Dead Flowers

Rip It Up, Issue 250, 1 June 1998, Page 18

Dead Flowers

A Hew Phase of Pop /

"Sexually it was a very dull tour for all concerned as everyone was looked after back home, I was one of the few single people there. Greg Johnson picked up an air hostess on the plane — that was kinda cool." Ensconced in an office at Ripltllp’s central Auckland HQ, Bryan Bell, guitarist and lead singer/songwriter with Dead Flowers, is recalling the band’s lightning-quick, late April romp to England with the Exponents, Johnson, Hello Sailor’s Dave McArtney, and Oz rockers, Mental As Anything. The tour, billed as The Running of the Bands and timed to coincide with Anzac weekend, amounted to four sold-out gigs over consecutive nights at the Shepherd’s Bush Walkabout in London, a regular haunt for thousands of drunken and dispossessed New Zealand and Aussie ex-pats. For Dead Flowers, their first trip to England was an action packed one, and the dramas began as soon as they stepped off the plane at Heathrow Airport. An organisational hitch saw the touring party arrive in the UK without working visas, making them legally unable to perform on English soil. Immigration officials at Heathrow were soon alerted that 16 musicians were wandering around the international terminal, and while the Exponents avoided trouble by informing Customs that they were in the country, “to get pissed,” Dead Flowers’ guitarist Damon Newton got nailed big-time. Bell takes up the story. “What happened was, the lawyer in London who was meant to be in charge of organising visas said that the Immigration computer had gone down and he couldn’t get us work visas. He told us to come over on visitor visas and

that we’d be fine, and just to tell Customs that we were on holiday. We get to Heathrow and 16 of us get through, and Damon who was one of the last to come through, unfortunately gets a real Nazi Immigration officer who starts grilling him. While trying to keep our situation under wraps, Damon lied himself into a corner, and he was taken into a room and grilled for a further four hours. Immigration got Barry [Blackler, Exponent’s manager] and Manolo [Echave, Dead Flowers’ manager] into a room and worked out the whole story. As it happened, the Immigration computers had never gone down, the lawyer was too much of a fat, lazy cunt to apply for our visas in time. Because Damon had lied to Immigration there was nothing else for them to do but send him back home on the next available flight, two days later.” Understandably, Newton is reluctant to dwell on his aborted excursion. “I got a guy who was very into his job,” he says. With Newton’s tour shortened to 48 hours, the fortunate members of the tour party resolved to make the most of it. Then followed their second encounter with authority. “All this shit had happened,” says Bell, “so we decided to take Damon out. We went to this club and some were snorting heaps of cocaine. We stayed there for most of the night, and at seven in the morning we still couldn’t sleep so we decided to go to Camden Market. We were in a cab driving through these empty streets, then we turned a corner and these two cops flagged down the cab and started interrogating us. They wanted to get us out of the cab and search us, and one of us had half a gram of coke in his wallet. Realising the obvious repercussions of being caught — they’d send us all home — we played it really straight and

very friendly to ‘the bill’, and they let us go.” Unable to obtain working visas after arriving in England, the tour party were obliged to fly to Brussels, secure the correct permits, then return to London — a journey that forced the cancellation of the first two Walkabout shows. On a Wednesday night, a makeshift version of Dead Flowers finally made it on stage. “We ended up using Dave [Barraclough] from the Exponents on guitar, which was weird,” says Bell. “He’s familiar with our stuff, but they were never going to be the shows they could have been with Damon. At the same time, we were in London and we couldn’t be bummed out, we had to put on as good a show as we could.” Aside from the “wicked buzz” of performing in the UK, Bell says Dead Flowers’ England jaunt opened his eyes to the massive task facing an unknown band seeking attention in London’s huge and diverse music scene. “I think starting from scratch over there would be an overwhelming prospect, completely intimidating.” In addition, Aaron Carson, sitting in for Flowers’ bassist Darryn Harkness, took the opportunity while in England to explore Stonehenge. “It was a bit of a pilgrimage, it meant a lot to me, and being a big fan of Spinal Tap it meant even more.”

In September 1996, Dead Flowers flew to Sydney to begin recording their third album, following up 1994’s Sweetfish, and Skin of a Stone, released in 1992. The band were entering a new phase; founding members Dave James and Riqi Hadfield had left, and the new line-up of Bell, Newton, Harkness and drummer Rob Dollars were shifting away from a heavy rock sound to a fresh pop approach. A week into the recording sessions at Darling Harbour Studio with Aussie engineer Robbie Rowlands, Bell was delighted with the progress being made. “Working with Robbie is great, he isn’t precious about the songs because they aren’t his babies. That means if we have an ugly baby he’ll say, ‘you’ve got an ugly baby, hey man, get a better looking baby.’ It’s

the first recording experience that I could say has been enjoyable, the other two albums were quite stressful.” Almost two years on, the completion of Dead Flowers has been, in

every sense of the phrase, a labour of love. Many factors, including forced periods of inactivity and financial concerns, conspired to ensure the band worked at a laborious pace. For starters, Dead Flowers arrived home from Sydney with the album only half finished, causing the project to temporarily stall while a ‘plan B’ was formulated. In the interim, Bell contributed backing vocals to the Exponents album Better Never Than Late, and while in the studio, spent hours observing the production style of former Split Enz I Crowded House keyboardist, Eddie Rayner. “I liked the way he worked,” explains Bell, “and I thought he’d be the perfect person to come along and put the freshness back into our stuff.” Beginning in April last year, Rayner and Dead Flowers toiled and grafted at Auckland’s Revolver Studio, and emerged this February, with an album that blatantly displays Bell’s exceptional songwriting and the band’s simplified pop sound. The new approach on Dead Flowers is evidence of the band having matured, says Bell. “It’s just growing up. When you first start, the biggest trap you fall into, and I did, is you write music for other musicians, you want to wank and you want to impress. It’s like, ‘we’ll make it really complex and we’ll do all this weird shit, and this other great guitar player down the road will think it’s great what we do with our guitars, and this other bass player is going to flip over this bass line.’ With this album, I really re-evaluated what I like about music, and what I like is songs that make me feel good, and songs that really rock out.

“On the first two albums we just winged it, on this album we knew we had to come up with the shit, and we addressed problems and listened to constructive criticism more than we did before. The longer you’re in a band, ultimately you’re going to get more professional and hopefully you get better, and that’s what’s happened with our band.”

Although it’s been four years between albums for Dead Flowers, Bell is maintaining a philosophical line on the extended difficulties surrounding their latest opus. “The actual process of making this album has still been enjoyable, it’s just the delays and the time doing nothing has taken the sheen off the enjoyment of it,” says Bell. “It’s frustrating that it didn’t all happen right the first time, but I can’t bitch about it because when things were wrong they were fixed. We had a lot more money being spent on the album and the project has been seen through to a high standard.” Questioned regarding the recording cost of the album, Bell is upfront.

“I think a fair estimate would be around $70,000. It is a fuck of a lot of money for an independent record label like Wildside, but in the scheme of things people would say $70,000 is a relatively cheap album. It would freak me out if you couldn’t hear $70,000 on the album, but I think you can, it would freak me out if it sounded like kaka.”

With album sessions progressing smoothly, the band blew out the studio cobwebs on a six week nationwide tour over the Christmas/New Year period, supporting the Exponents. Armed with sponsorship from Lion Breweries, Bell says there was free ‘Red’ all the time.

“It was a really unhealthy way of living, drinking non-stop for six weeks. It worked out that the first person to stop drinking was the first person to get sick. Jordan [Luck] got to the point where he couldn’t keep a beer down.” Dollars, whose preference lies with Tai Chi and not liquor, described the tour as, “the best six week period of my life.” Bell concurs. “Because the

Exponents have been touring around New Zealand for so long, they do everything really well. You get set up in really stylee hotels, you get per diems, you get free piss, and you’re always playing to over 600 people a night. When you’re doing that for 43 shows in a month and a half, how could you not enjoy it.” Dead Flowers enter a new phase as they release their new album halfway through 1998. For the first time, the band have received widespread commercial radio play for their singles, and touring with the Exponents has delivered them to mainstream audiences throughout the country. This broadening awareness of their music suggests Dead Flowers are positioned to have their best shot at experiencing significant local success. Bell and Newton are aware the third album is traditionally a turning point for some bands, but refuse to be burdened by pressure or expectation.

“If this album is not a commercial success, and if we don’t make that money back, or at least a reasonable chunk of it back, chances are there won’t be anymore Dead Flowers albums,” notes Bell. “At the same time, I don’t think about it that much, it’s just there. I think the band has delivered on the album, and that’s half the job done. We understand the dynamic of the band a lot better and we know that we’re not just doing it for the free beer at the end. We want to put out a good album that is a commercial success so we can keep putting out albums and make a living out of it.”

“To me, this is like record number one,” says Newton, “and the other two were almost demos to this one. It’s the first album of an international standard that we’ve done, and hopefully, this will be the first one to start us off.” JOHN RUSSELL