19. Drive through Patea (1/3)

“I then stated, long after her and I have left our earthly bodies, the language – via our anthem – will live on from generation to generation.”

Dalvanius Prime to Ngoi Pewhairangi

Mostly I remember songs from the 80s because I liked them, but there are a couple of spots in my memory reserved for musical moments of sheer awfulness.  As much as I’d like to forget these songs they are burned into my mind, forever reminding me that the 80s were not a jet plane to the stars of poppy, glossy loveliness, but a roller coaster ride with some plunging, vomit-inducing lows too.  Agadoo by Black Lace is one example of this awfulness.  Maggie by Foster and Allen is another.

Regardless of what you may (or, far more likely, may not) think of the song Maggie, you will have to concede that it is the kind of music, and the kind of duo, that was unlikely to appeal to an 11 year old boy in 1984.  These days, when there are so many ways to get access to music, it doesn’t really matter if the number one is crap, but in 1984 it was a dire situation.  Let’s list our options in New Zealand in 1984 for getting access to pop videos:

1. Use the internet (What’s the “internet”?)
2. Go on a music TV channel (We had two channels in New Zealand.  Channel One and – wait for it – Channel… Two.  Neither of them were music channels)
3. Watch Radio With Pictures (On at 9.25pm on a Sunday, which was controversially regarded as “too late” for 11 year olds “with school the next day” in my household)
4. Watch Shazam (Not much music and too much Philip Schofield)
5. Watch Ready to Roll (bingo!)

There was nothing flash about Ready to Roll and that was its beauty.  It was on once a week on Saturday from 6.00 to 6.30.  It counted down the top twenty for the week, and played a handful of videos in full on the way.  The key was that they always played the number one.  This was great when it was Let’s Dance by David Bowie, but unbearably disappointing when it was week after sodding week of two old codgers from Ireland rabbiting on about some bint called Maggie.

The Listener describes the situation well enough: “The video consists largely of two portly persons standing in a paddock, their lip movements unhappily out of sync with the song.”  As far as I can make out, New Zealand was the only country in the world where Foster and Allen have ever had a number one, and so by June of 1984, Foster and Allen were touring New Zealand.  ”This affable middle-of-the-road duo chose a freezing night for their first New Zealand performance at the Auckland Town Hall….  Allen sings and Foster accompanies him on his newly-acquired electric piano accordion.  His nimble fingers have won many All Ireland accordion playing titles.”

I can tell you what I would have liked to do to Foster’s nimble fingers, and it wasn’t hand him an electric piano accordion.

So when Poi E replaced Maggie in the number one position there was then the double delight of knowing that you never in your life again would have to hear Maggie, and the sheer awesomeness of one of New Zealand’s greatest songs.

Poi E became the biggest selling single in New Zealand in 1984.  I loved it then, and love it still.  If you were sitting next to me on the couch in my living room in March 1984 at around 6.25pm one Saturday I would have pointed out these bits to you:

Snort! A dog with a poi?  Come one!  Who doesn’t find a dog with a poi funny?

The boy in the crowd who is fully into it.  What a cool kid.

Dalvanius. Except I didn’t know it was Dalvanius then, I just thought it was a funny as guy driving by waving his tongue around.

The Maori Poi George (thanks Robyn), and a white chick who has been sniffing hair products

And, of course, New Zealand’s most famous breakdancer performing New Zealand’s most famous breakdance sequence of all time.

While Poi E was number one Michael Jackson’s Thriller was slowly slipping out of the top twenty; another reason Taika Waititi’s re-imagining of Poi E as a kapa haka Thriller tribute in 2010 was spot on.

So, in New Zealand we had Thriller and Poi E at the same time.  I loved both.  Both for their fabulous music, and both for their dance.  In Thriller it was MJ and his posse of zombies, in Poi E it was Joe the breakdancer and his posse of poi.

Kids of the 80s remember Joe the breakdancer more than any other part of the Poi E video.  He wasn’t that awesome when he got down on floor in the school hall later in the video, but he did a mean robot, and his gloves put him in touch with the coolest man on the planet: MJ.  Everything about Joe’s look and his moves suggested a dude who had spent thousands of hours in his Patea bedroom with a Grandmaster Flash tape and a full length mirror honing a talent.  Respect.  For me, seeing Joe demonstrate his craft was a moment of pride and recognition.  Pride because there at number one was a New Zealander doing the unspeakably cool act of “breakdancing”, and recognition that a part of what made it quintessentially kiwi was  that it was a little bit shit.

Time to take a drive through Patea and visit some ghosts.

Fly the flag

Very briefly something strange happened in the album charts in New Zealand in 1982.  Let’s watch it happen. 

The week before it happened:

If you’re not from New Zealand then there is a chance you think I’m going to make fun of DD Smash and their album Cool Bananas, but this is not going to happen because DD Smash were awesome.

Elton John Jump Up!  Now there’s something to make fun of (I have already, here).  By far the most risible though has to be the number four and number five double whammy of pap.  On the other hand, when you’re trawling youtube to find something to mock Kamahl with you might find this and see him in a whole new light:

So.  Are you ready?  Here it is.  The week I was talking about:

I know, right?  AMAZING.

Translation for rest of planet: the top three places on the album chart in New Zealand on the 2 May, 1982 are held by New Zealand or Australian bands.

Explanatory notes for people living in Britain or the USA: until some time in the mid 90s mainstream New Zealanders didn’t really like New Zealand music.  In Britain and the USA you are used to having music from your own country all over the charts.  In New Zealand we are not.  Aside from the fact we are too small to have enough quantity to fill up the charts, we also suffered from cultural cringe.  Mostly we thought of New Zealand music as being worse than British and American.  Which, to be frank, it often was – it wasn’t all the fault of New Zealand public – but sometimes it wasn’t, sometimes it was really, really good, and just needed a little love.

This chart then is a really remarkable feat.

It didn’t last.  One week later we have this:

Richard F&%king Clayderman as I like to call him.  Man he was popular with middle-aged New Zealanders in the early 80s.

Split Enz were a very good band and (for the three people who don’t know) had Tim and Neil Finn in its final line up.  Neil, of course, went on to Crowded House, but Tim has also made a lot of good music since.  Actually all the tracks I like on Time and Tide are either by Tim or the band rather than by solo Neil.

I’m not sure which track to play for Split Enz.  Six Months in a Leaky Boat is pretty fantastic, but I have always loved Dirty Creature.  Mental illness sounds great with a good bass line.

Cool Bananas is harder to get a video for.  The only things I can find have a very low volume, and the big song from this album – Devil You Know – really needs to be played loud. 

Dave Dobbyn (the DD in DD Smash) really deserved fame outside of Australasia.  Such a fantastic musician (well, until he stopped drinking).  Totally implausible as a rock star.  I mean, check out this outfit from the Radio With Pictures gig:

I can’t tell you how cool Adidas, stirrup leg pants were in New Zealand at this time.  Dave would have been rocking it a bit more if his pants had been black.  (Incidentally, I am aware of how funny the phrase “stirrup leg pants” sounds in England).

Dave was never a man who was ever going to rival Elvis, for example,  in the sex-appeal-o-meter stakes and, as we have seen, he wasn’t a snappy dresser, but he wrote great songs and, at this point in his career, there was a lot of fantastic stuff to come.

Maybe, then, we’ll save a Dobbyn clip for a little later.

Page nine

Mr. Errors and I had a talk about my column on his blog.  Actually, he did most of the talking and I listened (he certainly has a high opinion of his opinions).  He has suggested that I am taking too long to read each paper from 1912 and therefore I am not producing articles for his blog regularly enough.  He suggested that I just focus on one or two things.  Then he told me what those things were going to be: anything I could find on page nine of the Evening Post.

I went and looked at page nine.  It is the page that features stories for women and advertising (mainly for women).  I protested.  He insisted.  I asked for an explanation.  He said that I needed to broaden my horizons.  I protested quite vigorously that having been born in 1860, killed by a tram on a Wellington street in 1929 and suddenly resurrected in 2012 to write a column for blog meant my experiences were already quite broad.  He relented a little and said I could also review popular music in New Zealand every week because, “I know how much you like music”.  Yes, I said, I like music, but what is on the top of the pops now is certainly not music.  He looked at me quite grimly and said: “only female artists.  You can only review female artists on the top twenty.”  Then he smiled and said,

“If I created you… it’s easy enough for me to uncreate you.”

I went and looked at page nine.

***

Good lord.  Imported human hair?  Washable hair pads?  Quite a startling beginning to my attempts to understand women.

Aside from a piece about how to wear a scarf (there are a bewildering number of ways), and how to manage your servants, there is this little piece on children.

Now, Mr. Errors has two daughters, one aged five and half, and the other one and a half.  They are rather unruly examples of their sex, but charming in their way.  As I am a bachelor of 152 years it is perhaps not my place to comment on child-rearing, but it is my distinct impression that Mr. Errors is being reared by his daughters and not the other way round.  I had thought this was due to natural flaws in his character, and these certainly abound, but perhaps it is to do with the number of toys his children have and that devilish box they call a TV.  Surely all these moving pictures and jarring sounds are leading to a gross over stimulation.  Much better, the writer of this article suggests, that the infant simply look at the world around them.

Indeed. 

Mr. Errors has a garden.  The principle purpose of which seems to be for him to complain about.  Perhaps he should let his children roam more in it.  This would certainly stop them barging into my room at all hours and asking if they can play the drums on my head.  Impertinent.

Let him alone while he is good.  Splendid.

Finally, this young New Zealand lady has had a popular song in this country recently.  I draw your attention to it because Mr. Errors has recently taken up lawn bowls.

Her name is Anna.  She has an “h” at the end but I cannot bring myself to do this to a perfectly good name.  She appears to have a tattoo, and like wearing shoes called stilettos.  Lawn bowling, like everything else in the world, seems to have changed.

Mr. Errors assures me that if you “click” on the picture it will display the “video”.  I have seen this “video” and it is hard to decide which is more appalling: the antics of youth or the antics of the elderly.

In New Zealand we like Joy Division

We really, really do.  I knew that before I started listening to New Zealand bands from 1982.  You can tell by looking at this from Wikipedia:

In New Zealand Joy Division had five top ten hits, including back to back number ones.  You might say they were popular in the UK, but they didn’t fare that well in the mainstream charts.  In Wellington there is the Ian Curtis Wall which has been around for about thirty years.  Over the last few years it has been painted over and redone a few times in some kind of tagging battle between punks and the council.  Here is the latest version.

Personally I feel like it should be turned into a sculpture, and the words bolted on in bronze or something.

For a long time I didn’t get the Joy Division thing, and then I heard Les Bains Douches and realised how intense and fantastic they really were.  The crucial difference being that Les Bains is a live album, and that their studio albums sound dead.

The other way you can tell the Joy Division were big in New Zealand is by listening to some of the bands that were around in New Zealand in 1982.

 This song by Danse Macabre reached number 15 on the New Zealand charts.  Their song Conditioner was played on the John Peel show.  Cruelly this was a stepping stone to nowhere.  New Zealand bands don’t “make it”.  The exceptions prove the rule.

Even more obscure than Danse Macabre is Wellington based Beat Rhythm Fashion.  I love this song despite it’s determindly downbeat sound (or, perhaps, because of that).

The Bolton Street Cemetery features a lot in the video, and at around 3:18 it’s nice to see the band members enjoying a bit of sun up at the Mount Vic memorial, one of Wellington’s uglier memorials (nice view, shame about the desecration of a Maori cemetery to create it).  You get the sense while you are watching this video that it was very important to these young men to show no emotion in their video.

There was a film made by Chris Knox about the Wellington Scene in 1980.  The dude in it saying, “Sex? Sects? Oh, sects” is from Beat Rhythm Fashion.  In 1980 BRF seem to have been punks, but Joy Division obviously changed things.  According to the excellent Mysterex site the Chris Knox film was filmed at 246 the Terrace in Wellington, where BRF and many others lived.

Here is the  first part of the film.

The people in this film are fascinating.  Anarchists always seem gloriously unaware that their sophisticated musical instruments powered by a complex infrastructure that brings electricity to their homes is a product of civilisation.  The kind of thing that anarchy tends to destroy.  They also seem to constantly rail against being labelled while walking around labelling others and wearing clothes that clearly define themselves as a group.  Part of the routine is using the accent and vocabulary of another culture.  When the angry young woman claims she was beaten up by some “niggers” there is an awkward pause because (a) it’s a nasty racist word, and (b) nobody ever uses that word in New Zealand – it has no meaning.

Nice scene with an officer of the law in the second clip.  I had forgotten that they used to wear those pith helmets.  Not much to see here.  The whiff of police brutality is far off.  In fact, the police officer almost seems to be more like a rock journalist carefully taking down names and asking what instruments they play.  The audio is unclear but I hope he asked the band about their musical influences as well.

Apparently the woman in red playing the bass at the end of the second clip is Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson’s wife.

Part of the Wellington scene a little later was a band called Riot III who managed the impossible: they had a top twenty hit with a punk protest song called 1981, and again got onto the charts with a punk EP called Subversive Radical (in January of 1982 which is how I found out about them at all).  They did this with no airplay.  Actually the lack of airplay was something they were pretty hacked off about at the time.  1981 was of course about 1981, and got noticed even by The Listener:

There is a great story on NZHistory  (read it, it’s cool) about how Riot III blockaded Avalon Studios in Lower Hutt and blasted them with music to try and get their video played (a video that the head of programming had called passe).  At the end of the story on the NZHistory site is the still hacked off Void (the lead singer of Riot III) who has left a comment on the article.  If you want to know more about Riot III and the Wellington scene I recommend this article.  It talks about the film that Chris Knox made. Riot III lived at 212 the Terrace.

Howard Morrison

1982 Style Guide: Two

Howard Morrison – How Great Thou Art

5 weeks at number one. Entry 20 Dec, 1981 (at #1)

Until then, the kids only knew me from the Bic ads…. But now I became a pop star hero in their eyes because of having an RTR hit – and it was a hymn!

Howard: The Life and Times of Sir Howard Morrison, John Costello

I only knew Howard from the Bic ads (Bic Click, Bic Flick, and Bic Shick… the Bic things in life cost so little).  In fact that’s all I knew about Howard.  He was an old Maori guy who did Bic ads.  Here he is getting ready to promote Bic razors (a Bic Shic is in his hand).

In 1982 the biro pen had a strange magical allure for me because you weren’t allowed to write with them at school.  In Intermediate you were only allowed to use cartridge pens.  Or, in my case, cheap cartridge pens that blobbed and split and leaked everywhere.  I flunked handwriting class with Mr. K.  He looked at my spidery scrawl with open derision as if joining your sodding s’s to your sodding o’s was important.  Well who had the last laugh I wonder?  Me, a recorded rock and rap star living in Haiti, or you? A retired teacher.

I guess if I had met Howard in 1982 I would have said something nice about his song because I was nine and quite polite, but honestly it was one of those embarrassing things that sometimes get to number one for a whole lot of reasons other than their intrinsic awesomeness.

The clip below is taken from Maori TV’s coverage of Howard Morrison’s funeral.  It is a moving tribute.  Maori TV really is the best public service broadcaster in New Zealand hands down.

Howard’s reinvigoration of himself as an entertainer happened at the Royal Variety Show in the St James’ Theatre held in Auckland during the Queen’s visit to New Zealand in 1981. The director of the show was Tom Parkinson who asked Howard to appear in a comedy skit with Billy T. James.

I was highly indignant. How dare you demean my standing by implying that I am just a prop for a comedy skit? Do you realise that I was awarded the Order of the British Empire? Don’t you think I might want some say as to what I do in front of  Her Majesty and Prince Philip? I was really on my high horse!

Tom, being the nice person that he is, said, “Okay, okay!  What do you want to do?”

“I want to do a hymn.  Specifically How Great Thou Art.”

There was silence from Tom on the phone.

Performing How Great Thou Art to the Queen does seem a bit of a suck up, but it doesn’t come across like that in the actual performance.  Actually it reminds me of a cabaret act I did in the Dominican Republic once, I’ve Got a Lovely Pair of Coconuts.

Howard’s performance is hard to resist in a tribute video, but I remember it being fairly easy to resist at the time.  I can sort of see why it was number one even though it lacks all the charisma of Howard’s early days.

Top Three Style Tips

1. You can rock a white jacket in the right circumstances
2. If you can bust out Te Reo to the Queen, you can bust it out to anyone
3. You can get away with anything at anytime (even hymns with a spoken Maori section wearing a lounge suit in front of the the Queen) if you fully, sincerely and humbly commit to it and own it.