#electric toad

Five nights earlier we were all in Fremantle, watching Nick being a slow moving firework, with all the colours coming out, greens, yellows, oranges mostly, full of light. Drum machine propelling him across the face of the sky, across our faces, guitar tones disintegrating into crystal particles, grinding themselves to dust with a grin, reconstituting themselves in his voice and all the while clouds with gold linings forming as words out of his lips, his hair on fire with confidence and something newly deep happy and relieved within him. Me, Felicity and her unborn child got up on stage and my cheeks were red with joy and I put a microphone to the unborn child and hoped she wouldn’t mind. We saw that child, Nick and I and Marina, making the broadest moves a being can make, across the face of Felicity’s belly the night before in the lounge room. All clutching our spirits in sudden awe, like I clutched at my spirit when Nick was singing even though he might never believe it – and lots of other people did too.

So the night played out as we thought it would, a hundred and a hundred more human spirits moving out of their houses on Monday night, some propelled by friendship, some propelled by the thought in their mind of “kevinparkertameimpala” and “camaverycamaverycamavery” but the thing is whatever brought them all there, once the room was filled we were all in it together. Jake Webb was faced with a room already full which he never expected but he didn’t flinch he just called out a whale made of diamonds from inside his heart and let it sing through him and also touch all the guitar strings with its fins, and I didn’t see Maurice Flavel and Pete because I was metaphorically floating on a gondola in my friend’s throw-out denim and trying to convince beautiful men to give up smoking, but I saw them afterward and they were glowing like coals, and then Electric Toad’s 12 members on stage all running into a wall together and covering it with funny jokes that also make a statement of truth through the many guitars and the many drums and the double voiced chants of “I’m in Ben Witt’s room”, and Stephen Bellair’s gentle words explaining to everyone who didn’t know why we were all there and making it make perfect sense.