Part 8: Christchurch, flat, cold, cheap beer, I liked it!
We spent the first coupla days camped out by the Avon until the girls had found us a place to live (us males didn’t want to scare off prospective landlords). The houses were so cheap compared to AK and reasonably seedy to suit our needs. We’d met a few locals and headed off to our first gig not long after getting there. Unfortunately, one of the fuckers we invited back for an after-party stole Brons Docs. The girls sorted it out in the toilets at the next gig and all was well with the message of ‘the AK’ers are alright, don’t fuck with the females’. We’d met some Hamiltonians and hung out with them alot. But I didn’t get invited back to the local’s game of D’n’D on account my character was ‘too damn evil’ I guess (hey! those orphanages practically burnt themselves down!).
Christchurch is nice and flat (unless you’re a rich cunt and live on a hill) and the bottlestore was within ‘staggering with a crate’ distance. I interviewed a couple of bands (Holocaust, I remember cos I bump into Dave Gideon usually once a year) for a zine and got the ‘Serious Talk’ from Bron’s dad. Social Welfare were bastards tho, so to get them off my back, I went to an interview at Polytech. This girl at the interview kept on hassling me to ‘have a biscuit’. After refusing several times she said ‘You’ll like it’…Sheesh alright! Give me a biscuit!…. Yay! Dope biscuit! LOL…turned out she used to live at the Big House and moved out just before I moved in!
Some of our mates from AK were already down there so we had a small crew and the Hamiltonians were cool dudes too (hehehe…most of our mates down there were North Islanders….the Southers seemed slightly weird to us). NO IDEA was down there too! There were gigs at pubs and dole day rages as well as hall shows.
Richard had come down and was being a twat. He’d ripped off the neighbours pot and was flaunting his AK Skin shirt. I’d got accepted on a course and came home one day to find Bron crying. I asked her what was up but she fled to our room…’Hmmm…must be woman stuff’… Then Richard came out of the kitchen and started going off at me accusing me of ‘mouthing off behind his back’… “Fuck you! I’ll say it to your face!”. So after the usual verbal I punched him and he fell back. Then I jumped on him and pummeled his head a few times and shouted shit at him… mainly ‘Fuck your Skins shirt! Your not in fucking AK now you bald-headed bastard!” LOL… I could possibly have been wearing my Crass t-shirt. After he left, I got pissed and he came back with a bottle of Brandy to make up….Yayyy! (Try not to brawl with your GF’s family…it’s never pretty). A coupla weeks later I was backing him up in a fight. HAHAHAHAHA
My cat, Nightmare, was huge and evil. He could whip any cat foolish enough to cross his path and often did. If I was lucky, he’d let me watch! AUCKLAND STREETCATS AOK!
I’d go up to Wellington and hang out for a week with Kurtis and a buncha Wellingtonians/ Aucklanders every now and then, getting drunk and going to ‘sly groggers’ (illegal bars usually run by a gang’s prospects) hidden in the depths of Cuba street. I met Shane (pre-tattooist days) and we sussed out our birthdays were on the same day! (He’s younger tho). We’d play ‘Russian Roulette’ with a soft airpistol I’d scored and get fucked-up…LOL One morning in CHCH I’d walked into our spare room and found a crashed out Steve Droog there! Showed him round a bit of CHCH til he found some skins.
Apart from that CHCH was pretty much the same as other places (slightly prettier in winter maybe…) but it was fucking cold to us Northerners (tho I prefer the cold). Tech was sweet, we’d gone on a pub crawl with only 4 out of 10 pubs letting us in (No Punks!) and a pretty good music scene.
Then one night at a NO IDEA gig we got in a fight. At hall gigs, one side of the hall would be skins, the other side punks. Mark and I would wander in and say “Seeya Later!” and go off to our respective sides! I happened to be looking across and saw Mark get jumped by a couple of skins and ran over and jumped on the nearest guilty looking shavehead I saw. In no time at all a big brawl had broken out and the band had stopped with the shout of “TAKE IT OUTSIDE!” We got outside and were hanging around Mark when this Skin jumped over and clocked him with a bottle. He dropped, I grabbed the dude who’d bottled him and we lined up… when another fist hit me from the side dropping me. Next thing, two of them were kicking the crap out of me and I took a steelcap in the face (lucky I was drunkish…) ‘Hey! I thought youse were into one-on-ones! just got me kicked harder til a Hamiltonian saved me (Cheers Rob!). We bailed, my face was swollen for a week.
They jumped Mark again at the Hospital…and I ran into one in town “we’ll get you, ya punk scum”.Great…A week after that we were at a party at James (No Idea’s house) and the same guys were there. But they were all friendly and blew us out and got us drunk! Turns out they had heard that the AK SKINS were gonna come down…LOL…knew they were handy for something! So it was all good now. The pot was great, the gigs were brilliant, and the parties didn’t have the Riot Squad show up like in AK.