The title of this album is the first line of the first song and says it all about the way I was living. Up at noon for an early death breakfast and huge mug o' Darjeeling. Then out to ol' Brunswick St to see who was roaming. A good, if guilt-laden, lifestyle.

That's where the nostalgia stops, though. I won't be heading for that kind o' perdition for a rosy ol' trip any time soon. But for then it was great.

Between this and the previous compilation (Sad Clowns and Castaways) I moved to Melbourne and stayed there, Greg did, too, a few years later and then Ian.

There was a pub near Greg's first Melbourne place which featured a coven of retirees singing with the piano. One of the warlocks had a vibrato that sounded like a slowed down engine failing to turnover: rRRrRRrRRrRRrRR. When I took Greg there to hear it he collapsed against the wall. That was it, my friends, we had to reform The Gatekeepers.

Play live we did, better than we had but still not extremely well. Record we did and much more successfully. Here's the cream o' the crop o' that.

Context:

As 1985 ground on Brisbane felt so flat after uni that its endless punishing hills seemed like massive overcompensation. No study, no band ... Dad coming down every few months in a maelstrom of power tools and renovation ideas (well, it was his house) .... my one remaining creative outlet had become writing fiction ... It was time to move on. Margot, fellow ex-Gatekeeper, got a job there and invited me down to start a share house. No thought required.

Two years later, Greg Wadley also emigrated from Queensland and suggested we take up the thread again. We did. Some new material and a few gigs played to small audiences made up of the other acts on the bill later we just thought it best for everyone if we recorded what we had and left it.

Greg bought a Tascam Portastudio.

The big sessions, with Ian Wadley on drums, happened in Ian's room in the winter o' '88. This was probably the highest audio quality I've every been involved with in the analogue realm. Most of the tracks suffer from unreadiness of performance or arrangement and get frustratingly sloppy. Most of this is due to me.

Most of what's on offer here, though, is me on my own with the 4-track and a lot of that is from a short time between Greg moving to Sydney and retrieving his gear a month and a bit later.

After that there were sporadic recordings put out under the band name (the Indoors 12" and songs on a couple of the Spill compilations) but no further serious attempts to form the band for live playing. The feeling regarding that was pretty much that it had long outlived its purpose.

Anyway, after this there's one last album of new stuff and then I move on .... If you've stuck with us so far, please accept my bow and thanks.

Content:

There was a lot more I wanted to put on here but I either couldn't source it or if I could it had fallen victim to poor storage over many years. (I will put one vote in for chrome cassettes. All of them I bought at the time still sound good.)

There is a lot of tape noise on these as most of them were done hurriedly without any idea of them ending up here but where the spirit of it comes through I've kept it in without noise reduction.