A Nervous Piss With Ghost Chilli on His Hands | Proper True Yarn Podcast (Part 5)

Part five with Luke Geiger is the Mount Isa Rodeo yarn, and it might be the funniest five minutes of the series. The setup: Luke and the boys land one of their biggest gigs ever, playing the Isa Rodeo alongside O'Shea, the Screaming Jets and Aussie rock royalty The Angels. After the Friday crowd thinned out on the Jets, the promoters flipped the Saturday order, so The Angels went on first and Luke's crew got the closing slot, sharing a green room with the Brewsters and Dave Gleeson, who spent the arvo singing cowboy songs with them out the back.

Earlier that day the barbecue boys on site had handed Luke, a self-confessed chilli man, a bottle of their hot wing challenge sauce, the Ghost of Chainsaw. He had a respectful amount on some roast meat, fiddled with the bottle, and thought nothing more of it. Ten minutes before showtime, packs on, ears in, guitar on his back, he ducks into the single portaloo for a nervous piss. What follows is the discovery that ghost chilli does not wash off your hands by itself, a door flung open with one leg in and one leg out, jeans at the ankles, a handful of portaloo soap, and a man scrubbing himself for Jesus and everyone to see while The Angels rip into Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again twenty metres away.

He made it on stage, still smouldering, and opened the set by thanking The Angels for opening for them, only to look across and find Gleeson and Rick Brewster standing side of stage listening. Gleeson stayed for the whole set and ended up jumping up to sing a Johnny Cash song with them, which Luke rates as one of the coolest things the band's ever done. The ep wraps with the world record stakes: one adjudication slip-up across 120 hours and the whole thing counts for nothing, which is roughly 30 four-hour gigs back to back, unpaid. Watch this space.