Sundae Painters: (clockwise from left) the late Hamish Kilgour, Kaye Woodward,
Paul Kean and Alec Bathgate and the eponymous album. Photos / Supplied
Sundae Painters: (clockwise from left) the late Hamish Kilgour, Kaye Woodward,
Paul Kean and Alec Bathgate and the eponymous album. Photos / Supplied
Sundae Painters sit in the middle of a Venn diagram of the Bats, the Clean and Toy Love/Tall Dwarfs. An informal band of bassist/keyboard player Paul Kean and singer/guitarist Kaye Woodward of the Bats, Alec Bathgate (guitarist/keys of Toy Love and Tall Dwarfs) and Hamish Kilgour, this Painters’ sole albumhas a pall over it. In a cover by drummer/songwriter Kilgour, it was his last project before his death in December 2022, aged 65.
Kilgour was a wayward spirit who co-founded the Clean (and their offshoot the Great Unwashed) with his brother David, and was also a prime mover in Bailter Space and the Mad Scene. He also released two albums under his own name.
An idiosyncratic talent, his drumming was as distinctive as Moe Tucker’s in Velvet Underground.
These pieces were recorded in a farm shed in Christchurch/Ōtautahi. Delaney Davidson was guest guitarist on Hollow Way and drummer on Sweet Dreams, and Alan Starrett – a fellow traveller with the Bats, Clean, Puddle and others – was on dulcimer for Serious Eye.
In the South Island’s psychedelic-folk genre, Sundae Painters weave their way unevenly from the motorik pulsing and transcendental vocals of Hollow Way (coloured by drone and sitar-like sounds from Bathgate) through Velvet Underground speak-sing on the oppressive Aversion, with wire-thin tripped-out guitar insinuating itself, and on to the Bats-cum-Clean once-removed In Came You.
The instrumental HAP 1 never achieves the liftoff hinted at (HAP 2 is more assertive), the pleasingly off-centre Thin Air is part Clean and part Incredible String Band, Sweet Dreams, sung by Kilgour, comes close to Tall Dwarfs’ anomalous pop and the dreamy Serious Eye (composition attributed solely to Kilgour) is the standout, which ends too abruptly just as it heads upward.
Pieces here chug to a halt, betraying their rehearsal room, improv-jam origins.
A memento, full stop, perhaps even a vanity project. On a blindfold test many would pick the players’ pedigrees. Familiar, if sometimes unexceptional, pleasures from a Nun alumni semi-supergroup.
