Of course, given the circumstances we were.
We had a ready made rhythm section courtesy of Mattoid, so it was a matter of finding a guitarist, and there was this bloke called Jim, who worked on a prawn trawler. Given that I’d come up with the suggestion I thought I could do a bit of vocalising and maybe blow a bit of kazoo.
So there, within a matter of about fifteen minutes, we were.
There was still the small matter of getting some material together, but it took no time at all to come up with a name. Given the fact that Thor played what we regarded as heavy metal chunder it was obvious that if we were in fact worse than they were we’d have to be Heavy Chunder.
So we were.
When the members of the nascent Heavy Chunder gathered for our first rehearsal the following morning we were operating on an extremely limited time frame.
Part of the arrangement that had brought Cairns-based headline act Barabbas to the festival involved a second gig for the band at the Cycle Club Hall near the old Ross River Meat works, and we figured the gig would be a suitable occasion to unveil Heavy Chunder on an unsuspecting public.
With rehearsals limited to a couple of hours, choosing material was a potentially thorny issue, which was where A Meal You Can Shake Hands With in the Dark came in.
The Pete Brown in Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments was the Brown half of the writing duo who contributed a substantial chunk of Cream’s repertoire, and A Meal ... included a version of Politician preceded by a vocal rant that Hughesy had, coincidentally, learnt by heart.