This time around really is goodbye say the Seekers

By Peter Calder

Calder at large


The photographer is a little confused. Preparing to compose his shot of the ageless but perceptibly ageing folk group the Seekers, he's just noticed five people in the frame.

"Are you," he says hesitantly, anxious not to offend, "all in the band?"

Manager John Kovac - the one who looks young enough to be anyone else's kid - moves out of shot while the others burst out laughing.

"Aw, isn't that tragic?" says Bruce Woodley.

Seems like only yesterday it was different. "That" singer, Judith Durham, whose sonorous and plangent pop soprano was the group's keynote sound, may have been the only name to conjure with (go on: cover the caption and name the three blokes) but they were all household faces.

Of course it wasn't yesterday. The Seekers, by virtue of titles such as The Carnival is Over, I'll Never Find Another You, A World Of Our Own and the Oscar-nominated Georgy Girl, seem to have been with us forever, but their original career spanned less than four years, from late 1964 to mid 1968.

But it was almost yesterday - barely two years ago - that they were last through town.

They called it the 30th anniversary tour (it came five years after the 25th anniversary reunion, which was itself billed as the tour to end all tours.)

Now here they are back again, saying this will be the last time.

"I'm damn sure they've said that before," comments one slightly jaded observer.

"Perhaps we can have it in writing this time."

Bassist Athol Guy is slightly defensive, like someone accused of outstaying his welcome.

"We've only had one reunion," he says.

"We set out to say goodbye, but it set alight a secondary career.

"We've been together this time round longer than we were together in the 60s. So we felt we had to say: this is the last tour."

In fact, the clippings show that they never said 'Never again!' until now and yesterday was the day to break the bad news to New Zealand.

Their manager cancelled a slew of interviews to make way for a press conference appropriate to the importance of the occasion.

And all that came were a middle-of-the-road radio station and the bloke from the Herald.

But the foursome refuse to interpret the turnout as lack of interest.

"Maybe there was a lot of doubt that we meant what we're saying," chirps Durham.

"People think we are going to be around forever and we had to get the message out there because all of us feel the same way: we've all got our own lives."

Auckland is the second stop (they tuned up and cleared their throats in Ballarat in rural Victoria on Friday) on a 50-date tour that will end in Dublin in June.

Ticket sales here suggest plenty of interest from the public.

Durham recalls the band's first farewell - a one-hour, live BBC special on July 7, 1968, when "people sat in front of their TV sets and cried."

How she could know that is unclear since she was singing in the studio at the time, but "the burden of causing the grief that the breakup caused was one of the major factors behind the reunion."

Now they are going to cause all that grief again.

Just this once. They promise.

* The Seekers play the second of two Auckland concerts in the Aotea Centre tonight before heading for Wellington and the South Island.