My cousin Zöe has been bugging me for a while now to do a guest column for Randomitronica, so after much whining about it on her part I have finally decided to concede to her wishes. So take this as a warning people. I’m just going to leave her entry the way it is and not proof read any of it. I have added some pictures to this post though. As its Randomitronica tradition to have pictures with these things.
There wasn’t any fire by the way, it was just me forgetting about how Zöe’s toaster is incapable of doing anything but burning toast.
-Chloé
Greetings folks, I’m Chloé’s cousin Zöe. That’s all the introduction you’re gonna get from me. I don’t know you people!! No names have been changed to protect anyone.
I’m writing this on Sunday morning. I currently have a hangover that could crush the skull of a less seasoned individual than myself. I can hear someone stumbling about in the living room coughing and muttering something about “dancing pants.” Guess who
that is.
Cousin Chloé and I got up to a few things this weekend, so seeing as I was going to do a guest Randomitronica I’ll write about that.
On Friday night we went to see Pearl Jam in concert, as I needed to do a review of the gig for work. That was fine by me. I got two free tickets out of the deal. I gave one to Chloé as a birthday present, despite her protests that she’d “rather have [her] tits ripped apart by weasels than listen to one single second of any of the languorous pap Pearl Jam has shat out for the last 13 years”. I cared not for her whinging. It saved me having to actually pay for a birthday present for her.
I finally managed to convince her to come with me by letting her know that a certain guy she fancies (we’ll just call him “Simon P. Southberry”) would be coming along too. Ah lust. It can be so handy when it comes to getting people to do what you want them to do.
Liam Finn plus Ben Harper & the I dunno, Deflated Ballsacks or something were playing support for Pearl Jam, but they’re both rubbish so we just stayed near the bar while they were playing. Jesus Christ the beer there was expensive. $11 for a bottle of Corona? That’s insane!
Where was I? Oh yeah, so Pearl Jam started their set only about 25 minutes after the tickets said they would, so that was pretty good going. Some giant sasquatch of a man drunkenly stumbled into me during Pearl Jam’s first song (Daughter) which wasn’t too cool because I’m small and was already half pissed by this point. So I did the only decent thing I could do really, and tripped him up as he careened out of my personal space. Ha ha! What a dunce.
Chloé wasn’t too happy about that cos by tripping the big guy up it caused him to fall onto Simon, who spilled his drink (red wine) on Chloé’s white blouse. But who cares. Whoooo! Pearl Jam!
Pearl Jam put on a very solid performance, the band played pretty much flawlessly, and Eddie Vedder was in fine voice. But they were at the end of a tour, so you’d expect the band to be tight and firing on all cylinders. It was also good to hear the road hadn’t worn out Vedder’s vocals. About two thirds through the gig it looked like he was soothing his throat with some kind of spirit from a big-ass bottle he had near him. Probably why he invited Neil and Liam Finn up on stage with him during the second encore for a rendition of that Chris Knox song “Not Given Lightly”. Which was a moment that was both patriotically rousing and incredibly fucking cheesy. Some people held their lighters aloft during this song. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to be ironic, they were full of boozed up silliness, or if they were just idiots. Probably all three. I wanted them to die.
They had a huge monitor on either side of the stage so you could see the band members clearly as various cameras focussed on what various members were doing at any given time. This was very much appreciated by me, even though it made me realise just how much of a walking cadaver Stone Gossard looks like nowadays. Seriously. If you shaved that guy’s head he’d be Nosferatu incarnate. But Nosfuratu with a guitar. In other words, getting dangerously close to farcical territory, ya hear me Gossard?
It was cool to see Matt Cameron live again. He’s one of my fave drummers, and the only other time I’ve witnessed him live was during a Soundgarden concert many years back (coincidentally at the same venue this PJ gig was at). I prefer his drumming in Soundgarden though, his beats in Pearl Jam are more pedestrian, not as inventive. But whatevz. You adapt your style to suit the band eh. I’m a drummer myself, I know how it goes.
I wish it had been Soundgarden playing. That would’ve cheered Chloé up. The grizzling bitch.
Pearl Jam played for quite a while, about two and a half hours or so. We left a few songs before the end of the concert in order to avoid a huge crowd of people all leaving at the same time. We could still clearly hear the band playing when we were way down the street from the venue. We then had to wait as a multitude of taxis went past us while Chloé was stubbornly smoking a cigarette. I tried explaining to Chloé that we needed a taxi that could accept credit cards so we shouldn’t be mucking about, but she wasn’t having a bar of it.
Well we finally managed to get an appropriate taxi, so Simon, Chloé and I went back to my place. The rest of my housemates had gone down to Taranaki for the weekend so it was just us in the house. Which was good, cos we felt like being rowdy.
We proceeded to hang out in the living room, threw the old I-Ching, ate some chips, drank some daiquirís and had some whippets. Chloé didn’t have any whippets though, because she considers them to be “retarded”. We had the music channel playing on the TV, they played a bunch of Pearl Jam, which was nice, although I was kind of glad when the Pearl Jam stuff finished as Chloé was giving me the evil eye after a while.
Then they started playing a Billy Idol marathon, which we were thoroughly entertained by.
By this time we were all starting to get pretty sloshed. I remember Rob Zombie’s “Foxy Foxy” clip came on the TV, which made Chloé stand up and roar “goddammit what the fuck is this turgid dross? Rob Zombie’s had a
fucking lobotomy!” at the top of her lungs, spilling chips everywhere. It was really funny. I think the outburst scared Simon a bit. Or maybe it was just the whippets making him look a trifle unsettled.
Simon wanted to play truth or dare but its no use playing that with Chloé and I as we’ve known each other since we were little kids, and pretty much know all of each other’s sordid little secrets.
My recollections of the night get fairly blurry after that.
I got up to go to the loo at some point and when I returned Chloé and Simon had disappeared. I assumed Chloé had squirreled him away in the spare bedroom to have her wicked way with him, but she soon returned, complaining that Simon had passed out on her.
Boys. Useless.
So then we watched
Pumpkinhead.
I woke up several hours later on the couch feeling like someone had shanked me in the head. Chloé was busy burning toast. After we’d both had showers, woken Simon and
kicked him out of the house sent him on his merry way I got a text message from my pal Johnny who was having a barbeque round at his place. Chloé had a whole bunch of mp3s that she wanted to give to him for his radio show, so we took a bus round to his house at about noon. We sat about in Johnny’s “man cave” (a smallish sunroom in the front of his house) for a while drinking Coronas and watching random bits of Samurai Jack episodes.
At some point one of Johnny’s mates arrived and we watched a clip on youtube he’d directed of some local political rally. There was an angry heckler guy in this video who got escorted from the premises by some rather large security dudes. Johnny’s mate had filmed the whole debacle. The angry heckler dude called out one of the security guys (“whatcha gonna do now ya fat maggot?!”) which I found so funny I laughed beer through my nose.
There were about ten of us hanging out in the house at this point. We all decided to go down to the park near Johnny’s house, as there was a free concert happening down there and you could bring your booze along. Johnny still had the 3/4 full bottle of Chivas Regal that I’d left at his house a few weeks earlier, so I took that along with me. Chloé wasn’t too keen on the idea of me bringing the whiskey along, she was all like “you shouldn’t take that with us, remember what happened last time you drank that stuff”. But she needn’t have bothered as I wasn’t going to listen. Because I
don’t remember what happened last time.
We got to the concert thingy, and Johnny and his mate went off to find some people to film. A bunch of us sat up on a hill drinking and watching the various musical acts perform. Che Fu played a set. He was in
Supergroove y’know. He was called Che Ness back then. His set was really lame and boring MOR RnB shit. I got frustrated with it after awhile and kept yelling that he should “shut up and fuckin’ play Scone Farm” until Chloé pointed out that Che never sang on that particular Supergroove song. Ah tits, man. I wish he’d played it anyway, that would have been something.
Don’t get me wrong though, to each their own with their personal music tastes. I just flat out don’t care for RnB. Che’s a pretty decent, versatile singer and his voice suits the RnB style, I just miss his “rock vocal” style he employed in Supergroove.
By that point the whiskey was starting to kick in so we thought it best that we walked back up the hill to Johnny’s while we were still able to stand.
I think we lost a guy on the way.
Johnny and a couple of his mates tended to the barbeque while Chloé and Johnny’s missus Trudy played Tekken 6 on Trudy’s Xbox. I just walked around the house talking to myself and humming Depeche Mode songs. I was to find out later that rather than humming the songs like I thought I was I was actually singing them very loudly and out of tune. And apparently my house wanderings had cumulated into me sitting in the empty bathtub for about forty minutes. But hey, at least I didn’t fall into the barbeque.
I don’t remember if I managed to get out of the bathtub myself or if I was dragged out, but I do remember that by that point there were way more people there and all the barbeque had been eaten. Bastards.
At some point I had a cigarette, I think, as there is half of one in my pocket. I must have been pretty soused to have done that.
And that’s pretty much all I remember. I’ll have to ask old Coughing Girl out there what went down during the rest of the evening, all I know is somehow Chloé and I made it back to my house.
I can hear her yelling. Something about Rob Zombie. Must be that clip on again.
Holy shit the fire alarm just started up.
~Zöe.
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