The Welcome Stranger (where friends and strangers sometimes get poor service)

So while I was writing that last post, I had this incredibly cred run of songs on my IPOD, cred to the point I actually thought, did I mix up my IPOD with someone elses? - well, I presume Stereolab are still trendy - and it was all this kind of odd indie nonsense. Naturally, I was quite cheered when S Club 7s Bring It All Back came on. My conversion from a Triple J rock snob to someone not averse to a pop tune would have been posted here if it had been a particularly interesting story that wasn't I quite liked The Beat Goes On by Britney Spears, and that's it, someone call the editor, there's gold to be published! Anyway, S Club 7, they were OK - my cousin (the one I sort of don't like), I bought him Bring It All Back one Xmas (the same Xmas I went drinking with Russell Robertson) and rather pompously gave him a bit of a lecture about real music and real songwriters...you know, I like to spend Xmas turning into Jane Gazzo (not literally). His response was to say I had a stick up my arse and put a Roy Chubby Brown DVD on, and then we had a massive fight because I was rude to his girlfriend. OK, so it wasn't exactly Deck The Halls at our house (we've had on and off fights ever since we were kids and he turned off my imaginary TV). What was really interesting about that Xmas was that he told me a story about one of his mates who went into a cafe in Penguin and tried to play some songs on the jukebox, only to have "We're Going To Ibiza" by The Vengaboys come on, and the record got stuck so about 14 times in a row We're Going To Ibiza came on, until everyone got up and left or threatened the management with violence and they all had to slink out in embarrassment. My cousin told me this like it was a hilarious story, while I (still in rock snob mode) shook my head and went, gosh, how awful, a cafe playing pop, didn't anyone have some emergency Sidewinder to play? No one had The Blackrock soundtrack to hand? Honestly....

All of which leads me nicely to the latest in the good pub guide to Hobart, and my long, long night at The Welcome Stranger. The Welcome Stranger (in Harrington Street, if you have a pen) you would think is a pub that, with a name like that, would have some men in tweed gathered around the bar as you enter engaging you in conversation like a lost soul as soon as you hit dry land after a long voyage to the island...I've got to stop watching Two Thousand Acres Of Sky...but of course, in true Hobart fashion, it's nothing of the sort. I can't remember why we went there, but I think it was because we wanted to play pool on my birthday. It wasn't the greatest birthday ever, let's put it that way. If you've ever had a birthday where you want to get drunk but no one else does, it was like that, only I wanted to gargle Jack Daniels at 4 in the morning while my friends were thinking light supper and a glass of milk - you know, different wavelengths. So The Welcome Stranger, it has a pool table, so we go there. Now, I remember very very clearly that Port Adelaide were playing Fremantle on the television (hold your excitement) and where you got your drinks from was a big giant open bar area with two staff behind the bar. The male staff member had this weird Bad Boy Bubby thing going on, he sort of had his tongue on the floor as his mouth was fixed in a wide open space, his body was vaguely lolling in the direction of the flickering Foxtel TV, his eyes rolling back in his head in his complete determination not to serve a single customer. It was futile trying to get him to move, never mind make a move to pour a drink. After about ten minutes of waving my hand in front of his face, I gave up and tried to attract the attention of the female staff member, a Max Sharam lookalike who seemed to take an inordinate amount of time cleaning one glass. I certainly admired her dedication to her chosen craft of individual glass cleaning, but it made for a long night as we waited for one of them to get the memo on customer service. Eventually, my patience was rewarded as Bubby snapped out of his Matthew Pavlich induced coma, and poured me a mediocre rum for five dollars, and grunted something about ice...had he sold me drugs, it might have taken the edge off the Manson family vibe...certainly no one in tweed was putting their arm around me, put it that way...

When we adjourned to the pool room, leaving Bubby to be Pavlichtonic again, we were unsurprisingly the only people there. I don't know why, considering the warm welcome all strangers seemed certain to receive. So we stuffed around on the jukebox, and tried to make our only drink for the evening last for three hours (in that dogged aren't we all having a great time way, we ploughed on as if we were raging like that girl in the dry cleaning ad). To pass the time, we began putting songs on the jukebox. Now, since it was my birthday, I was going to put one Britney Spears song on, just for old times sake - however, this was a no go zone, as Britney Spears is not an artist to put on in a pub - a very kindly Auntie picked a Britney song for me on a Paris video jukebox, and the reaction wasn't favourable. So even though we were the only ones there, I learned from my Penguin roots that it had to be rock music (or The Gambler) and I didn't put on anything more unfavourable than Khe Sanh or The Divinyls. We're Going To Ibiza was unavailable. Alas, and I swear to this day it was an accident, I was trying to put on Pantera, I put on Anticipating by Ms Spears somewhere between Metallica and I Touch Myself. And of course, in true sitcom fashion, by the time it came on, there was us, three massive giant Maori bikies, and two patrons with a fixation for blue shirts, denim jackets and drinking beer as if it was going out of fashion. Of course, the bikies didn't take to kindly to Britney, and threatened immediately to rip the head off or gut (one of the two, nice to have options) the person who put on this fucking shit...so I casually suggested it was Bubby, and they went out and...of course, I said absolutely nothing, and completely focused on knocking the little yellow balls into the little nets on the end of the table with the stick thing. I was so focused I won off the break...and of course, vacated the premises...

Naturally with my birthday going horribly wrong, I was in a pretty bad mood, and stormed out, certainly not feeling welcome, but I decided that before I went, I was going to try and win some money on the poker machines in the glamorous "gaming area". I don't know why this was, as I'm normally quite anti gambling, at least apart from my yearly bets on the Grammys (made a mint on Steely Dan one year). As I was progressing through the evening towards the poker machines, Bubby suddenly came to life and started shouting "Yercan'tgointhere..." and pointed to a giant sign on the wall. "Carnyaread...cleaning!" he said, and certainly, the sign said that there was cleaning, although I failed to see how the presence of a steam cleaner would affect the gambling experience - if anything, it would enhance it, given I wouldn't have to listen to the music of the machine as all the noise would be the steam cleaner and I would find that soothing and I could thus concentrate entirely on what I was doing, free of burd...I could see my line of argument wasn't swaying Bubby, who again began lolling into his pre cleaning state. My friends tried to get me to leave, but I wasn't really in any kind of mood, and again went to go into the poker machine bit, and again, he pointed to the giant sign. At this point, I noticed out the corner of my eye that at least three people were in the tiny little red seats, and they were indeed playing poker on the machines, with an obsessive gambling nature glowing on their little faces, the kind you only hear about in fables. "What about them?" I said, pointing, "how come they get to use the machines!" - ooh, I was mad, I was on my (Sean Micallef) high horse and about to say something about communism - Bubby stroked his dribble soaked chin, and then nodded. "They," he said, very slowly, "gots nowhere else to go...can't get rid of the pricks...big problems...". He then went back to stroking his chin, while behind him, a glass was really, really gleaming...

And a little voice in my head said, it is time to go back to where we used to be, and let's enjoy it...