This one was a whole lot scarier.

Bit of background – New Zealand in the 1980s was a lot more violent than it is today. Every Saturday night there would be a punchup in every pub car-park in the whole country. I was once driving past The Red Lion at about 4 in the afternoon and saw this guy, covered in blood, getting the shit kicked out of him by about 20 girls. I once went to a party where one skinhead cut another skinhead’s ear off because he said something bad about his favourite record.

You could get the crap kicked out of you for wearing Doc Martens or a leather jacket.

The general political vibe at the time was coloured by a recent a tour by the (Apartheid Era) South African rugby team that nearly triggered a civil war here – massive protests at every match, most of which turned really violent – by police armed with riot gear, primed for a fight. Thatcher’s Britain, Down-under. At one game somebody dropped a flour-bomb out of an airoplane and hit one of the players. A load of rugby players chased some guy out of a bar – he got in his car to try to get away so they lifted it off the ground so the wheels spun in the air… smashed the windows, hauled him out and kicked the shit out of him.

About a week after the first gig, we got this offer to do a gig at a party in a rugby club at the far end of the Hutt Valley – which to us was serious hill country. These guys we vaguely knew from this punk/skin-head band called Skank Attack were doing it and needed some support, so we said “ok”.

Turns out it was a bikey party – a gang party.

This was back before Harleys were a mid-life crisis thing, and before the gangs had become proper organised-crime businesses. There was one gang over the other side of the country where to be initiated, you had to commit two rapes that got into the papers.

By the time we’d figured out what we’d gotten into, it was too late to get out… we were absolutely shitting ourselves… especially me, because I was there with Susan… we were over-educated, under-employed middle-classed suburban kids, totally in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So we figured out escape-routes and emergency exit plans – which was really just a way of occupying our minds I guess… I’m pretty sure that Ian was loving every minute of it, and ratcheting up the fear as much as he could. It was his idea for us to go full-psychedelic… most bands around that time were into this whole kind of ragged-doom vibe, like Joy Division or Hunters and Collectors… it was post-punk, but only just. Ian thought it would be a good idea to go massively into the whole paisley thing… so I was dressed like this:

Those are my mum’s beads.

The only thing I can remember from the gig, is seeing myself from above – this delicate little flower-child telling a room full of terrifying feral looking blokes to “have a couple of beers and have a good time”, and then playing this set that they must have absolutely hated. About half way through Ian suggested that “maybe we should finish early”… we lasted one more song.

There was about 2 seconds of polite, disgruntled applause, then we fled. To be honest, I think the audience were more relieved by the early finish than we were.

The only physical damage happened out in the car-park… Phil from Skank Attack had pulled the hub-caps off Andrew’s Mum’s car and was sitting cross-legged on the ground battering the hell out of them with drumsticks. He sometimes came across as being a bit unhinged to be fair.

That’s him on the left:

Here’s a thing that Skank Attack did recently (I think)

I think that’s pretty good as it happens. I thought they were bloody awful at the time. Probably better than we were though.