Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  His appearance caused visible discomfort among the all-male judging panel. ‘This effeminate thing is very commercial in the heavy area,’ 2ZB DJ Paddy O’Donnell blathered incoherently. Entertainer Howard Morrison batted his eyelids and blew mock kisses. But Riddell had caught a glam rock wave the country seemed ready for. ‘Out on the Street’ was released as a single just days later, and became the first local No. 1 hit in four years.

  At sixteen I watched New Faces not with high expectations but because it was the only thing on the country’s one television channel. And it was music. By this time I’d been to see a lot of live bands. Some were great, others grim. Distinguishing between the two was how I’d begun to establish my own tastes and a sense of who I was. The bands I liked operated, for the most part, on a subterranean level. They didn’t consciously shun the world of radio, television and pop charts, but mass exposure was not uppermost in their thoughts. Space Waltz represented, if not quite the end of the world I had come to feel a part of at the Union Hall, then a distinct alternative. Glam rock had grown out of the music I loved but it had shed the idealism. This music sought the spotlight. It craved success and fame.

  Forty years after first seeing Alastair Riddell on the family TV set, I am standing in his living room in Titirangi, Auckland. His house is tucked at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac, right next door to where he grew up. After his wife Vanessa greets me, Alastair emerges from a studio where he has been editing a feature film he has directed; it was written and produced by Vanessa, who is also the star.

  There is a busy hum of creativity. A friend sits at the kitchen table tapping on a laptop, looking up at one point to pass an authoritative comment on a cultish British music festival. These days Alastair’s hair is short. He wears jeans and a plain shirt. He does not wear make-up. He says he has been trying without success to get the Herald to give his film, Broken Hallelujah, some coverage. ‘There was a time,’ he says with a sigh, ‘when “Alastair Riddell Makes Movie” would have been an instant headline.’

  Regrettably, I have not come to ask about the film. I want to hear how he remembers the change I observed in my teens, when glam rock supplanted what could be broadly called blues rock. I have heard from other musicians that Alastair had started out as an aspiring bluesman.

  He confirms this. ‘The first two or three records I ever owned weren’t pop records,’ he says. ‘They were black blues music, which I think my parents thought was quite good because they were very concerned about civil rights in America and the history of all that.’

  Alastair’s parents were part of Titirangi’s bohemian community, which included actors, painters and potters. ‘Don’t be a conformist,’ his mother advised him. ‘People who achieve things are not conformists.’

  The first record he bought, aged eight, was an LP by the eminent American folk blues artist Leadbelly. This was in 1960, before The Rolling Stones, The Animals and other British bands had spurred interest in the music. He loved it, and followed it with another blues album, this time by Josh White.

  As a thirteen-year-old, Alastair would bus into Auckland on a Friday night to see The La De Da’s play at The Galaxie, an alcohol-free dance club in Mount Eden. The La De Da’s based their music on the blues-influenced sounds of the British groups, and had a national hit with ‘How Is the Air Up There?’, a cover of a song by an obscure American garage band that had all the snap and snarl of a great Stones’ single.

  If The La De Da’s weren’t on, Alastair might catch The Underdogs with their resident guitar hero Harvey Mann, or The Action, fronted by sandpaper-voiced Evan Silva. He clearly separates these bands, with their roots in rhythm and blues, from the psychedelia that had already become commercialised and infiltrated the airwaves. ‘I liked the real psychedelia,’ he says. ‘I liked “I Am the Walrus”. I didn’t like twee songs about flowers.’

  By the time The La De Da’s left for Australia in 1967, white blues had gone global. Its unofficial spokesman was the British musician John Mayall, who styled himself as a campaigner for the blues in the manner of a political activist. His 1967 album Crusade was adorned with photos of Mayall and his band The Bluesbreakers brandishing placards as though they were at a protest march, with slogans like ‘The Blues Needs Your Support’. ‘I’m gonna fight for you J.B.’, Mayall sang. J.B. was the late Mississippi bluesman J.B. Lenoir; in Mayall’s song he seemed more like a martyred leader.

  John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers never had a hit single but the band became known as a musical hothouse, generating exceptional musicians such as Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce of Cream, Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, Mick Taylor of The Rolling Stones, and Andy Fraser of Free. Using the blues as a springboard, these groups developed individual rock styles that defied the three-minute limit of pop radio, and brought the guitar virtuoso into the spotlight.

  New Zealand blues fans could be as earnest and zealous as any. Liking the blues meant, by implication, that you disliked a lot of other things - commercial music for a start. It distinguished you from the multitudes who accepted unquestioningly what they were fed by the radio. Blues fans argued passionately over obscure issues. Was the rural blues of Mississippi superior to the electrified urban blues of Chicago? Was the saxophone a legitimate blues instrument? Could white men play the blues?

  They formed societies, held conventions. In December 1968 with his friend Selwyn Jones, Alastair Riddell organised the first National Blues Convention at Moller’s Farm in West Auckland, a one-day event featuring various Auckland outfits, among them Original Sun Blues Band, which Alastair had formed with his older brother Ron. A second convention the following year built on the success of the first, spanning a full weekend and attracting performers and crowds from all over the country.

  With their outspoken rejection of the commercial world, the blues fans were a natural fit with the burgeoning hippie movement. In fact, the 1969 convention seemed to double as an early gathering of the counterculture. Its alternative name Electric Picnic, the one printed on the ticket, had a decidedly psychedelic ring, and a programme note by organisers Riddell and Jones expressed the hope ‘all those interested in the music and all the performers who concentrate on different fields of blues [would] combine in one great fantasmagorical hugglemaflop’.

  Among the performers were the Mad Dog Jug Jook and Washboard Band, led by multi-instrumentalist Robbie Laven and featuring future Windy City Struggler Andrew Delahunty on harmonica, and a young Auckland jug band called The Greasy Handful, whose singer, Graham Brazier, would make his name six years later with Hello Sailor. Rick Bryant, up from Wellington, sang with at least three groups that weekend: the electric blues band Gutbucket; The Windy City Strugglers and a band of his own, Rick and The Rockets, that stretched the definition of blues to its cosmic limits.

  Among the Rockets’ line-up, which was seldom consistent from one gig to the next, were guitarists Graeme Nesbitt and Peter Kennedy. Their repertoire was dictated by a sense of the absurd, heightened by a shared enthusiasm for controlled substances. Highlights of their Moller’s Farm set included an arrangement of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, a convincing cover of The Goons’ ‘Ying Tong Song’, and a revival of ‘Running Bear’, the 1960 Johnny Preston hit with its tale of star-crossed Native American lovers and a politically unsound quasi-ethnic chorus. Alastair Riddell grins when I remind him of Rick and The Rockets. ‘They were hilarious, one of the highlights of the show,’ he says. ‘Peter Kennedy did the best Bluebottle I ever heard.’

  Giving themselves a name in the ‘50s tradition of Johnny Devlin and The Devils and Max Merritt and The Meteors, at a time when the fashion was for abstract or surrealistic handles such as Fresh Air and Throb, was just part of Rick and The Rockets’ subversiveness. But the band was definitely psychedelic.

  Rick Bryant remembers hearing an entire paddock-full of festival-goers laughing as one. The whole event was ‘very unusual. Several thousand people were having their first weekend as hippies. A lot of people were ha
ving their first LSD trips. A lot. Hundreds and hundreds.

  ‘There were specs going round where the lenses were pyramids and colours. It was like wearing an acid trip: “Here, have a trip with your trip.” It was a very pleasant occasion, a micro Woodstock, entirely pacific. There was nobody drunk or ugly, just a lot of fairly innocent young people being harmless and out of it.’

  By the time the ‘70s rolled around, Alastair Riddell was losing interest in the blues. The music was so deeply rooted in the African-American experience, how could it ever be an authentic vehicle for a middle-class intellectual in New Zealand? He was seeing possibilities in some of the new music coming out of Britain - initially the ‘progressive’ rock of groups such as King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator, then the more theatricalised pop of David Bowie and Roxy Music. He was also listening to songwriters from outside the rock realm, among them the French chanteur Jacques Brel and the English actor and satirist Anthony Newley.

  As Wellington’s Rick and The Rockets evolved into Mammal, up in Auckland Riddell formed Orb with Peter Cuddihy, Tony Raynor, Wally Wilkinson and Paul Crowther. Like Mammal, Orb was essentially a university band. It spiced its sets of covers with Riddell originals, including ‘Sea Bird’, which would reappear in the repertoire of Riddell’s later group, Space Waltz. It became one of the first New Zealand bands to feature a synthesiser, which was constructed by drummer and electronics boffin Crowther.

  In between Orb and Space Waltz, Riddell would cannily form another band, Stuart and The Belmonts. Satirically named for Brian Stuart, head of the Auckland vice squad, and the Holden Belmont cars driven by the New Zealand police force, it was a covers band devised with the express purpose of providing a living, and perhaps subsidising some of Riddell’s more creative projects. From 1972 to ‘74 Riddell - with The Belmonts, which included Raynor, Steve Hughes, Greg Clark and Brent Eccles -worked two or three nights a week at weddings, twenty-firsts and RSA clubs, playing popular favourites from Harry Belafonte to Elton John. They even played Lion Breweries’ booze barns until Richard Holden fired them for allegedly stealing beer.

  If Stuart and The Belmonts was Alastair Riddell’s concession to the musical tastes of middle New Zealand, Space Waltz was a ploy to ambush it with his own. And at least for a short time it worked. The notion of glam rock had been seeping into the country since the early 70s, with the hit singles of T. Rex and its glitter-and-satin star Marc Bolan. It had been consolidated in the person of David Bowie, who was fast emerging as the most significant English pop star of the decade. Although it had the same blues roots as every kind of rock since Elvis Presley, glam put no premium on authenticity. It was a shameless game of dress-ups, reviving the styles and fashions of early rock ‘n’ roll. Faded denim was out; satins and leopard skins were back. There were touches of sexual ambiguity and apocalyptic angst. Songs tended to be punchy and concise: your fifteen-minute guitar solos will no longer be required, Mr Clapton.

  Riddell was characterised as a local version of Bowie, then known for the gender-bending personae of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. Although the similarities were undeniable, ‘David Bowie never wrote a song even vaguely like “Out on the Street”‘, Alastair points out. ‘It has a swing chorus and a half-time verse. Jacques Brel and Peter Hamill were at least as big an influence on me, but in New Zealand all anybody could ever hear was Bowie. He was the only reference point we had.’

  ‘Out on the Street’ might have been the beginning of a sustained career but EMI, the company that had signed Riddell, had no idea what to do with him. For a follow-up, one staff member suggested he try and write something like songs by the Canadian classic rock group Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Alastair remembers, ‘Before it happened I had this pure vision about who I was and what I wanted to do. By the time I’d been in EMI’s thrall for three or four months I was absolutely losing my way. My energy just completely dissipated.’

  Riddell ventured to Australia, where a Melbourne music manager, Michael Browning, had shown interest in Space Waltz. Browning proposed taking the band to Britain, along with another he had just signed, AC/DC. Riddell was keen but couldn’t reach consensus with the other band members. By the time the Space Waltz album came out in 1975, Tony Raynor, Wally Wilkinson and Paul Crowther had left to join Split Enz. The glam moment was almost over. Its absorption into the mainstream could be seen in the multitude of pub covers bands around New Zealand that had adopted a glam look.

  Yet, emerging from the university blues and psychedelic scene, Space Waltz had left a legacy: it had showed a way out of the underground and towards success and fame. In May 1975, at the height of its popularity, it had headlined a concert at the Auckland Town Hall. In the music magazine Hot Licks, reviewer Roger Muir had observed: ‘It looks like another one of those visiting rock concerts, judging by the crowd ... Hey - two local groups, would you believe. Things must be looking up for the local music scene at last.’

  Opening the show was a band that had done its time on the university circuit, played clubs and even pubs, and was now looking to realise much bigger dreams.

  11

  A DRAGON’S TALE

  A siren’s oscillation cuts through the Christchurch night. You can’t tell where the sound is coming from until a Ford Transit van rounds the corner with a police car in pursuit, lights strobing madly. Behind the wheel of the van is a man dressed in red and pink lycra, with shoulder-length hair and mascara. But it’s the one in the passenger seat the cops are after.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Most of what I know about these events I’ve learned only lately, from a man I had never previously met or spoken with. It was October 2014 when Ray Goodwin, a guitarist and founder member of Dragon, emailed me. He was in an isolated region of New South Wales known as Northern Rivers. His nearest town was Mullumbimby, where he went for cellphone service and wi-fi. Somehow word had reached him that I was writing about Graeme Nesbitt and memories had stirred. He wanted me to know he would be happy to help.

  I emailed back, thanking him for his offer and wondering when he might be free to answer some questions. I never had to ask any questions: the memories began flowing to my inbox almost immediately, a trickle at first, then a torrent.

  Goodwin remembers first meeting Graeme Nesbitt in 1971 at a Student Arts Festival in Palmerston North, where Nesbitt was one of the organisers. Goodwin was down from Auckland with a band, OK Dinghy, which also included future Dragon mainstay Todd Hunter. He says Mammal were on the bill as well, but this may have been the final incarnation of Rick and The Rockets. If the details are hazy, he blames it on the thing for which the festival is best remembered: Black Sumatran pot. The drug had reportedly been smuggled into New Zealand by Aussie surfers, and was so powerful a joint could render ten people stupefied for hours. ‘For years afterwards this pot was highly sought after but never turned up,’ Goodwin adds wistfully.

  Having had a glimpse of Nesbitt’s entrepreneurial flare, Goodwin wrote to him asking for his help to lift the newly formed Dragon out of the Auckland circuit - which mostly revolved around a single club gig - and on to the national stage. He had been impressed by the way Graeme had put Mammal on the road, cultivating an audience centred on university campuses.

  Nesbitt was not particularly taken with Dragon’s style of music, a rather heavy-handed prog rock, but he saw in the group a touch of the professional ambition that Mammal - much as he loved them as people and musicians - lacked, sometimes to a comical degree. Mammal’s mishaps were an endless source of amusement. Nesbitt would regale Goodwin with stories of band members getting ‘stoned enough to play’ then losing their way to the stage, or Rick Bryant, rendered insensible by Mandrax, trying to navigate one of his Jaguars down a narrow Thorndon street, bouncing off every parked vehicle. An inveterate collector, Rick’s obsession was clapped-out 1950s Jags. Most of the cars he hit were his own.

  The members of Dragon were, by contrast, go-getters. At the centre of the group were the two brothers from Taumarunui,
Todd and Marc Hunter. Marc was the singer. Todd, the elder of the two, played bass and was sober and responsible. Largely through his efforts, Dragon had already succeeded in wangling a recording deal with Polygram; the company would release their ponderous quasi-concept album Universal Radio in early 1973.

  Goodwin remembers Graeme Nesbitt wondering out loud if Dragon might be able to incorporate some members of Mammal. Goodwin didn’t believe such a merger could possibly work, unless as some sort of extended family, a Grateful Dead-style commune. Nesbitt, though, seemed to be thinking further ahead, and in a sense his vision would come true. Within four years Dragon would be the top band in Australasia, living a life of rockstar excess, with two of Mammal’s star players in the line-up.

  The first Mammal to sign up was guitarist Robert Taylor. Graeme Nesbitt hustled him into Dragon following Mammal’s demise in late 1974, setting the group in a new, grittier direction. A couple of years later, he would similarly manoeuvre Mammal’s Kerry Jacobsen into the Dragon drum seat.

  Graeme’s involvement with Dragon had begun straight after Goodwin’s initial appeal, although no managerial role was ever formalised. He started building the band’s profile in Wellington, at first co-billing them with Mammal at the Union Hall, and later giving them headline status at the much larger Town Hall. He negotiated their appearance in a cinema commercial for Pinky chocolate bars, in which Marc Hunter managed to make an innocuous jingle sound like a series of lurid double entendres. (‘Take off your red satin wrapper,’ he crooned.)

  Graeme also accompanied Dragon to Fiji on an infamous 1974 tour, where he inadvertently became the star of the show. In a foreshadowing of their future hit April Sun in Cuba’ - Tired of the city life, summer on the run — Dragon had hatched a plan to get out of Granny’s, the downtown Auckland nightclub where they had been resident most of the year, and decamp to the tropics. Todd and Marc’s mother Voy came from Rotuma, a small volcanic island near Fiji, and the brothers were keen to connect with family there. An uncle known as Fast Eddie, who ran a wedding reception lounge in Mangere, South Auckland, helped them get a booking at the aptly named Golden Dragon nightclub in Suva. Graeme would accompany them as tour manager.