s. Other standout gigs were re-lived: Astor Theatre ’82, Kooyong ’85, Venue ’86 and Festival Hall ’87.
So there I was, at the WACA indoor nets with 100 flushed and excited teenage girls, ready to bowl to Daryl Braithwaite.
The next few minutes were life-changing. Well not really, but they did change the direction of my musical life. My friend's cassette got thrashed that weekend and I knew the lyrics to most of the songs by the next day.
There are guidelines to making a mix tape when you're in love: no heavy metal, no techno, no hip hop, no breakup elegies, no schmaltzy love songs and definitely no Phil Collins or Rick Astley.
We’d run out of petrol returning from Mildura. Mobile phones were an invention of the future. We couldn’t even see a house light in the distance, let alone a public phone.
We never rehearsed, or even discussed what we would play; we just dove into the river of music and let it carry us along. Ross' playing was so in the moment, and each time we performed it felt like it was for the first time.
Hey Little Girl does not remind me of anybody in particular. But it reminds me of Madrid. It’s what I heard at that moment, when I needed to hear something just like it, when I was between jobs and almost broke.
Chisel got in the groove and just after the ninth repetition of ‘Saturday Night’ I yelled out the famous line: “Well if you don’t like it what are you doing standing there for twenty minutes for?” You should have seen the stares I got.