“Are you a musician?” she asked.

“No, why?” I replied.

“You look like a rock star.”

Well, let me tell you, I floated out of those rooms and driving home I said aloud to myself (there was nobody else in the car) … “You’ve finally made it.”

A little late in the piece but better late than never.

Although maybe it’s not too late at all. Hey, if The Rolling Stones can put out a new album and tour again (surely, they will, they can’t help themselves) why can’t I have a crack?

After all I used to be in a band, a long long time ago. Actually, it was Grade 6, in Hong Kong. I was co-lead singer of a kids pop group called The Sidetracks with several American kids. I played one gig. That was it.

You can read about this in my Hong Kong memoir The Kowloon Kid. There are a couple of chapters about it … Remember the Sidetracks and The Rock Star Across the Road. That rock star happened to be a young Michael Hutchence who lived opposite us in Kowloon Tong.

He used to come over to our place in the afternoons with his brother Rhett and I would be playing music by The Doors and The Beatles and The Stones and I often wonder if that had some effect on him. The chapter about him begins “when I knew Michael Hutchence only one of us had ever fronted a band and it wasn’t him.”

He did go on to have a bit of success. I mean he was a rock god! Before he was taken from us far too young.

I have often dreamt of revisiting my blip of rock stardom but to no avail. I did do some busking in my twenties and was part of a studio band I dubbed The Ripples in Rockhampton, when I was starting out in journalism.

But words, not music became my career. Maybe that’s just as well. But I have tried to look “elegantly wasted” as INXS once put it. That worked when I was young and lithe but not anymore although I think I may just look wasted some days.

I told a lady I know about my rock star moment and she said “Phil, you look better than Mick Jagger.” “Without the money,” I replied.

“Money is not everything,” she said. But it is something.

Phil Brown
Editor, InReview Queensland.