Kean and the keyboard player, Jane Walker, had been in a band in Christchurch called The Basket Cases. The other three came from The Enemy, Dunedin’s first punk band, which had moved to Auckland and promptly broken up. With Alec Bathgate’s trebly guitar and Walker’s piercing electric keyboard sounding like something off an old La De Da’s record, they could almost have beamed down from The Galaxie circa 1967. The main thing that identified them as a product of the punk era and not some ‘60s teleport was singer Chris Knox.
Knox, at twenty-six, was possibly the country’s oldest punk. He stalked the edge of the stage, microphone in hand, surveying with mischievous intent an audience who, with a few exceptions, seemed to be a typical, conservatively dressed Willy’s crowd. Then he jumped off the stage to prowl among the tables, leaning inches from the faces of startled drinkers, serenading them like a demented supper-club crooner. Unsatisfied with the reaction, he picked up a broken beer glass and, his grin nearly splitting his face in two, stabbed himself in the forehead, splattering blood over askance office workers. It was shocking, yet unexpectedly and overwhelmingly uplifting. Knox was determined to connect at any cost. When he sang of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, huddled together in a bottomless hole he was not celebrating nihilism, but rather renouncing the self-destruction with which rock ‘n’ roll seemed to have blighted itself.
Among their spectacular originals, Toy Love scattered a few songs that I wouldn’t have expected to hear any band play, anywhere. They did an astonishing version of The Doors’ ‘People Are Strange’. Better still was a medley of Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’ and The Ohio Express’s ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’, combining with perfect absurdity one of the most bitter, deep-versed songs of the ‘60s with one of the most cheerfully inane.
The decade was coming to an end. So was the band I had been playing in for two years, along with the vague dream I’d had of making a living playing the music I loved. But at that moment New Zealand rock ‘n’ roll could not have seemed more furiously alive.
24
TRENDY LEFTIES AND ORDINARY BLOKES
There were times during the ’70s when it felt to me as though the love of music that had stung me as a child was the only constant thing in my life. And yet during those years music had changed too, reshaped by fashion, and forces even greater. At the start of the decade there had been a profound division between the music served as entertainment on New Zealand television and radio and the music I had found at the Union Hall and elsewhere. The former was the music of the mainstream, songs everybody knew. The latter was, for want of a better term, the music of the counterculture. It was a secret soundtrack, broadcasting on its own underground frequency. When Bruno Lawrence directed Blerta’s anarchic extravaganzas from behind his ragtag drum kit, or Mammal sang ‘Play Nasty for Me’ while Peter Frater’s lights painted their faces in lurid shades, you were either there in the room, experiencing the event in all its dimensions — sonically, visually, bodily - or knew nothing of it at all. You couldn’t hear it on the radio or see it on television, let alone watch it on YouTube, download it as a podcast, or access it via any of the other media that today allow us to sample, in vicarious and diluted ways, a little of everything.
The music that made it to the airwaves back then was crafted for a different purpose and different people. Listening now to the local pop records of the early ‘70s, I’m impressed by how well made so many of them are - something that, as a teenage rock snob, I would have been loath to acknowledge. Māori singers such as Mark Williams, Bunny Walters and Prince Tui Teka, many backed in the studio by Rockinghorse, created what now strikes me as a type of indigenous soul music, albeit one influenced more by Nashville country and Italian aria than by James Brown. Once on the East Cape I heard Prince Tui Teka’s ‘Mum’ playing while singleted labourers shot pool and drank beer by the jug. I’m not sure anyone actually sang along, but someone had put a coin in the jukebox to hear the song and I could tell it was appreciated. Suddenly its social function seemed absolutely clear. The mother in Prince Tui’s song was the mother of every man in the room. She might be alive or dead, it didn’t matter. By celebrating her life Teka had given her a presence in that bar, so she could remind her sons that however drunk they got, whoever won the pool or the rugby, whomever they got into a fight with, they should never forget the responsibilities they had to their wives, their kids, their mother, their iwi.
But the songs coming out of radios then could also seem absurdly at odds with the world into which they were being cast. This was illustrated with perfect Tarantino-esque irony when John Hanlon’s breezy 1974 single ‘Lovely Lady’ played over the closing credits of How To Murder Your Wife, the 2015 teledrama on the true story of suburban wife-killer Alfred Benning.
The musicians I saw at the Union Hall had been predominantly male. There was the rare exception. Baby, Ragnarok and 1953 Memorial Society Rock ‘n’ Roll Band all had a female singer, in each case the lone woman in the line-up. For a brief time Mammal featured Julie Needham on vocals and violin. But there is no question that rock was a masculine world. Even with The Little Red Schoolbook to guide me, and a mother who read Germaine Greer, I hardly stopped to question the male hegemony of the music scene.
By the end of the decade punk had arrived and put paid to all that. Punk started from the idea that anyone could be in a band: three chords and you were away. In many ways it restored the old idea of pop as entertainment, something that had been lost in the earnest musicality of 70s rock. Women now claimed a place on the stage, and it didn’t matter that they hadn’t spent the previous decade woodshedding their Eric Clapton guitar licks. The way The Wide Mouthed Frogs charmed and commanded the crowds proved that.
During the decade New Zealand had seen cultural changes far beyond musical ones. In 1972, after twelve years of National rule, the country had elected a Labour government. The new prime minister, Norman Kirk, had revived a sense of social justice and moral responsibility that had seemed desperately compromised under Keith Holyoake, whom poet James K. Baxter had dubbed Mr Mouldybroke. Kirk was not a member of the counterculture. In many ways his views were conservative. He opposed abortion and homosexual law reform, for example. Yet under him New Zealand felt like a place where a discussion of dreams might at least be possible. He withdrew New Zealand troops from Vietnam, joined an international boycott on sporting relations with South Africa, and barred visits by nuclear warships. He even sent a New Zealand naval frigate, with a member of parliament on board, into the Pacific to protest against French nuclear testing at Mururoa.
Kirk’s sudden death after less than two years in office, followed by the 1975 victory of National’s Robert Muldoon, altered the mood. If the counterculture had enjoyed a moment of optimism under Kirk, it quickly became embattled under Muldoon. A pugnacious man with a bad temper and a malevolent grin, Muldoon took an aggressive stance towards anyone who might not agree with him. He despised academics. He decried ‘trendy lefties’. He once hit a protester outside a meeting of the Landlords Association, where he had given a speech and stayed on for a few drinks. He often talked about ‘the ordinary bloke’, a notional person on whose behalf he was fighting. The ordinary bloke seemed to be a New Zealand male who just wanted to be able to do a day’s work, go home, drink beer and watch rugby. Anyone with progressive views on education, environment or equality was the prime minister’s natural enemy.
A distinguished music professor once told me what happened when he was introduced to Muldoon at a function. As he began to explain the nature of his work, the country’s leader snorted, ‘Classical music? Huh. I don’t have time for that.’
Muldoon didn’t have much time for pop music either. He resisted a lobby that wanted to lift the forty percent sales tax on records, although he maintained the exemption for soft-porn magazines such as Penthouse and Playboy. From the middle of the‘70s the number of local recordings went into a marked decline, with record companies unable to justify the investment in a small market.
> In 1980 the New Zealand band Mi-Sex, riding high on having had an Australian hit with their song ‘Computer Games’, invited Muldoon to attend their concert at Wellington Town Hall and witness pop music as a viable form of cultural expression. He accepted the invitation, appeared to enjoy himself, and didn’t use the earplugs provided. But he still didn’t drop the sales tax.
In spite of a national conservatism embodied by Muldoon, middle New Zealand, the people the prime minister liked to refer to as ‘Rob’s Mob’, gradually began to adopt some of the trappings of the counterculture. Rugby players grew their hair — at least long enough to cover their collars and cauliflower ears. Policemen sprouted sideburns and moustaches. Even marijuana was no longer solely the vice of anti-authoritarian longhairs. Pissheads were starting to smoke pot, while farmers - diehard National voters - had begun to dabble in crop diversification of an illegal kind.
In music, too, ideas that had once seemed outlandish had to some extent infiltrated the broadcast frequencies. Shortly before Blerta disbanded in 1976, they were given their own series of television programmes. Like the success of Space Waltz’s ‘Out on the Street’ a year earlier, the Blerta series showed how the symbols of rebellion and dissent could be assimilated and accepted, particularly if they were presented in the same safe packages as other entertainment.
But if middle New Zealand co-opted a few bohemian trappings, unrest continued to blossom on both sides of the divide. Rising oil prices and loss of unrestricted access to the British market, both forces beyond Muldoon’s control, brought a steep rise in unemployment and a drop in real income. Māori and Pacific Islanders were hit particularly hard. In an effort to keep things the way they were, Muldoon increased subsidies to farmers and instigated such grand schemes as construction of the Clutha Dam, which involved flooding a beautiful valley and got him offside with the burgeoning environmental movement. Meanwhile the alcohol industry went from strength to strength. The desire of New Zealanders to numb their minds appeared to be on the rise. The breweries were there to provide the means and profit from it. Sometimes it felt as though the country was divided between those who thought the answer was to get rid of Muldoon and those who thought it was just to play more rugby and drink more beer.
25
ON THE STREET
The 1980s arrived and I was a newly unemployed musician in a city suddenly brimful of bands. Wellington seemed to be fizzing with dangerous energy Punk had kicked open the imaginations of a lot of people who had not previously thought of themselves as musical. Everybody’s flatmate seemed to be wielding an instrument. The best of them made up for lack of expertise with attitude and energy.
I would go to parties and find a band mid-performance in a living room, amplifiers propped up on armchairs, and to suburban halls, where groups were mounting their own shows. The more accomplished of the new breed sometimes played at the Rock Theatre. A lot of these bands, among them The Wallsockets, Naked Spots Dance and Life in the Fridge Exists, lived in flats near the university. The members had the air of academic refugees, and the crowds they attracted were a mix of similarly disaffected intellectuals, anarchist mischief-makers and bootboys looking for trouble.
At a flat on The Terrace I found myself in an impromptu jam with a left-handed guitarist called Kevin Hawkins. I’d seen his group Shoes This High at Rock Theatre. Their angular and intense music reminded me a little of the Captain Beefheart records I’d listened to back at Onslow and I liked Kevin’s playing. Our jam session, though, was doomed. As Kevin wrestled some animal howls from his instrument and I tried to find a bass part that might fit, he seemed stoned and distracted. The painter Tony Fomison was having an argument with his brother in the corridor outside and the session was soon abandoned.
Around the same time, my North Terrace household was visited by two brothers, Dan and Nino Birch, decadent dandies who had grown up in Hong Kong and acted as though they had seen something the rest of us hadn’t and were going to show us provincials a thing or two. They would stand in our front room and, in their posh accents, make such pronouncements as: ‘There have never been any good bands in New Zealand.’ They meant to remedy this, and formed a trio called Beat Rhythm Fashion. The name reflected the loftiness of their demeanour, as though they could not play pop music without passing a comment on its simplicity and disposability. They weren’t strong singers but their tunes were weirdly haunting and their lyrics mourned a society they saw as suffocating on its own complacency. The music was persuasive, even if its creators were obnoxious.
More fun was a band of Onslow College students I caught one night on a five-band bill at Thistle Hall. They called themselves The Rodents, which was apt as the stage seemed to be infested with them. I couldn’t count how many there were, as none stood still long enough. They had several guitarists, a couple of saxophone players, singers, a keyboardist and at least three drummers, although only a single drum kit. One of them would command this while the others hovered like reserves, ready to take the sticks should their bandmate show signs of fatigue, which sometimes occurred mid-song. They played everything at a rapid tempo, and I recognised many of their songs as sped-up versions of the Rough Justice repertoire. It turned out they had been regulars at Last Resort and had studied us closely.
While some of the new bands intrigued me I couldn’t imagine joining any of them, and before long I was making music with Bill Lake again. If punk had left any impression on Bill, it was only to convince him there might be hope after all for a band as ramshackle as the Strugglers. He had begun writing songs with Arthur Baysting and we learned a few of them in the basement flat of the Strugglers’ drummer, Steve Hunt. Bill, Steve, Andrew Delahunty and I began to perform occasionally, sometimes as the Strugglers, sometimes as The Ducks.
Bill had no ambition to make music his profession. He was working as a postie at the Central Post Office and mentioned there might be a job going there. I signed up the following Monday. Like making music, walking around Wellington was something I’d loved to do long before I’d thought about doing it for a living. From the time I could walk, my dad had taken me for what he called ‘rambles and scrambles’. He’d put his pipe in his pocket, a few provisions in a pack, and we’d head off for an afternoon in Bolton Street Cemetery, or up the hills above Khandallah where he’d played as a child. A few years later my brother Tim and I began rambling and scrambling on our own. On winter days when Tinakori Hill was covered in mist we would put on our coats and climb the track from the top of Thorndon’s St Mary Street in search of the cave where we’d heard a hermit lived. Other times we ‘d jump the fence at the Highbury end of the reservoir and bushwhack our way down to the dam, trying to avoid the park rangers, or roam the no man’s land behind the office buildings on The Terrace, where we’d find such treasures as old letter blocks discarded by nearby printing factories.
Now, as a postie, I got to know the city even more intimately, learning the backyard shortcuts, the bush tracks and switchbacks, and how to dodge the dogs. The route I was assigned took me high above the city, where I could look down at the tops of the buildings surrounding the harbour and see homes clinging to the hills. I’d never stop for long: the harder the rain and colder the wind, the faster I moved and the sooner my working day was over.
The hours were not very rock ‘n’ roll — seven a.m. starts, six days a week. Yet in some ways the post office resembled a bigger version of the Rough Justice bus. There were about forty posties at the central branch: actors, poets, musicians, gardeners, linguists, philosophers, communists, gamblers and junkies, all glad to have found a job that paid them enough to live on and left enough hours in the day to live their other lives. Posties talked to each other while they sorted their mail (and one or two talked to themselves). We would discuss music, movies, books and the excellence of the date scones at the government-subsidised cafeteria on the next floor, but you couldn’t let the conversation slow you down. When, at nine o’clock, the supervisor called, ‘Clear down!’ you had to be ready to bu
ndle your letters, throw them in your canvas bag and get out the door.
Some posties lasted only a short while. I sensed the career of one new recruit would be brief when I spied him, from the other side of the cafeteria, making his way painstakingly from the tea urn to the table where the rest of us were sitting, a full cup of tea balanced on top of his head. I never found out whether he spilt any - by the time he would have reached the table the rest of us were back downstairs sorting our mail. When I returned that afternoon after completing my round, I was not surprised to see him still busy at the sorting case. It would be nightfall by the time his customers received their mail.
Other posties had worked there for years. Tall Malcolm knew every walk in Wellington and could get around his deliveries faster than anyone. When I began he had already been a postie for a decade. He spoke half a dozen languages, and would store up his leave and take off to Rajasthan or Mongolia before reappearing a few months later, the same stooping, sandalled, straggly-haired streak of lightning.
By early 1981 the sorting-case conversation had turned to the coming visit of the Springbok rugby team from South Africa. When Norman Kirk had become prime minister in 1972, he had called off a Springbok tour, knowing this would make him unpopular with the rugby and beer brigade but concerned about likely violence and the way the country would be viewed on the world stage. ‘When it comes to a decision between what I must do in the light of the facts that are put before me ... and a desire to avoid criticism, then I would be failing in my duty if I did not accept the criticism and do what I believed to be right,’ he had said. Nine years later Muldoon, who referred to anti-tour organisations such as HART (Halt All Racist Tours) and CARE (Citizens Association For Racial Equality) as ‘traitors’, told the New Zealand Rugby Football Union that if they wanted to host a South African rugby tour it was up to them.
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