More a performance than a gig, we played one song to open the awards. Sound check at three, arriving at the stage door, from the outside this place looked like a huge tennis dome. After driving all through the night from WAGGA WAGGA to Adelaide. We were spent by the time we got there. Richo powered on with a five hour shift from somewhere to somewhere else. Ten hours to stare out the window at my reflection, nothing to see but black. Not even many stars are out tonight, but if you look up for long enough out here I promise you a shooting-stella-solar-show. Sleeplessness, shotgun position with the Underground Lovers blaring. A soundtrack to the black open fields of the oil coloured night. Wesley snoring in the back. We stop at all sorts of all-night petrol stations with old men serving us who have lived in the station and will die in the station. The sun doesn't rise until well after six, and we've still got three hours to go. But finally we arrive at Paradise (which is a suburb in Adelaide) where we are staying and while the guys get two or so hours sleep I sit up and type out yesterdays tour diary. We all get ready in our award wining suits and ties and head off to Festival Theatre.

Our dressing room is filled with a hundred lights around the mirrors. So, feeling a tad over important Jamie and I pretend we're millionaires for the rest of the night, with outrageously posh accents and loud pompous speeches to no one. A quick red in the bar at the Theatre and suddenly we're on in five. Opening the awards with 'Running around the white picket fence'. Just before we go on Jamie peeps around the curtain and spots Tim Rogers and the guys from Powderfinger among other rock stars out the front. My legs feel like jelly just before it sets. The over-stressed stage guy is telling us when to go on, when to start, where to walk off to, when to make noise and so on..... and then, before I know it, I'm walking off and people are clapping and ya-hooing. The song went for what seemed like ten seconds: got on stage and screamed a bit, jumped a bit, waved at the end and that was it. After it we had pats on the back, and 'that was great' from the stage people, my legs were now set jelly. I got lost in the corridors of the back stage and lost the guys, this place was a maze of long corridors and sharp turns leading to big stair wells with 'NO ENTRY' written on them. We all stood around back stage for a while talking about it and how fast it went and then off we went to our box up in the theatre for clapping at the nominees and booing at the winners.

Powderfinger won just about every award, Timmy Rogers won a couple, Sea Scouts won the best unsigned act from Tassy, so there was much clapping for that, but all in all the Music Industry Critics Awards were a croc of shit. Now off to the: free AFTER SHOW PISS UP WITH AS MUCH OF ANYTHING AS YOU WANT dinner. The Bluies were on the same table as Art of Fighting and Adam Zammit from Revolver magazine. The entrée consisted of strange little eatables I'd never seen, before I ate each one I had to asked the waiter (who was there for no other reason than to fill our cups full of red or white or beer) what it was I was actually about to eat. My cup was never empty all night, slowly but surely every one at the table was getting plastered. Our table was the loudest, screaming at each other over everyone else. Then the speeches which were death, they went on forever and were of no importance or consequence to any one at our table. Every time a politician finished a sentence, the table (only ours out of 50 tables) erupted in a ya-hooing frenzy. The monotonous speeches over it was dinner time with an amazing chicken dish or a vegetarian dish. I ate and ate, then when I had finished I ate some more. Then desert I couldn't fit in, but had to. More wine and after dinner mints being thrown around the room by someone at our table, the wine made my eyes water, my vision was blurry and my speech slowed to a halt. I talked to everyone I could then on we all went in to the Adelaide night. Freezing! The rain came down but no one cared, went to a cool cat place called 'Super Mild' to drink Gin, then off to a club called 'Electricity' for more. The night finished with Richo, Jordan (our mixer), and I in a cab all asleep going home to Paradise.

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