It started in 1997, when a little-known bass player came up with some songs of his own, which he tested out on friends and friends of friends on intimate performances in lounges and kitchens, using just voice and acoustic guitar. The songs were introspective, haunting, and didn’t seem to quite belong to any specific tradition.

But it was a different sound that Donnelly introduced shortly thereafter on an EP’s worth of tracks by the fictional Delicious Food Band. Rather than heart-on-sleeve songs, this new project, shortly thereafter renamed SJD, was an experiment in judicious sampling, slicing and dicing into outrageous collages that somehow hung together as compositions.

Less than a year later, the self-released album, 3, formalised the SJD style. If those lucky enough to have heard his acoustic solo act had been gob smacked, they were knocked out of the ring by the album. Obviously DIY and made on computer gear groaning under the weight of his exacting demands, the record was full of moody grooves that somehow broached the dance world while hinting at real songwriting skills. In other words, he was New Zealand’s own Beck, without being in the least bit derivative of that star. Nevertheless, SJD clearly had similar abilities to collide worlds.

Already nearing 30 when his first recordings hit the 95bFM playlist, little is known about Donnelly’s pre-SJD life, so we pressed him for details about the formative years. It turns out that right from the beginning, he was a mixture of musician and technology-meddler:

“The start of it for me was about taping songs off the radio on an old reel-to-reel recorder,” says Donnelly. “I’d then drop in little links and things between the tracks, using rather a lot of speeding up and slowing down of the tape and using the overdubbing function to make crowd sounds, applause, etcetera. After that, it was endless overdubbing with a Casio VL-tone until I bought my first synth, a Roland SH-101, in my early teens.

“I managed to inveigle my way into the school band on synth and keys – kind of like a teenage Eno with floppy fringe and a Joy Division T-shirt, and spent most of my sixth and seventh form skiving off to the music room, which had two 2-track machines, which meant endless overdubbing and sound degradation!”

Donnelly reckons he filled around 40 cassettes with “synth ditties and soundtracks to imaginary films” before he briefly joined a Christian rock band, where he wrote his first “proper” songs, “a lot of them about nuclear annihilation and teenage depression … we were way too left of centre for the God-botherers.”

A big moment came in his early 20s when, playing in a post-punk-influenced band called the Love Popes, Donnelly picked up the bass guitar. His melodic approach to the instrument would play a big part in the future SJD sound. Later, he mastered the fundamentals of guitar to start a country-rock band called The Slaters, but “started messing around with samples and synths in my spare time, which sort of evolved into the first incarnation of SJD. I liked the results, because I could put ‘songy’ bits into the music but not get so sick of them, because there was a big cushion of instrumental weirdness surrounding them.”

Lost Soul Music, released through Stinky Jim (Jim Pinckney)’s super cool Round Trip Mars imprint, showed that a major talent had arrived.

Perhaps Donnelly sums up in that one sentence why so many were drawn to electronic music hybrids in the mid-to-late 90s: with the influence of hip-hop and trip-hop and techno and house and other dance styles coming through, traditional song structures seemed dull, if only for a moment in time.

While 3 was impressive, its successor, Lost Soul Music, released through Stinky Jim (Jim Pinckney)’s super cool Round Trip Mars imprint, showed that a major talent had arrived with its deft and skillful integration of new technology – electronics, heavily manipulated sampling – and old-fashioned writing and singing skills. And although the record only scraped to 50 on the NZ album chart, the song ‘Tree People’, with its hilarious sped-up vocal and humorous rhyming couplets, did own the 95bFM playlist in 2001.

Southern Lights (2004) saw Donnelly putting his electronics on the backburner with a set of classic 60s and 70s-influenced songs, while collaborating with a who’s who of hot names, including Don McGlashan (with whom he would subsequently appear as a sideman, and later perform together in The Bellbirds), David Kilgour, Paul McLaney, Anika Moa, James Duncan, Dominic Blaazer and local jazzers Dan Sperber, Kingsley Melhuish and Jim Langabeer. Making it to 31 on the album charts, like Lost Soul Music it contained a song in ‘Superman You’re Crying’ that many felt could have been a smash hit.

“I just can’t get past certain beautiful sounds I hear from that late 60s and early 70s music,” Donnelly told me in 2004. “I’m crazy about that stuff.”

But the interior workings of the songs were something different. “At the time I was doing psychotherapy, which was a new experience for me, and I was feeling terribly threatened … you don’t know if people are on your side or not, you desperately want it all to be true because you want to come out of your shell and for it to be wonderful and life can be better, but you don’t know if it’s true. The song ‘Place Surrounded’ was getting inside the feeling of that psychological state – threatening and destructive at the same time. So, in general, the album has a few darker aspects.”

If Southern Lights dazzled many, 2007’s Songs From A Dictaphone struck perhaps the perfect synergy for the musically schizophrenic artist, somehow managing to successfully merge clever electronics with songwriting smarts. To date it’s his highest charting album, zooming all the way to 11. Once again subtly incorporating the talents of James Duncan, Paul McLaney, Sandy Mill, keyboardist Dominic Blaazer, drummer Chris O’Connor, as well as a small string section, it’s an album that many felt encapsulated and shone a light on what made SJD great, and struck a beautiful balance between searching and playful, groovy and ethereal, and every point in between.

If Southern Lights dazzled many, 2007’s Songs From A Dictaphone struck perhaps the perfect synergy for the musically schizophrenic artist.

After that, the following year’s Dayglo Spectres felt disappointing. Co-written by guitarist James Duncan, who became a partner in SJD over this period, the sound seemed willfully detached and ironic and guitar-centric, while the songs took a backseat. But if Dayglo Spectres represented a sideways misstep, to many, Elastic Wasteland (2012) a whole four years later was just one step too far into the abyss. It was the first SJD album since his debut to completely fail to chart, and received a critically mixed reaction.

In 2015, Donnelly spoke about the album, which won the prestigious Taite Music Prize in 2013:

“That’s my version of synthpop, but it coincided with being the middle of winter and being a little melancholic, so it ended up being quite a melancholic version of synthpop. I realised after I did that a lot of people wrinkled their noses because they didn’t get it at all. Because when you hear people’s synthpop it has a late 80s, early 90s sound about it. The glories of synthpop for me were Soft Cell, early Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark … stuff that was influenced by Kraftwerk, and influenced by soul music, and either had super electronic sounds or warm lush sounds, but wasn’t that brittle sounding stuff, that brittle plasticy sound, which is that Michael Jackson and Madonna stuff.

“It’s a very miserable album,” he admits. “I always think there’s a bit of hopefulness in there, but really, it’s quite despairing and sad. But I had to make that album, no choice.”

What’s missing from this story, of course, is that from 2004 onwards, Sean Donnelly had become a busy lad collaborating with and helping other artists with their music, as well as a short period adding jingles to his income. With the persistence of an ox, he’s never stopped writing and making his own music, but increasingly, he’s been invited into the musical world of others, and that’s by turn changed his approach.

It began with Don McGlashan, who was still in the tentative steps in the wake of the immolation of The Mutton Birds of reestablishing himself as a solo artist.  

“Somebody gave Don a copy of the very first thing I did,” Donnelly told me in 2010. “I got to meet him and he played some euphonium on Lost Soul Music and he was trying to do his songs solo, so I helped him get his solo thing up and going a little bit. The first incarnation had me on loops, and then it turned into a band thing. I’ve had an association for the last eight years or so with his music, so I know him pretty well. I always think we’re quite kindred musical minds. I was always a fan of his music, and thought he was a great lyricist and melodicist, and he always had a slightly left of centre way of looking at things, particularly the Front Lawn and that first Mutton Birds album, I really did love that stuff, and Blam Blam Blam. He always throws a weird chord in there, and the melody follows in a slightly bent way but it’s really great.”

The Donnelly/ McGlashan union went all the way with the first incarnation of a side project, The Bellbirds, which also featured longtime SJD vocalist-supreme Sandy Mill along with keyboardist and film composer Victoria Kelly. 

By 2010, Donnelly had also been invited into the circle of Finn, and became a key player on Neil Finn’s project with his wife Sharon, Pajama Club.

By 2010, Donnelly had also been invited into the circle of Finn, and became a key player on Neil Finn’s project with his wife Sharon, Pajama Club.

Explaining the recording nearly a year prior to its eventual release in 2011, Donnelly said: “It started with Neil and Sharon just mucking around being a rhythm section, him playing drums and her playing bass. We built them up almost SJD-style, layer on layer, with Sharon singing all over them. Neil’s trying to sound a bit different from how he normally sounds, and he plays some amazing guitar. The initial thing was that band ESG – New York new wave disco. You know, can’t really play your instruments but having a good time doing it. But it’s way, way more widescreen than that now.”

Subsequently, Donnelly toured the Pajama Club project with Neil and Sharon to the UK, but missed the final dates when he nearly died from a mystery illness. Happily, he fully recovered from the ordeal, and Neil Finn went on to provide significant contributions to the latest SJD album, Saint John Divine (2015).

In 2010, Donnelly told me how much he’d love to record his next album in Finn’s Roundhead Studios, but how it was out of his reach financially. “I’ll see how it goes, I don’t want to take the piss, but I’d like to get a bit of a cash injection from a record company. Otherwise I’ll just record it in my own home studio. But Roundhead is a brilliant place to record, it really is, it’s not for no reason that it gets touted as a premier recording studio. It’s more than the fact that it’s got everything a musician needs. It does have a fantastic vibe there. Neil really loves music, and he really loves all the underground stuff that’s happening in New Zealand.”

As it happened, the award-winning Elastic Wasteland was recorded all by himself in his cramped home studio, but finally, on Saint John Divine, Donnelly got the chance to record the whole thing at Roundhead. Of all the SJD albums, it’s the most organic-sounding, with little in the way of electronic enhancement, but solid performances from the usual players (James Duncan, Chris O’Connor, Sandy Mill) and with Neil Finn contributing piano, Wurlitzer, electric guitar and backing vocals.

The critical reception and general level of interest for Saint John Divine have both been spectacular, while Donnelly himself sees it as easily his best to date.

“For me there’s depth in these songs that I haven’t quite achieved before. A lot of the ideas on the earlier albums seem half-baked to me now. I still like the idea of small kernels of songs with a lot of instrumental embellishment, but there’s too many bits in the music, and it sounds like it’s not as truthful. Some of it’s a little bit too conscious of trying to sound clever, and hiding behind things. I feel like a better person for having made those last two albums, because I feel like there was more honesty to it. Maybe that’s all it is – it’s stripping away some of the obvious cleverness, some of the contrived elements in the music so that it’s more of an outpouring of my heart and soul. Clever is just like a joke I’ve heard too many times and it’s not funny.”