Don McGlashan's anchors aweigh

Don McGlashan on the lake at Takapuna. Picture / Martin Sykes

Don McGlashan has a fresh wind in his sails. Well, sail.

For on this Anzac Day morning we are sitting in his Laser as the singer-songwriter finds a puff of breeze and the craft picks up a few knots across the dark brown waters of Takapuna's Lake Pupuke.

It only has the one mainsail. And on breezier days even that can be more than enough for the short but solid McGlashan.

So with variable winds out of the northwest and only the swans and some waka ama teams for company we splash about going nowhere in particular. We talk, the conversation punctuated by Captain Don's observations on the flukey breeze and polite commands to go about.

The reason for this waterborne chat is ostensibly his long-anticipated post-Mutton Birds solo album Warm Hand. As he rigged the boat earlier he found the idea ironic.

"This is the only place I don't think about music."

But sailing on Pupuke also represents something of McGlashan's life past and present.

He grew up a few streets away in Milford.

He'd spend his Wednesday afternoons at Westlake Boys' High sailing and daydreaming. He sailed competitively through his teens, just as music took hold and his talents bloomed.

It was the start of what's been a richly diverse career, from the punk and post-punk years of the Plague and Blam, Blam, Blam, the theatrical-musical-comedy-film troupe the Front Lawn, and the return to rock'n'roll with the Mutton Birds.

Along the way there's also been McGlashan the composer with soundtrack work for everything from An Angel at My Table to television's Street Legal to this year's No. 2 - he wrote the gospel-styled Hollie Smith-sung Bathe in The River which became a surprise top 10 hit.

Five or six years ago, having returned from Britain to eventually call it a day on the Mutton Birds - the band he guided through four studio albums and many international airport terminals through the mid- to late-90s - he found himself back at Pupuke.

He was here to start fulfilling those sailing daydreams he had when stuck in a tour van somewhere Up Over. He came down one Wednesday night.

"And there were all these blokes furiously thrashing around in their lasers swearing at each other and having the time of their lives. I thought, 'that looks like fun'."

He bought himself a Laser, joined the Pupuke Boat Club, which, with its windowless green shed on the lakeshore, has possibly the most modest yacht club house in the country.

McGlashan also likes it because here he's just sail number 148919. He once brought a few Mutton Birds greatest hits CDs down to the club to give away as prizes. He suspects they're still in a box somewhere in that shed.

McGlashan's surfer wetsuit might be emblazoned "Threat", but he's not much of one to the other club members. Loves sailing, hasn't quite got the tactics down yet.

"Oh no. I once had a book about sailing tactics and it had two chessmen on the cover. That is all I remember. I'm a ludo piece that has found its way on the board."

He's had days when the sailing and music has combined with some strange effects.

Once, down in Wellington, he borrowed a Laser and went sailing in a local race at the Worser Bay Yacht Club. The capital's stiff breeze took his toll on his nerves. He came in early, and it was a pale and still slightly terrified McGlashan who was regaining his composure that night on stage at the International Festival of the Arts.

Of course, he's not the only sailor in Kiwi rock. Andrew Fagan is famous for his bluewater exploits. Blam Blam Blam bandmate and guitarist Mark Bell is a champion racer of Paper Tigers. McGlashan's sailing ambitions are more modest. He wouldn't mind crewing on a bigger boat but wonders if his haphazard musical commitments might make him an unreliable team member.

As McGlashan points out Pupuke's usual racing course on the lake, a theory is postulated by his own idiot crew - that sailing a typical race is a bit like song structure. Those windward beats might be the verses, heading downwind the chorus, with the occasional squall to deal with in between.

"Yes that's right - dynamics. But you can't capsize in a song."

Of course, in Anchor Me there's one nautically-themed classic in the McGlashan songbook. And the new album ends with Queen of the Night, a song inspired by the plight of the crew of the Bounty who didn't follow Fletcher Christian and his mutineers to Pitcairn. Its first single Miracle Sun is set on the Northland coast during the summer of Opo the dolphin.

But as we head out across the lake, McGlashan says he will probably never write a song about his maritime passion.

"I don't think I ever will because it's just too difficult without getting maudlin and sentimental. It's like writing a song about sex - it's one of those things that we do that means an awful lot to us, but it's probably best that we not put it into words."

Actually, there is a sex scene in new album track Passenger 26, which traverses a similar creepy psychological and New Zealand back country territory to his earlier White Valiant.

Elsewhere the album carries stories told from the point of view of a drug mule (Courier), and even more disconcertingly, a New York PR guy involved in a cover-up of a Third World industrial disaster (Toy Factory Fire).

It's a narrative style which harks back to the likes of the gun-dealer's memoir A Thing Well Made on the first Mutton Birds album.

"I suppose it's trying to approach something like that and expose all the anger, but then pulling back from the pure protest song."

The album's most personal heartfelt number - I Will Not Let You Down - was written not by McGlashan but Sean "SJD" Donnelly, who, when not releasing his own terrific solo albums has become a studio collaborator and moonlights on bass in McGlashan's live backing band, The Seven Sisters.

SJD rejected the original version of the song from his own album. McGlashan had always loved it, right from the demo tapes which the pair regularly swapped as they "bounced from crisis of confidence to crisis of confidence".

Finding himself a track short, he asked Donnelly if he could rework it. The result is possibly the greatest love song McGlashan has recorded since While You Sleep.

But it means that McGlashan's solo album doesn't sound any more personal than the songs on the albums he's done with band names on them.

"Um, I just pulled out of the bag whatever was closest to the top - all the way through from Blam Blam Blam. Don't Fit it Marsha is a really personal song and While You Sleep is a really personal song and Anchor Me - they're extremely personal."

Anyway, with having the likes of SJD and the rest of the Seven Sisters, it's not like he's drastically changed from band frontman to soloist anyway.

But without the clutter of major label politics - the album is out through indie Arch Hill Records - and a burning need to conquer the world, McGlashan says there's something "clearer" about his approach to music now.

After an hour or so thrashing about, dodging the boom and successfully keeping the tape recorder dry, we head back in. I'm feeling oddly rejuvenated. It's the first interview I've done that's ever given me a wet bum I tell Captain Don, who replies something vaguely rude about whether such encounters should always have that result if they're really good.

As we finish putting the yacht on its trailer, McGlashan points to a rocky outcrop near the ramp.

That, he says, is where they took the shot for the cover of the first Mutton Birds album - the one of an arm holding a euphonium, Excalibur-like, from below the surface of the lake. That was McGlashan, head under the freezing water, brass instrument in one arm, rock in the other to counter the buoyancy of his wetsuit, happily near-drowning for his art.

These days, though, he's up on the surface, steering his own course and hoping for just enough breeze to get him round that next mark.