PICASSO TO THE CORE

Rip It Up, Issue 178, 1 May 1992, Page 20

PICASSO TO THE CORE

We're gathered in the Hallelujah Picassos giant warehouse space in the bowels of Auckland's waterfront. It's Sunday afternoon and the Picassos are finalising plans for their forthcoming national tour and detailing arrangements for the party to celebrate the release of Hateman In Love, their much anticipated vinyl debut.

It's been a stressful few weeks and to top it off they've just found out

their lease has been taken over by the Watershed Theatre Company. A worthy successor, but ifs sad, this is a great space, not to mention home to frontman Roland, as we can see from the mass of records, booh, art, T-shirts, boxing gloves and Coca-cola tins strewn around his

living area. The trouble is, the HP's have been

presents their old standards and new material in a complete Picasso

screaming out for the release of an album for so long the appearance of Hateman is almost an anti-climax. They released a single last year ('No More'), they've appeared on two compilations (Positive Vibrationsand Freak The Sheep Vol l\. They've released their own cassettes (1989's Taxi Driverand last year's Peanut Butter). But Hateman In Love

package in which all the elements add up, from the name of the record itself to the artwork to the careful sequencing of their songs, maximising the effect of their multifarious musical style. There's even Picasso merchandising in the pipeline: caps, T-shirts, stick-on tattoos, Picassonova Hallubricant condoms. Bobbyion says they've already written another album's worth of songs, which will see further honing of the Picassos' style; that irreverent blend of reggae, thrash, pop and punk rock which has earned them some critical flak and a lot more devoted followers. "We know we've set ourselves a hard task, but we wouldn't be interested doing it any other way," says Bobbyion. "We just couldn't sit down and hone ourselves to bang out a certain style day after day, especially with the amount of work we put in." : But swapping styles within a set, even within a song, has lead to accusations of dilettantism, of musical schizophrenia, of flirting with the sacred power of reggae. To which Bobbyion retorts: "Did they call Sly and Robbie dilettantes when they started playing funk and rock? It's no different for us. We believe in reggae music, we all like reggae music and we're 100 per cent behind it. When Herbs started playing reggae they also played all this other sort of music as well and no-one said to them 'oh look that band's trying to be a reggae band'. We're not trying to be a reggae band, we are a reggae band, but we want to be good at playing it. It's just a perfect dance style and ifs a perfect format for some of the lyrics we write. Wsrld problems sort of stuff."

Ah yes, the lyrics. Particularly those sung by the band's resident angry young man Mr Roland Rorschach, he of the berating vocal style, the incendiary chants, the righteousness spiels. How serious is he about all that stuff really "Very serious," replies Roland. "All I can say is if I write the lyrics I'm definitely serious about what I'm singing. In the last 10 years we have seen a decline in ideals, nobody's singing about them anymore." What kind of ideals? "People don't have ideals any more and I have. I don't have to tell you what they are, that would get too personal. They come up in the lyrics. Music, especially rap and reggae, is not merely entertainment any more ifs also educational, for motivation purposes." But ifs a big undertaking, singing about being righteous. 'Tm not singing about being righteous. I'm singing about observations, how I feel. A lot of people miss things, they don't observe behaviour patterns or reoccurances in their peer group. They don't see it coming. The

primeval sort of feeling, ifs one person's angst against the world.

Picassos use samples, but employ

election a year and a half ago, nobody saw it coming and the implications it would have voting National. Everybody's screaming now." What about that dodgy line where you sing "Your mother is a whore". What's wrong with whores? "It rhymes, Donna, it rhymes." BOBBYLON: "I think the song you were thinking about before is 'Snakeman's Cr/. What it means to me is some dissatisfied person who's basically setting what they feel to a musical beat and we tried to make that one a real tribal beat, a

There are some things people need to have shouted at them." The Picassos mix and match musical styles to keep themselves, as much as their audience, interested. A reggae bassline appears in a

thrash number, which breaks to a pop jazz ditty before thrashing back into something with a hardcore

bassline which is finished off with a reggae outro. BOBBYLON: "We're really conscious of cutting up our styles and mixing and matching them together, sort of like what a DJ would do with a record, but we're doing it live."

The HPs love it if some over-enthusiastic member of their audience leaps the stage, grabs the mike and sings along for a song.

They're proud of their hardcore element as symbolised by the theme song 'Black Spade Picasso Core' even if it means they've had to put up with the occasional bonehead skinhead. When asked if they get much flak for being three white guys playing reggae, Bobbyion says: "Not as much flak as we get for one black guy playing thrash music." As at their Deßretts show when someone came up to Bobbyion and said 'Great band mate, next time be white'. "People like that who give us a hard time, they end up with the base of a microphone stand in their face," says Bobbyion. "That's our attitude. Yeah, we run into all those things. But as far as black people or brown people or whatever colour you want to call them hassling us about three whities playing reggae, most of the time they've got nothing but respect for us.

"We're trying to play reggae music which is comparable to our peers overseas, we're not playing some kind of reggae from the colonies, we're going all out to play the best type we can in the world sense. We want our music to stand up to anything around the world, just like anyone else." JOHNNY: "A lot of people playing reggae around the world are really fucking brilliant musicians. We're not. When we go on stage we don't have this whole attitude of 'yeah man, we're going to lay down some hot licks'. We've got a primary knowledge and we know what we like to hear, thafs the way we work so we do anything we can to make that those sounds."

BOBBYLON: "How can you sound like one particular style of reggae anyway when there's hundreds of styles and thousands of artists doing it in Jamaica alone. A lot of them are my heroes. Like Dennis Brown, Sugar Minnot, Littlejohn, Pinchers, Pliars, Chaka Dennis, Dr Alimantado, there's millions. I personally like singers."

As does Roland, who mentions the low tonations and rap singing style of TK Dirtsman as a current favourite. Roland says Bobbyion's been into reggae the longest and he knows the most, he used to do sound systems down in Rangitiki and

Wanganui ("with one turntable — fastest flipovers you'll ever see"), an interest which sees its continuation in the Riot Riddum Sound System now run by Roland and Bobbyion when they're not being Picassos. As for admired bands, Johnny cites Urban Dance Squad, Boogie Down Productions and KMFDM as favourites. Like those bands, the

turntables instead of samplers to ►

► obtain a bit more warmth in the sound. Old reggae samples and phrases have been used in the past and Bobbyion says he'd like to < sample some lines off Capital City Chaos, a Wellington punk rock album from the mid-70s. "There's some really good lyrics that you get on Wellington records because they're more politically motivated down there, there's a whole goldmine of obscure stuff." Johnny mentions African music, and Africa itself, as another area of influence. Which brings us to the tribal aspect of the Hallelujah , Picassos — those primal rhythms and chants, the symbols that appear on their skin and in their artwork, their awareness of the spiritual aspect of making music. BOBBYLON: "Wjrld music really influences us. We love African music and we love Africa as a country and we'd like to incorporate some of those beats into our music, but in a European sense as well. We're all pretty European, we're not trying to say we're from New Zealand and grew up with a whole lot of Maori people and have all this Maori history behind us. We haven't really got any history at all behind us, we're making our own history right now." And they want to make sure it's being documented correctly. Bobbyion is worried that I haven't asked enough song-by-song questions about the album and they haven't told me what the album title itself means. Something to do with duplicity, loving and hating at the same time, extremes existing side by side, the way the songs themselves do on the album.

"It's not a perfect world and we're not offering a way to escape," says Bobbyion.

Well, REM might sing about losing their religion, but the way these guys talk, they've gained theirs. You know what it's called. DONNA YUZWALK