Powderfinger announces return to music

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The perfect summer’s afternoon in Brisbane, to my mind, is made up of four things: a cold can of XXXX Gold in one hand, the polished wooden deck of a Queenslander, a summer storm rumbling through then politely leaving before sunset, and the gentle strumming of Powderfinger’s guitarists in the opening bars of My Happiness.

Of course, I don’t believe I have ever actually had all four elements come together in such divine Brown Snake alchemy. But my point is, they all feel unique to someone who grew up in Brisbane in the 1980s and ’90s.

In 2001, I bought a copy of Odyssey Number Five – and while that heavily scratched beer coaster is long gone, the soundtrack to my formative years remains. The good news is that Powderfinger, after a nearly 16-year hiatus, have announced they’re back, meaning I can relive those halcyon days of staying up late to watch the X-Files on Channel 10 when it was still cool and applying industrial quantities of Lynx Africa after PE class.

Now Powderfinger’s reunion is hardly on par with Oasis’, not least because a flight home to Brisbane is a lot cheaper than one to Manchester, but I do think it can evoke a similarly powerful shot of nostalgia. When I recently watched Don’t Look Back In Anger at the cinema, I was struck by what this all meant to people, what it had meant to me, and how very little it had to do with the Gallagher brothers absolutely 12/10ing Acquiesce.

There were grown men from Manchester to Mexico City, Seoul to Sydney, completely overcome. This wasn’t hero worship, or a kind of Beatlesmania or One Direction fever; rather it was a moment to stop and think back to who you were when Definitely Maybe was released, who you are now and reflect on everything that had come in between.

For me, so much has happened since November 2010, when I stupidly forgot to get the day off work and had to give away my ticket to Powderfinger’s farewell gig.

Less than a year later, I quit that job and moved to Sydney. Then came different career breaks, break-ups, half a dozen rental apartments, adventures overseas, COVID, more COVID, unexpected wins and dumb mistakes (I both started and quit smoking) and the big one – meeting my future wife. These days really did turn out nothing like I’d planned.

And music really does have a special sort of power to take us back to a time in our lives when things felt simpler, to a time when Powderfinger was a regular fixture on FM radio, The Simpsons aired for three hours every Saturday and Sunday morning on Foxtel and you had to keep the phone line free so you could fire up MSN Messenger over dial-up and attempt to talk to girls.

Although I suspect Powderfinger’s reunion won’t inspire fans to wind back the clock and buy a Nokia 3210, they will nevertheless reminisce, and they will reel off the lyrics to Passenger like they’re hearing it on radio for the first time. And they will revel.

Especially in Brisbane, where I can feel the breeze whipping off the water behind the Riverstage.

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