On Tour With Husky: Part Three - ‘That Forever Never Place’

Husky recently wrapped up their intimate national tour and so too brings an end to vocalist Husky Gawenda's tour diaries.

In the final instalment, Gawenda takes the reader on a journey to a place he can only visit when performing onstage.

Check out part one here.

Check out part two here.

My eyes are closed. I’m in the song. For a moment, I disappear. It’s a bit like a magic trick the magician herself doesn’t understand. It’s also like a dream - it makes sense and doesn’t make sense, time moves slowly but passes quickly, the more you try to remember the more you forget. I don’t know what line I am singing but I know it’s about halfway through the setlist during Spaces Between Heartbeats. I can’t be sure exactly what line it is because I lose myself in that moment. For a second or two, I am not there. And when I say a second or two, I’m just guessing. It could be a week in long time.

I’m standing on the shore of a blue diamond sea. There’s a shipwreck in the distance. I know this image well. Jagged bones that haunt the incandescent eternity, refusing to decay. There’s an old broken down pier to my right. It looks like the prehistoric skeleton of some long dead leviathan, now just a place to perch for the sleeping turnstones. I know this image too. There is nothing else but sand and sky and sea, bleached by the sun, swept by the wind, corroded by time.

There’s a girl standing beside me. She wasn’t there and then she was always there. She is faceless. I look down and see that we are holding hands. We don’t speak, this is a wordless place. There are only feelings and the only one I can pinpoint is that longing you feel for someone when they are right beside you, which can cut deeper than the longing for someone who is far from you. It is morning, actually, that is the other feeling I recognise. The feeling of morning.

There is a bead of sweat travelling down my forehead and past my brow arriving finally at the tip of my nose where it forms a droplet, quivering there for a second before it plunges to the stage floor. I feel the metallic honeycomb of the microphone on my lips. A deluge of sound floods the silent beach and like a flame to a photograph, the image melts to black.

I open my eyes. I’m back on the stage. All the faces in the front row, beautiful strangers, some singing, some smiling, some eyes closed, some indecipherable. Chord change, what is it again? My hands get to it before my brain does. Is it right? Heart pumps out a few extra beats. Yes, it sounds right, nice work hands, I owe you one. What’s next on the set list? How’s the show feel? I think my guitar is out of tune. This is the last chorus, focus on this last line, it’s the most important line of the song. ‘I can feel you in the spaces between heartbeats lately, and maybe, it’s for real.'

I’m no longer in the song. Gotta get back there, back to the song. Maybe if I can get back there, these guys will follow. And that’s what they came here for, isn’t it? To get back to the sand and the sky and the sea and the faceless girl and that bright, bright morning.

To get back to that forever never place.​