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Perhaps A Blindfold Would Have Helped? | Well, maybe not.

You never know what you’re going to get onstage from NQ Arbuckle’s Neville Quinlan. But you can usually count on some kind of zany hullabaloo with unpredictable moments of wit and poignancy thrown in. However, Quinlan’s tour story concerns a time someone gave him a left-field experience.

“Touring is sort of one test after another one,” he begins. “It’s fantastic and it all works out, but one night you’ll be playing at an abandoned train station for anarchists, and another night you’ll be in a wine bar, and another night you’ll be in a punk rock bar in Milan. During my last tour, every night my consort or sort of chaperone, Stephano, would take me before the show to his mother’s restaurant, which was the most beautiful and fantastic Italian restaurant in the countryside. The father is the man who’s greeting everyone, with waitresses draped all over him, and the mom is in the kitchen — quite a large woman — and a great cook.

“Except”, he says, “one night Stephano’s mother said, ‘I’m going to cook you something special and very expensive.’ And the plate comes out, and all it is just big rinds of fat. And not like lard, which is soft; they were big, thick, hard, gristly rinds of fat. And a huge plate too. Stephano says proudly” — and here Quinlan puts on his best Italian accent — “‘This is for you, not for me; it’s too expensive for me.’

“I looked at him and I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit, I can’t eat this!’ But I fight my way through some of it — I mean, you could see the hair still on the fat. It must have been straight from the butcher shop. Finally I just couldn’t eat it anymore.” Hmm... probably too late to fake being vegan....

“But,” Quinlan says, “Stephano’s mother was standing right there! So I had to pretend to have the flu. I had to keep running off to the washroom and sort of hanging out there for a while, you know, and then coming back — I don’t know what I was doing, really. Finally she took the plate away. And actually I was starting to feel a bit sick after eating that much fat.

“That night I was playing a gig at a train station — as in, the ‘audience’ was sitting around waiting for trains. Italian gigs are funny because no one speaks English, so on the one hand you can say really anything, but there’s no point in explaining anything either. My stomach was just aching from a cramp from having eaten all this fucking fat, and I could barely sing, so I was trying to think of funny things to do, and at one point I unplugged my guitar and sort of chased this guy around the room, and everyone thought that was really funny.”

“That is funny,” I say.

“Well, I was just trying to get him to buy a CD, and think of things to do because I couldn’t sing.”

“I just have one question about the large plate of fat,” I say. “Are you sure Stephano and his mom weren’t just playing a trick on you? Surely they can’t eat a whole plate of fat either.”

Quinlan chuckles. “No, no,” he says. “They take their food so seriously over there that had it been a joke, they would have come back later and told me.”

“Well, maybe they did, but it was in Italian.”

He pauses. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says.

Well, hard to know. In any case, Quinlan seems to have made a complete recovery. Undaunted, he says, “That was the only rough meal I had over there. I keep trying to figure out a way to go back.”

In the meantime, NQ Arbuckle plays the Pawn Shop on Sept. 17. If there’s anything on the menu, Quinlan would appreciate seeing it before ordering it.