Twelve Questions with Andy Dowding

Andy Dowding says New Zealand produces a lot of great music for such a small country. Photo / Jennifer Dann

Andy Dowding has been producing the Vodafone NZ Music Awards with his Kiwi partner Justine McKay since their lives in New York were overturned by the events of 9/11.

1. Where were you both on September 11, 2001?

Justine was on her morning run past the World Trade Centre. She was right underneath Tower 2 when the second plane hit. She saw people leaping out of the building and landing on the pavement. She had an incredibly traumatic, visceral experience. I was in our apartment in Tribeca less than half a km up the street. I couldn't get to her because the police had cordoned off the block in front of our building so I spent an hour pacing up and down until thank god she appeared. We then stood together in the street with our neighbours and watched the towers come down. A river of shell shocked people covered in white dust flowed past. A fireman appeared. I asked if he was alright and he said, "I can't find my guys. I need to call my wife." I gave him my cell phone, I gave him my landline, but nothing worked. He just wandered off. I think his whole unit had died in the collapse.

2. What did you do in the aftermath?

We spent the next few days holed up in our apartment with friends and neighbours. All the news trucks were parked outside our front door. I'd see the recovery guys going into ground zero and coming out with that thousand yard stare of people who've been at war. I went outside once to try and find some food and I saw thousands of photocopied sheets of people's faces plastered over every available space. That's when it really hit me that 3,000 people had gone to work one morning and were basically atomised.

3. Did that change your perspective of the world?

Witnessing something like that you realise that all this stuff that we get caught up with in our lives - success, money, status, having the latest coolest clothes, is just not that important. We'd been working as freelance consultants to TV companies like HBO and Fox, music companies and trendy magazines. When the phones came back on every call was to cancel this event or that project. America was like a tortoise putting its head back in its shell. People couldn't return to business as usual for quite some time. Justine's from New Zealand so we came here for Christmas. She quickly got TV work with Julie Christie and I fell in love with the place. We were very lucky to arrive in Auckland during its 'spotty teenager' phase and have seen it grow up and become a real city.

4. How did you become the Vodafone NZ Music Award producers?

Soon after arriving we met Deborah Pead of Pead PR socially. She told us the recording industry was seriously considering canning its music awards because they'd lost faith in them. So together we went to Rianz with a plan and it worked. We've built the awards into a Vector Arena event that's televised live to half a million viewers and become part of the national psyche.

5. What did you think of New Zealand music?

For such a small place I was really struck by how much great music comes out and how interesting. The Maori and Polynesian culture makes it different. You've got guys from South Auckland expressing themselves through hip hop but they're just nowhere near as pissed off as guys from South Central LA and they've got a natural sense of humour.

6. Is running a show that's televised live on prime time TV hair-raising at times?

Back when we started there was all kinds of drunken behaviour. At our first awards the father of a famous New Zealand artist was so hammered that he got up to go to the loo, forgot where he was and had a wee in the aisle of the Aotea Centre. The bosses of New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers were in the audience and told us at the after party it was the best awards they'd ever been to. They were used to the Grammies which are quite stuffy.

7. What's the secret to hosting a good awards ceremony?

Shows like the Grammies and Brits are a 5 hour plod controlled by TV and broken up by ad breaks. We focus on making the experience in the room as fun as possible and hope that translates to TV. Our show's two hours long and once it starts it doesn't stop. We don't write scripts for presenters to read on autocue, we just ask them to keep to the time limit. When we started with C4 the show was an hour-long special of edited highlights so we had plenty of leeway to experiment and fine-tune it over the years.

8. Do you worry what people might say live?

It's up to the musicians if they want to make a tit of themselves. We've had people try to grandstand. Home Brew one year went up to accept an award from Ben Harper who is quite a spiritual person and said "Thanks God for not existing and fuck John Key" or something and you could see Ben was not comfortable and others weren't impressed either. These days artists are much more savvy.

9. Have you always worked in the music industry?

I actually started out in the fashion industry working in the West End of London for a guy called Jeffrey Rogers, known as 'The King of the High St', who supplied the big department stores like Top Shop. He was a Jewish trader who'd come up from East End markets and for some reason liked me and gave me my first break. I had a big mouth, a lot of confidence and a good eye for what kids wanted. I was the bane of the designers' lives because I'd tell them what wouldn't sell. There were some dodgy characters in the rag trade. I had some hairy moments.

10. Such as?

Shady dealers try to stich you up by playing both ends against the middle and taking a cut. Once I placed an order for 100,000 T-shirts for British Home Stores that were supposed to be made in Greece. I got a call saying they were stuck in customs in Yugoslavia where they'd been making them cheaper and trying to sneak them across the border. So at age 20 I had this very scary buyer yelling down the phone that'd she never do business with us again.

11. How did you get into the music industry?

I was working nights in the club scene during the 'Second Summer of Love' in 1988, DJing and promoting clubs. I ended up working for record labels doing everything at the back end from getting CDs manufactured and artwork done to distribution and promotion. I've always been a musician too. I was the singer in the band at school and taught myself to write songs on the guitar.

12. What did you parents make of your career?
Mum had a tough childhood. She was taken out of school at 14 and put to work to support her family but she escaped that shitty council flat, married my middle class father and moved to conservative Sussex. They're very quiet people who don't like to make a fuss. They must see me as an aberration. When I was 18, all I knew was there was something much more interesting out there and I went looking for it.

The Vodafone Music Awards are on TV3 tonight, Thursday 19 November, from 8.30pm.