‘I just need to stay onstage and I will survive’
In A Sharp Left Turn Mike Chunn recalls Split Enz’s first Australian tour in 1975 to support Hush, which eventually lead to the band relocating from New Zealand. Here, Chunn recalls his crippling agoraphobia.
The 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 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 hardcore 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. Metalflake, V8, pot-bellied bizzaro clowns and gangsters scoured 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 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.’
A Sharp Left Turn: Notes on a life in music, from Split Enz to Play It Strange, published by Allen & Unwin is available in bookstores now. RRP: $45.