I’d seen the Rolling Stones at Wembley Empire Pool in north London in 1973 on the Goats Head Soup tour, still with Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman. I remember scorching versions of Starfucker, Happy and Rip this joint. I saw them again on the Voodoo Lounge tour at the Sydney Cricket Ground, supported by the Cruel Sea, with 78,000 others including my 13 year old son, Joe. Our tickets were numbered something like Stand 7 Row 1, seats 4 and 5. I just knew we would be in the first row right in front of the stage, not in the front row of a nosebleed stand where, without any binoculars, we could watch ants with guitars performing way off in the distance. I spent much of the evening trying to convince Joe that what we were experiencing was just amazing.

By the time they next came to Sydney in 2003, on the Licks tour, I’d surpressed the memory of that anti-climax but was crushed after trying and failing to get tickets to their sold out gigs at the Olympic stadium. But then they announced a single gig at the decaying art deco Enmore Theatre in the next suburb to ours. With maximum capacity of 1600, this called for the abandonment of all restraint on how unbelievable getting a ticket would be.

Sydney’s Enmore Theatre

Tickets would go on sale on a Monday morning at 9am, by phone or on-line. All the publicity insisted that all tickets would be sold to the first 1600 who got through. I got to my office at 8am and experimented with which desk arrangements of phone and mouse would give me as a right hander the best hope of frantic, rapid phone redial and repeat resets of the web booking page. I’d mouse with my right hand and press the redial button with my left. At 8.55am I got going, over and over for a full hour like a bar-pressing rat in a lab experiment. Not once did I get through.

As all optimism drained away, I gave it a few final attempts, running a “this time, surely” prayer in my head. Nothing. I then walked down two floors to the room that housed my research grant team. “Well, meet the guy who just wasted an hour of time he should have spent working away on a paper, trying in vain to get tickets to the Rolling Stones gig at the Enmore” I told them sheepishly.

Katie Bryan-Jones was a Californian Fulbright scholar who was spending a year with us. She was about six foot two, in her early twenties and bursting with good health and vitality. She looked at me and said deadpan “Do you like the Rolling Stones?”  I began to explain that everyone my age had grown up with their music as a soundtrack to their lives.

She interrupted me. “Hey, I‘ve got two tickets to that gig. Would you like one?” She explained that she’d heard that if you joined the Rolling Stones’ Australian fan club, and paid $100, you got well over that in merch like T-shirts, caps, badges and CDs but importantly, priority access to tickets. So she’d joined and got the tickets to the Enmore.

I nearly wet myself with excitement. These were the hottest tickets I could ever remember going on sale. An almost intimate gig with the world’s most famous ever rock band  to tell people about for the rest of your life. Would I like a ticket?  Is water wet? Is the Pope a catholic? But haven’t you bought the other ticket for your boyfriend or something? “Well, sort of .. but really, you’re very welcome to have it” she assured me. I handed her the money on the spot.

On the night of the gig a few weeks later, we met in a Turkish pide shop a block away from the Enmore. My shout and order anything you want, the magnanimous ticket holder told her. I’d brought a very good wine along.

An hour later, we walked down toward the theatre, stopping to buy and load up a disposable camera at a pharmacy. This I secreted down my underpants, expecting a no cameras inspection at the door.

As we neared the main entrance, Katie handed me the tickets. I looked at them and froze. There were no seat numbers on them. Had she been conned and been sent fake tickets?  It seemed possible.

Security goons swarmed everywhere. One came up to us and reached for our tickets. It was the “colourful Sydney identity” strongman Tom Domican. I was reminded of the Rolling Stones hiring the Hells Angels as security at the ill-fated Altamont concert  in 1969. He pointed us to an internal doorway which led us to the mosh pit. So not only had we real tickets, but we had the best tickets you could get. We were about 10 metres from the stage in a sea of aging forever youngs.

I saw a few famous names and faces near us in the crowd, Glenn A Baker and Adam Spencer were two.  How amazing that these celebrities had been able to get tickets in the huge competition to get the few that were on offer! What were the odds of that?

Jet were the support act. I remember nothing about them other than wanting them to get off after each song. Twenty interminable minutes later, it started. They opened with Midnight Ramber, Tumbling Dice and Live with me. Ronnie Wood and Keef both looked cadaverous. Both  ignored the smoking ban and played sweeping, chiming chops and riffs deep in my DNA. They throttled their guitar necks and looked utterly dissolute. Mick ran about all night, pouting and jaggering and enjoying it enormously. Charlie was in his own world, impassive and rock solid.

About three quarters of the way through, two ordinary looking guys in jeans and tees with guitars sauntered on stage. I missed what Mick said but then it rapidly dawned: it was Angus and Malcom Young from AC/DC. The four guitar gods dueled through the BB King standard Rock me baby, and Angus and Keef duck-walked across stage, Chuck Berry style. We all died and went to heaven.

I’ve seen hundreds of musical acts over my life (Bands seen), many unforgettable. But this had just everything. It was the benchmark. The best. Pure bliss.

Throughout the night, Mick constantly pulled on a water bottle and at one stage threw an open one into the air near us. Water that had been in the bottle, perhaps in direct contact with his lips splashed over us. This molecular intimacy made us both decide that, for those moments, homeopathy might well have something to it after all.

Me, I’ve not washed my face in the 20 years since.

Sydney Morning Herald review

The full concert

10 favourite Rolling Stones tracks  I’m movin’ on (live)  She said yeah  That’s how strong my love is Get off my cloud Monkey man Can you hear me knockin’ Fool to cry Backstreet girl  Too much blood   Rocks off  (and my band doing it in 2012  at Balmain’s Cat & Fiddle pub with Adam Spencer guesting on guitar)

I’m often asked “so now that we have plain tobacco packs, with their huge graphic health warnings, what’s next in the marshaling yard to try and drive home the realities of the risks of smoking?”

Canada pioneered graphic health warnings on packs in 2000, and by 2016, over 100 nations required the “see and can’t forget” pictorial warnings. Canada is now actively considering health warnings on all cigarettes (see picture).

One of the most potent of all the graphic health warnings that have run in Australia since 2006 is the one about smoking causing gangrene.

Gangrene (rotting flesh) can occur with peripheral vascular disease. It occurs mostly in the extremities of the body, particularly in the in the feet and toes when insufficient blood supply reaches these areas due to narrowing of the blood vessels. Smoking is a major risk factor for PVD because it is a vasoconstrictor and raises blood pressure.

The first public campaign to highlight gangrene was run in New South Wales in a 1983 campaign for the NSW health department developed by John Bevins.  A TV ad on amputation after gangrene was screened in the years after the gangrene pack warning appeared.

I helped find the lower photograph below of the gangrenous foot that was used in Australia’s first generation of graphic health warnings that appeared from 2006. I obtained it from a surgeon at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital where I worked at the time. He gave me these two photographs of gangrenous limbs of smoking patients. I sent them to the Health Department in Canberra who tested them in focus groups. The first one showing the exposed bone was apparently rejected as being just too confronting.

The huge reaction the gangrene warning and the public discussion the graphic warnings caused got me thinking about how they might be made even more powerful.

In 1981, I saw John Waters’ cult film, Polyester staring the drag queen Divine and Tab Hunter. Waters incorporated “Odorama” scratch and sniff cards into the film. Wikipedia notes that “Special cards with spots numbered 1 through 10 were distributed to audience members before the show (see picture below). When a number flashed on the screen, viewers were to scratch and sniff the appropriate spot. Smells included the scent of flowers, pizza, glue, gas, grass, and faeces. For the first DVD release of the film the smell of glue was changed due to, as Waters states, “political correctness”. The gimmick was advertised with the tag “It’ll blow your nose!”

Gangrene has a very potent foul smell that can be highly distressing to patients and those who care for them before amputation.  When I started being asked the “what’s next?” question, I wondered about the potential of extending tobacco health warnings into the olfactory zone.

I called up a Professor of Chemistry at my university and asked him whether he knew of any chemical attempts to develop the smell of rotting flesh. I explained my interest. Absolutely deadpan and as quick as a flash, he told me that there were two candidate organic compounds cadaverine and putrescine. Putrescine is manufactured industrially. He called me back an hour later, having looked up the costs of bulk supplies of putrescine. I recall it was not off the planet and in any case, would be paid for by tobacco companies if the idea ever progressed.

Australia’s tobacco packaging legislation could easily be amended to allow for the mandatory incorporation of a putrescine scratch and sniff tab on packs carrying the gangrene warning.

In 2015, two psychologists conducted experiments where they exposed subjects to three odours: a neutral smell, ammonia and putrescine. They recorded how long it took subjects to walk 80 metres away from the campus exposure locations after smelling these odours. Those randomly allocated to the putrescine smell walked away faster from the exposure sites, causing the authors to speculate that “the results are the first to indicate that humans can process putrescine as a warning signal that mobilizes protective responses to deal with relevant threats.”

“Heath warnings don’t work”

There is a conventional folk wisdom popular among continuing smokers that tobacco pack warnings have no impact: they keep smoking regardless and just switch off. The companion argument here is that smokers are fully informed about the risks of smoking and so banging the same drum about health risks is a useless strategy.

There are several big problems with these arguments. First, if health warnings were so ineffective, someone needs to explain why  the tobacco industry has fought them tooth and nail all around the world for decades, particularly when they moved from anodyne to explicit, specific and graphic warnings. As recently as December 2016, British American Tobacco’s lawyers were attempting to stymie increased graphic health warnings in Hong Kong and Philip Morris did all it could to prevent Uruguay from implementing graphic health warnings. Companies don’t usually bother attacking policies that are ineffective and have no impact n their bottom line.

Second, it has been repeatedly shown that the overwhelming reason given by ex-smokers in explanation about why they were determined to quit, is health concerns. There is daylight between those concerns and other reasons that are nominated, as shown in the table below. Just where is it that smokers pick up these concerns from? Where would they ever find out or reflect on what atheroma or a brain bleed from stroke looks like if they never saw an image of it? How would they know about a person with emphysema’s constant struggle to breathe if they had not seen vision of it in a health warning ad? People with end-stage emphysema don’t tend to walk around in public very much, because they can’t.

And third, there is a very substantial body of research that examines questions about the impact of pack warnings on smokers’ understanding of risk, intention to quit and quitting behaviour, concluding that warnings can be powerful ingredients in motivating quitting.

Big Tobacco will hate this proposal. And that’s all we should really need to know in deciding that it’s an excellent idea.