Driving Up a Mountain

And so my - at the time - last Oz INXS concert rolled on. For the first time, I was not in the sweaty mass at the front vying desperately for a brief eye-fuck from JD. Which, by the way, I never get. He smiles, flirts and acknowledges plenty of people, but I - possibly through virtue of being brunette - appear to be invisible to the lanky legged one. Maybe because I call him the lanky legged one. Or, possibly because he can sense that, despite living in Vancouver for two years, I think Kraft Dinner foul and the only time I tried to play hockey I nearly brained myself with my own stick. Indeed, despite my standard chat up technique to the boys of Canuckshire being to ask them, with wide eyed innocence, just who exactly Wayne Gretzky is, I usually snoozed off before they were quite finished explaining so still don't fully know. Just on the off chance he ever stumbles across this blog, may I just say JD, may I just state for the record, that I love Keiths? In fact, I spent the best part of the 2001-2002 school year happily ensconced in the Cambie pub forming such a close and intimate relationship with Mr Keith that I now call him Al? Just keep that in mind for Shepherds Bush, please. Eh.


Just for a change, I digress. Being out of said sweaty mass, I had the interesting opportunity of observing the concert experience rather than being in the thick of it. That's not to say that you can't be in the thick of the experience from far away from the stage - I have plenty of back of Wembley and Earls Court experiences to attest to that - but that, as I'd seen the show so many times by this point, I could chose to notice things that I might not have otherwise. For example, instead of just staring dreamily into Jon's baby blues, I could appreciate what a clockwork rhythm unto itself is the relationship between him and his fantastic drum tech. Normally during a show Tod is so unobtrusive that that it is as rare to notice him as to catch a glimpse of a near extinct creature, like a platypus. Not that I would compare Tod to a platypus in any other way. At Newcastle, I had the perspective to watch as he crouched in readiness, handing things to Jon, moving his microphone back and forth and I am sure doing a multitude of other things I am too ignorant to see, but that keeps the driving beat that is the foundation of an INXS show moving smoothly. Equally I could see Lindsay, with the focus of a sniper on a starter block, poised holding either a guitar or saxophone ready to hand it to Kirk at the precise correct moment. I thought I saw him playing the guitar at one point, but he later explained that he'd been tuning it - the concentration required to do that during a show is mind boggling. There was a slight sound distortion at one point, when the bass seemed to be turned up, but 13 and a couple of other blokes I didn't recognize darted about for a couple of seconds and then I no longer thought that Garry was going to blow my face off. In my crew love fest, I even managed momentarily not to hate Jen, the woman whose job it is to help undress JD. Although he evidently takes responsibility for his footwear himself as he decided, inexplicably, to change his shoes halfway through the show. It took him about three songs to do so; with an almost feminine multi-tasking ability, he somehow managed not to miss a note or a beat of performance as he laced up a new pair of boots. Footwear issues aside, there was again that edgy vibe to the performance that was in evidence in Brisbane. One of the things I have always loved about INXS is that, despite their great success, they've never been one of those slick, mass-zeitgeist grabbing, can-do-no-wrong relatively bland (in my opinion) superbands like U2 or Coldplay. You almost feel as though they might spectacularly fall on their faces at any moment, and even though they never do, it's one of the things that make their live shows so exciting. I actually thought that this might literally happen in Newcastle, as JD (in the second pair of shoes) jumped up on a speaker and just for a second wobbled alarmingly backwards. My heat leapt into my mouth and I found myself, quite involuntarily, poised like a starting runner with my arms held out. Because, whenever 6"2 of Canadian lands on me from a great height, I am more than capable of catching them, twirling them merrily above my head and launching them back from whence they came with a cheery wave. Luckily, in the interests of me not being squished like a fly, JD regained his balance and disaster was averted.


The following day, my destination was the Blue Mountains and Katoomba. The western view from Katoomba particularly interested me, as for a good 25 years after the first penal colony was established on what is now Sydney, no one saw it. For an entire generation, as far as they were concerned, the country ended to the west with the mountain range. They had just about built the Harbour Bridge and started shooting Home and Away before a particularly determined group of explorers - Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson (thanks again to Bill Bryson - in fact, just assume that everything I know, about everything, I learned from him) - finally managed to scale the dense foliage and presumably uttered something along the lines of "well bugger me", when they caught sight of a bloody great huge country lying before them. Sadly however, I was denied the opportunity to recreate that moment after sitting in traffic for three hours to reach Katoomba, because the rain was so thick that I couldn't see a bloody thing.


So much of what I experienced in Australia was the exact opposite of what I expected - although I suppose that its very up-side-down-ness was to be expected. I had expected to shoot, in a mere few hours, from Cairns to Brisbane on a major motorway peppered consistently with motels and beach resorts, and I imagined Katoomba as a sleepy little mountain town. In fact, it has strip malls and is reached, at speed (traffic permitting) by a three lane highway. Despite this, it appear that there is little in the way of indoor activities on offer in Katoomba - grumpily staring out at the battering rain, I admitted the reality that I'd spent hours climbing a mountain in order to watch Neighbours in a motel room.


You know the way that siblings can infuriate you in a way that no one else ever quite achieves? That is precisely my experience with the Three Sisters, the famous rock formation that theoretically one can see from near Katoomba. In the morning, further grumpy from a shower with a large spider, just as I had travelled far enough back down in the direction of Sydney to not feasibly be able to turn back, the rain suddenly stopped and the sun broke through the clouds. Somewhere, on the wind, I could swear that I faintly heard "nyah, nyah, you caa-aan't see us!"