BAILTER SPACE

Rip It Up, Issue 200, 1 April 1994, Page 16

BAILTER SPACE

I’d forgotten what Bailterspace were really like. -' ' >

I’d forgotten how completely devastating they could be, up on stage, with the sweat sluicing off them as they pour out that huge glorious noise completely unlike anything else in the world.

But now they’ve come back. By the time you read this they’ll probably have gone again, but they stayed just long enough to remind us how much we miss them and how we can’t replace them.

Bailterspace are pretty happy not be be based in New Zealand any more. They’re now firmly ensconsed in New York, with a hip record label (Matador - also home for the, likes of Pavement, Liz Phair, John Spencer Blues Explosion among others) and enough of an income to be able to be Bailterspace all the time — which they didn’t have a hope of doing in New Zealand.

Guitarist Alister Parker and drummer Brent McLachlan are now living in Manhatten with bassist John Halvorsen ten minutes away by train in

Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Brent got lucky when a Dutch friend who was leaving for Berlin gave him a huge flat that he reckons “makes New York totally green with envy.” Alister has just moved from being across the road from legendary club CBGBs.

John’s a little bit more worried about his area, though.

“Greenpoint, Brooklyn looks quite beautiful and clean with lost of nice parks and things but underneath the ground, maybe 30-40 feet down, there’s an oil leak from an oil tanker that’s been going on since the start of the Second World War. There’s millions of gallons of oil under Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I live! Apart from that the air is just really toxic and there’s all sorts of industry around and it’s just one of the most toxic points of the earth — which really freaks me out.”

Lack of clean air aside, New York is treating the band well. They’re finding the public transport system “super efficient” and everything’s so much quicker to get to than in Wellington. “In Manhatten you can

walk everywhere, it’s avery condensed city, it just goes straight up,” John says. “I think New York’s the only city [in America] where you don’t need a car and it’s so much cheaper not to have one. If you own a car you move it every day if you’re parking on the streets, for the streetcleaners, or it gets towed away. ” They’ve also managed to avoid getting mugged, and John thinks he’s had more problems in Wellington. “But you see it,” he

continues, “Oursoundman had some trouble recently, just before he moved back to England. Three guys had him down, knee in the back of his neck, and were at the point of putting a gun to his head when he managed to get a shot of adrenalin and squirm out of his jacket and run down the street before they knew what had happened." Brent agrees. “There are certain places you definitely don’t walk at night. Central Park is still a funny

place you don’t really go, especially by yourself.” But there are obvious differences with New Zealand. “You have to look like you belong, as soon as you look lost or as though you unsure they pounce on you,” says Brent. . John nods, and says “The fatal mistake most New Zealanders make when they go to New York is they do what they do in New Zealand and that’s make eye contact with a lot

of people, including strangers in the street, it’s just second nature here. Any New Zealandertravellingto New York finds they get into a lot of touble for a start, ‘cos what happens if you make eye contact in New York with a person is that it immediately establishes a relationship, and they will zone in on you to sell you one thing or another, or just to take whatever you have, so you learn nobody does that, you just walk without eye contact

with anybody, which is strange to get used to.”

The band have been doing considerably more than playing New York’s legendary clubs (CBGBs, Irving Plaza, Knitting Factory, Maxwells etc). As a fulltime band they’ve done their fair share of the touring grind, and as soon as they get back to the US they’re straight back into their longest American tour yet — five weeks — followed by a video shoot for ‘X’ off the B.E.LP. EP, then six weeks across Europe, then two more weeks touring in America, then another recording project, the follow up to their new album Vortura. While the band are finding the rush preferable to how they used to have to spend a year and a half saving money to be able to leave New Zealand, it’s taking its toll on the band.

“Whenever there’s a spare moment we have to get together to try and coordinatethings, we’ve been very busy the whole time we’re been here and we’ve hardly had a chance to see anybody,” John sighs. “Just constantly every day we have to be revising a course of action, it’s like trying to steer some out of control machine.”

Despite having only toured America in short bursts, it’s been a strange experience for the band. “It’s amazing driving through the different parts

of America, like Detroit. Once it was the heart ofthe American car industry and now ten years after the industry collapsed there’s still all this huge industry there but none of the machines are working. There’s just these massive weeds poking through these broken windows. Then you get to the suburban part of Detroit and there’s these beautiful old homesteads with marble stairs that have been completely burnt out, they’re just burnt out shells with no-one living in them, no-one can sell them, it’s just like this ghost city,” John shakes his head. “That’s notjust Detroit, you get the same thing in Philadelphia and Camdentown and a lot of different cities.

“It’s spooky. The bigger cities like New York and LA and Chicago, you see a little of that kind of decay, but it’s really when you get out of those cities and go to some of the mid-range cities that you see the urban decay in a way that you never imagined possible.” But Philadelphia also provided for a strange highlight. At the Khyber Pass, a tiny little club on the site of a historic slaughter, the band walked into the venue to play there for the first time, to the sound of the Gordons on the jukebox. John smiles, “Apparently ‘The Coalminer’s Song’ and ‘Adults and Children’ were their favourite songs on the box but they didn’t know

who we were. Knowlege of the Gordons and New Zealand music in general is far better in Europe. The band keep in touch with the New Zealand scene through fanzines like the Dutch, all NZ content Tuatara. The whole fanzine scene, according to John, covers “all these obscure bands from obscure towns

— bands that perhaps aren’t even known in their own hometown are legendary in Bavaria and Stuttgart. These fanzines are read by millions of people but none of these people are able to buy any of the records —they’ll swaptheir car for a record, they pay huge amounts for these really unavailable records.

“It’s a fascination with New Zealand as a country, and a lot of Germans and a lot of Europeans in general refer to New Zealand as their idea of paradise — such a small country and such a lively music scene. ”