When it first became apparent I was to tour Cambodia I really wasn’t sure what to expect. So I had no expectations, bar maybe trying out a few tropical fruits I had never heard of before. A swarm of dragon flies welcomed me to Phnom Penh. I had never seen orange dragon-flies in swarms. In Tasmania you will often see two flying together, but never in a swarm.
My agent told me to be careful after the first night, when after discovering myself on the cover of The Advisor I fell off my producer’s motorbike (not hurt, thank God)! After the fall I was taken into a girly bar where he put the Mincers on the stereo and I danced with 20 whores to Look in the Mirror. Little did I know that tuk tuk drivers would soon be calling out my name in the twilight. In hindsight I got way more than I could have bargained for: the adventure of a lifetime.
Curiously, the tour didn’t go as expected. Stu and I had travelled to PP where we had picked up Melanie Brew (of local punk-rockabilly band Tango & Snatch) on bass via our agent. The first three days we spent in rehearsal at Theaheng Music School. Lugging my gear up 10 flights of stairs to the rooftop studios was kinda like boot camp and after three days of it I was considerably fitter.
My first few nights were spent at the Silver River hotel; my room overlooked a car park inhabited by a curious smattering of haphazard businesses and extended families coexisting with the stink, among wrecks and machete-wielding workers hacking bamboo into small chunks while children played (I thought I’d booked a room with a river view). I eventually found somewhere good for $9 a night, and managed to talk them into not kicking me out a couple of times due to misunderstandings.
The first show at Equinox was well received. It felt great to finally be out of Tasmania, doing what I loved most to a whole room of international types who really seemed to be digging our sound. The first major tour hurdle was the King Father’s cremation amid a Disneyland of ritual which had sprung up in his honour across the city: our gigs were postponed for nine full days.
The following week came the second hurdle: managing to fall out with the drummer I’d travelled from Hobart with. I decided to continue solo, and ventured out to the Cambodian Space Project’s Australia Day gig at the Cambodian Naval Base. It was stinking hot and 100 Khmer kids splashed in the foam-filled pool, while roughly 300 expats crammed under the canopies and umbrellas. The meat pies were cold, the sausages didn’t taste like sausages and we sweated like pigs, but I had never quite felt so patriotic in my green and gold sandals.
That night I travelled to Kampot with the CSP. On the tour bus I met a fellow Tasmanian: Tim Oliver, a teacher and photographer who had just relocated to Phnom Penh and decided to make the journey with the band. In the following week Tim documented my time exploring the city, as well as staged photo shoots.
Weary after one all-day session spent posing with pigs and chickens and armoured cars, we found ourselves at the Red Fox on Street 136 – my new favourite bar. It was here I met renowned author/Pussy and the Learjets lead guitarist Tom Vater in the flesh for the first time. Tom had helped me line up our Bangkok show at the Overstay via Facebook. We realised we both wanted to work with the same producer here, so why didn’t we just go into the studio and collaborate on a few tracks?
A few days later we rocked up at Jan Mueller’s (aka Professor Kinski) recording studio with new strings on our guitars and an etched-in-stone plan to make a punk rock racket. We got to spend two days recording, mixing and mastering two tracks, Good Behaviour and Flow Chart. The clips to both songs are currently under construction and will use some of the 10,000 photos Tim took earlier than week.
Then I visited Tuol Sleng, where men, women and children tortured and murdered men, women and children. My buoyant mood was hacked down by ghostly machetes. Dripping sweat into my t-shirt, already soaked with sadness and empathically paralysing my moments with anguish, sadness, torment and despair. Never before had I visited a place so haggard with torture and death. As I walked away suddenly I could feel the sadness of the city, and also the resilience. And it was strong.
After the King Father’s cremation, I’d noticed a heightening in energy around the city in a really positive way. Although eerie music had been spilling out of public speaker boxes on most street corners, there were thousands of monks and people mourning, all wearing black and white. I donned the regalia and mourned alongside.
It probably wasn’t the greatest idea to fire my long-term drummer on tour, but I did. Fellow Aussie Myley Rattle from Show Box wanted us to play at his venue so badly that he found me a replacement, Norwegian wildman Henrick Rassmussen, who I borrowed from local heavy metal band band Splitter.
Our second show at Show Box was my favourite gig of the tour. I was so happy to be playing with a band at that point and it was my birthday. Unfortunately that day Tim the photographer fell victim to foul play. He was drugged and woke up two days later, missing our last tour dates. Conversely I wasn’t really feeling it at our Kampot show a few days later and it rained solidly for the whole time we were on stage, which was a pretty loud layer of noise in the semi-outdoor setting of Bodhi Villa.
In the end I had been on planes, in papers, on banners, on motos, in tuk tuks. I have felt the sweaty city of Phnom Penh breathe me in and wrap me in its chunderous bowels. So rank were some of the stenches they paralysed my breath for blocks, like the putrid stench of poo river near Tuol Sleng. Yet the perfumes were exquisite and the bling so blinging.
The smiling faces and broken onlookers; beggars’ fists, desperate measures. Among the traffic the flight of fury as a moto overtakes at 100km an hour (the official speed limit is set at 25). I was involved in two attempted muggings: one in a tuk tuk, the other a late-night bag snatch (luckily the only things stolen were my phone and make-up wallet). I got really tragged out when I realised I had no red lipstick and found it impossible to find that colour in Kampot, though I did get a large Dragonfly tattooed on my back at Moi Tiet bar/tattoo parlour.
I reminisce about the night I went into the Heart of Darkness… and came out alive, with my wallet; about the rides bathed in the golden late-night glow of the street lamps. The tuk tuks revving down large empty parades; my driver hunched over and black jacketed, monkeyesque. Never before had I felt so free in the warm sticky air.
It was hard to go home, to a place where a beer costs $5, dinner $20 and you can’t even get a passion fruit and mint frappe. Back at my day job, fantasising about my holiday, I’m trying to write new songs and make movies in my spare time. I’m planning drum auditions and have three likely candidates. And I’m dreaming about a European tour later in the year, via Phnom Penh, of course.
Hear ZoeZac’s music on soundcloud.com/zoezac.