Wellington’s country troubadours The Warratahs are this year’s APRA inductees into the NZ Music Hall of Fame. Long-time follower Chris Bourke charts their legacy and the roads they’ve travelled.
The scene: a West Coast pub. A woman, exuding melancholy, puts a CD into the player on the bar and makes her selection. An instantly recognisable fiddle scratches a melodic opening; the first line is equally familiar: “Could be the time to change my address / And maybe find some peace at last …” Her adult son joins her in a brief, slow dance.
The fleeting moment is from the new film Pike River, about the West Coast mining tragedy. The music is like a hug from a loved one. Deep in our subconscious we all know it: Maureen, by The Warratahs, now nearly 40 years old.
Their name is a misspelling of a stake in the ground, but the Warratahs have always been about moving on. The themes in the songs are everlasting: lost love and failed dreams, but most especially, keeping your bags packed. So the smartest move the band ever made was cruising on the Interislander. Their participation in the 1990 TV advertisement – written by their old friend Rob Winch – turned New Zealand into a seamless state highway and made the band guests in every home. Their audiences have always felt bonded, as if at a family wedding, and the music is similarly timeless and intergenerational.
As well as Barry Saunders’ lived-in voice and get-rhythm acoustic guitar, essential to The Warratahs’ sound has been the fiddle of Nik Brown, which conveys the Celtic roots of country with the daring of Stéphane Grappelli. His playing can be romantic, sentimental, joyous, bittersweet. In full flight a Warratahs’ gig threatens to bubble over, with the spirited filigrees from Brown’s violin bow spraying rosin on to the closest dancers. Underneath it all, an upright piano – originally from Wayne Mason, then Alan Norman – calls the dance with Floyd Cramer’s slip-notes and Moon Mullican’s irresistible boogie.
It took very little time for The Warratahs to become a national institution, as familiar on the open road as Sam Hunt and Minstrel. The band started in 1987, playing for free each week in the downstairs bar of Wellington inner-city pub The Cricketers Arms to a motley audience of public bar regulars, friends from film and music circles, even ballet dancers from the nearby academy. The band members were only in their 30s but were already music veterans who had done time in accomplished groups such as the Fourmyula, Rockinghorse and Timberjack.
At a time when airplay for New Zealand music was minimal, The Warratahs’ songs were picked up by radio stations such as the ZBs, the National Programme, Avon and Windy: outlets whose music and audiences didn’t reflect pop’s 80s cutting edge of synthesisers and 100 haircuts.
Reinforcing awareness of the band was the constant use of its first videos as “fillers” during gaps in TVNZ programming. It’s easy to forget that in 1987 there were only two TV channels. So film-maker Waka Attewell’s clips were unavoidable – and charmingly down to earth. Both Hands of My Heart and Maureen are shot in a school hall, reflecting the humble, remote venues The Warratahs made their specialty.
Maureen is almost a mission statement, a song of faded love and shooting through. In a cut-down Holden Kingswood, Saunders heads out on the highway, his acoustic guitar on the back seat. He drives north out of Wellington; moments later he returns on the same road. He visits the railway station, the airport. Is he looking for Maureen? Maybe she’s shifted home to Melbourne; she’s got better things to do. “Better things for Maureen,” comes a wry aside, as he watches a plane taking off towards the Tasman.
For years, the band was constantly on the road to entertain audiences from Northland to Southland. They eschewed the highways of the rock circuit for gravel roads found only on Lands and Survey maps. Curiously, the band was popular earliest in the cities, where a demographic slightly older than the pub-rock crowd still wanted a night out. The clannish country scene was initially wary. On The Warratahs’ first visit to Gore, they arrived to suspicion but left with a few awards and many new friends. The country audience caught on that the baton had been passed from the Tumbleweeds, Garner Wayne and Dusty Spittle.
“The band seems to have created a need in people’s lives,” Wayne Mason told me in the late 80s. Their sound was instantly nostalgic: an acoustic guitar, a fiddle, a piano or accordion, and a rhythm section with more tickle than slap. The band is still at home playing halls with stages decorated with ferns and trestle tables groaning with savouries.
Forty years on, it seems telling that the band’s swift, late-80s popularity came at a time New Zealand’s cradle-to-grave society was being dismantled by neoliberalism. “They’re tearing our old town apart / and closing down the railway” (St Peter’s Rendezvous).
From its earliest days, the band mixed originals by Mason and Saunders – written together or alone – with cover versions of country standards from the 1960s. They avoided trucking songs or those that referred too specifically to another country’s highways and mountain ranges. For years, songs that mentioned New Zealand place names were either novelties or too corny to last. Mason and Saunders shrugged off the cringe to reference New Zealand in a way that seemed uncontrived and from real experiences. The songs visit Taranaki up near the bush line, where a closed factory tumbles with memories. They call in on a brooding father whose cigarettes burn down to the end. They leave Wellington, where nothing ever happens – but why should it, anyway?
The Warratahs’ reliable sound and relatable songs have long been their calling card. Mason left the band in 1994 to pursue other musical interests. After a five-year gap, Saunders reconvened the old firm, saying, “I missed our sound and it didn’t seem to go away, so here we are.”
Like Jagger and Richards, Saunders and Brown have recruited friends as the rhythm section moves on. The band now tours and releases albums at a more workable pace. Alt country musicians such as Marlon Williams, Delaney Davidson, Mel Parsons and Ebony Lamb look to The Warratahs as mentors. The baton is being passed.
The Warratahs will be inducted into the NZ Music Hall of Fame at this year’s APRA Silver Scroll Awards at the Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch, on October 29.