We played at the Woodford Festival, in Queensland, on the 27th and 28th of December.

Then Lorne Falls Festival on the 30th, then flew over to Marion Bay in Tasmania for the afternoon of the 31st, then back to Melbourne for the New Year’s Eve show at Fed Square.

We are The Cat Empire.

We were the main act, playing right up until midnight and bringing in the new year. It was the end of 2004.
We arrived at the square around 7pm, red-eyed and exhausted from the continuous driving, flying, performing and partying of the last few days. There were stressed-out stage managers and PA guys and event organisers running around and talking into radios.

We did a quick sound check and rehearsed a song with Paul Kelly.

There was a huge screen set up. Somebody important and under pressure explained to me how it was going to go at midnight – we had to stop two minutes before twelve, stop dead, no matter what we were doing, even if we were halfway through a song. Then there would be a live cross to a newsreader – maybe Sandra Sully, I can’t remember – who would be standing on top of one of the buildings in the city skyline. She would talk to the crowd, and the television audience, and hype them up for the countdown, and then the screen would show the numbers – 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. My job was to lead the countdown. And then to shout ‘Happy New Year.’ Then, there were about twenty guys in kilts with bagpipes to do the Auld Lang Syne thing.

That was how it was supposed to go.

How it actually went was like this: We stopped dead at 11.58 pm. It was awkward. There were over two hundred thousand people looking at us. We didn’t know what to say. We looked at a giant blank screen and waited for someone like Sandra Sully to appear. The stage silence stretched on and on. I might have tried to make a joke and there might have been a screech of microphone feedback, or maybe that’s just something I saw in a movie.

We waited for someone like Sandra Sully, but nothing happened on the screen.

Then suddenly 2, and then 1, flashed up and disappeared.
I looked around, but nobody was telling me what to do. Was that 1, like the end of the countdown? What happened to the news reporter on top of the skyscraper, and 10, 9, 8, 7 6, 5, 4, 3?

From the stage we could see fireworks going off down the Yarra.

‘I think that’s it, people,’ I said. ‘Happy New Year…’
A small cheer rose up.

Then we kept playing and people started dancing again.