MARIST Brothers boys college is just up the road from my place. The Range Rovers make their morning drop-offs and their afternoon pick-ups. The occasional lad can be seen on foot.

This is weekdays. On holidays or weekends, the boarders, apparently let loose for short periods, hunt in packs – three, four, five of them together – and can be either HEARD (thanks to a dollop of F-bombs and one of them holding an old-style boom-box going Doof Doof! or Hip Hop!) or SEEN (puffing on ciggies and chewing on pizzas, on their way back from the local shops). These are the lads of today.

Now, go back a few years – mid-80s say – and I imagine the boarders at least are still swearing their guts out on a weekend, gobbling Marinaras aplenty and smoking enough to compensate for their week-time Godliness… But at least a couple of things are quite, quite different…

ONE – A much higher percentage of the school population suffers their to-ing and fro-ing on foot (Range Rovers having not yet entirely conquered The Earth)… And TWO – At least a few of them wouldn’t be caught dead near neither a Hip nor a Hop! These boys – Karl, Richard, Garth and Jack – the fledgling Purple Avengers – are (outside of study of course) immersed mentally, bodily and spiritually in lonnnnng guitar solos, meannnndering Manzarek-keys and spaced-out, bass-bedazzled sonic journeys, man, the likes of which the great Castle On The Hill ain’t never produced before…  Oh and they’re STILL going…

“We survived the intensive caning regime of Marist Ashgrove together.” Karl tells me during Confession. “Same age, same fucked-offness. I gave my Year 12 English talk on the History of Punk, which was admittedly easier to squeeze into five minutes back in 1984.”

“The Avengers line-up was completed in 1987 when we pestered Garth into becoming a drummer. Yeah, we all knew each other from school and Richard and I are cousins too.”

“We all have pretty eclectic tastes but converge on things like Psychedelia, Space Rock, Punk and Free-Form Jazz. We became a very improvisational band, largely due to long hours spent rehearsing in the old Target building. We’d often jam a 45-minute tune, turn the cassette over in the recorder then start again!”

So when you guys get together now, all these years later, what’s, like, you know, THE SAME?… “What’s the same,” Karl emits joyfully, “is that we still play music because we’re obsessed with it! And there’s a lot of mind-melding going on when we play. I still use a variety of free-associative and sound-painting techniques in my songwriting.” Yeah baby!…

And what’s, like, umm, DIFFERENT?… “What’s different nowadays is the limited time we can spend together in the same place, due to the band members being spread around the globe [One of them’s even in Trumpland! Or is that TrumpVegas?!]. We’ve overcome this with a combination of DIY recording technology and expensive plane flights!”

I used to say that Powderfinger’s single most strategic move, at least in their early days, was to not break-up, cause, Hell, nearly everyone else couldn’t do the splits fast enough! But, now that even the great Finger are but a memory, more kudos then to our musical Marist boys – now husbands, fathers and career-men – who, unlike The Finger, The Beatles and even The Stones, have stayed original and intact now for timeless geological periods!… There is nothing more spaced-out and Rock & Roll than a friendship like this … Yep, they’re STILL together and still so very, very Purple!…

THE PURPLE AVENGERS launch their new album “A Storm of Years” at Oriental Rock 3, Saturday December 10 at The New Globe, Fortitude Valley, with fellow old-timers CHOPPER DIVISION and THE BAM BAMS.