Number 10 - At last

Modern Giant - The Band Has Broken Up (2007)

There have been two occasions in my life when I have heard a song on the radio that I thought was so blindingly good I was compelled to ring the station straight away to find out what it was. Funnily enough I can remember making the first of these calls but cannot remember what the song was. Perhaps it wasn't that good. The second time was The Band Has Broken Up. It was being played on FBI and I am sure I can remember where I was: in The Brown driving out of a carpark in Randwick. Perhaps you would make up a more rock'n'roll locale if we were working with fiction but these are the mundane recollections of my life remember.

Not that long ago I would have mounted a very strong argument against the possibility of what is essentially spoken word poetry ever becoming an important part of my musical life but I had never heard of Adam Gibson. Any man that starts a poem with the line "Midnight Oil, The Hummingbirds, The Clash" is going to grab my attention. The fact that it is backed by a great little rock tune, incidentally produced by Simon Holmes of the aforementioned Hummingbirds, doesn't hurt.

I am a sucker for nostalgia and what Gibbo does in this 4 and a half minutes is tell a story familiar to those of us that were in our 20s in Sydney during the 90s. I can recognise the life I did live, of parties in the inner west where "girls were enticing and pale" and lamentations for all the nights spent watching guitars that I should have spent playing them, and also the life I wanted to live, a life where I actually spoke to the girls at those parties and found out what was at the other end of the plane trips that all of my friends went on.

Most of all I wanted to meet a girl at The Hoey and disappear with her into the Burke St night just like Gibbo's character does at the end. Alas that never happened but who cares because I have had the pleasure of disappearing into the Burke St night with Girl O'Sea and that is all I need.