Don McGlashan on Chris Bishop awards spat and why he yelled ‘shut up’

Musician and composer Don McGlashan. Photo / RNZ, Cole Eastham-Farrelly

By RNZ Online

In May this year, Don McGlashan made headlines when he had a spat with National Party MP and Cabinet minister Chris Bishop at the Aotearoa Music Awards.

“I didn’t know who he was… I heard all this fury and somebody complaining and then Stan Walker did his big piece, with a lot of hikoi imagery and a lot of flags waving, and the whole audience stood up, it was this marvellous, heartfelt moment," McGlashan tells 30 with Guyon Espiner.

“And there was somebody yelling, ‘What a load of crap. This is performative. What a load of bullshit.’ And I thought, you know, I’ve had 40 years or so of dealing with unruly hecklers in New Zealand… I didn’t know who it was. I turned around and said, ‘Shut up, you dickhead.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘What’d you say to me?’ And I realised who it was.

“And the only thing I could do was really just repeat myself. So I said, ‘Shut up, you dickhead,’ as reasonable a way as I could have said, ‘Shut up, you honourable dickhead.’ I didn’t have the presence of mind to say that, but I really had no idea who it was. I thought he was just an out-of-control and somewhat entitled heckler.”

Successful songwriting career

“Like a very square peg in a very round hole” is how McGlashan describes his otherwise incredibly successful songwriting career.

McGlashan wrote or co-wrote many of New Zealand’s most iconic songs, including Dominion Road, Anchor Me, There is No Depression in New Zealand and Bathe in the River.

Stan Walker performs at the Aotearoa Music Awards in Auckland. Photo / Juliette Veber

He was inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2023, and a documentary about his life and his music called Anchor Me is due for cinema release in January 2026.

“I tell the truth, I didn’t think it was going to be made,” he says. “So, Shirley Horrocks got in touch with me. I like her work a lot… it was a good excuse for a cup of coffee.

“But I’ve had so many experiences over the past few years where people have wanted to make a documentary, but it hasn’t been funded, so I kind of didn’t really expect it to happen. But Shirley is incredibly passionate and committed, and she made it happen. So I was kind of in shock, I must admit.”

McGlashan’s legacy stretches back to the scratchy post-punk of Blam Blam Blam in the early 80s, the percussive eccentricity of From Scratch, the musical comedy of The Front Lawn and the gorgeous ’90s pop melodies and reflective genius of the Mutton Birds.

McGlashan and the Blams

McGlashan’s first big song was There is No Depression in New Zealand, released by Blam Blam Blam in 1981. The words were by Richard Von Sturmer, “essentially a poet who sort of burst onto the scene wanting to do all these other things”.

While it was written before the infamous Springbok tour, he said the tune somehow “became a kind of unofficial song about the tour”, which McGlashan took part in – as a protester.

Don McGlashan performing in the RNZ studios for NZ Live, May 2025. Photo / RNZ, Cole Eastham-Farrelly

“I was incredibly ineffectual because I’m little. I can remember being in a crowd of protesters and there was a standoff, and the Red Squad [police] were all the old, huge, beefy men, you know, with batons. And for some reason, I ran out from the crowd and booted one of them in the bum. I still don’t know why I did that.

“And then… we both looked at each other. He looked at me as if like, a mosquito just sort of touched him, you know? And I looked at him sort of going ‘not sure what to do now’.

“So I ran back into the crowd and… later on they were going around doing individual arrests, and they just pointed at me and pulled me out, and I was handcuffed and led under the stands of the test, so we could actually hear the test going on.

“And then we were taken… for processing, and I ended up spending the whole evening there with my English lecturer. He was in the cell with me, a really cool guy. He’s not with us anymore, guy called Sebastian Black, and we talked about [Samuel] Beckett. And… it’s arrogant to say this, but I think it’s probably the first time that anybody talked about Beckett in that particular cell.”

McGlashan said that was possible because he wasn’t like the other “punky type people in those days”.

“I didn’t go home and, you know, take drugs and lie on the floor with the room spinning, listening to The Clash. I went home and listened to [Anton] Bruckner and [Gustav] Mahler because I was a French horn player.

“But, but the Blams happened and we started touring the country, it was kind of too big a thing to ignore. It was like everything else in my life had to sort of go away, because here we were in a clapped-out van, playing to different sets of people every night, you know, just playing our hearts out, and the audience were going crazy.

“And it was kind of like, this is where I belong. This is my home.”

The Front Lawn

McGlashan’s pre-Mutton Birds band, The Front Lawn, were known for their humour as much as their sound. But that wasn’t always the plan.

“When we started, we took ourselves terribly seriously. We didn’t think we were going to be a comedy act. We thought we were working with what it means to be from this weird country at the bottom of the world… And so we had all these sort of highfalutin’ ideas, and then when we got in front of people, they laughed.

“So we thought, well, we could run with this. And that’s why we turned into a comedy group.”

That sense of the unusual carried through to the Mutton Birds, one of New Zealand’s most beloved 90s groups, who had a number one hit about a talking heater.

“We’re bringing these weird songs into this environment where everything was really aimed at three-minute pop songs and Blur and Oasis… It was nothing like what we were about, but we got an audience, you know? And I wasn’t capable of writing anything else.”

Being in a successful group like The Mutton Birds meant having to put up with “ludicrous, bizarre stuff that happened all the time”, McGlashan says.

“Every day, there’d be stupid things – like at one stage, we got a call, the manager called us and said, ‘Michael Stipe from REM has personally asked you to come in and open for them in Prague. But you’ve got to get in the van now, right now’ …

“And then we got in the van, and we got to the Channel Tunnel or something, and then we found out that it had all evaporated, you know? And then later on, we found out that Michael Stipe didn’t know us from a bar of soap. He hadn’t asked us in person.”

- RNZ