rip it up 1977-1997 THE SONGS

Rip It Up, Issue 238, 1 June 1997, Page 8

rip it up 1977-1997 THE SONGS

Most cultural ephemera that surrounds you will break, fray or fade, but if it lasts, it will firstly become unfashionable, then move into a likely to be trashed phase and only after a few years have passed, it will evolve into the retro, rare and collectable stage. And with the benefit of hindsight you will fib, you will say, “I was always into Abba.” Without trying to be sentimental or partisan, the songs of an era do survive, they may move from vinyl to digital, from uncool to cool and from one genre to another. But the popular song will survive, sticking in your brain whether as loved or loathed house guests. For the RipltUp 20th Anniversary we’ve selected two New Zealand songs per year and we will cover five years in each of the next few issues. We’ve tried to choose a chart song and an alternative song from each year. This month writers Chris Bourke and Russell Brown have spoken to some of the people who can be held responsible for some of the finest songs to be lodged in the brains of the young and restless between the years 1977 and 1981. 1977 HELLO SAILOR Blue Lady (Key) “We were in the studio doing the first album, and as those good songs do, it just came out, the chord structure and the riff came out of nowhere, and we just beat it into shape from there. I never in a million years supposed it would have the longevity that it does, I didn’t even know that it was good enough to put on the album initially, for a time I wasn’t even going to put it up for consideration. When we played it live, before it had been recorded, there was no reaction other than a few people danced. But when it picked up airplay it became our most requested song — ‘Blue Lady’ would not be what it is without the airplay. “The lyrics of that song are quite deeply steeped in innuendo. ‘Blue Lady’, it could be about a dead woman, it could be a woman that’s upset, it could also be a woman wearing a blue dress. It’s about all of the above, but it’s also about the beautiful blue glass of those indigo blue lady syringes, which were quite a work of art, they’re very rare now. The song was very much a product of my lifestyle at the time, the thing that surprises me is the fact that it still gets airplay and is still popular after 20 years, I take that as the biggest compliment of all.” Graham Brazier SUBURBAN REPTILES Megaton / Desert Patrol (Vertigo) The Suburban Reptiles could have been a jazz band. But Simon Grigg, who had the idea of forming a band among his friends, which he would manage, was reading an /VA4F with David Blyth (director of the cult NZ film Angel Mine) and saw the first live review of a Sex Pistols’ show. Naah, it should be a punk band, they thought. They were the first New Zealand punk band to release a single. Phonogram was the only company interested, though Grigg suspects the manager’s interest in Zero, the singer, wasn’t strictly musical. The company had the Boomtown Rats on its label, and wanted the band to cover ‘Looking After No 1’ before Geldof’s lot had made it a single. The Reps said, fuck off, and went to Harlequin — then an 8-track in Mt Eden — and recorded four demos on S2OO of borrowed money. Tim Finn, a friend of drummer Buster Stiggs, came along and the band thought, “he’s a pop star, he can produce,” says Grigg. “He walked in, walked out, and we thought — so that’s producing.” “None of us were compos mentis when we made those records,” says Grigg. From the demos, it was decided to re-record ‘Megaton’ for the single. They pressed 500 copies, and all quickly sold out. The first pressing used the old Vertigo label. "I wanted it to have that horrible hippie painting by Roger Dean,” says Grigg. “It was like a fuck-you gesture.” It was also Grigg’s idea to make it a 12” single, another New Zealand first. “In those days few local records were made. We worked out in 1981 that more New Zealand singles were released that year than in the whole of the 705.” CB

1978

DRAGON April Sun In Cuba (CBS) “Paul Hewson and I used to room together and we always used to stay in Melbourne at a hotel called the Old Melbourne Hotel, which, back then in the 70s, was a reasonably upmarket place to stay. We used to have parties there, needless to say we did quite a lot partying, and one night I remember, we had been drinking whiskey and we both woke up insanely hungover. Paul had this sl4 guitar he bought from a junk shop, and he sat up in bed, wearing his customary grin and nothing else, and he started playing, and we wrote that song in almost the time it takes to play it, about three and a half minutes. It’s the quickest song I’ve ever written, and it's become the most durable Dragon song. Paul and I both went, ‘whoa, shit, that’s a song’, and we got up and borrowed a portable Sony tape player from a roadie and did it again, stuck it down. Then we went downstairs and had some poached eggs. Paul had been reading a chess book about Raoul Capablanca, and there was a chess match in Cuba between Capablanca and Ghezu Maroxy. How the phrase ‘April Sun In Cuba’ came about, Paul was writing about one of the players complaining about losing the chess game, saying ‘the sun was in my eyes, the April sun in Cuba made me lose’, it’s dreadfully obscure but that’s what it was. But if you strip away all that stuff, the song is really about teenage yearning to get out of somewhere. After that, we became more adept at writing two minute-40 pop songs, and that was, I think, one of the better ones.” Marc Hunter SCAVENGERS Mysterex (Propeller) “It was one.of the first tracks to be recorded for the AK79 album. ‘Mysterex’, was all about Mike Lesbian, the original lead singer in the Scavengers. He went to get a job with an advertising agency, basically his girlfriend said, ‘get a real job, stop being a punk rocker’. ' So he changed his name back to Mike Simons and went and got himself a real job. The bass player at the time was Ronnie Recent — who now is a big, international pop star with Dead Can Dance — he was roped in to do the vocals. They were pissed off [with Mike] ’cause it left them in the lurch, so they wrote a song, ‘Mysterex’. It was a little more obscene at first, than what ended up on the record; ‘Mysterex, we think you’re a cunt, and you know you are’, or something like that. At Zwines, there used to be a bit of graffiti on the roof, it said, ‘Mike L is God’, and when he left the band, Johnny [Volume, guitarist] got up on a ladder and crossed out ‘God’ and wrote ‘cunt’. To this day, if you go down there and look in the window, you can still see, ‘Mike L is a cunt’.” Simon Grigg, Propeller.

1979 TH’DUDES Be Mine Tonight (Key) Peter Urlich was Th’ Dudes lead singer but because of the song’s range, guitarist Dave Dobbyn sang on their first single. It was done in the big room at Stebbings Studio, which has a rich, ambient sound like the classic NZBC Durham Lane studio which is now a carpark. “The guitars are leaking through everything,” says Dobbyn. “It didn’t matter, the song was just a drone, with a high B and E working their way up the fretboard, thrashing away. I couldn’t play barre chords right across, so it was sasier to play them like that and leave the other strings open, letting the chords ring. You can do a lot with that.” Dobbyn and lan Morris wrote separately, but didn’t want to argue over every song, so credited everything Dobbyn/Morris. “It means you have an automatic writing team in the band, which makes it easier,” says Dobbyn. “We both still get a cheque from APRA.” Morris was also an engineer at Stebbings, so he was aware of arrangements and production. “He was really into the mechanics of how Beatles’ records were made, and as an engineer he had the jump on us,” says Dobbyn. “He was the guru of twirling knobs and chord progressions. We wanted it to sound Byrdsy, Californian. It seemed like a song for the beach.” Th’ Dudes had in mind an epic pop song, like ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ or ‘Born to Run’. Now, Dobbyn cringes when he hears the long, jangly guitar solo (which Stranded In Paradise credits as influencing the Dunedin sound). “It all felt like an epic. We were getting lots of work. It was exciting, this thing had wheels: from Glen Innes to travelling the country was quite a big leap. It didn’t take long for it to get played a lot around Auckland. We had a couple of good summers on that one.” The song reached number 36, for one week. CB

TOY LOVE Rebel/Squeeze (WEA) The Beatles may have invented the double-A sided single, but Toy Love managed it with their first release. ‘Rebel’ became the A-side after the band heard the song played back in the studio. Alec Bathgate’s washing-machine guitar and Mike Dooley’s booming toms have an instant impact, and Jane Walker’s tacky organ give it the requisite return-to-pop hook to match Knox’s Kinksian lyrics. Written in the band’s Williamson Rd flat in Auckland, both songs were recorded and mixed at Mandrill in two days. Producer Glyn Tucker — who had been in pop bands during the 1960 s — wanted a live sound to the songs, and ‘Rebel’ went down quickly as the band had already played it for a few months. ‘Squeeze’ — which started life as an Enemy song called ‘Cockteaser’ — took 12 takes, with Tucker suggesting the brief instrumental break. The band recorded five demos in the session as well. “We were thrilled with ‘Rebel’, we thought there was no reason it wouldn’t get played on radio,” says Chris Knox. “It was catchy, with interesting lyrics, we thought it could storm the charts.” The band first heard a test pressing at a party in Hamilton, putting the acetate on after a Beatles single. “It sounded alright. We said, Yes! We’ve done it — a huge hit.” TVNZ shot videos for free, the band dressing in tails for ‘Squeeze’ against a white screen. TVNZ were very, proud of it, but to Toy Love it seemed... new wave. Knox remembers enjoying crushing a toy doll in the final scene. The single was on the charts for six weeks, peaking at No 29. ‘Rebel’ got some airplay, but three months later something happened which was unheard-of for a New Zealand band: the single got a rave review in the NME. CB

1980 SPLIT ENZ I Got You (Mushroom) Noel Crombie remembers Neil Finn coming along to a rehearsal with a song that began chug chug chug/ chug chug chug. “Everyone sat around fairly nonplussed. We thought, not a bad little song, we’ll give that one a go.” Young English producer David Tickle convinced the band to keep it simple. To the three-note melody, Eddie Rayner added some cheesy retro keyboards, just right for postpunk pop. “We started to really think about arrange- — ments,” says Eddie. “Not repeating parts or having too many, getting back to the first chorus.” Neil remembers thinking the chorus (“I don’t know why sometimes I feel frightened”) was a little trite. “I thought it wasn’t an extraordinary song. We just did a good arrangement of it in the studio and it was right for the times. At the time I was a bit embarrassed by it because it was so basic, but the band thought it was great.” The others convinced him to leave it as it was. Just as well: ‘I Got You’ spent eight weeks on the top of the New Zealand charts, ten in Australia, and reached No 12 in Britain. After nearly eight years, Split Enz were pop stars. Eddie says that the first time Split Enz had played Australia, “We were booed off stage, by little girls, basically, who wanted to see their teen idols. And now we were being screamed at by their younger sisters. Neil was plastered all over teen pop magazines and posters, TV and radio.” CB SPELLING MISTAKES Feel So Good (Propeller) “I wrote it in a caravan that I used to live in, in Glen Innes, it started out being about a friend of mine, but it ended up being changed. When we were recording it, one of the lyrics went, ‘I could give you all the shit that I had to give’, but the powers that be decided ‘shit’ should be erased. So we inserted ‘stuff’ instead, but on the recording it ended up sounding like ‘love’, so the nature of the song changed, it had more of a bent about a lover. We recorded at Mascot, and Barry Jenkins, he so-called ‘produced it’, but all he did was smoke up large and laugh in the studio. When we came to do the video, we asked for a huge plastic bag to be made for us, to play in and generally writhe around in. But when we got to Avalon [TVstudios], the set had a whole lot of tinsel hanging from it, we were a bit pissed off about that, but we thought, ‘oh well’. When it aired on Radio With Pictures, it turned out to be the same set that Flight X 7 used, god knows what their song was, but their video was on that night too, they looked like pretty identical. “[‘Feels So Good’] came out after a song which is kinda embarrassing for me now. ‘Reena’s Pissflaps’ was our big song, but it’s good that it took over and got bigger.”

Julian Hansen