Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  Grand Affaire (EMI album, 1976)

  Two albums of mellow country-rock. Wayne Mason’s song ‘Through the Southern Moonlight’ (from Thoroughbred, but also released as a single) has had a deservedly long life. The south of which it sings might be the American birthplace of country rock, but the song can just as easily be heard as a musical postcard from New Zealand’s South Island or, given the swaying palm groove, an island in the South Pacific. Rockinghorse’s finest work, though, can be found on the records they made as house band for EMI during this time, backing Māori and Samoan singers such as Mark Williams and The Yandall Sisters. Listen to Williams’ ‘Sweet Wine’ or The Yandalls’ ‘Sweet Inspiration’ for some sweet Pacific soul.

  ROUGH JUSTICE

  Graeme Nesbitt produced the only commercially released recording of Rough Justice, a song called ‘Whitby Success’. Written by Peter Kennedy and Rick Bryant, it appeared on the compilation album Home Grown (Radio Windy) in 1979. Four original songs recorded that year when Rough Justice were 2ZM’s Band of the Month remain unreleased.

  SPACE WALTZ

  ‘Out on the Street’ (HMV single, 1974)

  Space Waltz (HMV album, 1975)

  Alastair Riddell’s audacious bid for the glam moment is preserved in Space Waltz’s sole long-player. His fondness for early Bowie shows in the occasionally florid lyrics, while elements of his prog past are carried over into the eight-and-a-half-minute ‘Seabird’. But if the overall effect is of a slightly overwrought period piece, the high drama of ‘Angel’ found a surprising fit with the 2014 horror-comedy feature film Housebound, where it was a soundtrack highlight.

  SHOES THIS HIGH

  Shoes This High (STH EP, 1981)

  Straight to Hell (Stiltbreeze album, 2014)

  The self-titled four-song EP was the only recording Shoes This High released during their brief existence, and always seemed brittle compared to what I heard live. Frontman Brent Hayward, in particular, sounds uncharacteristically subdued. But you can hear the Beefheartisms, especially in ‘Not Weighting’, where Kevin Hawkins’ nervy high-treble guitar rubs and grinds against the other two instrumentalists — bass player Jessica Walker and drummer Chris Plummer — like a bone machine. In 2014, US indie Stiltbreeze released Straight to Hell, a full-length album of a live recording from the archive of Bob Sutton, recorded at Billy the Club (formerly Rock Theatre) and capturing this combustible band in all its febrile glory.

  SPLIT ENZ

  Mental Notes (White Cloud album, 1975)

  True Colours (Mushroom album, 1980)

  Waiata (Mushroom album, 1981)

  Mental Notes was Split Enz’s first and arguably greatest album; it’s certainly their strangest. Co-writers Phil Judd and Tim Finn probe questions of fear and sanity in unpredictable, disorienting songs, while keyboard player Eddie Rayner burnishes the prog-pop arrangements. While continuing to report from the edge of anxiety, the Enz became increasingly accessible in their following albums, culminating in the pop explosion of True Colours and Waiata, where Judd’s replacement Neil Finn displays his gifts with songs like ‘I Got You’ and ‘One Step Ahead’.

  TAMBURLAINE

  Say No More (Tartar album, 1972)

  The early ‘70s saw soft rock acts such as James Taylor and Crosby, Stills & Nash serving up antidotes to the nerve-shattering sounds of blues-rock and psychedelia. Tamburlaine produced a local version of the mellow medicine, combining vocal harmonies with intricate acoustic arrangements and a few exceptional songs. Of their two albums, Say No More (1972) and Rebirth (1973), the former is the stronger. Steve Robinson’s Silver Scroll-winning ‘Lady Wakes Up’, with its ‘woodbox of memories’, now seems a bit twee, but ‘Raven and the Nightingale’ rollicks with bluegrass gusto, while ‘Pass a Piece of Paper’ achieves a perfect balance of melody, harmony and lyrical reflection.

  TICKET

  Awake (Down Under album, 1971)

  Formed in Auckland and hothoused in Christchurch nightclub Aubrey’s before an audience of American servicemen on R&R from Vietnam, Ticket were in many ways the epitome of psychedelic blues-rock. Their debut Awake is the more exciting of their two albums, showcasing the fluid and deeply Hendrix-inspired guitar of Eddie Hansen and the furiously tight rhythm section of bassist Paul Woolwright and drummer Rick Ball. (Decades later, Woolwright and Ball would play together again with a far more economical style in Hello Sailor.) Frontman Trevor Tombleson’s enjoinders to ‘free yourself’ are very much of their time.

  THE TOPP TWINS

  Go Vinyl (Dragon’s Egg EP, 1982)

  Honky Tonk Angel (The Topp Twins album, 2009)

  Initially known as yodelling buskers, Huntly-born sisters The Topp Twins became the musical voices of the protest movement, with witty original songs espousing various causes, from nuclear disarmament to gender equity. Hirini Melbourne’s ‘Ngā Iwi E’ was a part of their repertoire as far back as the 1981 Springbok tour, but didn’t appear on one of their recordings until the 2009 album Honky Tonk Angel, produced by Don McGlashan.

  TOY LOVE

  ‘Rebel’/’Squeeze’ (Elektra single, 1979)

  Toy Love (WEA album, 1980; reissued Real Groovy, 2012)

  Live at the Gluepot (Real Groovy album, 2012)

  Although Toy Love made an amazing debut single (‘Rebel’ backed with ‘Squeeze’) and a couple of follow-ups that were almost as good, their sole self-titled album — produced in Australia by Dragon’s Todd Hunter — didn’t quite capture the kinetic excitement this band could create on stage. While the songs are almost uniformly great, the sound is spidery and thin. Some of these deficiencies are made up for in the 2012 remastered edition and subsequent Live at the Gluepot, recorded on the band’s final tour in 1980.

  THE WIDE MOUTHED FROGS

  Like Rough Justice, the Frogs’ only commercial release was on the 1979 Home Grown compilation — an early-Motown-style original called ‘Someday’, co-written with Tony Backhouse.

  Sources and notes

  PREFACE

  ‘... a decade that New Zealand really experienced in the ’70s’: Tim Finn, interview with Nick Bollinger for Radio New Zealand, 2014.

  MESMERISING ECHOES

  Bill Dwyer was born in Ireland and emigrated to New Zealand in 1954. Extroverted and charismatic, he was initially active in the trade union movement in Wellington. In 1960 he founded the Victoria University Anarchist Association. In 1963 he moved to Auckland, where he was prosecuted for neglecting his infant sons, and again for using offensive language while addressing a crowd in Myers Park. By the mid-60s he had moved to Sydney, where he sold thousands of tabs of LSD, was sent to prison and eventually deported. In the United Kingdom he changed his name to Ubique (Latin for ‘Everywhere’) and launched a festival on a royal hunting ground just south of Windsor. For a few years The Windsor Free Festival brought carnival anarchy to Britain, until Ubique Dwyer was locked up again, this time for creating a public nuisance.

  REBELS AND REFUGEES

  Denis Glover was a pioneering New Zealand publisher and poet. He wrote satires, lyrics and love poems but is most fondly remembered for ‘The Magpies’, New Zealand’s most widely anthologised poem.

  James K. Baxter was one of New Zealand’s best-loved poets. His first collection was published in 1944, when he was eighteen. A stern social critic and champion of the disenfranchised, in the late 1960s he founded a commune in the tiny riverside community of Jerusalem near Whanganui, where he took on the bearded and barefooted manner of a biblical prophet.

  Colin McCahon is credited with introducing modernism to New Zealand painting, and is regarded as the country’s most significant modern artist.

  Douglas Lilburn was one of New Zealand’s most admired classical composers, combining European training and a distinctively New Zealand voice.

  ‘YOU CAN’T DRESS LIKE THAT IN THE HUTT’

  ‘All Along the Watchtower’, a song by Bob Dylan, was most famously covered by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Electric Ladyland, Polydor, 1968).
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  Robert Nesbitt, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  HIDDEN TRACK: ‘PLAY NASTY FOR ME’

  The initials RSA stand for Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association, often referred to as the Returned Services’ Association but best known simply as the RSA.

  ‘Ten Guitars’. Composed by British entrepreneur Gordon Mills, this song first appeared on the B-side of ‘Release Me’ (Decca, 1967), a single by his protégé, the singer Engelbert Humperdinck, but became a New Zealand hit in its own right, and remains a staple of singalongs and showband repertoires.

  ‘Help!’ This song was composed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded by The Beatles (Parlophone, 1965) as the theme tune for the film of the same name.

  ‘Desolation Row’ is the closing song on Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia, 1965), a surreal ten-verse ballad that incorporates such figures from history and literature as Cinderella, Casanova, Ophelia, Einstein (disguised as Robin Hood), Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and the hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Dick Dale is an American guitarist and pioneer of the surf rock style, utilising Eastern scales and heavy reverberation.

  Buffalo Springfield was a seminal American folk-rock band in the mid to late 1960s, and included future superstars Neil Young and Stephen Stills.

  Prog-rock is short for progressive rock, a genre developed in the late ‘60s and early ’70s by groups such as Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, Yes and King Crimson; they wrote, performed and recorded suites and long-form compositions, borrowing some of the structural and compositional conventions of classical music.

  Frank Zappa and his group The Mothers of Invention created elaborate musical collages that referenced Dadaism and absurdism. An example is ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’, Zappa’s self-described ‘underground oratorio’ from the Mothers’ album Absolutely Free (Verve, 1967). The song shifts abruptly from doo-wop to vaudeville to what sound like television jingles, from orchestral fanfares to musique concrète to moments of aural anarchy, all in seven and a half minutes.

  The Beatles’ ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ from their album The Beatles (Apple, 1968) begins as a fingerpicked folk song in a minor key, briefly lumbers into waltz time, and skates across 9/4 for a few desperate bars before landing on a classic ‘50s doo-wop progression - the same chords as ‘Earth Angel’ and a thousand other vintage rock ‘n’ roll songs — which it repeats to its conclusion. The whole thing lasts about as long as ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. It is like a whole side of The Beatles compressed into a single song.

  EVANGELISTS

  Rick Bryant, unpublished memoir.

  ‘The older generation ... of the young’: Evening Post, April 15, 1970.

  ‘A programme note by organisers Riddell and Jones ... fantasamgorical hugglemaflop’ — from programme for Second National Blues Convention, 1969.

  Salient and Craccum, 1964—1974.

  Rick Bryant, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  Mark Bracefield, An Administration Handbook For Universities Arts Festival: Otago Universities Students Association, 1970.

  ‘Unlike previous Arts ... entertainment value’: Craccum, July 9, 1968.

  ‘Complaining in his opening paragraph ... derivative and deficient’: Craccum, September 2, 1968.

  ‘I NEED YOU ... Arts Festival and I need you’: Salient, May 27, 1970.

  PETER F. AND THE LIGHTS

  When the Highway album was reissued in 2011, the first time on CD, these liner notes were mysteriously modified. A few names such as Gary the hassler and Steve the roadie had survived, some new ones (Lorraine and Helen) had been added, others had vanished. And someone had evidently decided to add thanks to God.

  Peter Frater, interviewed by the author, 2015.

  Chris Prowse, interviewed by the author, 2015.

  INCREASING SOPHISTICATION

  Tim Mulcare, The Political Economy of Six O’Clock Closing: New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation, 1999.

  ‘Prime Minister Keith Holyoake ... the gaiety and increasing sophistication of our city’: Evening Post, February 5, 1972.

  GLAM ROCK AND FANTASMAGORICAL HUGGLEMAFLOPS

  The New Faces’ clip of Space Waltz’s 1974 performances and some of the judges’ responses can be found on YouTube. In 1973, the year before Space Waltz hit the screens, Split Ends had tried the same thing, although their twisted vaudeville was trumped by the less threatening novelty of the Bulldogs Allstar Goodtime Band. In 1972 Shona Laing and John Hanlon had launched successful careers with New Faces appearances, riding the international singer-songwriter trend that had made household names out of the likes of Melanie and Cat Stevens.

  Alastair Riddell, interviewed by the author, 2015.

  Bluebottle was a character performed by Peter Sellers in the British radio comedy The Goons.

  Rick Bryant, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  ‘It looks like another one of those visiting rock concerts ... looking up for the local music scene at last’: Hot Licks, 1975.

  A DRAGON’S TALE

  Ray Goodwin, correspondence with author, 2014.

  Details of recording ‘Education’ from Robert Taylor in interview with Nick Bollinger for Radio New Zealand, 2000.

  ‘ We discovered the meaning of his name ... without any sign of repayment’: Hot Licks, 1974.

  Details and quotes from interview with Robert Taylor by the author for Radio New Zealand, 2000.

  DEPARTURES

  Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, fifth edition: Plume, New York, 1997. First published in 1975, this book was seminal in the development of rock literature. In a series of loosely interlinked essays on half a dozen American acts, from long-deceased bluesman Robert Johnson to then living Elvis Presley, Marcus made an argument for the study of rock ‘n’ roll as a way to understand American culture.

  THE WINDY CITY STRUGGLERS GO ELECTRIC

  Rick Bryant, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  Jarrod Gilbert, Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2013.

  BROADER THEATRE

  Rod Bryant, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  MEDLEY: ‘LAWDY MISS CLAWDY’/’SUNSHINE’

  ‘It wasn’t cut in a commercial studio ... raw and exciting.’ Details about the recording of Johnny Devlin’s ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ largely come from Chris Bourke in Blue Smoke: Auckland University Press, 2010. Johnny Devlin cut two versions of the song six months apart. Although the first version sold reasonably well it received limited airplay: the New Zealand Broadcasting Service argued that the recording quality was not good enough. A faster and more popular version was cut with The Devils at Stebbing Recording Studios in time for Johnny’s national tour over the summer of 1958-59.

  ‘He had a rock ‘n’ roll suit made ... leather’s out.’ Interview with Johnny Devlin at Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, 2014, available on YouTube.

  ‘NOT THE MUSICAL GENIUS BUSINESS’

  ‘Hands ... mutton hams’, Warren Barton: Dominion, July 30, 1997.

  ‘ ... like twin kilos of corned silverside’, Alex Veysey: Evening Post, January 24, 1991.

  ‘... one of life’s great gargantuan, Rabelaisian characters’, Alan Smythe, in Bernadette Rae, ‘The Party’s Over’: Weekend Magazine, August 1997.

  ‘He had been lured back to New Zealand ... and formed the Quincys’, details from Gary Steel, The Quincy Conserve Profile:

  AudioCulture, www.audioculture.co.nz

  Jackie Matthews, interview with the author, 2014.

  ‘There has been a tendency for musicians to play for themselves ... we’re in the entertainment business,’ New Zealand Herald, March 27, 1973.

  ‘Holden would also go to London to audition prospects ... they lowered their asking price’, details from Mark Scott, ‘Selling the Track’: New Zealand Listener, January 14, 1989.

  Paul Davies, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  ‘As wel
l as providing our younger patrons with the best musical entertainment... employment with their musical commitments’: Brewnews, August 1974.

  Mike Corless, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  PIG’S HEAD AND PIPI BOLOGNESE

  ‘During Labour’s brief government, between 1972 and 1975 ... a possible antidote to the ills of modern society, as well as a means of showing people the virtues of a simpler life’, Margaret Hayward, Diary of the Kirk Years: Cape Catley/Reed, 1981.

  SHOWDOWN AT THE SPECTRUM BAR

  Clinton Brown, interviewed by the author, 2015.

  PUNKS AND INDEPENDENTS

  Charley Gray, interviewed by the author, 2014.

  ‘... against consistent opposition from a powerful lobby that included Alcoholics Anonymous, the Salvation Army and the breweries — a handful of high-end restaurants had finally been granted licences to serve wine and beer.’ Some details from Conrad Bollinger, Grog’s Own Country: The Story of Liquor Licensing in New Zealand: Minerva, Auckland, 1967.

  TRENDY LEFTIES AND ORDINARY BLOKES

  How to Murder Your Wife: Television New Zealand/Screentime, 2015.

  James K. Baxter, A Death Song for Mr Mouldybroke: Caxton Press, 1967. First printed in New Zealand Monthly Review, November, 1967.

  Some details about the life of Norman Kirk from David Grant, The Mighty Totara: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk: Random House, Auckland, 2014.

  Some details about the life of Robert Muldoon from Barry Gustafson, His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon: Auckland University Press, 2000.

  ON THE STREET