​And so now, forty years later, maybe I can name some names here! The ‘more enthusiastic fans’ mentioned in my Pulp report, who stormed the stage at the cancelled Blondie gig in Brisbane in early December 1977, were my mob, or our mob, led by Bob Farrell, future sax-man in the original Laughing Clowns. Pumped up by ideas of revolution fostered not by years of fighting on the streets in Bjelke’s Brisbane but rather too many MC5 albums and the success overseas of our mates the Saints, Bob Farrell, who was well-known for his feats of daring (like what had killed Les Mathers a few years earlier at the age of only 18), Bob clamboured up on stage and started spouting  some sort of fist-pumping “Do you wanna be the problem or do you wanna be the solution?” rhetoric. I think I just gleefully watched from the front-row. Naturally the cops started hauling him away as had happened many times before. This was standard in Brisbane back then, an overbearing police presence at any rock show. The special Task Force had vowed publicly to stamp out punk rock. And this was punk rock even if “In the Flesh” then sat at the top of the local pop charts. But there’s more backstory too. I don’t know, can’t remember, if as the Telegraph front-page suggests there was any attempt at arson (a flicked cigarette would have been enough to constitute that charge), or if there was later an armed gang that tried to break-in backstage. Soon we learned that Debbie hadn’t had food poisoning at all, the result apparently of too many bad cherries (which is like: who eats cherries in Lismore when you can get superb local tropical fruits like mango, paw-paw, pineapple, bananas, avocado, macadamia nuts?), but then we heard it was the result of a dose of too-strong Australian heroin. Which now seems like a pretty scurrilous thing to suggest, but those were the two urban myths that came to surround an event that itself has become fabled. Blondie were the first rock stars from overseas that I met. As a budding fanzine reporter, I’d gone up to their hotel rooms and sat around the pool with them. The frisson of Debbie Harry in the flesh was devastating. We dutifully trooped back to the return show and behaved ourselves for a set that as Blondie was back then, was just a tad light-on. But still a ton of fun. The tour really did have a glavanising effect in Australia. We were finally getting to hear on record a bit of this stuff that was going on in New York and London, but wouldn’t get to see live most of the early pioneers whether the Sex Pistols, the Damned or Television or Richard Hell. Blondie were the first and one of the few, the tour hastily convened as soon as Molly Meldrum took a liking to the single and started playing it on Countdown. He held up a Ramones album and called them the Ram-Ones. Bob Farrell took up the sax and almost overnight was circular-breathing like Pharoah Sanders, and when he joined the foundational Laughing Clowns in Sydney in 1979, he lent the band’s sound the extraordinary tenor of his tenor. He quickly quit the music business, after an altercation with Jimmy Barnes at a party. Me, I left Brisbane forever only months after the incident.