First published in 2019

Text © Mike Chunn, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
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system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
To Brigid
Cover photograph: Murray Cammick
Endpaper photograph (front left): Bruce Jarvis and
Endpaper photograph (front right): Gijsbert Hanekroot via Getty Images to the memory of Von and Jerry
Photographs in the picture sections are from Mike Chunn’s personal collection
unless otherwise credited. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders
and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher
apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any
corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

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Chapter Eleven
Across the Ditch
T
he plane carrying our line-up of eager, twitty New
Zealanders landed and got processed, and we
checked into two rooms at the Squire Inn, Bondi
Junction, which was over the road from the Bondi Lifesaver
nightclub; a convenient position because this was to be the
venue we would be playing at that night. Tim, Crombie,
Eddie, Croth and I all crammed into Room 416. Two beds,
three stretchers. Salubrious rock’n’roll accommodation. The
others—Dave Russell (our tour manager), Murray Ward
(soundman), Wally and Juddsy—were a floor above. I  can’t
recall ever going to their room. Why didn’t I ever catch the
lift up and drop in on them? I don’t know the answer. Maybe
they all slept in a double bed and we just weren’t prepared for
that confrontation.
When we went to the suburbs to pick up the Hush sound
system for our debut gig, it wasn’t there. The Hush dudes
knew nothing about our using it. They’d never heard of us.
I looked at Tim, who looked at Juddsy, who looked at Dave.
We had to flag the Lifesaver show. On the way back to the
hotel, weaving through the miles and miles of Sydney streets,
we read a small press mention in a music rag. It heralded our
arrival as ‘New Zealand’s raunchiest rock’n’roll band’. Tim
124
looked at Juddsy and Juddsy looked at me and I looked at
Dave. On our return to the Squire Inn, Dave went mad trying
to find a sound system.
While he was distracted, we took in Sydney and found it
to be loose, fast, bent and full of semi-derelict and submerged
life-forms; an extraordinary contrast to the staid, plain and
protected social structure back in Auckland. Pornography
had flooded in, and newspapers bulging with hard-core sex
were lined up at corner shops beside the Sydney Morning Herald
and the Women’s Weekly.
Prostitutes lined Kings Cross; it was at its sleazy height.
Teenagers in hot-pants and fishnets lolled around, their eyelids
filled with lead; a few metres away, the squinting eyes of a pimp
with slicked-back hair and a wide collar. Light brown loafers
shining out from under his shimmering turquoise flared slacks.
You didn’t want to catch his eye. There was a song on all the
radios called ‘Girls on the Avenue’ about these pathetic lasses.
To this day, and on to tomorrow, I’m sure, if I hear it I am back
at the Cross aged 22. What an age to be filled with wonder.
None of us seemed to talk about our female partners left
on the rocks of New Zealand. Maybe the whole social strata
of pop music bandhood and partners was too much to be real.
To be manageable. It was easy for Tim. He didn’t leave anyone
behind. Juddsy had left a wife and child. For me there was
Paula, and there were other names for other band members.
They were out there somewhere, on the other side of the ditch.
Right here on the wide perimeters of interstate highways
and hippy footpaths with meandering groups eking out a
living, well . . . there was a neat, balanced contrast. Metal-
flake, V8, pot-bellied bizzaro clowns and gangsters scoured
Across the Ditch 125
the inner-city borders with mile after mile of flag-waving
second-hand car yards and that wasn’t all. The cars were
advertised on television as well, phones were push-button
and the hi-fi shops stocked exotic, slick machinery. Music
instrument stores displayed the world’s best guitars, amps,
drums, et cetera. It would be some years before New Zealand
joined the party. Back at the Squire Inn, we lived on cereal
and Vegemite sandwiches washed down with continuous
cups of instant coffee and non-dairy whitener stolen from the
maids’ trolleys.
I had some decisions to make. Each time I had fallen into
the mode of fear and terror, the panic attack, I vomited. Surely
there was a reason. Did I have a physiological dysfunction? I
must have. Let’s start somewhere. So I stopped eating when
day turned to night. No dinners. None. ‘That may well ward
off this horrendous illness of the head,’ I thought. I’m a
scientist. I’m an Engineering Science graduate. I must know
something! I decided to try it. I started losing weight (well, of
course). I also stopped drinking alcohol, in case that set off the
terror. I mustn’t be triggered.
After about two weeks we got our shit together and had
a gig booked at the Bondi Lifesaver. We planned to wear the
zoot suits. Cool. My special yellow suit. And after the wait we
would be ready.
As the Squire Inn was so close to the venue, we changed
into our costumes in the hotel rooms and ran across the road
looking like madcap freak children, smiling, whooping and
hooping, through the door of the Lifesaver to wait that short
time for show time. Well, I didn’t. I hurried back to the hotel
room, turned the key and ran to my camp stretcher. I lay on
126 A Sharp Left Turn
it staring at the ceiling. The invisible spiders moved across the
floor, pouring over my body. I screamed. There was no one
there to query it. The fear and terror did their usual sadistic
bitch. Heart racing, racing, racing. How many bpm? Maybe
160? The fastest yet? Thoughts in my head speeding round
and round. Could I hold one for an infinitely short duration?
I couldn’t. I had to get back to the show. What will I say? How
can I not go back to the show? I had to get back to the show.
My heart was screaming. Get back to the show!
I ran back out the door, down the stairs and out into the
street, my yellow zoot suit shuffling in the Sydney breeze.
I went into the changing room just as they were all walking
onto the stage. As I joined them and walked between them,
over to pick up my bass (flatwound strings), I was suddenly
free. Whoosh! I felt perfectly normal. It was as if nothing
untoward had happened. There was nothing the guys could
see in me that told them what I’d just been through. To repeat
myself—I was free. And we started the show and we were
very, very good. We had arrived.
The crowd got off on it. On us. Split Enz over from New
Zealand. I looked at the others in the band, those beautiful
boys from across the sea. The intense, circling lead singer
Tim, the slow-swaying master Juddsy, the Eddie man with
his lightning fingers, the Crombie flaying the crowd with
tricks and mysteries, Croth flying across the drum kit, his
hands electric, and me. My Gibson Les Paul bass, my saviour.
I wasn’t holding it; it was holding me. Embracing me. Keeping
me from harm. Here on this Sydney stage. All of us: from a
world that was not the place to be. New Zealand. I thought,
‘I just need to stay onstage and I will survive.’
Across the Ditch 127
O ne thing quickly became clear to us. We had to stay in
Australia by whatever means possible and just go for it.
We had to relocate to this Australian environment. Hence a
number were sent back to New Zealand to sell cars, gather
or not gather female partners, close rent on flats, et cetera.
I became more and more screwed into whether or not I
would actually live long enough to be the bass player this
band needed when the big time hit. The niggling fear seemed
to be ever-present except onstage. Not eating at night seemed
to confirm my self-diagnosis and most nights I could relax,
despite being in the hunger zone. But I just couldn’t deal
with matters of real life like girlfriends and cars, so I left it all
hanging and refused to let it toy with my head.
Crombie, Tim and I wallowed in the Squire Hotel waiting
for the rest of the band to return so we could start doing more
shows. We sat up in the restaurant when it was closed, as
they had a piano there. It was up there that Tim took an old
piece he’d written from 1972 and stretched it out. It ended
up becoming ‘Maybe’ once Juddsy returned. We also dealt
with boredom in a cool, productive fashion by deciding that
everyone should use their middle names. (I’ve been using their
middle names already in this book, so you’ll just have to go
with me on this.) As a means to grapple with the dull throb of
another day and a seamless garment of tawdry nothingness,
changing to our middle names seemed—well—OK. And it
happened. When he returned Juddsy didn’t change his from
Philip to Raymond, though, and I don’t blame him. I took on
Jonathan but wasn’t enamoured of it. It went back to Mike in
due course!
Otherwise we swam in the Squire Inn pool like some
128 A Sharp Left Turn
English pop band who has had a global hit and is killing
time in the sun. We did find the Sydney climate to be very
appealing. And Tim came up with the title for our hopefully-
one-day-to-be-recorded album: Mental Notes. I thought that
was very cool.
And then, lo and behold—one day they all returned. Dave,
our guy on the spot, had a date booked, so we clambered into
this vehicle or that vehicle and the next thing you know we’re
onstage at the Coogee Bay Hotel and Michael Gudinski, the
main man of Mushroom Records (the main man of the whole
Australian industry), is in the audience. This was outta sight.
And how did we play? It may best be summed up with
this loving little tale. After we had finished, a lad by the name
of Ted Mulry came backstage. He had had a few Aussie
hits. He’s worth googling. He looked at us all, sweating and
breathless, and said, ‘Holy shit. There are only two bands
I’ve ever seen where I couldn’t take my eyes off them. One
was The Beatles. You’re the other one.’ Aha! We all talked in
silence (our speciality) about how this might be the moment
when Gudinski walks in the door. And he did.
Well, it wasn’t actually that night. It was a few days later.
But he offered us a recording contract and we took it. We
didn’t think about it. I don’t recall having a lawyer advise us.
We just said, ‘Yes!’
The month of May was set aside to record this album that
we had been dreaming of recording for what seemed like an
eternity. We had barely been in Australia for 30 days.
And then Gudinski rang again. Roxy Music were flying in
from the UK and doing a show at the 5500-seater Hordern
Pavilion in Sydney and we were booked to open the show.
Across the Ditch 129
 This got us thinking. Roxy were top-class. Big hits. High-
level stuff. Of course we wanted to support them. They might
stand side-stage and watch us. Which was exactly what they
did.
The more we felt their eyes on us, the better we played.
We pulled out all the stops. Back in the dressing room, prior to
Roxy taking the stage, their manager and their guitar player
Phil Manzanera came in. This time we had voices, we had
language. And Gudinski was poised and hearing it all.
Manzanera expressed an interest in recording us, but after
details were put on the table it turned out he wouldn’t be able
to be a part of the Mental Notes sessions. A scheduling issue.
This was a real pity. The recording of a debut album here in
Australia with a Roxy Music man at the helm would have really
woken up the Australian industry and we would have had a
head of steam when the album came out. But it wasn’t going
to happen.
The next best thing came to pass. Manzanera and his
manager set aside time in 1976 for Manzanera to produce our
follow-up album to Mental Notes. That would be in London.
We didn’t really analyse this suggestion. We put our faith
in fate that the commitment would, well, just work out. And it
was to be in London. The centre of the universe. We were in!
Everyone shook on it, and Roxy Music flew away.
In a week we found ourselves down in Melbourne, where
Gudinski had booked us into a concert called the Reefer
Cabaret. This was the left field. The avant-garde. The stoners.
We were ready for them.
We felt at home, and were able to muster the old buck-a-
head sense of presentation. Crombie had turned playing the
130 A Sharp Left Turn
spoons into a concert highlight. Tim was the Harlequin and
he sped from side to side. Juddsy was projecting his almost
rigid stage persona and many eyes never stopped staring at
him. Wally and I in our matching costumes played our parts,
side by side. We’d been together on stages for three years, from
an empty RSA hall in Pakuranga to the Hordern Pavilion
in Sydney. We’d been on stages together for what seemed a
long time now. How long is three years? Croth tumbled and
flammed. Eddie shocked them with his gargantuan talent.
It was us. Split Enz performing at its height. To the right
audience, down there in Melbourne town.
The press reviews spoke volumes. The following from Juke
Magazine:
Kerrist, they’re madder ’n us. Leaping about the stage,
pink suits, blue shirts, red suits, long legs, short legs. Doll
faces, human faces, new faces. Cackling, screaming,
leering, bounding, jerking, lurking, always prepared to
pounce on my poor nut. Pictures of the giggle palace
thrashed through my scone.
In Split Enz you will find classical and neo-classical;
music hall honky tonk and sleazy vaudeville; acoustic and
electronic, good ole rock ’n roll, a piano full of cool jazz and
some Gregorian chants or Calypso shouts for good measure.
We had a resurrected James Dean, [Judd] white-faced
and hollow eyed in a teddy boy suit of bright red . . . the
lead singer [Finn] moves like a sped-up movie of Charlie
Chaplin doing an imitation of Harpo Marx—or is it vice
versa? He comes on with a patter that sounds like Waiting
For Godot done by a music hall M.C.
Across the Ditch 131
In that show, we transcended the ‘curiosity’ status formerly
bestowed upon us. It was a turning point. We were still
adamant about holding an inimitable position in this very
active, commercially driven market, but we realised that
it would be impossible to spend weeks planning one-off
extravagant and theatrical concerts. We were going to have
to play hotels, cafés and clubs because we had to eat. So we
developed, very quickly, an extreme presentation in which
each of us hid behind a fanciful disguise, cloaked in one of
Noel’s extraordinary costumes.
In New Zealand we worked outside of any system if
only because, when it came down to it, there wasn’t one.
But in Australia we were confronted by managers with quick
tongues, record company people (we had never met any in
New Zealand), agents, flared jeans, roadies, Mandrax, coke,
trucks, overnight drives, schedules, Polaroids, Mogadon,
t-shirts, Quaaludes, blotting paper and abuse. The only
aspect we rarely came up against was groupies. We were
plain and sexually impossible to categorise, so best left alone.
So we rebounded into ourselves, seeking out a collective sense
of purpose to avoid being part of this menagerie. And New
Zealand slipped into the past.
T he Mental Notes recording sessions started not long after
the Reefer Cabaret show. It was 8 May 1975. We were
at Festival Recording Studios in Pyrmont. Richard Clapton
had recorded ‘Girls On The Avenue’ in that studio not long
before. We all knew what a hit that had been. Maybe it was
hit time for us.
132 A Sharp Left Turn
It was all systems go. We were brimming with expectation
and a fair quotient of paranoia, which had leaked into the
band’s psyche over that time. We had limited recording
experience but wanted to create a masterpiece. We were all
worried about how it was going to turn out.
The rhythm tracks kicked off reasonably well. Within
three days, my Gibson Les Paul Recording bass, Croth’s
drums and Eddie’s basic keyboards were down. Then started
the overdubs. By now it was clear that the engineer was
uninterested in the whole exercise; it would not be unusual
to find that he had literally gone fishing. Damn. Why didn’t
we insist on another one? No one knows the answer to that
question.
Juddsy, in a stroke of opportunism, rushed in after the
rhythm tracks, recorded his vocals and was done. He then
followed that with a colourful array of guitar parts that he
had concocted, and was able to clock out of the studio and
into the control room. Smart move.
The follow-up sessions were fraught with problems. The
guitar overdubs found Wally sweating in a tiny room with a
huge Marshall amp screaming out, while in the control room
it sounded more like a twanging rubber band. Over and over
he would play, and a sense of jinx set in.
It got no better when Tim came to do his vocals. After one
session he wrote home: ‘Well, it’s been a tortuous week. The
tension and nervous strain have been unbelievable. Because
we have waited so long for this album we’ve been striving
for perfection and any imperfections that have arisen due to
musical fumbles or emotional traumas have appeared worse
than they actually are . . . I feel very drained of energy.’
Across the Ditch 133
 I watched all this evolve. Everything turning into slow back to Bondi Junction, where I lay on my camp stretcher
steps. Slow steps forward. I had finished my parts. I sat in the and wondered. That’s all I could do. I’d already done my
control room watching the repeating spools of tape recording wandering. Now I wondered. Why? What was driving me?
the same thing over and over again. The more someone How could I know?
recorded themselves, the more they seemed to get it wrong. I could go and see a psychiatrist. But I didn’t. I didn’t tell
And then—I knew it was going to happen. Maybe I anyone what was going on. I must have thought, ‘How can
made it happen somehow. One day, I had to get out. I was they understand?’ But really, I didn’t talk to anyone because
suddenly trapped in there. I avoided everyone and went and I was so embarrassed to have brought this deeply foolish life
sat in the reception area. For a while. Then I took off and upon myself. I  was a buffoon. A  wretched, slowly wasting,
started walking down the street; a street with no hedgerows. wasted bass player in a really good band. Let’s leave it at that.
It was under a motorway bridge and heading east. I walked The Mental Notes sessions reached their conclusion with
and walked and walked. I didn’t look at anybody. I sidled past a vague sense of security about what was ‘in the can’. They
department stores where you could buy one-kilo blocks of were our songs. We’d played them. From the songwriting
Rocky Road. I passed a shop selling Ferraris and Maseratis. flow of Juddsy and Tim and the moulding and orderly
They looked alive in there with their spotless paint. I sped business of our not-so-orderly imaginations, Mental Notes
up. I went through the Cross. More hookers. Pimps. Deep- existed. And then we all packed our wobbly suitcases for a
fried food that could kill you. Junkies lying on the grass in the flight back to New Zealand.
feeble, small parks dotted here and there. I went as far as I
could. Through the Eastern Suburbs. And I kept on walking
into the surf at Bondi Beach. I fell under the waves.
I had escaped . . . but from what? Was my subconscious
(my head) telling me to keep going? ‘Keep swimming,
Michael.’ Across the Tasman Sea. Back home. But my
heart kept me stationary. Still. Lifting me up on each wave
and falling down with it and driving me back to the beach.
Returning. Returning. The dim glaze of the sun filtering
through the surface. Like hundreds of small underwater
lamps cradling me.
I stayed in that surf for over an hour. Then I got out
and bought a towel, dried off in the sun and caught the bus

134 A Sharp Left Turn Across the Ditch 135