Luck exponent of long pauses

Jordan Luck and The Exponents are back on tour this summer. Picture / Dean Purcell

Despite having misspent a good part of what now looks like my youth attempting to interview musicians, I seem to have forgotten one important thing. And this is that asking direct questions of musos who are - how shall we put this? - getting on in years is not a profitable exercise.

I had quite a few questions prepared for Jordan Luck, who tells me he is 54. He is about to embark on a 25th birthday tour with the Exponents, the first time they've been on the road in five years. The tour begins on Wednesday and ends at the Auckland Harbour Festival on January 29. And "we promise it will never happen again (so says Barry)", reads the promoter's email. There's a small chance I would have managed to extract this information from Luck, but only a small one. I didn't ask about Barry.

The moment at which I stop asking the prepared questions is when a black and white cat with an elongated exclamation mark of a tail runs into the room. Luck says, "Charlie! Hello." I say, "What a long tail that cat's got." He says, "Yeah, that's what everyone says." Then he says to the cat, "This is Dean [the photographer] and Michele. This is Malcolm."

Malcolm? "I thought you just called it Charlie?" "Oh," he says, not looking at all fussed, "I thought it was Charlie. He's not here." There may or may not be another cat called, possibly, Charlie. Don't ask me.

Actually, the moment may have come a little earlier when Luck says - of a question about his age asked about 10 minutes before - "I lied to you by the way. I'm 44."

I knew he was having me on, but decided not to say anything. So now I ask if he was hoping I'd say he's looking pretty good for 54. He says "No, I wasn't anticipating that, oh, no, no, no." And "I think something believable's good, like 54." I could say, he suggests, that "he looks a lot like Dave McCartney and I know he's 54". This is probably true.

What he does look is a bit ravaged in the face, a bit like a younger Rod Stewart, and pretty fit from there down. This is an odd mix, but one not uncommon in getting-on-in-years rockers. As is the rumpled hair. I suppose he brushes it sometimes but he didn't for us.

He didn't put shoes on either, or turn off the telly, which is playing some true-crime show on the Discovery channel.

He is a relaxed host. When we arrive at midday he asks whether we'd like tea, or coffee. He looks in the direction of a half-drunk bottle of Amstel Light beer and says vaguely, "or something cold?". He's fairly famous for drinking but says that now he drinks "oh, sometimes. I'll get through six in a two-hour session." He got through four or five in our hour and a bit session. At one stage he went out to the kitchen to get another while he was only halfway through his last, so it was hard to keep count.

Still, not very rock and roll, is it, drinking light beer? "I never drank spirits. Mind you, when we were younger we used to drink those four-litre casks of wine. And, of course, it was there for you."

The long pause while the true-crime story plays out is his response to my not-quite question about his drinking. I tell him that there are reams of clippings about his drinking in which other people express concern, but none in which he's ever said he worried about it. He sticks a dead match in his mouth and chews for a bit while he thinks about this.

He could just say that, for God's sake, he's the lead singer in a rock band and that he likes drinking and that it's nobody's business but his own. But he is, despite the glances at the telly while being interviewed, a polite, if easily distracted, fellow.

He finally removes the match and says, "No. Well, I'm aware of problems with drinking but I would say that I think ... probably if you're doing maybe 150, 200 shows a year, out of those you'd be hard pushed to find four or even five even bordering on incomprehensible. So that was never a problem.

"I think in some ways it was kind of like you wanted to see how far you could just about go. Which is very pointless but you'd think this next thing's going to fail, or someone's not going to like this, but everyone always did so it didn't really come into it."

This is about as clear as the cat's name, so I push him a bit further and he says, "I don't see, unless you go on to drugs or something, I don't see how much further you can go really ... I'm sounding a bit self-examinary here ... " This is perfectly all right, I tell him, I'm making him do it and, besides, I'm intrigued now about where this is going. "Well," he says, "I can only say if I was doing that again I'd probably still want to find out where it ended up." And where it ended up was? "Euphoric, happy."

He certainly seems happy and relaxed, sitting on his leopard skin print couch, talking to us and the dog. And even happier, euphoric even, once he can end this talking about the drinking by saying: "You could ask for anything and you'd get it. Whatever you need, whatever you want. It sounds like a Status Quo song. It is actually ... Are you guys Coro fans?"

What a fantastic segue, and a brilliantly executed escape. Status Quo are, he tells us, going to be on Coro. This is, apparently, wonderfully exciting.

He loves Coro, and Dad's Army. He spends a couple of hours in his lovely, immaculate garden every day. He says, "The cherry tomatoes are going crazy." I tell him I don't think any of these admissions can be good for his image. I attempt to stop him when he gets on to his passion for The Waltons. Honestly, he has 25 years of rocker status to preserve and I'm not about to let him wreck it in case I want to come back and try to interview him again when he's 64.

But there's no stopping him. He runs from the room and returns with a boxed set of the telly series, still in its shrink wrap. He won't open it. "No, no. I just like to look at it." Oh, look, I say, I'll open it for you, it'll be less painful and might help him get over this thing. He says, "You've taken quite a lot of liberties already." Which proves that he is capable of being quite sharp, really, just occasionally.

I've attempted to help him with his image, and failed, so he'd better have a go at summing it up. "Don't know. Gardening. No, I have no idea. Never worked on it." What he thinks other people might think it is is this: "Friendly bloke. Approachable. Quite a good singer. Writes good songs. Hear that a lot."

All of which is about right, especially the "writes good songs" bit. He's much better at writing songs than talking and his songs are so good I think we can forgive a bit of waffling - and The Waltons.