Cry of the Indigenous KIWI ANIMAL

Rip It Up, Issue 84, 1 July 1984, Page 10

Cry of the Indigenous KIWI ANIMAL

Jewel Sanyo

Brent Hayward and Julie Cooper are like a secret club, or an inside joke. Maybe a mini cult. Their select performances of acoustic music are litanies. Julie says, "I don’t think we’re entertainers. We keep people in touch, that’s what we do.” Like the Six O’clock News ? “It's on a more real level than the Six O'clock News it's warmer.”

"We don't want to be a mystery to people, we're demystifying performance. We consider we've got a task, it's like an invocation to the people. People are used to the ordinary entertainment format you go along, it's a social thing, the performance isn't always important as long as it fits into other things, such as alcohol and a lot of it is a mystery. We don't want to do that.

'' Our outlook is positive. We don t want to give people paranoia. What

I don't like when I hear other band? is 'I look at the world and think it's horrible' and people boogie around and dance and go to a party. The music is so loud and pressing it surrounds with the power of negative suggestion." Julie thinks the Kiwi Animal format is the best way to reach people. "We like sound, it doesn't have to be loud, we follow sound around. We use acoustic instruments. there's more subtlety there and more room, you can hear the words.

I think we are informing people about simple things. Some things are day to day events and some things are drawn from outside ourselves.

"The album is called Music Media because it's to do with information from all different

sources, a lot of it is personal experience. " Blue Morning', with me singing vocals, is a personal situation, a complete freedom inside myself, on my own. 'Assasin'. which Brent sings with harmonic guitar, that was drawn straight from the Philippine Airport incident that happened last year. It was put through the media and we read it. They talked about four or five armed guards, Brent had this idea and rewrote the story so one of the guards had been the assasin. After this it was exposed that this was the fact. The way the original story was worded people could have believed anything. "If I look at a situation and think about writing about it I can't be objective about it without feeling the absurdity of being objective.

Sometimes I think it's absurd to even write..." (In 1981 Julie wrote a small book of feminist poetry, Tights, Sox and Knickers.)

"I'd like to see more women at our performances. I'm half the group, sometimes I'm the most sensible party. Sometimes not. It's really important to be working with a man, for complete balance, one man, one woman."

Julie questions preconceptions about entertainment.

"We've believed that our music and performance was quite fitting on an entertainment level. We’ve changed our minds we don’t use those means used by entertainers to entertain.

"PIPS asked us to perform in Aotea Square on New Year’s Eve, with the idea of variety, something different from the fire eater and the IZB goodtime band. Most people expected something different, an acoustic duo, like the New Faces awards. There were hecklers, two or three of the people who call themselves streetkids who threw beercans. They influenced the whole suburban crowd.

"We got letters from the guy who had us there suggesting that as performers there was a certain format we should follow if we were to make it work. He suggested we were using shock tactics. He said he was hassled by the ACC organisers for having us there, he was dubious about paying us. He doesn't understand that the way we perform is the way we perform. ’ ’ Julie says they prefer to find venues that complement their performance to the usual pub gig. "We have made a commitment and when we perform we want to make it special. "Music Media is our first album. It's a neat first record and it's got 12 songs on it. We've got some accompanists on four of those songs. In this record we've given a good example of what we've been doing and things are starting to change for us now." She says they are starting to write longer song structures with more experimentation than the short cohesive album songs. "I'd like to make really long

records, that were hours long, like soundtracks.

"I’m really happy using acoustic guitars at the moment (croons) I'm really happy it’s a good way of doing things, finding your own roots.

- "We're here trying to do something and this is what we can do best. We've got a lot more to do."

I asked Brent Hayward where he thought The Kiwi Animal would be in two year’s time. "Still probably doing what we're doing right now slogging away. There's a very good chance we will be starving, we have been up till now.”

But they are making changes. "Patrick Waller is playing cello with us now. There's a lot of room in what we’re doing for other people, other instruments to come in, we've woken up quite a bit since our first EP. I'd like more people involved with the music, also say with the selling of it, T-shirt printers, maybe even somebody designing the cover art.

"We’ll have to get more money for what we're doing, we hope that our audiences are gonna get bigger. I think that with the material that we're working on now, there's things that make a lot more people accept us. Nice things, dreamy like things, soft, not tense, not something going boom boom at ya something to make people come into the music and the music come into the people.” 'Real' excludes "the people who think that just because they have all the latest English recordings, that's where it's happening man, or in the USA some good music could come out of this country that wasn’t just the usual ... y’know, rock'n’roll.”

He says rock is almost an exotic form in New Zealand. "I think we have to make up our dances rather than just have a floor full of people looking all the same, dancing all the same. "I know you can dance to our music because I’ve seen it in Christchurch and Palmerston North particularly, they made up the dances. We've got to invent our

own dances. All this shit about God, isn’t this place quiet as if they always want it to be loud and full on.

"The latest music that we're making is more meditative, you have to come down to it it’s up to the listener to invent from what they're hearing, too. I’m all in favour of people getting a feeling from what they see, hear, what they're reacting instead of being told there’s not much creativity going on and yet there’s a hell of a lot of people not doing anything."

He admits that new acoustic music has attracted limited audience numbers. The Kiwi Animal promotional approach:

"We toured all around the country and played everywhere except Invercargill. We were one and a half months on the road, that’s a fucking long time places like Greymouth Auckland's a long way away. We ended up doing a David Bowie’s 'Let’s Dance’ in the public bar in Greymouth on Saturday night. It was raining outside and all the locals were inside. They did like it. Maybe we’ll have to take the album to them. The audience weren’t the usual club set, they were just ordinary people." Is that who you want to get to? "Yeah, yeah. There’s people who will buy whatever music is going this year, we’re not really concerned with them.”

The Kiwi Animal will be making another video, filmed by Chris Knox, independent of Flying Nun. Chris offered to make a video for them. Brent says the video of "Making Tracks should be finished at the end of July. "We re gonna try for Radio With Pictures again.” Kiwi Animal will be performing in the Playspace fusion festival, "just a little 20 minute spot up at the Gluepot with a whole lot of jazzbands. We want to do maybe a country-wide tour in ' September and go to as many place's as we can. A sort of bread and butter circuit."

Is the 'Music Media' album in the New Zealand charts?

"I don't know, I don't look at things like that."