Musician turned writer Rachael King's newest book is about a primary school girls' punk rock band that solves mysteries. Photo / Supplied
The Christchurch-based author has a new book — and a new song. Rachael King speaks to Kim Knight about playing bass guitar, writing books for kids, and what happens when those worlds collide.
Rachael King was 15 when she played her first gig on a borrowed bass guitar at the Performance Cafe on Auckland’s Symonds Street.
She stood with her back to the audience. “So, yes. Pretty nervous.”
1 - 2 - 3 - 4.
King’s music cred was honed in the era when “student” was an acceptable and indefinite day job — and nighttimes were for playing with the band(s).
Battling Strings. The Cakekitchen. The 3Ds. Celine. King recorded in Boston with Godstar (a band that included members of the Lemonheads) and did a couple of live gigs and one recording with Bressa Creeting Cake.
“How did it make me feel? I don’t know. Oh, my God, I can’t think of any adjectives to describe it. It was really fun. It was quite unique. Not many of my peers were doing that kind of thing, and I got a lot of respect from an early age, which was great.
“When you’re playing music you like, it’s just really exciting and uplifting. When you’ve really nailed something or the people are responding to it, it’s really very satisfying.
“It was just a really formative time. And really good for independence and confidence. I always say to my friends who have girls, ‘give them a guitar’.”
Oh, the dark and noisy places it will take you.
King was a teenager playing support for The Chills, Birds Nest Roys and Goblin Mix. Battling Strings (first formed at Northcote College with Dave Saunders, Andy Moore and Mike Shepherd) opened for Shayne Carter’s Straitjacket Fits second-ever Auckland show.
Carter wrote about that time in his recent memoir; King shared her memories of the gig in The Spinoff’s books section:
“It felt as though the dripping ceiling was only a foot above us as we played. We kept our heads down, intent on our instruments, sometimes our backs to the audience. The hotter it was, the easier it was to play, because sweaty fingers slide over bass strings better than cold ones. We were in our own world when we played, loud, and I’d glance up occasionally to see faces lit by the stage lights or silhouettes standing by the bar . . . ”
King wasn’t old enough to buy a beer, but she was there — tall enough to get away with it if she kept her mouth closed to hide her braces when the police came looking for underage drinkers.
And then, one day, she sold her bass, bought a laptop and became a writer.
The End?
Last month, in a Christchurch living room where the decor included a framed Flight of the Conchords poster and a taxidermied magpie, King clicked “play”. The guitars were as loud and dark as ever but the lead singer’s voice was pure 13-year-old punk. “That’s me!” says a delighted, and 54-year-old, Rachael King.
Because why wouldn’t a musician turned author write a book about a band, and then write that band a song, and (with a little help from her youngest child), record it?
King’s new book Violet and the Velvets: The Case of the Missing Stuff was sparked by the author’s experience at Band Quest, the nationwide live music event for primary and intermediate school-aged student bands. Most of the girls King saw performing (with the caveat that “I think it has improved since then”) were singers.
“There were virtually no girls playing instruments . . . I just thought this is a microcosm of the music industry. You can see that it starts at an early age. The girls are pushed towards the microphone or, I don’t know, the piano or violin or something. Not guitars and bass and drums.
“I wonder, too, whether girls are much more encouraged to just ‘have a go’? I’d been playing six weeks when I had my first gig, but the kind of music I was playing, and the kind of music Violet plays, you don’t have to be a professional musician. You just have to have enthusiasm.”
It is almost two decades since King won the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Award for best first novel with The Sound of Butterflies. Back then, every media interview opened with the fact that her father was the historian and author Michael King, who died in 2004.
“My dad always said it’s great you want to be a writer, but you should get a real job as well,” she says. “Honestly? I’ve talked myself blue in the face about that stuff. I’d kind of quite like to get away from it actually and just be me.”
This week, King releases her fifth book. Violet and the Velvets: The Case of the Missing Stuff is “about a primary school girls’ punk rock band that solves mysteries”. It’s another endorsement of King’s decision to stop writing solely for adults.
“I don’t like it when you see age bands on things,” says King, but she does acknowledge Violet is pitched younger than her previous “children’s” books - Red Rocks (which won the 2013 Esther Glen Medal and has been adapted for a television series screening now on Sky Open and Neon) and last year’s The Grimmelings (which this adult reader devoured in a weekend and can’t wait to go back for a longer soak in its extraordinary language).
“There’s a lot of discourse around the English-speaking world, from librarians just crying out for shorter, middle grade and young adult books with illustrations,” says King.
“That’s why graphic novels are so popular now. Because kids just don’t have the same attention span. And if they’re a reluctant reader . . . Violet is really well spaced out, it’s got room for the text to breathe, it doesn’t feel intimidating.”
It comes in at just 20,000 words, includes illustrations by Phoebe Morris and contains font changes that ping off the page and break up the text.
“But I wanted to write it like that. It wasn’t begrudging. I wanted to write a short, fun book.”
The plan is to write a series of four Violet and the Velvets books.
“They were originally going to be 12,000 words each and then I just couldn’t help myself. I had to make them more complex and longer, to have more depth and character development.”
Plus, they’re kind of personal.
Like King, Violet plays the bass. And, like King, she has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But if the former is central to the story, a recently diagnosed King is downplaying the latter.
“So often, when there’s stuff about gender or neurodiversity in kids' books, it’s about the struggles. I just wanted to write a really happy, joyous book about a kid who just happens to have ADHD. Also, there are not a lot of portrayals of girls with ADHD.”
King received her diagnosis in 2022.
“I was the dreamy, daydreaming kid who was always disorganised and never finished things. My teachers loved me, because I was really smart and engaging, but they got a little bit frustrated with me as well. They knew I wasn’t living up to my potential.
“I did really well academically, up until high school. I mean, it was fine, but my reports were basically ‘she should be doing much better’.”
She says she felt like a weirdo until “I found my tribe with music and stuff”. It took her nine years to get her Bachelor of Arts and she’s never had a 9-5 job, but “the jobs I have done, I’ve done really well, because I’m kind of passionate about them and they’re always dynamic, they’re always changing, so there’s something new. And I’m quite good in a crisis”.
Social media posts describing “life with ADHD” were King’s first clue to the possibility she might have the condition.
“I was just like, ‘that’s not ADHD, that’s just normal’. And it started happening more and more.”
Eventually, she sought an expert opinion. “I was diagnosed, and it just made sense of a lot of stuff in my life.”
If King is Violet, she is also Violet’s mum, described here by King’s punk heroine: “About 100 years ago she used to tour the country playing in clubs and bars and at festivals. Once she even got to tour America with one of her favourite bands and she fell in love with its guitarist, and if they had stayed together maybe he would have been my dad and I would be living in New York right now.”
True story?
“No,” says King.
But some of the other “mum” bits - like an arts festival job, blurred boundaries between home and work, Saturday mornings in bed with a book, a list of favourite bands that include Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Look Go Blue Go Purple and Elastica, and a declaration that Kim Deal (The Pixies and The Breeders) is the GOAT bass player?
“Absolutely.”
King is contributing a portion of her Violet royalties to Girls Rock Aotearoa, an organisation that aims to inspire youth (women, trans, intersex, takatāpui, queer and gender-diverse) through music. And, she says, her second book in the series will draw more directly on some of her own experiences with sexism in the music industry.
“The alternative music scene was really feminist. Even though it was dominated by men, I never felt like I was talked down to or ‘less than’ or anything like that. It was the punters . . . comments like ‘aren’t you a good girlfriend, carrying your boyfriend’s guitar’.
“I didn’t even wear makeup. When we did a music video for The Cakekitchen, I remember actually going and hiding while I put some eyeshadow on, because I was embarrassed. A few years later, and there were makeup artists on all the shoots. Once NZ on Air started funding things, people started caring more about that stuff.”
King says she stopped playing in bands, because “I didn’t enjoy it anymore — there are quite a lot of egos involved”. But she hopes this book will convey the joy of the do-it-yourself punk ethos.
“I’ve had parents say to me, ‘my kid’s learning the bass’ and I ask if they’re in a band. ‘No — they want to get good first’. How do you get good unless you’re in a band? This idea that you shouldn’t do something unless you can get better and better at it? There’s not a lot of ‘just do it because it’s fun’ and you don’t have to be the best at it.”
This is definitely not the approach she brings to writing.
“Ummm . . . No.”
King rails against the idea that children’s books are somehow not as important as those for adults.
“Who’s going to buy all those adult books in the future? We need to write really good stories for kids to get them into reading for pleasure, not just so that they can read textbooks. I could go on all day about the stats around reading for pleasure, the head start that it gives people.
“People see writing for children as a hobby. And that makes me so angry.”
(For the record, she has also had enough of complaints about the cost of books. “Books are the same price that they’ve been for, like, 25 years . . . I think the problem is that everything else is so expensive that books feel like a luxury, and people think that books shouldn’t be a luxury . . . but we’ve got libraries, you know?”)
Long story short: “You can’t make a living, really, as a writer. Especially as a children’s writer.”
That will not stop her trying. Next month, she takes up the Frank Sargeson fellowship. Grants, residencies, television sales, a stint as the director of Word Christchurch, and appearances at other literary events — “I did something like 34 speaking events last year” — help pay the bills. In October, The Grimmelings gets an American release via Margaret K. McElderry Books. The second Violet and the Velvets book has already gone to Allen & Unwin NZ; Song of the Saltings, her next young adult novel, is due for submission later this year.
All this, and a primary school punk band to manage. Does King ever imagine a life where she kept the guitar and didn’t buy the laptop?
“You know, when I first moved to Wellington when I was 33, I remember going and seeing a band and thinking ‘I miss this. Oh, I should start a band — but I’m way too old.’ I was 33. What an idiot. I would totally do it now.”
Violet and the Velvets: The Case of the Missing Stuff by Rachael King (Allen & Unwin NZ, $18.99) releases March 18. Secrets at Red Rocks is playing on Sky Open (7.30pm, Sundays) and Neon (full season streaming now).
Kim Knight is an award-winning senior arts and lifestyle journalist who joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016.
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