Steve Braunias meets an eccentric superstar couple who sold millions of records and created a worldwide movement.
God moves in… eccentric ways, deep in the unsearchable mines of Albany, that arid, distressing outpost of civilisation, neither part of West Auckland or the North Shore, its own strange ageographic state, forever chomping at the land to build more, bigger subdivisions - it was here that I journeyed on a recent afternoon to meet and pay respects to an elderly couple who ought to be regarded as New Zealand music superstars but have remained the biggest-selling artists you’ve never heard of, even in their pomp, when they sold more than a million records and were held with awe throughout America. David and Dale Garratt, 84 and 83 respectively, live in a gated community. It has a swimming pool. Their apartment was like stepping into a gracious home in Remuera, where they lived for many years. A long dining table made from blond wood, mirrors with gilt frames, enormous houseplants…
“It’s old stuff,” said Dale. “A lot of it [came from] off the road. Just junk from everywhere. It’s junk. It’s junk, the mirrors, the photo frames - that silver came from the Takapuna market. You’re always supposed to have silver, Ralph Lauren said.”
Dale did most of the talking that afternoon, full of asides, interruptions, tangents, random thoughts. David made a pot of tea and brought out a plate of Dutch windmill biscuits. Dale sat at the head of the table, and said to him while he was fussing in the kitchen, “Can we have a little thing of napkins?”
He said, “Tea, dear?”
“I’ve drunk a whole lot of water. I’m all good.”
“Biscuit?”
“I just had a banana.”
She was small and forthright, a wise Ngāpuhi kuia with a bright smile. He had the look of an absent-minded mystic, his hair flying in wisps, with “clear, topaz green eyes”, as Dale wrote in her memoir Please Help Yourself, remembering when she first met him “that [those eyes] would one day stare back at me through our daughter Rachel”.
They had achieved something incredible, and were looked on as visionaries and prophets; they spoke in tongues, their Christianity was dynamic and supernatural; they were two nice old people who have suffered, as Dale put it, “brokenness of all kinds”.
He was raised as an Open Brethren in Dunedin, one of 11 children (“David’s mother,” she wrote in her book, “told me she was pregnant for 20 years”). She grew up in Mt Eden, where she danced ballet and loved jazz, big bands - anything with an exciting rhythm. “I was raised a heathen,” said Dale. “You’d call me what an old Christian would say was ‘worldly’ when I met him.”
They met in 1962 at a Youth For Christ concert in Wellington. David said, “I was singing onstage with one of my sisters, and I saw Dale in the middle of the room. I saw her because she had a hat on.”
“I thought you might have noticed me because I looked nice, not because of the hat.”
“Well, you did look nice.”
“I had dated everyone in the free world,” Dale said, “and then decided I wouldn’t ever date anyone else again until I felt God gave me the right person.”
Like most eccentrics, David was a life-long eccentric. When they met, even his job was eccentric: he was a tea taster, for Bell Tea (he always makes the tea in the Garratt household). They married and had two daughters, and became actively, fervently caught up in the Jesus movement of the 1960s. David, more than Dale, liked to talk about those times, their intensity and their meaning; he saw patterns and purpose. He said, “Something remarkable was happening spiritually throughout the world. There was an alertness. All of a sudden, in South Africa, in Canada, in England, everywhere, things were happening spiritually that seemed unconnected but were the same. God, the Holy Spirit, was all of a sudden being revealed as actually giving spiritual gifts to human beings.”
Dale liked to sing. David had learned to play three chords on a ukulele from a Samoan friend. They both loved hymns and had the idea of recording a few songs of praise and worship as a way to spread the word of God. They booked a studio in Nugent St in Grafton.
David: “We had a drummer friend who used to be a drug addict. He had a friend who played piano, and Dale had a cousin who was a guitarist, so we decided to put a few of those songs on to a little disc.”
Dale: “We thought it’d be helpful for people to take home.”
David: “So, we went to a little studio in Nugent St and did nine songs in four hours with these musicians who didn’t share any of our feelings. It made me realise God uses anyone.”
Dale: “Nobody at church played guitar or drums, only piano and organ. But as a teenager, I was going to the dances all the time and didn’t know anything but a rhythm section - piano, bass, drums, guitar. So it was natural for me to say, ‘That’s what we’re going to get’. But it wasn’t popular with Christians at the beginning. They said, ‘You’re using the devil’s tools’.”
They released their first album Praise The Name of Jesus: A Live Expression of Worship in the Outdoors in 1968. I brought along a copy to the interview. It’s a bit of a masterpiece, and it made them superstars.
John Hawkesby was there at the start. Speaking from his home on Waiheke Island, the former broadcaster said he booked the Garratts to play at the Drift Inn on Robert St, Ellerslie, a folk music venue that he ran from 1966-1971. It was Ellerslie’s answer to The Cavern in Liverpool, which he drew on as the model; it had a low ceiling, and wax sensually dripping from candles burning in empty wine bottles (it was unlicensed - no one actually drank). It hosted concerts on Sunday nights and could cram in 600 hipsters. The Garratts played with their band, a kind of musical and religious conglomerate known as Scripture in Song.
They sang Bible verses set to soft rock. “Very innovative,” said Hawkesby. “Churches were looking for a new expression of worship. They struck a vein, and it went gangbusters.” Their debut album Praise The Name of Jesus, recorded live at the Awapuni racetrack in Palmerston North, went to number one on the UK gospel charts and is widely credited for inspiring a worldwide wave of live gospel records. Over the next 30 years, Scripture in Song made an astonishing 37 records, as well as songbooks which sold in their millions.
Stephen Bell-Booth, a celebrated Christian songwriter, played piano on Praise The Name of Jesus. His house in Awapuni looks over the racetrack. “Interesting gig,” he said. “There was an upright piano and some of the notes didn’t work. I had to navigate my way around quickly and remember which ones to avoid.” He remains in awe of what the Garratts achieved: “David and Dale were revolutionary. They started a movement; it was a worldwide phenomenon, led by the Garratts from their base in Auckland. They were absolute pioneers.”
The LP sounds exactly like what Flying Nun artists like Chris Knox set out to achieve as a music philosophy: lo-fi. A thrush sings very loudly in the background of one of David Garratt’s raps to the audience. It’s one of the least professional records ever made, but it has something else, a purity, an ecstasy. David: “It was edited with a razor blade. I said to God, ‘Should we even put this out?’ I felt Him to say to me, ‘If you sow it as a seed, I will make it strong’. And it became a huge-selling record.”
Their biggest hit was their 1972 double album Prepare Ye The Way, which sold 88,000 copies in New Zealand. “Every Christian home in New Zealand had a copy,” reckoned Bruce Grail, a Scripture in Song alumni who wrote the album’s orchestral arrangements on his honeymoon. “It became a significant album globally. They generated a whole new massive scene in the US. It really is incredible.”
I brought a copy of Prepare Ye The Way, too, to the Garratt household; John Hawkesby can still picture the cover: “For a Christian album, that was rather good. Usually, a Christian record would have some appallingly smiley person on the cover looking like they were waiting for the rapture.”
The cover was a hard-edged, documentary-style photomontage of a crowded city street and heavy machinery tilling the earth, illustrated by Peter Haythornthwaite, now recognised as one of New Zealand’s greatest modernist designers. That collaboration was a feature of the way Scripture in Song operated – the Garratts never stayed still, constantly changing the line-ups of their band, working with a stable of songwriters around the world (Dale wrote songs, too; she’d hum melodies on to a cassette and work with a musician to create a structure). They recorded with many of the biggest names in New Zealand Christian music, such as the Pink family (songwriter Dr Ramon Pink became the chief Canterbury DHB medical officer of health), as well as musicians including Billy Kristian (the bass player for Ray Columbus and The Invaders) and Gray Bartlett, who was among the many suitors who proposed to Dale before she chose David.
There’s an amazing photograph of the Scripture in Song ensemble on the back cover of their 1978 album Father Make Us One. They look like a commune of well-dressed and prosperous hippies, assembled on the front porch of the Garratts’ five-bedroom home at Ōmāhu Rd in Remuera (swimming pool out the back); it’s a creative hub of Jesus freaks at the peak of the Scripture in Song phenomena. Dale studied the photo and said, “This guy was a Bible teacher … There’s Tony, who used to be a druggie … This couple had been out in the jungle in Brisbane and eating the mushrooms.” I pointed to a little girl on the front steps, wearing a bonnet, like someone from Gloriavale. It was their daughter Rachel. “We were touring in Arkansas and saw all the Amish people,” Dale said. “Rachel just loved their clothes and would never take that bonnet off.”
One year, in 1982, they toured the US and Europe for 10 months. They were awarded the International Dove Award in 1984 by the Nashville Gospel Music Association for lifetime achievement. The fourth Scripture in Song LP I brought to their home, Arise and Shine, was a collaboration with the blind wife of a Louisiana pastor; she features on the cover, smiling like she’s waiting for the rapture. Their music changed with the times: the 1981 LP Songs of Joy includes a fantastic disco track, Come With Praise. I was alerted to it by that brilliantly knowledgeable and enthusiastic champion of obscure New Zealand music, Dujon Cullingford of Ngāruawāhia.
“There’s not a whole lot of New Zealand disco from that era,” he said, “so any disco music that you can get your hands on from an NZ artist is already much appreciated. If Come with Praise was known to current DJs, you’d have a few edits already - you could put a beat behind it and make a house track from it. That track is amazing. Dale’s vocal has so much energy in it.”
It’s one of her best vocal performances with Scripture in Song, and there’s a case to be made that Dale Garratt is actually among the very best female singers in New Zealand music history. Her vocals on tracks such as There’s Just Something and Lift Jesus Higher on Praise The Name of Jesus are gorgeous, full of longing - of course, she’s singing to God, but it’s possible to hear them in another way. The great author David Foster Wallace had a fascinating approach to country music, saying that he saw a new, deeper value in it when he imagined the love songs as a metaphor, “that what they’re really singing is to God”; as a thought experiment, you can flip that, and imagine Dale Garratt’s songs of praise as beautiful love songs. To listen to her that way is to make the music travel beyond a Christian message and to hear them as stunning piano ballads from a long-lost 70s pop artiste.
But this is also to corrupt the very point of Scripture in Song. In a sense, it wasn’t even about the music. “We never wanted to do anything that was cluttered musically so that the message got through easily and clearly,” said David. When I asked him if he had visions of God, he said that a better way to describe it was he had impressions of God. He received an impression when he founded Scripture in Song: “My only job was to lead people to God, not to lead them to yourself. We never deviated.”
The millions of records and songbooks, the revolution that created an entire genre of contemporary Christian music - and yet neither of the Garratts were ever especially musical. David said an extraordinary thing: “We were completely inappropriate to do what we were doing. There’s a Bible verse that says God chooses the simple to confound the wise. And that’s the thing I want people to understand. We were unsuited to do what we did, but we were chosen for what we did because we were unsuited for what we did.”
Baptist pastor Luke Kaa-Morgan, a long-time collaborator with the Garratts, was familiar with the way they worked. He said, “David was more like the visionary, and executive producer. Dale was the primary soloist and songwriter. Together, they’re like the godfathers of the Christian worship movement in New Zealand. The esteem in which they’re widely held is lovely to see. They forged a path that was unique to them, and it resonated around the world.”
Eventually, the Garratts sold the entire Scripture in Song music catalogue to a US publisher.
I asked, “Did you get a good price?”
Dale said, “Yes. Extremely good.”
David said, “Pretty good price.”
I asked, “Over a million?”
Dale said, “Oh, yes. But we didn’t know anything about money, Steve. We were missionaries with music, and idiots with money.”
John Hawkesby said of them, “Delightful couple. I’ve got a real soft spot for David and Dale. They are without guile. They had a gentle naïvety in their business dealings.”
I said, “You are describing two holy fools.”
He said, “Glorious innocents, led to slaughter.”
The years of “brokenness of all kinds” were from 1998 to 2005. They lost virtually all the money they made from the sale of Scripture in Song, and a carcinoma killed their daughter Rachel. The girl with the topaz green eyes and the Amish bonnet died at 33.
“When that pay-out came,” Dale said, “somebody sloped up to us who just wasn’t on the level and said, ‘I can invest it for you’, and that was that.”
I asked, “How much of it went?”
She said, “About two-thirds.”
David said, “But it wasn’t like he purposefully pinched our money. It wasn’t like that at all.”
Dale said, “But it was always a gamble. He was a developer, and he could have lost it at any stage. And he did.”
David said, “We didn’t know. I asked my lawyer and he’d already invested some money in him, so he was okay. I asked my accountant and he didn’t see a problem.”
Dale said, “He was doing a Ponzi kind of a thing.”
David said, “No he wasn’t.”
Dale said, “I don’t know if it was deliberate, but he was gambling with other people’s money, that’s for sure.”
David said, “Here’s the thing. This is absolutely real. A while later, he got cancer and was going to die.”
Dale said, “Lung cancer.”
David said, “And we went to see him - in a hospice, wasn’t it, darling?”
Dale said, “Yeah. Ponsonby. The one in Ponsonby.”
David said, “As soon as I walked in, I knew I had completely forgiven him. I told him, and he was so relieved.”
I asked, “Did he die?”
Dale said, “Yes. He died. Yeah. Sad.”
David said, “It’s important to understand that both of us were able to completely forgive him.”
Dale said, “I didn’t do it easily to begin with. I’d drive past the properties in Remuera where he lost all our money, and I’d say, ‘God, I forgive him. I forgive him’. But it was in my head. It wasn’t in my heart. Finally, I could forgive him, and hold nothing against him. Because the money was something God had given us, and we squandered it. We put our last bit of money into building a house in Takapuna and were paying $17,000 a month to the bank on interest. Meanwhile, Rachel was dying, and she would say, ‘Mum, can you take the kids? I can’t cope with them today’, and we’d take them to this mudheap in Takapuna. So yeah. It was an anguish. But it was our fault that he didn’t handle it properly.”
The word ‘fault’ resonates in the lives of the Garratts; it places blame when none is due, when bad luck and tragedy take their course. Dale writes in her book about some of the things people said to them when Rachel died. The worst was, “If you had more faith, Rachel would have lived”. The sheer cruelty of that remark is an insult. David, in particular, was very close with Rachel.
“They were in a very dark place when she died,” said their friend Luke Kaa-Morgan, who had lived with the family when their daughters were little. “Rachel was like a glorious little pet. She was a child everyone wanted to enjoy. Just a dream of a little girl.”
I said to the Garratts about being fleeced, “It wasn’t your fault.”
Dale said, “I just felt so sorry for him when he got sick. That was the last thing you wanted to happen. You wanted him to come in and say, ‘I’m going to try to help pay you back’, or ‘I’m sorry’.”
I asked, “Did you hear that?”
Dale said, “No.”
David said, “His wife did pay something.”
Dale said, “Oh, a tiny bit. It was nothing.”
I said, “But you kept about a third?”
Dale said, “Maybe not a third. We decided to go on a trip because we’d never had a real holiday. We were always working during the Scripture in Song years. So we took a cruise, but it drained us of what we did have left, more or less.” She turned to David, and said, “You always said we probably shouldn’t have done it. But I’m glad we did. I think it was a lovely thing to do.”
David didn’t say anything.
I asked, “How are you doing now?”
She said, “Some people are helping us. But we’re on thin ice, I would say, financially.”
David said, “It’d be difficult to live here if it wasn’t for the goodness of friends.”
That was another word that resonates in the lives of David and Dale Garratt: goodness. They radiated it in their apartment in Albany, these two grand old eccentrics, these OGs of modern Christian music, these million-sellers who were so devout, so humble. I asked if they still owned copies of their life’s work, and Dale said she was pretty sure the albums were in a box somewhere downstairs.