You’d probably expect that relocating to Bowen would have meant that any significant concert action would be likely to involve travel, and, to an extent you'd be right.
Since March 1984 I've travelled to Townsville, Proserpine, Home Hill, Brisbane and Byron Bay to catch concerts but from the time I decided not to head over to the Milton to catch The Models I've been aware that the odd significant performer has made his or her way through Bowen.
Some of them mightn't have been significant at the time they passed through. There was a comment from Nicole Kidman when she was in town for the filming of Australia that her husband had played the Denison many years ago, though I'm not likely to have been hurrying off to catch Mr Urban in concert, and I seem to recall comments that Phil and Tommy Emmanuel spent some time here when they were much younger.
Many of the name acts that pass through are, predictably, well past their heyday or cardboard replicas of some well-known outfit. There have probably been dozens, if not hundreds of acts proclaiming themselves to be The Drifters and I was inveigled into rolling along to the Denison in the mid-eighties to catch one of them. While a good time was had by all, it wasn't the sort of show that went down in the memory bank labelled as legendary.
My reluctance to catch The Models at the Milton probably resulted from the fact that going out on a Thursday night has unfortunate ramifications when it comes to backing up for work on Friday and the fact that there was no one nudging me in the ribs pushing me. I seem to recall buying and enjoying a ten-inch EP by the band in the early eighties, but when I went looking for concrete evidence to support the dodgy brain cells it wasn't where I expected to find it.
Predictably, visits to pubs on weekends accounted for most, but not all, of the live music experiences over the years.