New Zealand, ecstatic and epic. Its beauty and power is in every New Zealander’s DNA. Even of itself, the landscape is astonishingly creative. Deep in the heart of Milford extremes of weather literally remake the landscape every 10 minutes. This creative energy too is part of our birthright.
Māori have words and a system to describe these forces. We don’t but we certainly feel them. Living in this land our artists are given a sense of infinite space, daring, a sense of terror and an unparallelled imagination. Our very inarticulateness and frail identity as Pākehā gives our work an emotional width and frailty. There’s a careful spiritual power in the ritual that is a Teeks concert but as Pākehā we bring hearts as big as the Pacific Ocean.
Here are 10 of my favorites. If we were going to warm up we would probably start with the emotion of Max Merritt’s ‘Slipping Away’ or the joy of Mark Williams’ ‘Yesterday is Just the Beginning of My Life’, both online. Then we’d come to …
Lovey Dovey – Split Enz
A song so brilliant it blows up the word genre. I mean what genre do you call this? Brechtian voodoo Hey Nonny songs? The 1970s were a flowering of great New Zealand culture: Red Mole, the Enz, punk, the Dunedin sound, and the Māori Renaissance. Leadership so farsighted and clear, the benefits to all have just multiplied over the generations. Art tells the truth. Here Split Enz throw their lance deep into the future.
Today is Gonna Be Mine – David Kilgour
Ecstatic and epic in size. “I wrote my name across your sky.” David Kilgour’s guitar is like the Sun coming out. I don’t know how he gets that sound. Abstract and golden – it’s a burning brand of lyrical power. Here he bottles it in a song.
Pull Down the Shades – Toy Love
I saw Shayne Carter with Bored Games sing this – first sung by Chris Knox in The Enemy – in the Dunedin Town Hall while Shayne attacked his sister’s beloved soft toy. What a moment, but what a song. One of the great anarchic anthems, the song, as song always does, held the moment in its jaws. Chris Knox changed my life, as he did many people. Seeing him perform at the university cafeteria climbing up ladders and other acts of violence, taunting students out of their beloved apathy, was extraordinary. The air changed that day. I have never been the same since. Thank you, Chris. He pioneered a whole world of bravery which is still with us, check out Auckland’s Audio Foundation under Jeffrey Henderson and other forms of brilliant diving into the deep unknown of sound.
Say Honestly – Eru Dangerspiel
The size of this song is incredible. I heard the incandescent Ria Hall sing this at the Auckland festival with my daughter. I thought I had gone to heaven, and was forced to write a song the next day in response. Dr Rikki Gooch (Eru Dangerspiel) is a blessing to New Zealand music in any capacity, be it performer, composer, or presence. Check out anything he does including his beautiful contributions to David Long’s exquisite albums Ash and Bone and All Things Remain Silent.
The Little Things – Trinity Roots
It lodged in your heart the first time you heard it, and it immediately made sense of being here. It spoke of care, tenderness, and attention, it dared you to be kind. It takes a band to deeply trust each other to make music this delicate.
I have always felt that the mark of a truly great band is how they play a repeating phrase over and over. Think of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ from the Beatles. It takes unity of purpose, intention, sheer balls, and commitment. Hearts fused.
When I first heard ‘Egos’ on the 2004 Trinity Roots album Home, Land And Sea, I exulted in every second of its 3 minutes 30 repeating phrase. Each moment they dug in deeper was absolute bliss. It marked a moment for me when New Zealand music seemed to be growing so sure of itself that it could do anything. Great drummer of course.
Drummers are often the moral spirits, in every way the heart of the band. Think of Questlove, Ringo, Charlie Watts. There’s a great Baby Dodds quote: “As a drummer you have to pay attention to everyone. Drumming is spirit and it can’t be an evil spirit. If you drum evil you put evil into somebody else’s mind. God help an evil spirit band. They’re liable to step on each other’s instruments. Might put limburger cheese in a man’s piano.”
We have great drummers in this country, think Chris O’Connor, Ross Burge, and many others. Let’s give the drummers some.
Song for Sue – Don McGlashan
He lifts us through the most mundane detail to the utter incomprehension and incompatibility of death. It’s so grounded it can naturally become vast. Its grace is magnificent. It shakes you. Theatre and festival director Sue Paterson in real life was an extraordinary woman and a mentor and friend to so many of our artistic community. Utterly irreplaceable, like this music. Don McGlashan keeps getting better. It just about kills me not to mention ‘Miracle Sun’ – or ‘Miracle Song’, as I like to call it. But there, I’ve just done it.
Song of the Years – Dave Dobbyn
It takes a poet to set a poet. A setting of the James K Baxter poem for the Baxter album. Here Dave Dobbyn effortlessly creates the song James K Baxter perhaps always heard in his mind’s eye when he was writing the poem. A Catholic la-de-dah song, Genre: Very Very Good.
Speaking of landscape, Dave’s album Twist had an amazing sound to it, like you were walking through the deep bush. Wet and complex forms. Beautiful writing of course but the sound and imagination of it could have only come from here. The sound, a kind of poetry of the skin. And speaking of poetry it brings me to …
Requiem II – Victoria Kelly, with Sam Hunt
Why this song isn’t played every day on RNZ Concert and RNZ National I don’t know. A setting of Sam Hunt’s poem ‘Requiem’, for Victoria Kelly’s amazing secular Requiem. An utterly superb melody that wings its way slowly into a never-ending sky. It worked for Marvin Gaye, it works here. Beautifully written and arranged, and featuring Simon O’Neill, the great singer of Wagnerian heldentenor roles. Here, Victoria commissions his voice into the purest falsetto, making a vocal line of utter vulnerability, simplicity and wonder. Brilliant.
In the Garden of Sonic Delights / Wild Energy – Annea Lockwood & Bob Bielecki
Annea is a New Zealander and a proponent of deep listening. Part of the US avant garde since the early 1960s, she was recently made a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work was inspired by the walks she had as a child in Christchurch, in the Arthur’s Pass, being immersed in the sound of rivers and birds. An eco feminist, she has used the latest scientific technology to map rivers, record the sound of pianos being burnt planted or drowned. She is perhaps most famous for her sound of mapping rivers as vast as the Danube and the Hudson. With ‘In the Garden of Sonic Delights’ she and Bob Bielecki find way to bring the waves of infrasound and ultrasound into our audio spectrum, therefore giving us access to what we feel but can’t hear. Sources such as trees, the sun, seismic activity, hypothermal vents are here, all made real for us as sound.
At a London installation of her work she wrote, “I’m hoping with the sound to draw people inside the river, so they lose all sense of separation. The river is no longer an object; it is something in which they are engulfed.” The more we can recognise how we are not separate from the phenomenon of the world, the more we can become concerned about the environment. What you feel at one with, you can’t harm.”
She is yet another one of our brilliant artists which we have never heard of because the sports segment of the news is too long. Even in Covid when there wasn’t any sport there was a 21-minute sports section. The creative industries contribute more to the GDP in this country than agriculture, yet there is no news of them – so what, they don’t exist?
Submarine Bells – The Chills
Martin already has two actual stars named after him. Martin Phillipps, and The Chills. There couldn’t be a better example of the fragility wonder and poetic imagination that, I believe, is inherent in all of us who live in this country. But there is a powerful continuity to all this. Just one step back from Martin is his father, Don. Under his watch the Methodist Church gave church land back to Māori and fully committed to the bicultural pathway. And right beside Don – in the same church and choir – was my own father Colin Gibson, who spearheaded and championed a New Zealand contemporary hymn-writing tradition. His work, too, was inspired by New Zealand landscape as an expression of the power and love of God. He might not be on Spotify but on Sunday he will be sung all over New Zealand and the world. For those of you who don’t go to church you will have heard his music on Anzac Day played by the New Zealand Army Band, a tune called ‘Honour the Dead’.
And the last twist in the tale lies with our kids and young people. What they make of this land and how it makes them feel. Dare I mention in this regard my own daughter Vida Gibson, who was up for a Taite Prize for best newcomer last year. She is VIDA on Spotify and the album is called Aquatopialien. We have some CDs at home. But best not to mention your own kids eh?
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John Gibson composed his first major work at the age of 16: a rock opera. By the age of 24 he had been musical director at Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre, and at Auckland’s Theatre Corporate. In the mid-1980s he acted on-screen, playing a keyboardist in an aspiring rock band in the TV drama series, Heroes. He also composed songs for the fictional band in the series, winning a Gofta award, alongside the show’s musical director Stephen McCurdy. Since then Gibson has composed music for television, theatre and dance, from Shakespeare to modern theatre. He often collaborates with his wife, noted choreographer Shona McCullagh. Gibson’s theatre CV now runs to more than 100 scores, and 150-plus original songs.