10. Talking To A Stranger – Hunters & Collectors

Mark Seymour, lead singer of the Hunters, wrote probably the best music memoir of all time, so there’s not a lot I could add to what he’s already written. In fact, you can listen to him read the passage about this clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewfJjdHLdbA But it won’t prepare you for the 80s styled insanity of this clip, a band firing on all cylinders in a 13 tonne truck heading into the future.

They remind me of driving around Sydney with 2 friends, one who hated the song Run Run Run (a 12 minute heart spasm of a thing on the album that spawned this), the other who kept playing it, rewinding the tape and playing it again while the first whined and moaned in pain on the back seat.

Or driving to Melbourne with the first (let’s just call him Eyman, as that’s his name) in the middle of the night, getting 2 flat tyres in a row and having to hitch a ride with a family, sitting on the back seat and cradling a tyre between a 4 year old kid who kept looking at me as though I was going to steal his teddy and an elderly aunt who kept forgetting why I was there as the dad in the front seat told me repeatedly that he wouldn’t have picked me up if I did have the tyre.

At the next town people would drive past and give me updates on when Dave the Tyre Guy was going to finish breakfast, and when I eventually got back to the car Eyman had slept through the whole thing blissfully. When we arrived in Melbourne, with nowhere to stay and no real idea where to go, we headed to a pub in St Kilda because I’d heard the Hunters played there sometimes, and we started drinking. Suddenly this clip made a lot more sense to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyiYBajrefY