by Dom Harvey
The version I taped had been recorded by an American group, the Tokens, in the sixties. Listening to it over and over, I noticed our choir was putting in nowhere near as much effort as the Tokens put into it. So I took it upon myself to add some falsetto harmonies:
‘Weeeeeeeeee oh weee ohhhh weeee umm ummm awaaaaay.’
I was so excited. I thought Mrs McGrath, who was running the choir, might single me out for some praise, let the other kids know I was the standard, the benchmark, they should all be trying to reach.
Just as I predicted Mrs McGrath did single me out. She pulled me aside and asked me if I would like to stand in the back row of the choir and try to ‘not sing so loud’.
I was only nine but I wasn’t stupid. You don’t put someone in the back row and ask them to sing quieter because they are too awesome. I knew what she was up to and I was devastated. I don’t resent her, though—she was right on the money. The fact she even let me stay in the back row was charitable.
After that tour of the retirement villages I stopped singing in public—my dreams of rock stardom shattered, all before I had even turned ten.
Subconsciously, maybe this is why I opted for a career in music radio. This would allow me to be in the music industry, albeit very much on the fringes.
The opportunity arose in December 2010 to get this tick on my bucket list by releasing an original song. It was suggested by my boss at The Edge radio station, Leon Wratt. He came up with an idea for our radio show called ‘X-mas Factor’—a Christmas time piss-take of the talent quest TV show X Factor. Mike Puru, Jay-Jay Feeney and I were each issued the challenge of coming up with an original Christmas song. Given our severe lack of any sort of musical talent, and to ensure this would not be a complete embarrassment, we were told we could work with an established artist if we could convince anyone to put their reputation on the line.
Jay-Jay approached an incredibly talented but relatively unknown guy by the name of Seth Haapu. He agreed to take part and within a couple of days had written a catchy innuendo-laden pop track called ‘XXXmas’. The chorus went like this:
Oh oh oh!
Do I hear ho ho ho?
Kissing all year long under mistletoe
Don’t send an STD down my chimney-ee
I’ve been a naughty girl
Santa, be nice to me
I’ve been a bad, bad girl
I’ve been a bad, bad boy
Mike Puru called up one of New Zealand’s best singer-songwriters and New Zealand’s Got Talent judge, Jason Kerrison from the group Opshop. They are old mates who went to radio school together. After graduating, Mike used his diploma to get a job in music radio. Jason went on to have a wildly successful music career. He had an old Christmas song he had written years earlier that he told Mike he was welcome to use, an epic ballad called ‘Nothing More for Christmas’.
I need nothing more than being with you
I could want for nothing more
I need nothing more than to be with you
I could wish for nothing more
No room, no view
[Whispered] This Christmas
Only you
Only you-oo-oo
I don’t know what it all means but I bet any guy who can write stuff like that never goes to bed alone at night.
My own genre would have to be rap. I’ve already explained that I can’t sing—a fact recognised decades earlier by Mrs McGrath. But I could talk as well as the next bloke, so I would have to play to my strengths.
I approached Scribe, arguably New Zealand’s most successful rapper. I say ‘arguably’ because these hip-hop people all look quite menacing and I don’t really fancy getting on the wrong side of Savage and his friends at the Dawn Raid music label, who could also arguably be the best.
Scribe is famous for being difficult to track down. Had Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden just stuck close to Scribe it’s possible that US Intelligence would still be scratching their heads looking for them to this very day.
I was warned by my boss that Scribe was hard to pin down and reminded that the deadline for the song was not far away. No pressure! It was a long shot, trying to get Scribe, but you don’t know if you don’t ask. I sent him a tweet:
Yo! @mcscribe I need to come up with a Xmas song for a work competition. I want to do a rap. LOVE to do it with you my man. Holla if U keen.
With words in my tweet like ‘my man’ and ‘yo’ and ‘holla’, how could he turn me down? Clearly, I had some hip-hop ‘cred’ (that’s a quick way of saying credibility, FYI).
I sent my tweet and assumed I would probably not hear anything back from Scribe. But the very next day, I got this reply on Twitter:
Sounds interesting @DomHarvey I’m in London, back in NZ Monday. Could be keen. Email me your lyrics & music track and I’ll say yes or no.
Not only was it a reply, it was a tentative yes. This was promising!
I noticed that Scribe didn’t use words like ‘my man’ and ‘yo’ and ‘holla’ in his tweet, which made me feel rather foolish. I made a mental note to ease up on the street lingo for future dialogues between Scribe and myself.
I emailed Scribe the lyrics I had written and the backing track—an upbeat, modern take on the traditional ‘Jingle Bells’. My song was called ‘Christmas Wrapping’. Granted, it was not exactly ‘99 problems but a bitch ain’t one’, but I thought it encapsulated the whole feeling of a Kiwi Christmas pretty well.
Christmas in New Zealand and you know what that means
Every year we have pretty much the same routine
Finish up for work on December 24
By 4 pm everybody’s out of the door
The mall is so busy you might as well just leave it
You can only get a park if you’re a paraplegic
When you finally get inside and get what you need
You double-check your list because you want to exceed
All the expectations so there is no one upset
When they finally unwrap the presents that they get
It’s embarrassing when your sister says ‘lame’
When she sees you gave her your picture in a frame
And now it’s Christmas Day and the kids get up first thing
So damn early they are up before the birds sing
Open up their presents—‘Thanks Santa—too much!’
‘Just what I wanted—an iPod touch!’
Chorus
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way
Santa’s in a Skyline coz he traded in his sleigh
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way
Sorry for the oil that he left on your driveway
Rap
And now it’s Boxing Day and we’re back to the mall
The big sales on and you want to spend all
Of the vouchers you got the day before
Or exchange the stuff you don’t want no more
And if the weather’s good we hit the beach for a swim
The shit’s so cold that sometimes we don’t get in
All the girls are wearing their Daisy
Dukes so short
And covering their eyes with the sunglasses they bought
Them Dolce Gabbanas
Probably cost four hundred dollars
But she don’t care—probably worth it for the hollas
‘Uggh,’ she says—‘all those guys are so creepy’
But she loves the attention secretly
Dudes driving slow with the ‘for sale’ sign up
Car’s not for sale they’re just hoping to hook up
We are New Zealanders and it’s a Kiwi thing
So turn the volume up, ma-fucker—let us sing
Chorus
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way
Santa’s in a Skyline coz he traded in his sleigh
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way
Sorry for the oil that he left on your driveway
A
fter hitting send on the email to Scribe I nervously anticipated his reply. Would he want to be involved in the collaboration? Would he like the song or think the lyrics were a colossal pile of steaming faecal matter? I cared a lot because the deadline was looming and if Scribe turned me down I had no plan B.
Scribe’s reply was good news—he agreed to take part—but he wanted it to be made very clear he’d had nothing to do with the songwriting process. Until that point I never knew it was possible to experience relief, excitement and embarrassment all in one two-line email.
We met in the studio the morning Scribe arrived back from London and exchanged an awkward four-part handshake that ended with our shoulders gently banging together and Scribe’s fingers clicking as he pulled away. I always get very nervous when someone goes in for anything other than the traditional handshake. I find it hard enough just to remember all my various computer passwords—how the hell am I supposed to keep up with all the current handshake trends?
We got the song recorded in under an hour. Scribe did two lines, then I rapped the next two lines, until the song was complete.
As established earlier, I am unable to sing. I did think I was fit to rap, though. That assumption was buried when I heard my parts of the song next to Scribe’s. His parts sounded awesome: rhythmic and flowing. My bits just sounded dorky. I sounded like a nerdy white guy who was having a crack at rapping. Funnily enough, that is exactly what I am so I probably should not have been so surprised by this.
In the end I adopted the slogan ‘Fake it ’til you make it’. I would have to pretend to be a bad-ass rap superstar.
I went back in the recording booth and starting rapping. To get into character, I started clutching my genitals—like 50 Cent and all those guys do when they rap. I was only a couple of lines in when Scribe stopped the session and asked what was up with my voice.
‘I’m doing it in an American rapcent! That’s when you rap in a different accent.’
When Scribe said he hadn’t heard of that before it gave me great pleasure to tell him that ‘rapcent’ was a word I had invented, just then, on the spot. He was impressed. He didn’t say he was, but I could tell by the way he shook his head.
Before leaving, Scribe again made a point of telling me to make sure his name was down on the publishing sheet as a performer but not a writer.
I was starting to get a complex—just how horrible were these lyrics?
The three X-mas Factor songs were all released on the same day. I had done it. I had released an original song. My boyhood dream of being a recording artist had finally come true. And thousands of people really liked it. And when I say thousands, I mean seven.
Really catchy love it
Lauren
I love your song Dom! It’s got a cool beat and a good modern Xmas song!
Aarena
This song is the best, lyrics are funny and the tune is catchy!
Jackie
Wow! I’m surprised . . . I totally love this song.
Tania
Dom man u awesome hahaha here I was doubting this song. U rocked it, rapped it and U didn’t even sound that bad . . . .Scribe should be flattered that u asked him to do it!
Owen
WOW! I love this one. Go Dom!!! I’m getting an iPod touch for Xmas so I am definitely going to buy this to download onto it.
Ty
Wow Dom that was very funny and catchy. Scribe is awesome. I vote for you!!!
Mike
Jay-Jay Feeney’s pop track, Mike Puru’s ballad and my rap song were all made available to purchase and, incredibly, all made it into the top 20 of the official New Zealand singles chart. This created a huge amount of envy among real New Zealand musicians with actual talent who do not have their own top-rating radio show as a vehicle to try and sell their music.
But I had no time for this jealousy. I had realised my boyhood dream! With less musical talent than Crazy Frog, I had not only written and released a song but made it to number six on the charts, sandwiched in between Michael Jackson in seventh place and Katy Perry at number five. A good friend of mine pointed this out in a text message:
Enjoy this moment mate. This will be the only time in your life you have Katy Perry in front of you and Jacko right behind you.
Now there’s a visual that is titillating and terrifying in equal proportions.
GO SKINNY-DIPPING WITH
MY OLDER SISTER IN BROAD DAYLIGHT
Fortunately I got this one done before things got all, you know, hairy and scary looking. This one got ticked off the list a decade before either of us hit puberty. It was a real family affair, too. While me and my sister frolicked in the shin-deep water, our mum sat on a chair taking photographs. Well, I say ‘photographs’, but the truth is it was just the one snapshot you see over the page. These were the days when cameras had films that took twenty-four photos and, when finished, those films had to be taken to a specialist shop to get developed. And it wasn’t cheap, either. Because of this, Mum would use her camera sparingly. I do recall one particular roll of film Mum used so sparingly that by the time she got the prints back from the Kodak Kiosk at DEKA it included photos of me at the ages of five, six and seven.
In this particular photo, though, I was almost three. Bridget was almost five. Mum and Dad were still both in their late twenties. It was the summer of ’75 in our backyard in Liverpool Street, Levin.
Being from a reasonably poor family we could not have everything we wanted. This year the options were togs or a pool.
In this photo I look like I didn’t have a care in the world . . . but in hindsight maybe I should have been a little bit concerned about the size of my genitals. Take a good look. The only way you can tell that I’m a boy is that I have short hair. Bridget looks more hung than me. It actually looks like I have two bellybuttons and no penis. I’d like to tell you I have grown considerably since then but nobody likes a bullshitter.
Melanoma was not a word that anybody ever used because nobody knew about skin cancer then. Kids were encouraged to get outside and get some sun on them. A good tan was associated with good health. I don’t know if sunscreen even existed. If it did, it was not something we ever had at home. I recall Mum using something which smelt like coconut and worked as a sort of cooking oil for the body. The idea back then was to get as much sun as possible.
If the photo is anything to go by, another thing Kiwis were not big on in the mid 1970s was plants and landscaping—what a barren and sad-looking bunch of sections we all had.
This was also an era where privacy was not a big priority—our ranch slider and patio were at the front of the house looking onto the street, as were most people’s outside entertaining areas. And that white picket fence in the photo was the boundary fence at the back of the property. Having a small fence like that, one that lets your neighbours peer right in, would be a negative now days when it came to selling your property. Back then, it was seen as a good thing. There was only one thing better than a small back fence, and that was a small back fence complete with a gate built in. This made it easy to pop over to borrow some emergency supplies—sugar/flour/ milk/whatever. A neighbour coming over and asking for half a cup of condensed milk would seem a bit odd now. But in the seventies it was quite normal—people did a lot of baking and shops were shut more often than they were open.
These gates and small fences also made it easy to pop over for a cup of tea and a gossip, because neighbours were not just there to be used and abused for their well-stocked fridge and pantry—Kiwis were actually friends with their neighbours. What a concept.
Smacking was another popular pastime in this era. I remember getting smacked. Lots! Mum was not the primary smacker in the family. That was Dad’s role. If we played up during the day while Dad was at work, Mum would pull out the line, ‘Wait until your father gets home!’ Then, sure enough, when our father got home we would get a smack for something we had done hours earlier. When you’re a three-year-old boy, an afternoon can feel like a whole week, so
often I would be smacked at 5.30 when Dad got home from work for something that I couldn’t even remember doing.
I even recall getting smacked once by Mum’s friend Shirley, who lived across the road. I was doing something I shouldn’t have. I think she caught me crossing the street without an adult and decided to take matters into her right hand. These days, the law frowns upon neighbours belting the kids next door, but back then it was not something anybody flinched at. Mum probably even made Shirley a batch of pikelets as a way of saying thanks for caring.
Being smacked wasn’t the worst of it, though. We also got the belt and, boy, did that hurt. Dad had this brown leather belt that was kept coiled up in a jar in the corner of his top drawer. This belt was never ever used for its intended purpose. It was exclusively for discipline.
When I was bent over the end of Mum and Dad’s bed, waiting for him to take his back swing, Dad would always make a point of informing me that what was about to take place was going to hurt him more than it was going to hurt me. I couldn’t understand it then and I still don’t understand it now. It was bloody painful for me being on the receiving end of it, so if what he was saying was true, my poor old dad must have had a really high pain threshold, because I never once saw him leave the room in tears, rubbing his bottom.
On the odd occasion when Mum was required to administer on-the-spot punishment she would tend to go for the second drawer down in the kitchen and reach for the wooden spoon. This would sting like hell if she held the end of the handle and just flicked the spoon bit at our legs. But often she was so wound up that she would make her arm do the work instead of the spoon. This would usually result in the smack not hurting, the spoon snapping and us kids laughing hysterically.