Transcript
'Bodies of Water' by Don McGlashan
Mihi
Kia ora koutou. Nga mihinui ki a koutou katoa.
Kia ora rangatira mā. Kia ora e hoa mā. Kia ora ngā tāngata ataahua o te Upoko o Te Ika.
Ko Don McGlashan tōku ingoa; ko Ingarangi, me Aerana, me Kōtirana te whakapararanga mai, engari ko Aotearoa taku ūkaipō.
Tihei Mauri ora!
Preamble
OK, a lot’s been going on for me in the last year or so. A documentary has been made about me; I’ve been invested into the NZ Music Hall Of Fame; I put out a new live album.
When I was asked to do this lecture I thought “Haven't the public seen enough of me lately?” Well apparently not.
I felt exhausted after the documentary - even though I wasn’t making the film - I was just having the camera pointed at me - but I also felt, paradoxically, that I'd love to have a go at answering all the questions that occurred to me after the camera was turned off. Not for my profile, or posterity - just so I can get things straight in my own head. So I said yes to this lecture, and here I am!
The link between heading out for a swim and trying to write a song
I called the talk “Bodies Of Water”, because I was asked to give it a title. I’m not sure how relevant lakes, inlets, rivers will be, but they do tend to interpose themselves in my writing, so let’s see.
I go swimming a lot. Either where I live half of the year, with my lovely wife Ann in Vancouver - in a place called English Bay, or, when I'm back in Auckland, the other half of the year at Point Chevalier or one of the tidal mud-flat bays on the Titirangi shore.
Although I'm a fairly confident swimmer, I always feel fear at that first dive: pushing off, and then coming up, breast-stroking.
The childlike fear of what's underneath; what snag I might hit; what aquatic creature might come up and bite me; what clammy weeds might brush against me. Then pushing through that fear and feeling the joy of moving in a new medium.
All of that, for me, mirrors jumping off into trying to write a new song. The initial fear of coming up with something hackneyed and useless. Then, on a good day, there's the blessed transformation as I realise that I'm moving in a new medium that was threatening before, but is now bearing me along on its own current.
Then there’s water as a metaphor for the subconscious
C.K. Stead, in, I think, “The New Poetic; Yeats to Eliot”, talks about the subconscious as being where all the good stuff comes from. The clear way we see the world, our own authentic voice. But we have no control over when that good stuff is going to be obliging and come out. All we can do is to keep our tools sharp so that when it does arrive, we can go to work on it effectively.
So we live on the surface, but the subconscious is below us, available to us.
As writers, we tap into the subconscious every time we reach a fork in the road. "Shall I do it this way, or that way?" When we make a choice, and the subconscious agrees, there’s a satisfying click - like the door of an expensive European car closing.
I also sometimes see bodies of water as representing our relationship with time
The future is like the sky. The past is underwater, and the present is what’s in between: the surface of the sea, the lake, the river; the tiny skin between two vast elements. It’s a cramped space, but that's where we live, sliding along, trying not to capsize. The future is unknowable, unattainable; in the present we’re too busy to concentrate on anything but our immediate concerns, so, in terms of raw materials, that only leaves us with the past, which is like a lake that's been formed by a hydro scheme. Streets, trees, empty buildings; ghostly, dark, washed by invisible currents. We can dive in there and see what we can find.
Then there's the real sea around us, here in Aotearoa
Not a metaphor, just a real thing. Very wet, very big. A unimaginable challenge for the brilliant Polynesian navigators who first found these islands, a leap into the unknown for the Pakeha families who were pushed by social injustice at home, and pulled by the false advertising of outfits like the New Zealand Company - and now a barrier between us and the world, keeping us a long way away from everything, while keeping us relatively safe from invaders. So far, anyway.
It has a huge impact on the music industry here. If you’re in a band in Belgium, you can load your gear in a van and drive to many countries. You can’t do that so easily in Aotearoa.
The sea, for New Zealanders, is like Outer Space.
So we have a deep, respectful, existential fear of it - and we should.
Our sense of the emptiness out there should make all of us more acutely aware of the need to look after this country of ours. This raft we’re all clinging to is the only one we’re got.
But the sea is also something we love. We swim, surf, paddle, dive, fish in it, walk beside it, sail boats on it, pay an arm and a leg to live anywhere near it. But whether we’re playing in it, or just standing, looking at it and wondering, we need it. It’s deep inside us, like the plains are for Albertans, or the mountains for Tibetans. That unlikely combination of a very sensible fear, and a paradoxical love, makes us who we are.
Milford and Lake Pupuke
I was the third of four kids, brought up on the North Shore of Auckland. My parents moved there in the 50s, when anything North of Takapuna was considered a wilderness, inhabited by eccentrics and Social Credit voters. About 2 years before I was born, my Dad , who was an engineer with the Harbour Board, got a scholarship to live in Holland and do the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering at Delft University. My Mum, Dad, older brother and older sister sailed off on the impressively named Dominion Monarch. The trip took two and a half months via Sydney, the Pacific Islands, the Panama Canal and Capetown. They lived in The Hague for over a year, all learning enough Dutch to get by. Later on, back in New Zealand, when I and my younger sister had joined the family, the older kids and my parents would sometimes slip into Dutch to talk about stuff that we littlies weren’t allowed to hear.
My mother was orphaned as an infant, and was brought up in in Mt Eden, by a much-loved Glaswegian governess, and by distant, stern uncles and aunts. She was a boarder at St Cuthberts School for Girls, and eventually Head Girl. She studied Shakespeare at University and went back to teach immediately at St Cuthberts. She was a gentle, absent-minded person, who loved poetry and music, and played the piano better than she thought she did. When she went back to teaching after her four kids were fledged she was the kind of teacher that people always remember. I can’t count the number of punters who’ve come up to me after shows and told me that they wouldn’t be who they are today had they not had my Mum for 5th form English, or had she not gone in to bat for them when she was a school guidance counsellor and they were in trouble with the police.
My Dad grew up in mining towns: Hikurangi, Huntly, Renown.. where his father was mine engineer. Grandad was a garrulous, hard-drinking man with a class-driven chip on his shoulder, which dictated that no son of his could mix with miners kids - meaning that - apart from sentencing my Dad to a pretty lonely childhood and adolescence, it meant he wasn’t allowed to play in the local brass band - which was usually the only music going in those small towns. To get around this, my Dad dug a hole at the far end of the back yard, covered it with corrugated iron, and crouched in there on cold nights to play his cornet, before sneaking off to band practice. It was an illustration of his love of music, and his grit.
When my Grandad was drunk, he was abusive towards my Granny, and my Dad, even in his early teens, often had to step in and protect her.
When Mum brought Dad to meet the Aunts and Uncles, he must have seemed a shy, odd man. Fiercely intelligent, a bit rough around the edges. Passionate about engineering, but without much conversation. If they disapproved, she didn’t listen. She had plenty of grit too.
Because both my parents were teachers, we had long holidays together as a family, and we’d spend most of them on Pakihi Island, at the bottom end of the Hauraki Gulf, where we had an acre of land, and a bach that my Dad built.
Us kids would play Go Home Stay Home in the shearing shed in the South Bay.
Once tagged, your “home” was next to the chutes that the newly shorn sheep slid down, into the holding pens under the building. This meant that intrepid players who were on your team could shinny up the chutes, tag you and free you, slipping on the lanolin-smoothed wood. Us four kids, plus any friends we’d brought, would play all day till dusk, when we’d hear my father start the generator over in North Bay, the signal for us to find our way back to the bach.
I can remember standing in the water at South Bay at twilight - hearing the disembodied voices of net-fishers about 3 miles away across the Firth at Kawakawa Bay - it was as if they were standing next to us. My Mother would talk about how Māori might have have explained those phenomena with stories about fairy-like beings (patupaiarehe was the word I later learned) or the Selkies of Irish and Scots tradition.
My Dad explained that it was because of the warm layer of air trapped close to the sea at that time of day, sound waves bouncing along it like electrons down a wire.
My dad wasn’t without poetry, but his was the poetry of the landscape, and the forces that made it. Walking along the beach, he would often bend down, pick up a rock and tell me stories about ancient heat and violence, lines of hot quartz pushing up through the chert and manganese.
in Milford, our family had a brick-based, weatherboard house near Lake Pupuke, in Waterloo Rd. (All the street names celebrate English History: Every victory of Admiral Nelson has its own street or cul-de-sac, and the Lake is bounded by Shakespeare, Kitchener, Hurstmere roads. There’s even a Byron avenue. The street-naming committee must have opted to gloss over Byron’s drug taking and sexual proclivities, in this instance. They did have standards though. Percy Shelley and Oscar Wilde don’t get a look in.)
The Lake is a strong part of my life, and has always been. I race my laser on it when I’m back in New Zealand, and I dream about it when I’m away. Sometimes the dreams have hippopotamuses in them. Not sure what that’s about. The Lake is round, about a kilometre in diameter, and as kids we would thrill to stories about how it was bottomless and magical. My Dad would tell us it wasn’t, in fact at one time it was the main water reservoir for the North Shore, but it was the magical stuff that stuck. Maurice Gee picked up this mythic quality when he wrote Under The Mountain. In that story, the Lake - the same Lake - is a vast petri dish for awful slug-like creatures, who could slither through underground tunnels out to Rangitoto, where they’d wait till the time came for them to take over the world.
We didn’t know it at the time, but that part of the Shore had a lot of writers around then. Frank Sargeson, and for a brief period, Janet Frame, lived on the other side of the Lake, in Esmonde Rd. Karl and Kay Stead lived there too, I think. Certainly Keith Sinclair and family.
Kendrick Smithyman and his wife Mary Stanley were just around the corner from us. Mary Stanley was a fine poet in her own right. But my family and I knew her as Mrs Smithyman, the remedial teacher at Milford Primary school, where we all went. She wasn’t much older than my Mum, but she bad arthritis, although that didn’t change how kind and patient she was her students .
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At Milford School - which was next to Lake Pupuke, aged about 6, along with a girl called Jill, who was pretty much my only friend, I read everything very fast, so once or twice a day Jill and I had to be sent out of the classroom to read to each other, so the class could catch up. We’d take our tiny metal and wood chairs out into the vestibule of the prefab, and sit amongst the wet coats, reading at our own pace. I used to love that.
Sometimes we’d forget ourselves, and would stay there, reading, even when the bell rang for Little Play, or Big Play, or even Lunch time - and the other kids would rampage out into the trees by the Lake, the boys forming gangs and fighting, and the girls hanging by their legs from the jungle gym - like rows of little bats.
Early Music
In the mid to late 60s my big brother and I would listen to the Kinks and the Beatles under the bedclothes after lights out. My big sister had a battery powered Phillips turntable, with little plastic speakers that formed the lid. I would take that outside and listen to Mary Poppins and the Sound Of Music soundtracks. Then later on to The Beatles cover of Arthur Alexander’s “Anna”. I’d puzzle over the lyrics of The Rolling Stones’s “Mothers Little Helper”.
I was a highly strung, tantrummy child. Very distracted at school. Prone to shouting out ideas at the wrong moments and getting into trouble. I couldn’t finish anything because I had already done it in my head. I felt that there was something wrong with me because everyone else could finish their work and I couldn’t. I don’t think they knew about ADHD then, or if they did, it hadn’t filtered through to the North Shore of Auckland. Around 7 or 8 I discovered that I could make the class laugh, and that sometimes made up for my growing sense of falling short, but not always. I had bad asthma, and if other children did come round to our house, it would often end in tears, with me having a tantrum or an asthma attack. Our family doctor prescribed heavy doses of Anthisan for me, a revolting green, oral antihistamine that I think is illegal nowadays except as a skin cream. For a while there I would knock back a large dessert spoonful of that before going to school. I’d be a bit sleepy, and spacey, but I wouldn’t get into trouble, and my handwriting would be legible.
I took piano lessons aged about 7 from an intimidating old man named Eric Bell, who lived near Milford Beach. He had had an illustrious career - he once had a regular slot on the radio, playing some kind of new-fangled organ called the NovaChord - but teaching me wasn’t his favourite thing, and he used to whack my hands with a ruler when I played the wrong notes. A bit later I started cello with a local Saturday morning music school. Around then another teacher at Milford school brought in an adult friend who had a snare drum to demonstrate to the class. He was in his twenties I guess, and painfully shy, absolutely stricken at having to stand in front of the class of small wriggling children. But then he played a roll, and time stopped for me - his two hands almost still, the ends of the sticks bouncing almost imperceptibly to make one long sound like rain on a roof, a sound which he could control, make louder or softer at will, just by raising or lowering his shoulders - I was spell-bound, and when class was over I ran home to tell my parents.
Some months later, the teacher who ran the orchestra at the Saturday Morning music school must have been racking her brains to find something which would make me less disruptive, and she came up with a 1/4” reel to reel recording of a piece from Handel’s Fireworks Music. Movement 6, Menuet 2. There’s no snare drum part, but sometimes people would throw in percussion for special occasions. This teacher found a recording of such an occasion, and gave me it to write out the part and learn it. My Dad had a reel to reel tape machine that he used to listen to choir stuff on, and he let me use it.
I still remember the part. It must have been a strange sight. A very small, very serious boy with flaming red hair, blushing madly, putting down his cello and leaving the orchestra midway through the concert, and coming back, carrying a snare drum on a stand, at least as big as him, to play the last piece.
Around this time, I started learning drums from an austere, dignified woman in Birkenhead call Mrs Notton. Then trumpet with Hugh Dixon - across the bridge in Epsom - a testament to my parents’ commitment - and then euphonium. Hugh Dixon reckoned my teeth were too crooked for me to ever be a good trumpeter - but Iater I secretly suspected that he needed a euphonium in his Auckland Youth Symphonic Band, and he had also twigged that my parents were probably long-suffering enough to fork out the money for one.
When I was 8 in Standard 4 - everyone had to do a project on India. Most children did some kind of wall-mounted display that took them weeks, and a fair bit of parental involvement, with pictures cut out of magazines, bits of careful joined-up writing, maps with pieces of string connecting them. I was too disorganised for that, so at the last minute I took two other boys out into the corridor and I worked out what I thought sounded like a Hindu rain song - harmonised in open 5ths. Geography wasn’t my strong point, and I think it was more American Indian than sub-continental. More Tonto than Ravi Shankar. But I thought it sounded pretty cool. The class had to choose the best project by the volume of their applause. The teacher, Miss Ransom, pointed at the different projects. When she pointed at me, the three of us just stood up and sang, and the class went crazy. Miss Ransom was livid. She said, and I remember this verbatim: “You have allowed yourselves to be fooled by a song. We’re not going to give Donald the prize for best project because that song was just something he made up, whereas other children have worked really hard, and copied things out of proper books.”
Miss Ransom was a good teacher, and I later found out that she had a soft spot for me, but felt she needed to clamp down on me, lest I rely too much on making stuff up, rather than applying myself to real work. Alas, I didn’t listen, and I’ve been fooling people with my songs ever since.
My Mum gave me poetry books that she was teaching from at school, and I was also a member of the Ashton Scholastic book club. I remember waiting at the letterbox, feeling really special because, of all the children in the street, the books I’d ordered were coming for me alone.
When I was 13 or so, my friends Rob, Mark, Simon and I would go to the derelict pool near Milford Beach to race little boats that we’d made. They were beautiful small pieces of craft. Inch-to-the-foot scale models of the 12 foot Cherub class yachts we were obsessed with; framed balsa wood hulls, stuck together with model aeroplane glue, and waterproofed with fibreglass resin. Sails that we’d sewed from real spinnaker cloth off-cuts, and a walnut sized lump of lead at the bottom of the centreboard for ballast. We’d set them off close-reaching across the pool, sprint round the other side, adjust the sails a bit, and let them go again, to broad-reach back to the other side.
In high school I read the poems of Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Robert Bly, Zbigniew Herbert.
In the Spring on 1974, when I was 15, my beloved older brother Alec (Sandy to the family) died, in a boating accident off Pakihi Island, with two of his friends. They had planned a trip over to the Island on Labour Weekend but the weather blew up, as it often does around that time of year, and their open boat was swamped.
I came to school the next day, not knowing what else to do. I remember my music teacher, Terence Maskell, quietly handing me a book of the Bach Chorales edited by Albert Riemenschneider. I will always thank him for that.
I don’t remember much about the time after my brother’s accident, But I do remember reading and re-reading Mary Stanley’s poetry, in her, I think, only published volume of work, a small book called “Starveling Year” - that was shunned by the poetry patriarchy of its day.
In a poem called “The Wife Speaks”
She says:
…I close
my books and know events
are people, all roads
everywhere walk home
women and men, to take
history under their roofs.
I see Icarus fall
out of the sky, beside
my door, not beautiful,
envy of angels, but feathered
for a bloody death.
She must have known Auden’s poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts”, written less than twenty years before.
Where, no matter what terrible or dramatic things are happening in the world,
…the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Auden mentions Icarus too:
…the sun shone
As it had to - on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
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Even at 15 I kind of knew that Mary Stanley was talking about the same thing as Auden.
But in a way that was more close-up and more human. Not standing back and shaking her head at the absurd tragedy of Icarus falling, but rather imagining what it would feel like to be his mother, holding him as he bleeds. I thought of my own mother, grieving for her son. And I also thought of her predicament twenty odd years earlier, arriving on the Shore, having been a Shakespearian scholar at university, now surrounded by all that literary energy that she was far too shy to have anything to do with.
My Dad was a Freemason, so that was his social life; my Mum would sometimes go out dutifully to Lodge Wives events, where I imagine the conversation was mainly about lamingtons and children.
I often wonder how different things might have been if she and Mary Stanley had become friends, back when both were young mothers.
Much later I would lift Mary Stanley’s line “Envy of Angels” for my song of the same name. That song is about my Dad - and in it, I was trying to talk about that spark of the divine that burns deep inside a Civil Engineer who’s trying to design a wharf or a bridge or a drainage system for people who aren’t born yet, in the hope that - even when the author of it is long gone - people may still find it useful.
Life went on. In 5th form another great music teacher, Martin Heath, persuaded the school authorities to pay for a trip to Jack Body’s Sonic Circus in 1974. We travelled down to Wellington in a van, and played a mostly improvised piece using cymbals and tape loops.
I must have been still around 15 when my brother in law the late Peter Walker took me to the clock tower at Auckland Uni to see From Scratch. 4 guys sitting cross-legged in a square, playing bakelite lamp shades with piano beaters. Peter also took me to see the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and introduced me to the poetry of Hone Tuwhare. My Dad was retreating into his own way of grieving for my brother, and when he did try to spend time with me, his conservative ideas made me angry, so we didn’t have much to say to each other for many years. Peter’s arrival on the scene was really important. When I got in my first band at age 15, Peter helped us get our gear to the Auckland Battle Of The Bands. He also taught me a lot about sailing, he was an illustrious sailor himself, one of the leading lights in New Zealand’s famous win in the Admirals Cup in 1987.
At Uni I studied music with John Rimmer, Douglas Mews, David Griffiths. I got into the University Singers, a small choir conducted by Peter Godfrey. I was never a great tenor, but I used to love the way, when we’d be on a trip somewhere, we all would pile out of the bus and sing in some cave or empty building, just for the joy of it. Pieces like Bruckner’s “Locus Iste A Deo Factus Est”.
I pieced together a BA over about 5 years - with many gaps and abandoned papers along the way. I loved the American Poetry paper presented by Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks. They encouraged students to keep a journal of dreams, impressions, reviews of books read, shows seen, music listened to, instead of handing in assignments. They wouldn't mark them, just check up occasionally that we were making regular entries into the journals.
That habit of keeping a journal has stayed with me for nearly 50 years now. I prefer the red, hardback Warwick 2B6, you’ll be interested to know - but if I’m forced to buy one overseas, I’ll settle for anything similar, as long as it’s cheap and sturdy. Don’t let anyone tell you that a leather Moleskin will make you write better. It never did that for me anyway. I have about 15 boxes of journals in storage.
From Scratch
When I was about 18, Philip Dadson asked me to join From Scratch. My friend Wayne Laird, who was teaching percussion at Auckland University, and who had pulled me in to write TV scores with him on a cops and robbers thriller called Mortimer's Patch, put in a good word for me with Phil. I loved the rigour and challenge of the From Scratch work. And that was when I met the writer Geoff Chapple, also a member of the group at that time, and we’re all still good friends, after all these years.
Philip believed, and still believes, that art shouldn’t be separate from the world, that artists have a duty to address issues that matter through their work. In Pacific 321 Zero, we chanted the names of Pacific Islands destroyed by nuclear testing. A few years later, we would perform that piece in Paris, protesting the French government’s continuing testing in the Pacific.
We travelled to Papua New Guinea for the South Pacific Arts Festival in 1980. It was an eye-opener for me. Most of the buildings in Port Moresby were stained red up to about chest height because of the locals’ habit of chewing betel nuts and then spitting out the crimson juice. I tried some. It was like a mild form of cocaine, or drinking lots of cups of strong coffee. Given that a few years later, I found out that I was allergic to caffeine, it was probably a bad idea.
Port Moresby was a scary place. At the opening ceremony of the Festival, on a large sports field, each national team had to line up behind their flag, having marched into the arena, singing and dancing. I had done some work accompanying Limbs Dance classes by this time, so we nutted out some pieces that we could quickly throw together, with the half a dozen Limbs dancers dancing, and From Scratch providing a beat. We would alternate with the Waihirere concert party and somehow give the impression of a representative national performance.
The day was badly organised and dragged on a lot. Some of the national teams got bored, sitting in full costume, in the hot sun, and started standing up and challenging the other teams to sing-offs or dance-offs. Some of these challenges got quite aggressive. To make things worse, someone had come up with some LSD tabs earlier on and I'd been silly enough to take one, so I my last memory of the day is me flailing away on some roto tom drums that we had brought with us, with the stadium spinning and swirling with bright colours and a palpable sense of danger.
Back in Auckland after that, I would occasionally guest with my friend Richard Von Sturmer's band The Plague, which also had my old friend Mark Bell - from model boats at Milford days - playing guitar. By this time I was a part-time second horn in the Auckland Symphonia – now the Auckland Philharmonia – and after orchestral shows I would turn up at dodgy sticky-carpeted bars with a trumpet-playing friend of mine, both still in our orchestral tuxedos, and we’d play brass lines behind The Plague, who quite often performed naked, painted with house paint in bright primary colours.
Wayne Laird asked me to learn one of the percussion parts in Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Two Percussionists, as three of the university music tutors wanted to play that piece. It was so exciting, and I met David Guerin, one of the two pianists, who is still one of my closest friends 45 years later.
I was studying the French Horn fairly seriously by now, although my inability - I suppose that’s the word - to practice enough was becoming a major issue. The university couldn't find a tutor for me in Auckland, so they flew me standby to Wellington once a week for lessons with Ed White from the NZSO. For about a year I gave up most of the academic work at university, and focussed on my French Horn diploma. I was cleaning fishing boats at Vos’s Shipyard in downtown Auckland, and running up the hill to the university every so often for chamber music practices, to do a few papers, (Anthropology with Anne Salmond, and South East Asian Politics with Steve Hoadley) and to sing in the choir, with the other choristers politely edging away from me, because I smelled strongly of anti-fouling and barnacles. The shipyard used to service all the Sanford's steel fishing boats, but it also built and maintained beautiful, traditional wooden yachts. There was a huge planing machine. When it was turned on, it started at a low F natural and swept slowly up through 2 1/2 octaves to a high B natural. When I was sweeping the floor, or stacking planks of sweet smelling Kauri or Kahikatea, I would sing along with the planing machine - harmonizing with it as it rose and fell.
I also mowed lawns for a while, with a contractor who would insist on all the team grimly sucking back a full bottle of beer each in his shed in Sandringham on Fridays after work. Sometimes I’d have to catch the bus into the city after that, and rehearse Bruckner motets with the University Singers, dizzy from beer, holding the music with grass-stained hands.
Not long after From Scratch came back from Papua New Guinea, I joined the Whizz Kids, which had formed after the break up of The Plague. I was on saxophone and rhythm guitar, neither of which I could really play, but the Punk zeitgeist gave us the key to those long-locked doors of technique and finesse. We did a few gigs, but it wasn't long before that band disintegrated, too, members defecting, centrifugally, first to the relative Big Time of The Crocodiles, and then The Swingers. What remained was Mark Bell, Tim Mahon, and me. We decided that I should play the drums, so I set about trying to learn how to do that. I was living alone in my friend Frank Stark's small warehouse in Auckland by that time. Frank was about to convert the place into a gallery, but he hadn't done that yet, so I set up my drums and a record player and bashed away to records by the Specials, Booker T and the MGS, and The Police. I had played percussion in brass bands, orchestras, and chamber groups, but on a drum set I no idea you were supposed to do with your feet. I worked really hard, and went to sleep in the wee small hours every night with aching muscles and blistered hands.
It was the era of PEP schemes. The Blams nailed one in the Manurewa area, and we spent several months driving South in the van early every morning and doing performances and workshops in schools and community centres.
Before long we were on the road more than we were in our respective flats. It was an exciting time, playing gigs, driving from town to town, exploring the country. Tim had the gift of the gab, and loved setting up tours for us. We didn’t make any money. Pretty soon we recorded some early songs and they got played on BFM. Richard Von generously gave us the name, Blam Blam Blam, and stacks of song lyrics, each one written in capitals on a page of A4, with so much vehemence that the last letter of each line often punctured the paper. We had a practice room in Hobson Street, and we’d jam away for hours, then pick up one of Richard's lyrics from the floor - and see if we could make it into a song. Richard’s approach to protest writing differed markedly from Philip Dadson's. It was rude, ironic, sarcastic. Like the Sex Pistols, if Johnny Rotten had read a lot more books.
As often happens, I started my own writing in the shadow of those two much more confident artists, Philip and Richard. For the Blams, I wrote something which was rather like a Richard piece – a song called “Respect” - a rant in the persona of an irate high school official who taken issue with one of our performances during the PEP scheme. Mark Bell and Tim Mahon were also writing good stuff - Mark a pointillist, turning out beautifully structured songs with lots of tension and release, and Tim with more of a Jackson Pollock - free-form approach.
Then, one day I was sitting waiting for Sound Check to start in a bar in Auckland somewhere, and most of “Don't Fight It, Marsha, It's Bigger Than Both Of Us” came into my head. It wasn't a savage, ranting song in the style of Richard. It seemed quiet and personal, although it did have an unreliable narrator – or at least a narrator who didn't seem to realize what a wanker he was. I played it to the band, but it was underwhelming and problematic. It needed a melody played on the euphonium and doubled by the guitar. So who was going to play the drums? We forgot about it for a while, and then one practice, we were at a loose end, and Mark said: Why don't we use the drum machine for that song of yours with the eupho? So that's what we did. As we got better at playing Marsha, the audience, relieved at having a break from the ear-splitting energy of most of our set, would seem to lean in, entranced by the simple angularity of it.
Marsha was an odd little story, with quite flat speech, some strange dream-like images that I didn’t quite understand, and a bolted-on outro that seemed bigger and more transcendent than the story really deserved. I couldn't really believe I'd written it.
One of my favourite authors, the American George Saunders, talks about the moment when, as a writer, you stop trying to climb someone else's mountain, and you realize that the small - as he puts it: pile of shit - that you're standing on might actually be your mountain. And from then on your job is merely to keep trying to find that of you which is authentically ‘you’, no matter how perverse and niche that might be. Perhaps this was the moment when I found my own little hill, and since then, all I’ve had to do is work out what kind of material the hill is made of, how I can make it a bit taller, and what I can see when I stand on top of it.
Blam Blam Blam finished suddenly in 1982. We had a van accident, in which Tim the bass player was seriously injured, along with his wife Carol. It felt like we had suddenly fallen off the edge of something, and nobody really knew what to do. Tim was recovering slowly, I was rattling around, being an itinerant drum teacher at various high schools in South Auckland, but I knew it wasn't sustainable.
The experience with the band had left me energized but confused, and I gradually realised that I wanted to do something completely different. I wanted to see new things: learn new things. I felt that I’d come too far too fast - some people were saying I was a good songwriter, but inside I felt I didn’t have a clue.
A few months after the Blam accident, From Scratch asked me to rejoin for a trip to London, Paris and New York, so I said yes. I don't remember much about the English part of the From Scratch trip, except perhaps taking part in a performance of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning. Paris was a hoot though. We were a kind of ‘living exhibit’ at the Museum of Modern Art for a month. At 10 AM we would mark out the floor with chalk lines in a large space in the museum, set up the tubes and scaffolding, and play Drum Sing, Pacific 321 Zero, or parts of Gung Ho 12 3-D. At the end of the performance we would pack up the tubes, and have some time off, before doing it all again at 2 o’clock. After hours, we would meet up with friends, drink cheap Algerian wine and explore the city.
At one point Philip decided that we should busk in the Square next to the Pompidou Centre. It's a charming part of Phil's approach to music, that he likes the idea of just setting up and playing in random places, rather than always been beholden to venues and schedules. For some reason, it fell to me to go and ask the Museum about borrowing a van so that we could take the tubes down to the Pompidou Centre. On the day we planned to go, the shabby van we expected didn’t arrive, but two men in spotless white overalls did, and they carefully put the tubes and scaff pipes in a large, refrigerated truck, waving us away with Gallic shrugs when we offered to help, and drove us very slowly through the city . We set up and played in the busker's Plaza, facing down threats from scary-looking fire-eaters and jugglers, whose thunder and income we were stealing. But we had a good day, and at the end of it, the two guys in white overalls, who had been reading magazines in the truck the whole time, painstakingly packed our stuff and took it back to the museum. Much later, I found that the museum had invoiced me for over a thousand NZ dollars at my parents address in Auckland, for the hire of the special art-moving truck and the two expert art-movers. The invoices kept coming for years, until they finally gave up.
New York
After the From Scratch gigs in New York, I stayed on, living in a flat with one of Steve Reich’s keyboard players, Nurit Tilles. I'd got a grant from the NZ Art Council to help me stay in New York for a few months and, hopefully, sit in on some Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians rehearsals and performances, and see what I could learn. The Dean Company had toured New Zealand a year or two before, so I knew them vaguely. Dance in New York seemed to be everywhere that Winter - Wherever you looked on the streets there were willowy-looking people in leg-warmers, smoking cigarettes, waiting for the lights to change so they could get to class, and I fell in with a bunch of composers and musicians who were accompanying dance as a side hustle. Often one of these accompanists would have another gig, and ask me to deputize for them. I borrowed a flight case with wheels, and learned to navigate the subway system up and down Manhattan, finding out-of-the-way Studios, unpacking bongos and other bits and pieces, and doing my best to keep up with hard-bitten dance teachers whose accents I couldn't quite follow. New Yorkers I met would tease me, because I was so alien and naive and didn’t understand the idioms. I’d complain about something and they’d say “Yeah. Tell me about it” - so I’d tell them about it. Again.
My friend Wayne Laird from From Scratch stayed on in New York for a while, and he had an uncanny knack of finding cheap tickets to shows. There were cut price afternoon performances of operas at the Met, special deals on jazz, Afro-beat shows in the West Village, and much else besides. I was like a dry sponge in water.
I still had my letter of introduction to the Laura Dean Dance company, and I felt I should do something about that, so I met with Laura, and asked if I could come to a rehearsal and watch them. It so happened that she had just started thinking about adding another drummer to her ensemble. She had been working with Peter Gabriel, choreographing a video for him, was excited by the power of rock 'n' roll, and wanted to break out of the restrictions of minimalism. So I was hired. We had 6 dancers and two musicians playing two drum sets, timps, and sometimes Laura played synthesizer. There was a big US and World Tour planned, leaving in the Northern Hemisphere Spring of 1983.
When we just started working together, in February 1983, Laura gave me her comp tickets to “The United States” – Laurie Anderson’s two day performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Anderson lifted the curtain on everyday things and made them shocking, frightening ( the domestic power socket blown up huge as a stage backdrop; a whole piece played by banging different parts of a microphone stand). That made a huge impact on me. But strangely, it was the old Irish ballads that my girlfriend at the time - Rebecca Armstrong, another member of the Reich Ensemble - played me in her apartment; songs of distance and longing for home, that planted some resilient seeds in me.
Just before we were due to leave on our big tour, I needed a place to stay for a few weeks. John Killacky, the company manager, said if I was really careful I could stay in the dance studio, as long as I cleaned up after myself and nobody knew. I couldn't believe my luck. The studio was on 17th St, at the edge of Chelsea, not far from Union Square Park. I could only get in there after hours, but then I had the free run of the place. I could play the drums all night and write songs whenever I wanted. My friend, Australian dancer and choreographer Garry Lester, was in New York at that time, and I invited him up to the studio one night. We drank a bottle of whiskey together and made an amazing dance and music piece, which neither of us have any memory of.
I walked him home down somewhere near Canal Street, and woke up in an alley, having lost the keys to Laura’s studio. I managed to crawl back to 17th st in time for John the manager to open up, but that was the end of my short tenure as studio caretaker.
On the big tour, we played all over the States, performed in Berlin, Lausanne, a two week run at Sadlers’ Wells in London, and then some strange shows in Bulgaria, East Germany and Yugoslavia as part of a Reagan era charm offensive..
When we came back from that tour, New York was hot, and everybody had a beatbox with Burning Down The House playing on it. I borrowed an empty apartment in the East Village and started writing some songs, living on rye bread, peanut butter, and $1:99 breakfast specials from a diner on Avenue A. One of the songs, “No Plans For Later”, turned up on the first Mutton Birds album about eight years later.
I started collaborating with my friend Ching Gonzalez from the Laura Dean Company – Ching was later a long time collaborator with Meredith Monk – we made a duo piece for an AIDS benefit show at PS 122 in New York, and then we made a piece called Flight Paths with several dancers and four musicians: including Nurit Tilles, and Ed Niemann, both from the Steve Reich ensemble. We performed that in September 1983 in New York, and got a good review from Jack Anderson of the New York Times.
That month, Daniel Keighley, who was living in NY at the time, and who later managed the Mutton Birds, took me to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens to see Talking Heads’s Stop Making Sense show.
I had no money by this stage, and some friends who ran a woodworking shop on Hudson st, near Canal st. said I could stay there in return for helping glue and sand kitchen cabinets. In the mornings I would walk a couple of blocks to the Hudson River, and watch the working boats ply back and forth to Hoboken and Jersey City, and the rowers, that reminded me of watching my brother competing in the Westlake 8s and 4s on Lake Pupuke.
Sometime around then, in the Northern autumn of 1983, I made the decision to come back to NZ. I wasn’t clear in my own mind as to why exactly I decided that. I was making friends in New York, I had a gig in a fancy avant garde dance company, I could have stayed and had an interesting life. But I could see a lot of work around me that was about ‘making it’; a whole bunch of artists clamouring to be heard, looking over their shoulder at other artists, trying to find their tiny point of difference. I had an inkling that if I stayed, I’d only ever make trivial stuff. The big stuff: love, family, loss, fate, belonging… all those things seemed to me to be back in NZ, waiting to have songs written about them, and I wanted to at least have a go at that. By this time, I’d got together with Marianne Schultz, one of the Dean dancers, but she wanted to stay in the company, at least for the time being. I didn’t, and she didn’t even know where New Zealand was, so we parted pretty philosophically, with no idea what was up ahead for us.
I got back to New Zealand, taught some classes in songwriting at Paremoremo Prison, became the music teacher for a couple of years at Auckland Metropolitan College. It was a great cohort of divergent, argumentative kids - the likes of Gareth Farr, Ben Howe, Josh and Otis Frizzell, architect David Mitchell’s two kids Tessa and Julian. I wasn’t much older than them all, and their energy was infectious.
I toured to the UK again with From Scratch and performed at the Edinburgh Festival. Part of the NZ crew there was John Cousins, with his wonderful piece “Membrane”.
Other Halves
I did my first feature film score around this time too. It was a film called Other Halves, directed by John Laing, from a story by Sue McCaulay. I remember one of the producers, telling me at short notice that I needed to go to Wellington to have a meeting about the film. He organised my transport and pushed $100 note into my pocket. I'd never seen $100 note before and I went straight to a secondhand record shop and bought piles of records. I can’t remember how the meeting went.
When Harry Sinclair came back from the UK, we met and decided to start The Front Lawn together. We’d been at Westlake Boys, but in different years - then he’d helped me with a Blam Blam Blam video, and we’d met briefly when he was passing through New York on the way to studying theatre in Paris. We quickly became a kind of performing arts school of two. We’d drive around from gig to gig, constantly arguing about what it was we were trying to achieve, what work was out there in the world that spoke to us, and how we could make things which were as good or better. Comedy was a by-product, because silly stuff tended to happen when we were on stage together, but we never really set out to be funny. Quite the contrary. I would bring a fragment of an idea along about, say, madness; Harry would bring something along about memory - and we’d bat these ideas around until there was something we felt we could put in front of people. We’d never know if a fragment was going to turn into a song, a short dance-y piece, or a sketch.
What followed was 6 years of intense work that Harry and I still can’t quite unpack when we try to remember it together.
For the last two years we worked with Jennifer Ward Lealand, who apart from being a fabulous performer, made us brush our ideas up, and be more professional. We performed all over the world, including two seasons at New York’s Dance Theatre Workshop, a stone’s throw from The Dean studio, where Garry Lester and I had made that Great, Lost Dance-and-Music work a few years before.
Lots had happened during this time. Marianne moved from New York to New Zealand, we got married and found a falling-down cottage in Kingsland, Auckland. Suddenly I had a wife, a house and a mortgage. I was on the road constantly with the Front Lawn, and Marianne was dancing with Limbs and with Douglas Wright and Company. In the meantime we were part of the group that founded the Watershed Theatre.
In 1990, I scored An Angel At My Table, directed by Jane Campion, another towering artist that I was so lucky to work with, and learn from.
When the Front Lawn ran its course, we started The Mutton Birds, I worked for months with David Long from the 6 Volts, then enlisted Ross Burge , formerly from the Spines, but then living in New York, and then adding Alan Gregg, who’d been in the uncomfortably named Dribbling Darts Of Love. We played all over New Zealand, before moving to the UK for four years during the latter half of the 90s. Marianne and I had two gorgeous kids by then.
In the UK, the band did well, signed to Virgin UK, made two albums, performed to thousands of people all over Europe, and on tours to the US, Australia and Canada. We sold a respectable number of records, and had great reviews – but in the major label end of the music industry, if you don’t burst in with a licence to print money, you’re considered to be failing.
I did feel sometimes that I’d dragged the band, crew, my family and our manager’s family over there on false pretences – and that if I could only write a song so perfect that everyone would sit up and take notice, it would all be worthwhile. But I didn’t do that - I carried on doing what I’ve always done – write what suits me. In spite of the temptation to try to climb someone else’s mountain, I stayed on my malodorous hill. A lot of the songs were like letters home. Envy Of Angels, the letter to my Dad that I mentioned before, was one of them. Not pop music - well, possibly ‘unpopular pop music’ - but certainly not what the record company were hoping for.
Lots of good things happened in England, but towards the end of our stay, the absurdities of our situation started to multiply:
We were told we had a gig in Germany. Wynton Rufer, the great New Zealand striker, had been signed to Kaiserslautern, West of Mannheim, and the idea was to celebrate his first game for the club, with a special event highlighting New Zealand wine, food, and, well, music. We learned that we had to mime to one of our songs during halftime. Not the kind of thing we signed up for when we started the band, but, you know: “Good exposure; You never know who might be watching; Trip to Germany” yadayadayada. However the “Kick a Goal” competition we were to follow had gone on too long because the fans that lined up to kick the goal were so drunk, they fell over before reaching the ball, so we ended up waiting a long time on the plywood stage in the middle of the field; on one side of the stage, a giant inflatable kiwi held by guy ropes, and on the other side, a giant inflatable kiwi fruit. Thousands of Kaiserslautern fans started slow-clapping, and the mood began to get ugly. Suddenly our song started playing over the sound system, so we picked up our instruments and started miming furiously. It was a windy day, and just as we started, one of the guy ropes broke, causing the kiwi fruit to lurch threateningly towards Alan, the bass player. A fierce woman with a clipboard rushed across the field towards us, shrieking in German and drawing her finger across her throat. Like the hero in a Biggles comic, Alan tried manfully to fight off the kiwifruit with his bass guitar. The image of us on that stage froze in my mind, and no matter what I do, I can’t un-see it. It comes back, unbidden, when someone asks me how it was being on a major label and living in the UK. The song stopped abruptly and we ran back to the tunnel, and the dressing rooms.
Things like that did start to make me feel like giving up writing songs altogether – and even though I intuitively knew that that would be the end of me – like a fish giving up swimming or a tree giving up trying to find the sunlight – I couldn’t see a way out. I felt I could never be a good songwriter, much less a good husband and father.
The grief that I’d pushed down when my brother died in 1974 all came to the surface. We had an un-insulated garage next to our house in Finchley Central, Northwest London, and between tours I would try to do some writing in there, wearing trackpants and an anorak pulled over my pyjamas, a balaclava on my head and socks on my hands, trying to write that effortless song that would solve everything, but some days I would just curl up on the concrete floor and be unable to move for hours.
We didn’t stop learning things during that time though. Our two glorious, sparky kids were providing splashes of insubordinate, antipodean colour at their respective school and playgroup. Marianne did a stint teaching at London Contemporary Dance School.
I stumbled on Ted Hughes’s anthology “By Heart” on one tour. In the back of the van on long trips, I learned some of them [the poems], including Gerard Manly Hopkins’s beautiful poem Inversnaid, partly because of the way it tumbled recklessly along, like the stream it described, reminding me of all the anarchic, wild nature back home.
Coming Back From London
After a couple of years we were dropped by our label Virgin UK, but our new manager Steve Hedges’s approach, which he referred to as ‘building the audience one at a time’, was working. We started our own magazine for fans, and at one point that had a bigger circulation than the NME, one of the cherished English music papers. Marianne had completed a masters at Middlesex University, the kids were doing well at school, making lots of friends. But my mum had a major stroke in late 1998, robbing her of almost all language, and that was the catalyst for us come back, along with the sense that if we were going to move the kids, we should do it earlier in their school years, rather than later. So we said goodbye to Britain, the seasons, the Turkish guys who ran our favourite off-license down the road, the hardware store that sold lawnmowers on the basis of how quiet they were.
Back in New Zealand, we reclaimed our house, which had been rented by friends, then neglected by friends of friends, and eventually, trashed by distant acquaintances of friends of friends, and we threw ourselves into work. I wrote the music for the big Y2K event at the end of 99, and started work on a long running TV show, Street Legal. I ended up working on that for four straight years. Searching for music to fill the many bar scenes where lawyers and felons had conversations, I came across Sean Donnelly, a shy young bass player, who had only released one album at that time: Lost Soul Music. I got a Fellowship in the English department at Auckland University, and that, coupled with Sean’s encouragement, pushed me towards my first solo album, “Warm Hand” released in 2005. I got more and more film work, and with the help of various managers, ever since then I have been able to juggle film and TV composing with putting bands together and travelling around the country playing new and old songs to people.
Various Blam Blam Blam and Mutton Birds reunions over the years have kept those ties strong. It's still thrilling to play that old stuff, and reconnect with those good people.
I'll finish the autobiographical part of this talk with one image.
I was musical director of WOMAD in 2008. One of the main acts got sick, so I was asked if I could contact Neil Finn to see if he would step in at short notice. Neil did, and asked me to duet with him in his set for a few songs. After that, he asked me if I'd tour with the band to America, Australia, and Europe, as solo opening act, and then playing various instruments and doing backing vocals with Crowded House. I said that I couldn't, because I had a big orchestral score to write, for Toa Fraser’s film Dean Stanley. He said “Bring your laptop and write on the road. It'll be fun”.
And I did. And it was like all the threads of my life were coming together, and I wanted for nothing. I would play the gig with the band, (the Crowdies tour was all in beautiful old venues, like the Irving Plaza in New York City, The Fillmore in San Francisco, the Orpheum in Los Angeles). Then everybody else in the band and crew would hunker down in the tour bus for the drive to the next venue and I would sit up front next to the driver with my headphones on, laptop out, studying Sam Neill or Peter O’Toole in a scene from Toa’s beautiful movie, conducting in the air as I worked out music that might fit. The driver sometimes looking over and laughing, if I accidentally sang stuff out loud, the big highways streaming out in front of us and behind us. Telling stories, playing my songs, still making up stuff and fooling people with it.
OK that’s the end of the autobiographical bit. Here are some random thoughts:
Douglas Lilburn used to think and talk a lot about Nationalism. Could we find or build a style that was uniquely ours?
I have been lucky, in that various people have taught me how to be an artist. Richard Von Sturmer taught me by his example. Phil Dadson taught me by his example. Both gave me pretty much the same thing: you have to do this, otherwise you get sick. You get up early, you work hard, you think constantly about what it is that you're trying to do.
When I went to New York I immersed myself in the work of a lot of artists - Laurie Anderson was one. Also Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and rock bands like the Golden Palominos, Television, Talking Heads. All that - plus the amazing people I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with over the years - helped to turn me into an artist.
But what does it mean to be a New Zealand artist? A New Zealand songwriter?
Interviewers sometimes tell me that there’s a strong sense of place about my songs - and I’ve had to work out what that meant.
I've always felt it best to use ingredients to hand - not through any nationalist tendencies - but mainly because I think I'll do better work that way.
Pick up a fiejoa and it holds your childhood memories of eating them, throwing them at people, the shape of the bushes as you walked past them on your way to school...
If you were to have to talk about it - you'd have what your senses tell you about its shape, smell - you'd also have what your imagination might tell you - maybe it looks like a tiny alien spacecraft - but you'd also have this strong platform of older memories and resonances to build on.
Pick up a pomegranate - or some fruit you've never seen before, and you only have your first impressions to go on. You may also have some literary or mythological information about pomegranates that might help you... but whatever you do - it's going to be harder for you to describe it - to make someone else feel what you felt; taste what you tasted.
That's why it's good to work with what you know.
And I think that’s the key to writing stuff that’s ‘of this place’.
Janet Frame evidently used to say that she preferred catching a bus or walking around cities, because if she took a taxi, she’d arrive at wherever she was going with nothing sticking to her. She also said that you’ll never know a place as deeply as the place where you grew up. That’s where most of the stuff that’s sticking to you comes from.
Nationalism is not as simple an idea, now, perhaps, as it was when artists like Douglas Lilburn were first pondering it. On a From Scratch tour to Japan, I met a Japanese writer after the show, who told me that she was terribly jealous of New Zealand artists, because - as she said - Kiwis could walk up a hill, look down at the view, and perhaps be the first person to have had that insight in exactly that place. Whereas in Japan, you stand and look at a mountain, say, and you can feel the presence of the thousands and thousands of artists who have stood in that spot and had that same idea.
I could see what she was getting at, but she was also forgetting something very important: that in Aotearoa all our hills had been sung into being well before people who looked like me started arriving with their sailing ships and muskets.
That’s why it’s so important for Pakeha artists in Aotearoa to honour te Reo, and honour the fact that the foundation of our multicultural country is the Treaty between two peoples: The Treaty that is at long last beginning to return to Maori - after over a century and a half of patient struggle - their deeply enshrined rights as Tangata Whenua, while at the same time giving the rest of us the right to also call New Zealand home. We still have a long way to go, and a lot of misunderstanding, misinformation and resistance to overcome. But that struggle is what is best about us, in my view.
When my song Bathe In The River had been out for a year or so, I was somewhere else in the world, and I got a call from Hollie Smith at some odd hour. She said “You’ll never guess where I am!” She was at Turangawaewae, performing the song for the signing of the Deed Of Settlement between the Crown and Waikato Tainui to acknowledge historical injustices, and to set a path for future co-management of the river.
And then more recently that song was chosen to be part of a set of songs in English, that were to be translated into Te Reo. Both of those were a huge honour to me. It’s hard to believe that next year it’ll have been 20 years since the release of that song and Toa Fraser’s movie “No. 2”, which it was a part of. That river has become a part of my life, along with all the inlets and Lakes.
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People ask me what can artists do in times like these. Looking at Gaza, Ukraine, the Sudan, the USA - it's hard not to feel despair. We may be buffered by distance down here at the bottom of the world, but the world is closer than it used to be. The books are already being censored. Some days it feels like it won't be long before they're burning.
What can someone like me do? Not much. Someone might throw in a more general question when I'm doing an interview to sell my latest thing. I might be accidentally sat next to an unruly heckler at a music event (!) But none of that’s going to make much difference.
I come back to something I heard the wonderful writer Patricia Grace say on television once. “The world needs witnesses”. - By that, I think she means both in the sense of: "I'm witnessing this, and I'll try to accurately describe it “ and also in the sense of: "I'm bearing witness; offering the truth that's inside me”. By describing our own corner in our own words, we shade, colour, and crosshatch the places and the people around us - so that they can be seen more clearly, in all their complexity. So that when we filter that through our craft, and make a song, a story, a dance, a painting - someone in the audience can say “I've felt that, that rings true to me”. And because of that, that person may feel less alone, more human. Fascism thrives on labelling and dividing people so they feel scared and want to go back to a bogus golden age where things were simpler.
Songs won't stop fascists gaining power, but songwriters and all artists through history have certainly been among the first to be silenced when the bullies take over the playground. So we must be doing something right.
Art brings hope. It helps people to feel more alive, more like themselves - less like an label. And by doing that, it helps people write the letters, go on the marches, vote, and do all the other things that actually do bring positive change.
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I started this talk with the notion of bodies of water being like the subconscious, from which come ideas that we can make into art to help us answer the important questions.
Or like a representation of past, present and future.
Or a metaphor for the fear of the unknown that I feel when I’m starting a new song
Or the very real, un-metaphorical barrier between Aotearoa and the rest of the world.
There’s another way of looking at bodies of water though. They’re where Islands can be found.
About 16 years ago I was showing an overseas musician around Auckland - we were driving around the Eastern Bays to Karaka Bay, a hidden place I go to sometimes when I have a few hours to sit and get my bearings. I was giving my friend a commentary on the Gulf and the islands and how we are shaped by the landscape around us in the choreography of sea and land, and I also talked about Rangitoto and how it suddenly appeared less than 1000 years ago.
I was feeling a bit lost, my marriage was breaking up, and towards the end of the day, I must have said something pessimistic about not being able to see the future and where I fitted into it. And he said “You never know, though. New islands might appear suddenly without warning”
New Islands; new possibilities. You might find them - “simply by sailing in a new direction” as Allen Curnow said - or they might appear suddenly out of the sea like Rangitoto - violent, rough on your feet, but somehow miraculous.
No reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā rā tatou katoa.
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