MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Rip It Up, Issue 216, 1 August 1995, Page 14

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

There’s more to the unassuming Auckland band Garageland than meets the eye. For starters, they’re the first Flying Nun band to sport a big ol’ Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics label on the cover of their record. They’re not a group that advocates killing cops or anything, but ‘Struck’, the second track on their five-song EP Comeback Special, boasts the word ‘fucked’ four times, and the inspired line, ‘Billy Joel is an asshole’, twice. Little to cause a fuss over, you’d assume, but someone in the Australian pressing plant thought otherwise, and the EP was returned with the warning label. It was an unexpected twist, according to Garageland’s singer-guitarist Jeremy Eade. “It was a complete shock, but it’s a joke, isn’t it? It just seems ridiculous. Without wanting to get too precious about it, it’s almost kind of insulting that someone can say: ‘Explicit lyrics, look out, this could be harming your children.’” Few reports filtered through of minors being corrupted when Garageland first courted public attention with a series of demos playlisted on Auckland’s bFM. Collectively, ‘Nude Star’ and ‘Pop Cigar’ spent over three months in the station’s Top 10, and ‘Struck’ was Number 1 for five weeks at Hamilton student station Contact 89. After a succession of high profile supports slots, interest in the band was peaking. “We had a great run of demos on bFM and we started to get played around the country. We needed to get something out there for people to listen to, and the plan was just to release the stuff ourselves. The thing about Garageland is that we really don’t exist within the Auckland music scene, so we didn’t really talk to any music people at all about releasing our stuff. Then, one day Lesley Paris [of Flying Nun] asked to hear a tape, so we flicked one

up just before Christmas.” At the time-, Nun founder Roger Shepherd, currently based in London, was back in New Zealand to accept an Export Recognition Award from Trade Enz. He and Paris had a brief huddle, which resulted in Flying Nun giving Garageland the thumbs up. “Flying Nun are perfect for us," says Eade. The other ‘more than meets the eye' aspect of Garageland is that the present personnel — Eade, Mark Silvey on bass, Debbie Silvey on guitar, Andrew Gladstone on drums — have messed about together, on and off stage, for the past 12 years; most notably at long gone Auckland club The Venue, run by Rus Le Roq (actor Russell Crowe). “It was fun at the time, but we had other things to do. We weren’t old enough to really keep concentrated on it. It was just kid-80s pop.” Individual members drifted apart, went separate ways, journeyed to find themselves, ever, before Eade reunited with Gladstone and Mark Silvey in 1992, while Debbie Silvey signed up again a year later. The rest, you know about. The major event in Garageland’s immediate future is an 10 day tour of Australia this month, with label mates Loves Ugly Children and King Loser. Eade’s been there once before: “I won a raffle to Sydney.” Once back home, they’ll begin work on an album. Until its release, Eade says: “We’ll just fucking play a lot.” Did he say ‘fucking’? Thankfully, some people will never learn.

JOHN RUSSELL