THE BILL DIREEN INTERVIEW

Rip It Up, Issue 87, 1 October 1984, Page 6

THE BILL DIREEN INTERVIEW

BY RUSSELL BROWN

A REACH AS LONG AS YOUR ARMS

PART 1

It’s been said before anyone bold enough to profess a love for music should be prepared to dig for it. It’s not enough to merely accept what is proferred by Those Who Are In It For The Money. Dig within these shores and you may find Bill Direen. He’s been involved, to varying degrees, with seven records and a couple of cassette releases but you may not have heard of him.

He’s a Cult Figure, perhaps. Those who own his records swear by them and those who do not, pay no attention. He was at his most overground with last year’s Beatin Hearts album (as the Builders, with Campbell McLeay and Malcolm Grant) on Flying Nun, but the subsequent record, Feast Of Frogs (with his wife Carol Woodward) was a return to the home-administered, limited pressing story of most of the past releases. It was hard to get. The new album, Fred Over Jorden, will be released not through Flying Nun but through Full Moon Records.

There is also the Full Moon Theatre Group and Full Moon Publishing. Want to know about the Blue Ladder? Read on.

The block of flats is one of the sturdy art deco-type buildings that dot Christchurch an odd mixture of the swishest of design concepts with the sturdiest of materials. In the corner of the lounge is a four-track tape recorder and a small mixer.

“We may not have much furniture,’’ Bill Direen grins, motioning at the bare room. “But we’ve got the four-track.’’ Same Old Story ... Bill Direen was born in Christchurch and raised in Wellington and Palmerston North. He was returned to Christchurch for schooling

at the Catholic boys’ school St Bede’s. He did pretty well at school and inevitably was forced to concentrate on the sciences but had more love for the plays and musicals he was involved in. Given his penchant for working outside authority structures in adult life it was probably inevitable that he would come into conflict with authority at a boarding school. “In my last year I got about a 30 per cent mark for English two terms running because the person who took English was the rector of the school. I think it wasn’t so much conflict with that as that as I grew up through school I became more and more aware of a system that wasn’t entirely desirable, through no fault at all of the people involved in the system. Catholic education, while being different, wasn’t really any worse than the education system as a whole, which didn’t encourage students to develop their skills in necessarily the right direction.” Was a Catholic upbring a creative stimulus? “Yeah, it is a most stimulating thing but it’s also a bit of an albatross. There are different forms of Catholicism and the only thing binding just about every person who is a practising Catholic is faith in something or other and then naturally you get the full range of people believing in the precepts of Chris-

tianity as practised by Roman Catholics, ranging from the Sunday churchgoer to the mystic.

“And through that education every now and then I think I got a hint of the genuine mysticism, genuine experience of one or two of the people, schoolmates and priests. And I think that’s the attitude I have now to such an institution, rather than some years ago when I would have been far more scathing. But it’s no worse than any other system.”

After school came a medical intermediate course, which didn’t last long. Then came a year’s work in a particle board factory. He spent the savings from that year living on the West Coast, looking after a house for some friends of his sister, “smoking grass and all the usual things you do on the West Coast. That lasted as long as my money did.” He gradually found a family “springing up around me” and, moved by feelings of responsibility, auditioned for Radio New Zealand and did his training as an announcer in Wellington, ending up working for a community station in Blenheim. “It was pretty gruelling really. I would wake up at six in the morning or sometimes six in the evening and go to work and put on my most happy-hour voice and say ‘What a

wonderful day for mowing the lawns!’ having left my three foot high grass at home.” The family situation dissolved and he went to work for Radio Windy in Wellington, where he was given the unlikely on-air name of Bill Diamond. “That was the station manager’s idea. He was a very high-powered guy and he had just arrived and at that time David Mahoney was working at Radio Windy. He would take over the morning shift from me, when I had just finished doing 12 till dawn. He invariably came in looking disapproving and eventually the whole thing came to a head. I would play whole albums for these guys who worked in a bakery in town and one night in particular

there were some fairly ... I’m trying not to incriminate myself here ... unincriminating goings on up there. They have a reel of each night, which they keep for two weeks for legal reasons, and when the manager listened to it we mutually agreed that perhaps the time had come for me to move on.” So Direen returned to Christchurch and the Vacuum, who had been practising occasionally in Blenheim, got into gear properly, “that’s when a lot of the best stuff was done.”

Within another couple of years (“Old aren’t I?”) he had completed an English degree and was living in Wellington again. “The English study had done nothing to destroy my interest in drama, in general it does for most people. I was employed doing children’s theatre by the Phoenix Theatre Group at that stage also John McLeary (aka the Spines) was working in the same sort of area and performed at concerts. I kept out of that sort of thing and just wrote songs and played them with Six Impossible Things and occasionally we’d put up a hexagram on the noticeboard at the Arts Centre, depending on what the I Ching was that week. I’d just managed to acquire a copy of the I Ching edited by Karl Jung and that summer started investigating that a bit.”

He eventually returned to Christchurch and there followed Kaza Portico and the Builders,the Bilders, the Bilder Bergers, the fictitious but highly entertaining Max Kwits and accomplices and their contributions to the largely forgotten 20 Solid Krypton Hits compilation. The Urbs were put together a few weeks before the 1982 Battle of the Bands and, with a startling set in the final at the Star and Garter, won the thing. The Urbs were renamed the Builders (again) and Beatin Hearts was recorded in Auckland before they went their separate ways. Bill and Carol then spent several months in Europe. Since then

the only band has been Above Ground, with Stuart Page (drums, now of the Axemen) and novice Maryrose Wilkinson on bass.

The records: Six Impossible Things EP (long gone and fetches extortionate prices); the Builders, Soloman's Ball (four superb songs, probably the best record of the lot, rereleased and available through Flying Nun); die Bilder, Schwimmen In Der Sea EP (unavailable but probably a few about in shops); Krypton Hits (in which a bunch of ChCh musicians get together under pseudonyms to create a mostly successful instant ‘Nuggets’ with some moments of real inspiration. Colin Morris in Wellington had it for $2 last year.); High Thirties Piano (rough, interesting and very limited pressing EP); Soluble Fish 12-inch (a very good stab at getting the essence of the Soluble Fish Theatre Group on record actually it’s possibly better than the troupe usually was live. All gone?); Above Ground, Gone Aiwa (primitive live/lounge recording with lots of spirit, including a scary version of a Leadbelly song, ‘Grey Goose*. Available from Full Moon, PO Box 2190, ChCh?); Feast Of Frogs (Carol and Bill divert into four songs by 50s French cabaret performer Boris Vian, lots of fun. From Full Moon or through Flying Nun); Bil Derine Fred Over Jorden (the new album, out soon, containing original recordings dating back to Vacuum days. A real variety of stuff, less of a ‘songs’ record than Beatin Hearts, rough, occasionally flippant. Full Moon Records.); Live At Gladstone tape (Direen alone on acoustic guitar, lots of background noise and patchy quality but interesting acoustic versions of already available songs and a fistful of covers. Full Moon.).

“You’ll have to excuse this,” he says, genuinely apologetic, as he tops up the beer in his glass with Vita Stout. “It’s a habit I picked up from my father.” It’s a cold day in Christchurch.

The Blue Ladder The Blue Ladder is situated at 87 Cashel St in central Christchurch. During the day it’s a gallery for local artists and from Friday to Sunday nights it is host to performances from the Full Moon Theatre Company and readings from people published by Full Moon press. The principals of the theatre company are Direen, Woodward and Julia Brown. The aim is to have the theatre pay for the employment of the actors, even if that means only a few dollars more than the dole. Direen is passionately keen for it to work. CONTINUED NEXT MONTH