The Headless Chickens: Chickenshits

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * * )

It was a long time ago - the history books say 1987 - but seeing the Headless Chickens play the night they won the Rheineck Rock Award was hilariously memorable. The room was full of the sponsor's people in suits, there were "smart casual" commercial radio types, and a peppering of a few in black jeans and leather jackets who'd seen the Chickens before and kinda liked the dark, unholy racket they made.

Beer companies prefer bar band blues rock - it gets punters drinking apparently - and for the sponsors to be confronted by the all-out art-attack of the Chickens was quite some shock. Angry words were exchanged with some judges.

At that time the Chickens - with the flamboyant Rupert E. Taylor prancing around on stage - were a very different band to the one they became. And the Chickens became one of New Zealand's great bands, even if their innovative approach and contribution go a little unacknowledged these days.

The most visible band on Flying Nun in the early 90s seemed marginalised in the 21st-birthday celebrations and no one covered a Chickens' song on the recent tribute album. Odd, but maybe the label was sensibly saving its energies for Chickenshits, the double album of hits, judiciously chosen album tracks, and remixes which reminds again what an impressive, ever-changing entity this band was.

From the meticulously constructed and barely contained frustration of Gaskrankinstation and the hypno-techno of the sky-scaling Donka they grew comfortable with technology, moved from darkness into the light (or at least a shadowland of the emotions), and had an ear for pop hooks and the new dance culture which was emerging in the late 80s/early 90s.

The Chickens were in the vanguard: they used samples from Shona Laing and the Crocodiles; when the line-up changed they blended the bitter (Chris Matthews' lyrics) with the sweet (Fiona MacDonald's vocals), and Flying Nun found it had the country's biggest dance band, a full-on dance outfit with memorable bass lines, on a label of mostly skinny guitar guys.

The arc of the Chickens' character and growth has parallels with another Kiwi band, Split Enz.

Consider: the eccentric Taylor (whose lovely Fish Song closes the first disc) was their Noel Crombie, the dark and moody songwriter Matthews was Phil Judd, and MacDonald, the late arrival who brought out the pop sensibilities, was their Neil. Both bands were equal parts art school ambition and popular appeal. Both were quirky and angular, never quite fitting the prescriptions of the music world.

Listening even now to the shadows'n'light blend of Cruise Control, the brooding George, and their own built-in self-reference of Do the Headless Chicken you are struck by their distinctiveness. And strangeness.

There's a similar sense of unease in Matthews' lyrics ("your happy day is here again" in Expecting to Fly? Yeah, sure) as there was in early Enz, but equally they could marry it to a rollicking beat (Donde Esta La Pollo). And MacDonald's Juice is as lovely a song as was ever written by Tim or Neil Finn.

But such comparisons diminish the Chickens' own worth. Tellingly the present compilation comes with a disc of remixes by Dick Johnson, Greg Churchill, Roger Perry and Joost Langeveld, David Harrow and other notables. It was the way their best songs were constructed around the solid rhythm section of bassist Grant Fell and drummer Bevan Sweeney that lent them to remixing and remodelling. That bottom end was solid and profound, and gave the danceable foundation to Matthews' grim musings. Included is the 94 Eskimo in Egypt remix of Cruise Control which went top 20 in Australia.

Headless Chickens were a band with a sense of purpose, musical curiosity and were real musicians making rock'n'roll dance music that magically crossed over on to radio, some of it even on to those commercial stations run by the guys who recoiled from them at the Rheineck Rock awards night. I wonder if any of them ever apologised to the judges?

And I wonder if whoever compiled the first disc has also apologised - there are a couple of tracks in a different order than the cover says. No matter, you just crank it up anyway.

Of course, any band with such divergent musical interests and changing members couldn't last. Something with that many legs was always going to walk off in different directions.

Although none of the individual Chickens has, so far, matched the often peerless efforts of the band at its finest moments.

And Chickenshits reminds you just how fine those moments were, and how many. A very proud number in fact.

Makes you wanna raise a glass to them. Do they still make Rheineck?