Ascent of the Ape

Rip It Up, Issue 89, 1 December 1984, Page 16

Ascent of the Ape

Russell Brown

It was during the year in Timaru that I first met the TV Eyepeople. Despite the years, my memories of them are vivid I wonder sometimes if time has retouched the colours. Patrick Faigan was slight, bespectacled, yet intense. Many of the locals found it difficult, if not impossible, to carry on a conversation stretching more than a few syallables with him yet I had glimpsed the wildly enthusiastic talker that lay behind the prescription lenses. Kevin Smith was tall and strongly built, with more than a hint of Tongan flowing through his veins. It was not uncommon for women to be attracted to him but even at that young age he had pledged his troth and remained steadfastly chaste. It seems strange now to think that he was later to be married at the same basilica we used to watch, sometimes for an entire Sunday, from the terrace of our bungalow. Echoes flood back of the friendly policeman who came to ask if the bands in the back yard could please finish before five o’clock Mass. The third of the Teev triumvirate I knew least well was Steven Watson, who had travelled to Invercargill to study accountancy and would only return to Timaru when the band then the Picnic Boys had one of its intensive recording periods with the four-track cassette machine they collectively owned. He would always be pleasant but sometimes I thought the interminable travel this mysterious man was obliged - to undertake gave him too much time to think. But the nights spent sipping

‘Deebee’ (a very sweet liquid brewed by the natives) and talking of the sunset could not last and soon the Riveria of the South was but a memory for us all. After his marriage ceremony Smith moved to Nelson to devote time to his twin passions, awesomely sensitive creative output and playing rugby football, Faigan took up a Baudelairean existence above a fruit shop in Christchurch and Watson, ever the rock, continued to delve into the mysteries of double entry bookkeeping in Invercargill. I still correspond with them occasionally and actually ran into Smith at the All Blacks v France test match in Christchurch. As the gentle nubian giant effortlessly plucked me from the gutter into which I had fallen I suggested that perhaps, with eight TV Eye tapes behind them, as either the Picnic Boys or their subsequent mutation, Say Yes To Apes, and two vinyl LPs and two new EPs, it was perhaps time for me to furnish my editors with an interview. Unfortunately, time was not our amigo and it was resolved to conduct a postal interview. Letters duly arrived from Smith and Faigan. The eccentric Watson, however, claimed he was unable to participate, his head having recently fallen off. I opened Faigan's letter first, slicing open the crumpled brown envelope and reopening the scar I had earned in an unfortunate

brawl at the notorious bar “Gladstone’s” in the South. His rabid prose gave answer to my first request, for an explanation of what TV Eye was: “Nationwide network of psychic desperadoes? Full frontal assault on the reality asylum or just another rock 'n' roll circus? To me it represents exploration, communication, confrontation, voodoo sex magic, the awareness of centuries, oh yeah, oh yea, oh no a probe into inner and outer space, an invasion of the memory banks, ‘laughing in the face of death and failure', the autumn of paranoia that stalks in the wake of the Summer Of Love.” Sometimes I worry about his reading. Smith described his function in the group and that of the others: “My function is solely to deliver the goods expected from one third of the group. Sometimes my input is an idea or rather the seed of an ideaand sometimes it is to fertilise an idea. I suppose that’s all any of us can do. Pat’s function or rather major contribution is to constantly monitor motives, ideals and processes and Steve’s is to constantly explore the state of the art and rationalise things the guardian of the technology. I am uncertain about mine. Obviously musically I endeavour like the rest of the band to play to the very limit of my ability (and often beyond).” Smith sings and plays guitar, Faigan drums and Watson plays bass guitar. Usually.

Faigan told of the group's new EP. the ominously titled Knife. "The sales pitch for Knife is like 'WE SUFFERED FOR OUR ART NOW YOU'RE GOING TO DIE FOR IT!* Violence implicit in every note. It's got three tracks; 'This

Is Your Lucky Night', a pub song of sorts, aimed squarely at the Knocking On Heaven’s Door'/'Casino Soul’ scene. I'll leave the criticism to the critical mass (check musicians-as-frustrated-critics angle here?) but I’d say A Fucking Hit! 'Deniz

Tek' our tribute to Radio Birdman. Steve wrote the music and I don’t get credited but I wrote the words, they go like this: 'DENIZ TEK OH YEAH! DENIZ TEK OH YEAH!' dig monolithic M Head drumming and Kev on reptile bass. Blow, man! And

finally 'The Great Western’, an instrumental we couldn’t find words for at first (tho’ a later, vocalised version turns up on the Summer Of Love tape. Whooo - SONUVABITCH!)"

(Since the letter Watson and Smith as the Hyphenears have released a new six-track EP, the ominously-titled Garden Of Lycanthropy.)

Smith on ambitions: "Have no regrets. Not go up in a firestorm. 1985 be a constructive and vital year for SYTA we'll make it happen. Be a fireman, a pilot, an All Black, a father, be famous, be fat, be an ape I have no doubt that Watson and any other man worth a pinch of shit shares these feelings." Faigan on the scene: "Don’t like much what's going on in the current NZ scene but as yet I'm powerless to intervene ... Christchurch is pretty arid right now. Radio U is a big toilet bowl run by unconscious con-men mostly people don't realise they're being sold shit and the people selling it will never understand that they're selling shit 'the kids are being hyped, man' radio cntrolled by Nazis, you’ve heard it all before. POSITIVE THINGS: a few good band, fewer brilliant ones ... the Great Unwashed, the Rip, Axemen, Doublehappys, the Rip ... that Songs From the Lowland tape is really good ... marie and the Atom at the State Trinity Centre were truly amazing. Look Blue Go Purple likewise ... Otis mace and David Eggleton at the Star & Garter... the Kefflms are good but I shouldn’t mention them 'cos two of the/n live here (incest! witch hunts! drugs! cannibalism! merciless self-abuse!).”

- The time has come to close this journal on the strange and wonderful TV Eye clan plumbing my memory and my emotions I could write a hundred books on the lives of these ludicrous adventurers. But before you go, dear reader, I would assure you that all the above is quite true once again the universe of truth proves to hold a strangeness and diversity that stretches far beyond mere imagination. But what is "truth"? And what separates it from what is "imaginary", "not real"? Could the fabric of the Universe be the thinnest of gauze curtains?

But here I must leave you. Rest beckons and my pipe is packed a-ready (the opium is a vice, granted, but surely there are far worse in this world?). I will depart with a proverb spoken in the wilds of South Auckland: "When the Falcon has been rebored it should be a time for rejoicing but only a fool runs races on ice cream.”