Charlie picked us up at Melbourne airport on a Sunday evening and ferried us back to his house in Bentleigh, a genteel suburb south-east of Melbourne city centre. We sank some Tasmanian beer (James Boag’s, pronounced “bo-ag” if ever you have a need to confuse a Victorian) and a few shots of duty-free Talisker before heading to bed. I slept very well indeed, waking woozily only for a short time in the early morning to hear Charlie and Penny’s eldest Annabel getting ready for nursery. I went back to sleep.

Our first day was a quiet potter around a local suburb named Hampton. We ate lunch just off the main road (I had a salmon risotto which tasted a little curious — this becomes important later), afterwards wandering out to the nearby beach and then heading home so that Penny could collect Annabel. Davis rode along in Penny’s Camry while Doug and I climbed aboard Charlie’s venerable, sun-blistered Ford Falcon Futura to cruise home in ironic style.

I fell in love with this car instantly. It was a redneck bruiser, a lurching retro-tank with acres of space and buckets of character. There was paint peeling off the bonnet, tinting film peeling off the windows and the HVAC controls were off-limits (“if you’re driving this car,” Charlie said, “don’t touch the heating. Sometimes it just stops dead”), but a 4-litre straight six, rear wheel drive and a willing auto box go a long way to mitigating such piffling cosmetic issues. I had an absolute need to get behind the wheel.

Charlie tuned the radio to Melbourne’s local indie station, Triple R as we rolled down Hampton’s main drag. He had been conducting not a PR offensive but open PR warfare against Triple R: “I faxed these dudes a copy of our album cover about six times, with the words “Coba Fynn” written on each one in big black letters.”

He had, in addition, forked over $300 for a series of ten thirty-second radio spots in the days leading up to our imminent gig, and we listened eagerly for it during each commercial break. Charlie’s initial script for the advert had been a semi-random list of adjectives like ‘bombastic’, ‘tender’, ‘farcical’, ‘emollient’, ‘surprising’ and ‘bonzer’ (along with the rogue compound noun ‘idiot-savant’) culled from band emails, and had been soundly rejected by the station. If you listen to Triple R’s self-produced replacement you can quite clearly hear the laughter in the narrator’s voice.

Our advert was not forthcoming.

“I’m going to call them with a request,” Doug said.

I watched Doug in the massive fish-eye mirror that the Falcon’s previous owner had clamped over the standard one, and which gave a back-seat passenger a panoramic view of pretty much the entire world, as he dialled Triple R’s number on his phone. This is the conversation he had, word for word:

Doug: “Hi, is this the correct phone number to ask for requests?”

Triple R: “We don’t generally do requests, but what are you looking for?”

“Can you play something from the new Coba Fynn album?”

Suddenly firm: “We don’t take requests.”

“Okay, fair enough. Bye.”

Doug turned to Charlie and I.

“She knew exactly who I was.”

“Oh God,” I cringed. “They must hate us.”

That evening we drove the fifteen minutes to Jam Tin rehearsal studios, two converted industrial units in an anonymous estate off the Nepean Highway, for our first practice in almost a year. We were listed on a whiteboard on the way in as “Covasynn”.

Our room was indistinguishable from more or less every rehearsal room we’ve ever used: a large but past-it sofa upholstered in unfortunately absorbent fabric took up one wall; a mismatched, abused drum kit faced it and a complement of middle-of-the-road Marshalls liberally painted with the words “Jam Tin” completed the picture. The combined whiff of stale BO and air freshener added some olfactory authenticity. We were instantly at home.

With most of our gear still in the UK, Charlie had sorted us out with two Strat replicas and a Stingray bass knock-off, all sporting maple necks, black bodies and white pickguards, and all bought for peanuts at the local Cash Generator. Either they sounded great or we’re chronically unable to appreciate expensive musical instruments; either way, the old ‘Fynn sound was surprisingly audible in these hundred-dollar guitars and battered drum kit.

We broke for dinner a few hours into the practice. The only place open nearby was a Nando’s across the road, so in the Australian style we drove the hundred years to the car park, scarfed down chicken burgers and drove back to Jam Tin to finish the session. The practice had gone rather well, I thought, and with another six-hour block still to come the following night, things were looking good for Wednesday’s gig. Charlie ferried us home and we retired to our various pits.

…only for me to awake nauseous and sweating at around 3am. I clambered off the sofa where I was sleeping that night, stumbled into the bathroom and had only just made it to the toilet when I forcefully hurled the contents of my guts into it. Chiefly visible in the matter I had ejected was risotto rice and partially digested chicken. “Oh God,” I moaned. The sight and smell made me sick all over again. I clung to the porcelain throne with eyes watering and chest heaving for a few more minutes. Finally finished, I brushed my teeth, gulped down some water and collapsed back on the sofa, sleeping, more or less, until Annabel got up noisily around 5.30am.

The bulk of Tuesday was an unpleasant blur, a sort of movie nightmare sequence of tossing and turning and sweating and shallow breathing, lest I trigger the whole thing again. The guys were off out somewhere, so when I managed briefly to get up I sat with Penny and Annabel and baby Alex and tried not to breathe on anyone. Penny gave me an electrolyte powder to help get some water back into my system and by 5pm that day I was well enough to get up, shower and get ready for the practice. At 6pm we were back in the same room down at Jam Tin. I was still a little wobbly, but we managed to take care of the loose ends in our set, and more significantly I was able to hold down some Thai food from an unassuming but decent local restaurant.

On Wednesday, Doug, Davis and I occupied ourselves with a little light sightseeing (lunch at Federation Square and a visit to the observation deck of the Eureka Tower, a genuinely entertaining attraction which comes across as a little desperate to define its uniqueness — “highest public vantage point in a residential building in the Southern Hemisphere”) while Charlie worked. We had a beer in a Federation Square café but I was still suffering from yesterday’s travails and a single ‘pot’, or Aussie half-pint, was enough to send me home for the day.

Thursday, the day of the gig, was mostly spent practising, writing down makeshift set lists and picking up rental gear. Charlie was working again, but having met up back at his house we made it through the turgid rush-hour traffic and were unloading our hired amps at the Empress with a couple of hours to spare.

The Empress was a marginally grungy place composed of a bunch of knocked-through rooms on the ground floor of an old hotel. We set up and soundchecked on the crowded stage with our begged, borrowed and (possibly) stolen gear and retired to the dining room to await our hoped-for public. What with our radio ad, spruced-up website and Charlie’s hounding of his colleagues at work, we were expecting literally teens of people. I picked at my stringy steak sandwich without much enthusiasm; lingering rumblings in my stomach combined with acute nervousness to suppress my appetite.

Gradually people arrived: some of Charlie’s colleagues, Doug’s old housemate Kristen and her boyfriend Steve who happened to live in Melbourne, and my old workmate Sheena who even more coincidentally happened to be on holiday in Melbourne at the same time. With fans of the headlining band Paint Me A Phoenix arriving too, the room was reassuringly non-empty.

We took the stage at 9pm, strapped on our matching pawn-shop guitars and played. And when all is said and done, we played pretty well for a band ravaged by jet lag, food poisoning and the common cold. Granted, we were a little shambolic at times, but what’s a drumless verse or a fluffed bass line between friends? We finished with our first-ever live rendition of Whitechapel, a track of which I’m inordinately proud despite having nothing whatsoever to do with its composition, and it rounded off the gig magnificently. We came off stage and clinked glasses. Tour complete! Now the drinking could begin.

After much heroic effort by all concerned, Coba Fynn have finally released our debut album! Calling It A Day is out now on CD and for download at bandcamp.com, and you can preview all of the tracks there, not to mention download our 2007 Waiting Days EP for free. cobafynn.com has been spruced up and our Facebook group is gathering steam — Calling It A Day is a misnomer, really; the ‘Fynn are back in town.

P.S. In Melbourne this November? Catch us there at The Empress hotel on the 4^th!

For four and a half hours.

We knocked back a few beers, flicked through the pile of somewhat current music magazines abandoned by the control booth’s previous occupants, and blethered idly. Finally Nick held aloft an unlabelled CD.

“Here it is.”

He wrote “Coba Fynn” on the disk with a black marker pen and handed it to Davis. There was general enthusiasm.

“Let’s get a drink! Nick, have you got time for a drink with us?”

And so began a night out to which I really struggle to do justice. The four of us grabbed a pint in the chilly courtyard of a bar just off Buchanan Street (the fact that I don’t remember its name may give you some clue as to where the evening was headed), then we said goodbye to Nick and the three of us took the tube to the west end to meet up with Doug’s sister Jackie and the Captain.

The thing is, that despite living in Glasgow for more than a year, I didn’t really get to grips with the city until the very last minute. I can try to pin the blame on any number of factors — the drudgery of commuting to Edinburgh, living down in the south side when really we should have held out for a flat in the west end, or even the trauma of redecorating a bathroom (it really was that bad) — but it occurs to me now that I might just have been suffering from undiagnosed nostalgia.

Back before the advent of the Roquefort Files, before Chris & Leyla left for the land of Oz, I found myself over in the west end of Glasgow for a few nights out with the extended ‘Fynn family. In the same way that Josh, Jeff and I parlayed our dank, lightless East Preston Street flat of the time into a stone-cold party machine, everything ‘Fynnish seemed to revolve around the idiosyncratic flat just off Great Western Road shared by Charlie, Doug and the Captain. There was boozing just round the corner in the coincidentally-named Captain’s Rest; there were parties, where guests would peer down at the words adorning the fish tank in the living room:

Neon tetra
Neon tetra
Tu es mon raison d’être

there was watching of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the small hours, and of course there was waking up the morning after and peeling one’s drooling face off the sofa. My expectations of Glasgow were subtly fixed by a few such episodes all those years ago.

Finding myself out again in the west end with Jackie, the Captain and the ‘Fynn acted as some sort of catalyst to bring not the memories themselves to the fore, but instead the state of mind. We ate; we drank; we drank some more; we tried to play the mastered album on Jackie’s CD player only to find that it would not work; we threw our hands up in consternation and then kept on drinking until we could drink no more. It was a great night — brightened just the slightest bit by the rosy glow of nostalgia, maybe, but a great night nonetheless.

P.S. Nick emailed us the CD image later in the week. It is good.

• Me
• Chris
• Neil
• Devon
• Jesus
• my Dad
• 2010

In amongst all this, Coba Fynn have been recording an album; I built a cyclocross bike and then abjectly failed to enter any cyclocross races; the Project is finally under way again; and just the other day we took the Antiquary pub quiz by the scruff of its neck and gave it a thorough hiding. Good times! (And though that sounds sarcastic, it is not meant to be so.)

She smiled, and then started to cry.

I score 50%.

After breakfast — a long time after breakfast, so thorough is the mental preparation and discussion which accompanies any activity involving two or more members of Coba Fynn — David & Jenna gave Doug and I a lift into the centre of town before heading back to Edinburgh. Doug and I had other plans, and we sauntered into The Arches to try out Alien Wars. We were lucky enough to have a couple of complementary tickets waiting, courtesy of Doug’s disgustingly successful sister Jackie, and unlucky enough to arrive at precisely the same time as every ned of school age in Glasgow. We grabbed a pint in the bar and waited an hour, as suggested by the receptionist (who, ironically enough, was too cool for school; in the movie of this particular day, she’d be filing her nails and flirting with the guitarist of an up-and-coming electro-pop band), and when we returned the queue was exactly as long as when we had first arrived.

We bit the bullet and took our place in line.

Alien Wars is, if you haven’t come across it before, a sort of live rendition of Aliens with a Glaswegian twist. That’s not to say that the creatures can be found drinking alone at busy city-centre bars, projecting a faintly aggressive mien and determinedly trying to engage in sectarian football chat anyone foolish to move within striking distance, but instead that our host, the imposing Corporal Mackenzie, had a deep but comprehensible Glasgow bark.

“It is not true that there are live alien creatures down here,” he admonished us sternly. “Now turn off your mobile phones; they interfere with the security systems.”

Nice, I thought. Don’t want a ringing phone to break the suspension of disbelief.

“Follow me!”

We were hustled through the double doors into a facsimile of the darkened corridors of Hadley’s Hope and told to line up against the wall. Flickering lights and dry ice abounded. Corporal Mackenzie started our ‘briefing’.

“As you’ve been told, an alien spaceship was found during recent renovations at The Arches. We’re going to view it now, and although it’s completely safe, you must stick with me and do exactly as I say. Now— whose mobile phone is that?”

We all reflexively checked our phones.

“Security systems deactivated,” a recorded PA voice announced. Ah, very clever, I thought.

“Shit! Fuck!” bellowed Corporal Mackenzie. “It’s all a lie — there are aliens down here and we’ve been experimenting on them. Run! Run!”

I won’t spoil any more of it, but I will say that I stumbled through the last door shaky with adrenaline and grinning with appreciation. It’s great fun, and it’s only on until the end of March. Do it!

The gig was originally supposed to have taken place in Glasgow’s Barfly, but its new owners HMV had taken one look at its finances and immediately closed it down, leaving the gig without a venue and the four bands adrift. Sim-o the promoter had pulled out all the stops to find us a new home at Ivory Black’s around the corner, and we turned up at 6 pm sharp (well, sharp for Coba Fynn) to watch apprehensively as the other bands were dropped off by their parents.

“What’s the running order? When are we soundchecking?” we asked the gig skivvy.

“I remember you guys from Barfly. You’re aren’t just another one of these kiddie Blink 182 cover bands, so we’ll put you second to last. Oh, and we only soundcheck the first and last bands because of noise regulations.”

Political correctness gone mad, readers. Call the Daily Mail.

“See you back here in five hours’ time!”

And so, after a few quiet pints and a burger in front of the fire at Rab Ha’s had us yawning and fighting off a Pavlovian urge to call it a night, we hauled ourselves back to Ivory Blacks to grab another pint and watch the last couple of bands before our slot.

We tuned up and plugged in, and at the direction of the sound guy we more or less soundchecked right there and then. In normal circumstances I’d have been spluttering with indignation — how unprofessional! — but on this particular night it seemed to fit right into the haphazard, last minute feel of things, and we were off into Glasgow Girl without any more fuss.

And oddly enough, we played a really good gig.

The crowd was a mix of giggling schoolchildren, a few neds hovering at the happy/belligerent boundary and some ‘Fynn regulars. The kids were too busy exchanging Bebo addresses to pay much attention, but our faithful fans were enjoying themselves and the neds in particular seemed to have been gripped with a strange fascination for the mighty ‘Fynn. A slack-jawed couple lounged over the security rail right under Charlie’s nose and stared fixedly up at him for the whole duration, while a cheerily demented guy near the bar danced away and locked eyes with at yours truly, punching the air as we na-na-na-na’d our way through Fox in the Phoenix. We finished to whoops and applause.

Last on were Ready 2 Fall, a fresh-faced foursome of Blink 182 wannabes who took my preconceptions and rocked them to pieces. We whooped and applauded in our turn, and I was impressed enough to later visit their Bebo page (okay, not all of my preconceptions) and have a listen to their recordings. You should do the same!

A couple of Fridays ago, Doug, Keef and I engaged in a mini pub crawl around the city centre to debate the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in between. (With particular emphasis placed on the eternal question of choosing a mobile phone operating system. I will admit to bringing this up forcefully and repeatedly until taken at least half-seriously. Did I mention I’ve treated myself to a new phone after a year spent out of contract?) We ambled the length of Rose Street until pitching up in the Voodoo Rooms, where we grabbed a few drinks and found seats at a temporary table off the main bar.

The place was hoaching: there was some sort of burlesque club being held in the ballroom, and so some very strictly dressed young ladies (a more licentious commentator might say that they were in fact not strictly dressed) mingled with the greater bulk of the cocktail bar-hopping clientele. For the uninitiated, the Voodoo Rooms has a sort of gaudy chic thing happening, with so much gold paint and black leather that it shoots straight past ‘tasteful’ and squarely bullseyes ‘pompous’ instead. It’s a bizarrely schizophrenic place: half of the customers were dressed to the nines, looking down their noses at a trio of unshaven, jeans-and-T-shirt sorts; and the other half were almost overdressed, Vegas style, and playing up to the camp décor splendidly. Who was right? Is the Voodoo Rooms genuine or pastiche? I have no idea.

The next week I met up with Doug again, this time over on Broughton Street to hear a band called Horsebreaker play the Phoenix Cellar Bar. They were good, although a couple of numbers sailed dangerously close to becoming performance poetry. We hung around after the show, Doug hoping to grab a few words with the lead singer. He pounced as she walked past.

“Hi! I’m Doug from Coba Fynn. Our bands are friends on Myspace.”

“Oh, hey! So glad you made it,” she smiled.

“Yeah, so—”

“Well, great to see you! Bye,” she smiled again and continued on without stopping.

Tremendous.

We retired to the bar upstairs and drank on. And on.

I felt distinctly unhealthy the next morning and it was with a degree of revulsion that I took my first sip of Guiness that evening, back in the pub again to discuss The Project with Jeff. I’ve been a little hesitant to mention The Project here — a fear of commentator’s curse, perhaps. In fact, all you’re going to get this time round is an acknowledgement of A) its existence and B) the fact that Jeff is acting as both editor and slavedriver in equal measure. Need to know basis and all that.

Anyway, we drank and pontificated and drank and played Zeppelin on the jukebox and drank some more.

The next morning, something miraculous happened. I was without hangover. I skipped to work (through the snow, if I remember correctly) and performed a normal day’s work without the slightest hint of cranial retribution for the previous night’s alcohol abuse.

I had mastered tantric boozing.

In other news, Ash & I went round to Jez & Serena’s last weekend for pheasant (shot out of the sky by our own estimable host), chat and some impromptu hat wearing, and Coba Fynn are limbering up for the first gig of 2009 at the Barfly once more. We even have proper tickets an’ all. Good times!

Callander isn’t exactly at a rarefied Highland latitude, but the towns thin out and the midge clouds thicken up remarkably quickly as Glasgow recedes in the mirrors, and the hotel had the feeling of a country retreat rather than one on the main street of an otherwise busy little town. Waxy & Phil were talking with a knot of beaming guests, so we waved hello and wandered inside for a drink. The hotel manager gathered us up to watch the first dance as we chatted with the Captain in the library and we filed through to the function room.

The next couple of hours shot by until with alarming rapidity we found ourselves in front of the assembled guests. “Waxy, I hope we don’t ruin your wedding,” Charlie said, or words to that effect. “We’re Coba Fynn. Waxy asked us to play—” (Charlie had explained some time previously to Waxy & Phil that Coba Fynn would of course be playing at their wedding) “—so we hope you enjoy yourselves.” He turned to us. “Let’s go.”

And so we did.

It was tremendii. CF original Glasgow Girl got the guests onto the dance floor and some choice covers kept them there, Waxy’s dad joining us on harmonica and wailing vocals for Hoochie-Coochie Man. We played two wedding requests: The Lighthouse Song for Waxy, the song practically playing itself through our intruments; and Phil’s favourite Smoke on the Water. The demanded encore of Crossroads was played at a blistering pace with blistering hands, and when we finished the set after forty-five short minutes I felt a twinge of guilty triumph at having stolen the ceilidh band’s thunder.

We took paper plates of buffet pies and spring rolls outside to cool down for a bit. Doug and I analysed the night’s performance in a chin-stroking fashion.

“Nice work there on the drums, Doug. Although I couldn’t hear myself very well—I thought maybe the bass was a bit low.”

“Really? I could hear you fine. I could feel you in my bones.”

“So long as it was your bones, and not your boner.”

“Obviously not, man. But I will say that if there was to be a sexual connection between any two members of the band…”

“…then it’s going to be the rhythm section, right? That’s what I like to hear.”

Ash laughed at us.

“Oh, it’s cool; we’re just being homoironic.”†

A fantastic night, and a fantastic wedding. Congratulations, Waxy & Phil!

* A month or so back we were pressed into service for Charlie’s boss’ retiral do at Oran Mor in the west end of Glasgow. We set up in the Auditorium under Alasdair Grey’s spectacular mural, soundchecked in the abbreviated time available and then got out of the way as the first guests filed in. Quite firmly uninvited to the meal itself, Doug, Davis and I ate mixed pakora at Charlie’s kitchen table while the dinner guests gorged themselves on wild salmon, truffled asparagus and caviar washed down by 18-year-old single malts and the finest cognac. (Probably, anyway. My speculation may be informed by a touch of jealousy.) We arrived bang on time for our set, waited through an hour of overrunning, back-slapping speeches and were hustled off the stage after only twenty minutes as the function staff started cleaning up at the stroke of 11.30pm.

** At Bannerman’s; intimate is the term, I think, meaning “comprised only of the band’s friends and immediate family.”

† Gauche, non-PC or just lame? I can’t decide.

FUCKIN TRAMS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then another:

Edinburgh does. Not. Need. Fuckin. TRAMS!!!!!!!!!!!!

We arrived after a stormy journey-into-terror drive to Glasgow (wherein we forded the M8) to find Davis alone on stage, idly picking out chords, and the sound guy looking at his watch, unimpressed.

We went on at 8.30 or so to an audience consisting mostly of the other bands, and the Captain. I had memories of the last time we played such a quiet gig, and they were not happy ones. Something this time just clicked, though: the audience, or lack of it, was incidental, and though I was happy that they seemed to enjoy the set it was more about hitting the right note within the band. We played consistently and convincingly, I think, and afterwards a Blim was sufficiently impressed to compare Fox in the Phoenix to the Clash.

The ‘Fynn and the Clash mentioned in the same breath. This is a welcome development.

I stayed to watch El Condor Pasa. Their songs and playing were good, but my God! they were bored. They’d been touring for two whole days and already they looked like they’d rather be looking for tall buildings off which they might reliably end it all. We clapped, they looked stricken. It was an odd show.

* * *

We had another gig on Saturday—a going away party for Emily, one of Charlie’s colleagues and the temporarily resuscitated Average Folk Band‘s squeezebox maestro—but before then we’d booked practice at the benighted Verden Studios. Verden is on the outskirts of Portobello, and squats within a ’70s office block on an otherwise derelict industrial estate. It has a few redeeming features—expansive windows in some of the upper rooms; mismatched but solid gear; mini-bars filled with cans of Irn Bru and bottles of beer—but mostly, it’s a hole. We were assigned a windowless box on the ground floor with litter stuffed behind the soundproofing panels and no ventilation.

And yet we had the best practice ever. We sweated freely and played our hearts out. My perception is too subjective to tell if we were actually good or not, but it felt like we were guitar heroes that day*.

The gig then came around that weekend. We had the stage to ourselves and oodles of time to play with before anyone arrived so we took our time getting our minimal set-up (amps for the guitars, a simple PA for the vocals) just right, then went our separate ways to park cars, get changed, grab some food and the like. Doug and I sat outside with squeaking styrofoam cartons of deep-fried whatever from the local takeaway, blethering aimlessly but engrossingly until everyone was back and the audience began slowly filtering in. Over the next couple of hours our better halves arrived, the Average Folk Band played a few songs, Ruth & Andy turned up with a load of visiting friends, and we finally were on around 10pm.

Christ, it was brilliant.

The Barfly set was still fresh in our minds and I’m pretty sure we played even better than the rehearsal. The crowning achievement was our run through Take Me Over (“that sounded like Nine Inch Nails” said Waxy, on hearing our first performance of it earlier this year), where we turned things up to 11, smashed it out of the stadium and [insert hyperbolic metaphor of choice here] so hard that a little girl ran away across the dance floor, hands clamped over her ears. Rock & roll!

We trotted out a load of radio friendly covers during the second half to get the audience up and dancing. Charlie coaxed a gaggle of giggling nurses to sing backing vocals on Twist and Shout; Andy arrived on the dance floor with a cartwheel inches from Davis’ face, and we finished with a messy, sprawling cover of Crossroads where we tried (and failed, but gloriously so) to channel Clapton, Baker and Bruce through our sweat-dripping instruments.

The silence rang in my ears after the clapping and cheers subsided. Sweat was rolling down my sides under my shirt, and my bass was slick with condensation. What a gig.

* Q10 in Glasgow is similar to Verden in this respect: its rooms are damp-walled caves formed by the arches of a disused railway bridge, with temperamental amplifiers, fungous couches and peeling paint, and still it seems to lift rehearsals a bit above the average.