My music tastes are as unpredictable as the last-minute adventures my restlessness has me taking my young on.
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Last month I was at Pseudo Echo, this week I’ll be at Metallica, but I’m almost more excited about seeing their support act, a band called Suicidal Tendencies.
You could find me at a rap show, in a metal mosh, at a DJ set, an Aussie rock festival or a punk gig.
Possibly the only habitat I haven’t been able to adapt to is one with a country music soundtrack.
But when I was a teenager, my tastes were a lot less varied.
The only hip-hop act I really liked was Cypress Hill, the only reggae I really liked was Bob Marley, and mostly everything else I listened to was alternative grunge bands and soft metal.
Among the gravelly voices full of angst, the heavy head-banging guitar riffs, the beats that make you turn your steering wheel into a drum kit and your hands into sticks, there was an anomaly.
Chocolate Starfish didn’t really fit in there.
Perhaps the most significant difference was that they were Australian, but there were many others.
It was exciting to be as obsessed with them as I was, because it made them somewhat accessible.
Sure, I’d seen Peter Andre at the Civic Centre and Kulcha on the back of a truck in the GV Hotel’s car park, but I hadn’t fallen in love with them like I’d fallen in love with ’Fish frontman Adam Thompson.
A pattern had started to emerge in my teen crushes on celebrities.
They were all bald.
There was Russell Crowe in his Romper Stomper era (purely based on looks, Hando was horrid), Bruce Willis’ John McClane in Die Hard, and, wait for it, the ‘too sexy for his own song’ Right Said Fred singer Richard Fairbrass.
My parents must have been concerned.
Still, when I was 15, they drove me and a friend to Rockalonga in Yarrawonga to watch Chocolate Starfish perform.
We got there early, and wearing my fan T-shirt, my friend and I parked our tushies in the front row, prepared to dehydrate ourselves so that we wouldn’t have to give our spot up to go to the loo.
Mum and Dad hung at the back.
Now if they were concerned about who I idolised before, you can imagine how much worse that might have been when Thompson appeared on stage wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned in hot pink with a derogatory word used to describe a promiscuous person, and proceeded to play the whole show in it.
Anyhoo, this was the ’90s and I was armed with a point and shoot camera loaded with a 24-shot roll of film.
I snapped away blindly, hoping the pictures would be as remarkable as you’d assume shots taken from the front row would be.
I used all 24, with no idea we were going to get a chance to meet Mr Fish post-show.
Those from my era will know that sometimes you could get another two or three shots out of a roll of film, but you never quite knew if you had until you picked your developed photos up from the chemist a week later.
The suspense was unbearable.
But when I found a picture of myself next to the one and only Adam Thompson with his arm around my shoulders, it was a teenage dream come true.
I’ve seen Chocolate Starfish perform a few more times at various festivals throughout the years since then, but was lucky enough to snag a couple of the only 100 tickets available to an intimate gig the band put on in Casablanca Pizza’s back room in Shepparton last week.
The ‘party with a purpose’ raised money for Thompson’s MusicKarma charity and was a little warm-up for the band in his home town before they embarked on their Raw Fish tour the day after.
I knew with only 100 people there I’d probably get another chance for a photo with him, so I dug out that picture from 30 years ago and, when the time came, I asked him if we could replicate it. Being the top guy he is, of course he obliged.
And the teenager inside me smiled a little.
I also asked him if he still had that T-shirt.
He told me it had actually belonged to the band’s original guitarist, Zoran Romich, who sadly died of cancer in 2012.
Then he told me that even if he had that T-shirt now, his wife wouldn’t let him wear it.
And the teenager inside me died a little.
The up-close-and-personal private gig at Casa was brilliant.
With a musical career that has spanned more than 30 years, the band’s talent has only grown.
But Thompson as a frontman is so down-to-earth and personable, he remains a country boy.
Albeit, in some very glitzy get-up you might not find on the farm.