On the road back to Melbourne

We have just played our last 3 shows of 2009 in Sydney.
We are back in the car again early in the morning and are now about 2 hours from the concrete hi rises and terrace houses of Sydney’s city.
Driving through the bone-dry, bone-coloured hills, underneath a factory of heavy dark grey clouds, lined up and moving slowly along through the otherwise blue sky on their invisible conveyor belt.
It’s the first time I’ve looked at this landscape for a while and I feel quite intrigued and inspired by it. I have the idea that sometime soon I’ll come sit on these hills for a few weeks, write some songs, watch the stars and probably read a Bill Bryson book… That is until Damian, making some strange falsetto noise in my ear, distracts me from the outside world. Pretty soon we find ourselves trying to laugh without using any facial expression whatsoever. It goes on for about 5 minutes before the outside world distracts me from him again.
The clouds have now joined forces to become one big black blanket and are now releasing all their raindrops. It’s coming down pretty damn hard on the windscreen and on to the bone earth.
I start thinking about how contrasting this world is compared with what we have been looking at in France and England. The rolling hills have turned from green to brown and the old stone villages and churches have gone, replaced with volcanic boulders and skeletons of trees.
Even though I know that the land here is in drought it still looks incredibly beautiful.

Right at this point in our journey back to Melbourne we go through cycles of speaking deeply of philosophy, the world, music, and life then falling silently into our own thoughts, listening attentively and singing along with whatever music is playing on the car stereo, then out of nowhere we spark into some incoherent, slightly sleep depraved idiotic humour. Most people would probably respond by looking blankly and slightly bewildered. But in the state of mind that we are in we just double up with laughter and continue to spiral further and further from anything comprehensible. Occasionally it is broken briefly by me fucking up my laugh with an unwanted snort.
Then as suddenly as it starts it stops. It goes back to deep conversation again.
This cycle should probably last another 3 or 4 hours before our arses fall asleep, our joints become fused and we become slightly irritable and plain old over it.

I can see that these long trips in Australia travelling from city to city packed with all our gear like sardines into Nick Cheeks’ car are going to be quite common for us in this coming year.
I look forward to playing more shows, seeing more of this country and becoming the band we really want to be…..

X

N.M.