I told him.
Actually, I told him my first name, but a fake surname (Just in case, said Frank). Like I said, I wasn’t yet used to male attention. It tended to make me nervous.
‘Got any more songs?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’
And then John said four little words that would truly change the course of my life, and his life, for the better. He smiled, and said, ‘Let’s start a band!’
And before Frank could butt in, I also smiled, and said, ‘Okay.’
The following week, John phoned and left a message.
I was scared to call him back.
What if I’d imagined it? What if we didn’t really sound as good as I thought we did?
Of course, Frank was adamant that I should ignore the call, but I thought about that for a bit and reminded myself yet again that fear and excitement feel almost the same and I was no longer going to let fear dictate my life—remember? So, as yet another ‘override’, I made myself a rule: when it came to creative risks, whenever I felt this feeling, I was going to try saying ‘yes’, and just see what happened.
I called John back and said, ‘Hi John, it’s Clare, from …’
And before I could finish my sentence, he said, ‘Hey! Let’s jam!’
I’ll never forget it. No small talk, no pleasantries, just ‘Hey! Let’s jam!’
I found his enthusiasm very amusing. I couldn’t help but giggle.
Turned out we lived around the corner from each other, me in Fitzroy, him in a share house in Carlton.
‘What songs do you want to jam?’ I asked.
He said, ‘Can you bring your songs?’
That scared me a lot, so I said, ‘Yes,’ and swallowed.
The first time I ever showed up at John’s door, I had a tape of my half-finished songs in my bag, and I was sweating. It was a cool enough day, but I was hot with fear, and before knocking on his door, I stood on his porch for some length of time, practising my FAFL and my FOF.
John invited me in and offered me tea. I was quiet. Mainly, I was just trying not to blow my own heart out with panic. Deep breath, deep breath, Face-Accept-Float-Let time pass.
John’s bedroom smelled a lot like Nag Champa and beer. When he started playing his guitar I relaxed. He was an absolute master. He could play pretty much any song I suggested. I kept thinking, Is this really happening? Even from this first jam, it was clear that John was a rare young man. He asked questions, he listened hard for the answers, he named the gaps in between and, from the first moment I met him, he made me feel like I mattered.
I never mentioned to John the stuff I’d been through in Oxford, but I guess I didn’t really need to. It was all there in the cassette I gave him—a recording of half-finished songs that I couldn’t believe I had agreed to share. I can’t tell you how sick I felt as I handed them over. I told him they were terrible, sorry.
He said, ‘I bet they’re not.’
The first time ever I saw Marty Brown’s face was at our second rehearsal, he was walking into John’s bedroom, ducking, because he was so tall and the doorframe was so low.
I had already heard of Marty; John had talked him up on the phone. They were housemates and bandmates. ‘An animal on drums,’ was how John described him. ‘Marty Monster. You’re gonna love him.’ And he was right: I would love Marty very, very much.
When he walked into John’s room that day, I had no idea of what role he would later play in my life. I was still singing. All I remember thinking when he entered was Holy fuck, that guy is tall! And John kept playing, said, ‘Clare, meet Marty,’ and the tall guy nodded shyly, said, ‘Excuse me,’ quietly as he swished past me, all limbs and grace, a centrifuge in motion, and before I knew it he was sitting on the drum kit, holding his brushes, playing along to my songs. No prep, no practice. Just instinct, and talent, and a touch of bravado. The three of us—John, Marty, me—this was the moment it all began. They were playing my songs back to me. All the bits that weren’t yet working, John had somehow set right.
John also had songs that he said needing finishing, and there in the room—pen a paper, call and response—we made his half-songs whole.
The following week, we did it again, this time in Marty’s bedroom, which was larger.
Marty was a self-taught sound engineer studying Arts and Commerce at Melbourne University, which was where he had met John. His bedroom was full to overflowing with … old stuff. Machines I didn’t recognise. Second-hand recording equipment: reel to reel, sound desks, microphones. After we had finished jamming, he said, ‘Okay, who wants to record a song?’
From a modern-day perspective, it is almost impossible to explain to you how rare it was to find someone who recorded songs in their bedroom the way Marty Brown did then. To put this into context, the internet barely worked, MacBooks had not yet been invented, and there were certainly no gangs of kids recording songs in their bedroom; the technology just didn’t exist. There was barely email. The fact that I happened to luck onto possibly the only kid in a fifty-kilometre radius who owned a reel-to-reel tape machine, a mixing desk and microphones, and just happened to have the skills to use them was incredible. I had never heard of, or met, anyone like Marty Brown, and I had certainly never been asked, ‘Who wants to record a song?’
And that’s how my recording career finally began—in Marty’s bedroom. I don’t even think we had a name yet, but eventually we did—we called ourselves Red Raku, after one of my favourite firing and
