Roger was keen to keep the band going so he advertised for a
drummer in the local papers.
One of the people who missed the cut was Andrew a pseudo punk
and a neighbour of Tony the disappearing ex Kashmir singer.
He had a brother who was in an up and coming band who were
being courted by Record Labels. (this never happened as they were in a car
accident just before they signed and it all collapsed) and I think he was
somehow destined to live in his shadow.
Kashmir eventually found a drummer in John , though nowhere
as good as Jessy he was competent and did what he was told. Like all good
drummers should.
One thing I reckon that Roger never really latched on to
during this period was how instrumental James was to the continuation of the
band.
James was a hugely popular guy and with Russell had a large
network of friends through their ability to find a party in anything. James held
band practise at his flat that was more of a drop-in party centre than home.
This network supplied parties and ultimately work.
During this time as mentioned earlier, Jim was back hanging
around and both he and myself would constantly be bagging Kashmir on how
serious they had become. I suppose I must single out how serious Roger and Chris
had become because James was often more times than not in for as much as he
could get out of it. With Roger there was always an emphasis on what the crowd
wanted and which songs were for dancing and which songs were for quiet times,
bullshit really, so Jim and I decided to put a band together to do it how it
was meant to be: Simple, stupid and fun.
We hatched a plan. Kashmir’s first gig with John was going to
be held at the old Youth Club a venue that had been unavailable for some time
due to renovations. We enlisted the services of Andrew the reject drummer from
Kashmir and named our selves I.Q =O pronounced eye kew equals zero. And we
would crash the Kashmir gig as the support. We made no secret of our playing we
informed Roger that the Youth club had accepted us.
We just wouldn’t tell him what we were playing or how we were
playing.
This drove Roger nuts, Russell and James thought it funny. We
even put up posters everywhere saying things like I.Q=O in Sydney soon coming to
Chadstone, or Kashmir & I.Q=0 in London coming soon to your town. Anything
to bump up the numbers. We rehearsed the week before the gig using acoustic
guitars and a drum pad, why we didn’t do things this way, in the beginning, is
beyond me, it was so easy and quick. Jim and I decided to do all our songs Kashmir
were still doing in their set and change the words on others. Because Andrew
was such a pain in the arse we decided to only use him on 5 of the songs. The
plan was to start as a folksy acoustic duo and finish as a hard-core punk band
in the course of 8 songs. When the night came Roger kept asking what we were doing
we didn’t let anyone know, but we made sure we did a soundcheck beforehand. Al
rocked up early and we asked him to control the levels of the mixer for us, he
said he’d be honoured and to his credit did a sterling job. The crowd was one
of biggest yet at the hall, I don’t know if they were expecting something
special or it was the usual nothing to do on a Sunday night in Chadstone thing.
Jim and I jumped on stage early and the crowd weren’t
expecting us because all the hall lights were still on.
We started with Leprosy and then moved onto a rendition of
Hey , Hey My, My by Neil Young (since it was his idea we stole the soft to
Ultra heavy theme from) We renamed it Ho, Ho Hee, Hee Jim playing the worst
harmonica he could. By this time I think the audience was starting to get the
picture as we went in our version of Knockin’ On Heavens Door. We then
introduced Andrew to a sort of Middle of the road ballad called YUK from our
Metal Magistrate set. I used nice clean guitar sounds at this stage Jim was
winning everyone over with his ad-lib and happy banter.
Then we turned on the overdrive.
The crowd probably thought we were one of those bands
that play in coffee houses up until that moment. Because we had no bass player
we had miked up Andrew’s bass drum for bottom-end attack. The crowd loved it
and were jumping up and down we were as sloppy as shit but they loved it even
though we wrote the song Circus the night before. Then we ripped into our new
version of Adolescence. By this time Roger and Co had realised we were doing
songs from their set and were screaming out rip off. Jim quickly reminded the
audience
” the song done by the originals is always better, remember
that later on tonight folks”,
and the classic
“We used to members of the next band but we all got kicked
out, probably too higher standard “
We finished with our version of Advance Australia Fair
morphing into Wild Thing something we did in Metal Magistrate and another part
of the Kashmir show that they used as a highlight. When we had finished the
crowd screamed for encores and Jim yelling back
“ We don’t know any more songs”
So like in the Metal Magistrate gig we just played a couple of songs again.
To Kashmir’s credit, they played a good set, even though we
reminded them that we warmed up the crowd for them.
We had a ball and did exactly the same thing again a
couple of months later at the next Kashmir gig, the highlight would have to be
accused of ripping off material, even though we wrote it. We decided to end it
there mainly because Andrew was an annoying a person that ever could be put on
this earth.
I think we needed to do that to get it out of our system and
say at least we did it.
