#AMPED FIVE CRACKED FULL#

Then comes a ballad, about a temptress from the wrong side of the tracks: “Recognition! Mixing up these faces.” Well, the rhyme is clunky, but, what the hell, the band rocks and the tune stays with you, and soon they’re into another one: some kind of white-boy rocksteady with funny lyrics about a guy who’s shocked his parents by dating an ethnic chick. “Recognition! In the strangest places.” It’s a good line for a chorus. The song seems to be called ‘Recognition’, with a swaggering open-chord riff cribbed from the Stones and a lyric about a philanderer who finds himself lying beside one woman while thinking about another.

#AMPED FIVE CRACKED FULL#

His Telecaster makes it three electric guitars on stage, and a roaring sound when the band’s at full throttle with that drummer kicking them along. The surname is Irish but the guy looks Italian with those dark, hooded eyes. Between them is the singer, a skinny guy with a head of black curls framing a pale face and a bent nose he’s wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, singing with his eyes closed, one arm outstretched and the other resting on the body of the Fender Telecaster slung around his neck, so that only when he moves the arm to hit a chord on the guitar do you see the four-word slogan on his shirt:

They’re jammed tight between the PA stacks on a small stage – a bass player so tall his head looks like it’s skirting the ceiling, a guitar player stage left with a Beatles mop playing a Strat left-handed, another guitarist across the other side wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and wielding a Gibson Firebird. At the end you drop down a couple of steps to a long room packed tight with a younger crowd – a lot of black leather and hennaed hair – and a bar at the back where you head first before turning to check the band. The bands play in a room out the back, past the front bar where the old-timers drink, through to a narrow doorway where a chalkboard announces the night’s attraction and someone stands behind a booth collecting your five bucks (it’s 1979), before you step through the door into a corridor filled with a familiar fug of cigarette smoke and stale beer, the wall on your left thumping to the muffled throb of a live band. The pub is a squat, redbrick pre-Federation pile squeezed between the old houses lining a quiet street in Richmond, just east of Melbourne’s glowing office towers.

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