Powderfinger dash reunion hopes ahead of two members performing at Fortitude Music Hall opening
Since they disbanded in 2010, there has been endless speculation about a Powderfinger revival. This is the inside story.
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Powderfinger bassist and venue operator John Collins insists he will be watching from the bar with beer in hand when his former bandmates Bernard Fanning and Ian Haug perform at the opening of his new joint next month.
Invites to the official opening party for the Fortitude Music Hall are on their way to the other ‘fingers Darren Middleton and Jon Coghill.
But Collins, like everyone in Team Powderfinger including manager Paul Piticco, are resigned to the fact that where two or more members are assembled, speculation of a reunion of one of Australia’s most loved and successful bands will reign.
Within 24 hours of the line-up announcement that Ball Park Music, DZ Deathrays, Tia Gostelow, and a host of superstar guests including “Bernard Fanning and Ian Haug (Powderfinger)” as they are billed on the poster, tickets sold out.
“People thinking Powderfinger are playing … it’s crazy. And it’s really funny. I am going to invite Darren and Cogsy as well but I can tell you where I will be and that is at the bar,” Collins said this week.
Within an hour on Monday morning, two announces gave fans the fuel to resurrect dreams of seeing the quintet perform together again.
The first was Triple J’s Dream Festival 2019, just half an hour before the reveal of the line-up for the Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall’s grand opening.
Triple J was besieged by hyperventilating fans who perhaps misunderstood the “festival” is an all-day broadcast of seminal live performances from their archives, including Powderfinger’s set in the Western Australian mining town of Karratha from the youth network’s AWOL series in 2007.
Double J will host that concert broadcast on June 22, as Triple J and Unearthed channels also replay some of the finest live concerts recorded by the network.
ABC National Music Correspondent and Double J host Zan Rowe said she remembers the absolute frenzy which greeted four-fifths of the band performing at Splendour In The Grass in 2017.
“The crowd in front of them at that gig were so young … and they still went nuts. Most of them would never have had a chance to see the band live before,” she recalled.
It was Fanning’s gig and marked the 10th anniversary of the band having last played Splendour, which is promoted by Piticco with his longtime business partner Jessica Ducrou.
Haug, Collins and Middleton happened to be in Byron so the day before Fanning’s set, they rehearsed (Baby I’ve Got You) On My Mind and These Days.
But someone forgot to tell Coghill and while social media was dominated by delight at the “one-off”, some fans were dark the drummer hadn’t been invited due to a pesky “misunderstanding”.
“No tensions mate just a bit of a misunderstanding really. It’s all good,” Coghill replied on Twitter to a fan who suggested “tensions still linger” among the bandmates.
Fanning nipped any future reunion speculation in the bud the next day in an interview with Huffington Post.
“There’s no plans or ideas for a reunion or a tour or anything like that,” Fanning told HuffPost.
“It’s just something that may happen from time to time, whenever we’re all in the same place at the same time.
“I think people want that to be the case — they want there to be a reunion and they want there to be a tour, but we don’t want that. None of us want that.
“The only circumstances under which that would happen would be if we really wanted to do it. It’s just not on the books for us.”
The band took yet another step to quell the swirling rumours of dissent in their ranks with a weird Instagram post four days later of the five men gathered around the engine of a car.
“We’re sorry we didn’t tell Cogs we were playing at Splendour. It was so dumb he made us fix his Rolls Roy.....um … er ......’99 Ford Telstar. She’s all running sweet now.
#noreunion #notour #noshow #noball #nostress #nostrils #numbnuts #Telstar #sorry #sweetas,” they captioned the photo.
A Powderfinger reunion tour would be difficult to muster after Coghill revealed last year he can no longer play drums for long periods after suffering permanent hearing loss from his almost two decades behind the kit with the band.
Now an ABC journalist on the Sunshine Coast, Coghill wears hearing aids in an attempt to counteract the loss and ongoing tinnitus problems.
“My deafness has a role to play in that, because if I play drums for an hour, my ears still ring, and it’ll last a day — even if I’m wearing earplugs,” he told The Australian.
As the band admitted in their official post-split biography Footprints, the conflicts between them became frequent and heated in the final years before their farewell tour in 2010, with the relationship between Fanning and Coghill particularly volatile.
Anniversaries are the new black in the music industry so it would be easy to ponder the possibility the band might do another “one-off” semi-reunion to mark a decade since their split next year.
But their manager Piticco reckons fans should accept Powderfinger called it quits the right way with the Sunsets tour.
“I guess when 2010 was said and done and we left the party, we weren’t being told to leave at 3am and not many bands get to pick exactly when they do,” he said.
“It’s forced upon most bands because of personal tumult, artistic differences or popularity decline.”
The reason Powderfinger are unlikely to bow to the reunion wishes of their legion of hopeful fans is they have very different and busy lives with young families who wouldn’t be keen on their dads hitting the road for a year or two.
Fanning and Middleton’s respective solo careers continue, Haug is playing in The Church and alongside Collins in their band The Predators and Coghill is a full-time journalist.
And with the launch of the Fortitude Music Hall, Collins, Piticco and their partners might look further afield to other states to create new venues.
But as Double J’s Rowe said fans will continue to dream that one day they will see Powderfinger perform again.
“Whenever you talk about Powderfinger, everyone gets love hearts in their eyes. They are a band who hold a special place the hearts of many Australians,” she said.
The Fortitude Music Hall opens on July 26 with the Triple J’s Dream Festival broadcast on June 22.