Don McGlashan has been announced as this year’s new NZ Music Hall of Fame member. Ahead of his forthcoming NZ tour, the end of which coincides with this year’s APRA Silver Scrolls where he’ll be inducted into the hall, the singer-songwriter reminisced about where his long and storied career has taken him.
McGlashan has long been a study in movement, both in genre and geography. He went from the drum stool of Blam Blam Blam, the percussion-pipe racks of art-music ensemble From Scratch and the theatre stage of the Front Lawn to being the frontman of the Mutton Birds then making it in a solo career. And that’s not all of it.
There was the year or so he spent in New York as the drummer in a dance company that toured behind the Iron Curtain. And being a ring-in on a Crowded House reunion that took him, via some very big audiences, to an even larger one at Glastonbury.
And that time he and Dave Dobbyn toured the country’s churches, then, a few years later he and Shayne Carter hived off through the nation’s arts festivals.
Late last year, he returned from Vancouver where he lives with Canadian wife Ann McDonell – not far from Stanley Park, biking distance to the community garden, he says – for a pandemic-postponed New Zealand tour off the back of Bright November Morning, his chart-topping fourth and fiercest solo album.
That one was with a band. Next month he’s back to start an 18-date jaunt through smaller venues in smaller places, accompanied by Anita Clark (who records and performs under the moniker Motte) on violin and keyboards.
“When you play a place where there are a hundred people in the room, as a performer it’s easier to look out into the audience and see a hundred stories. Or because there are a hundred people, there’ll be many more than a hundred stories. And as it gets bigger, that capacity to read what’s going on in the audience and to let your own stories go out and dance with those stories that are on the dance floor, that capacity doesn’t expand in a linear fashion. It diminishes to a degree.
“When you’re playing to a thousand people at the Powerstation like we did last year, you still get the sense that there’s many stories out there but the job is to keep it together and build on that energy that’s in the room and to do all those little acts of physics.”
Yes, occasionally McGlashan sits still. Mostly to write songs for him, or these days farty dinosaur ditties for animated kids show Kiri & Lou, a series created by his old Front Lawn offsider Harry Sinclair.
Yes, songwriter is probably what’s on his much-stamped passport.
But ahead of a solo-ish August-September tour of the country that takes him from Waiheke to Glenorchy, via Barrytown, Karamea and a few other out-of-the-way spots, we thought it was high time for McGlashan to put aside the song stuff for a memory slide-show of his musical travels across nearly four decades.
The early days
As a student, McGlashan was a promising multi-instrumentalist, care of classical lessons, playing in covers bands, orchestras and as a ring-in on shows by Auckland art-punks the Plague, then the Whizz Kids.
I remember being a music student at Auckland University and we toured the university capping review to Christchurch. I can’t remember whether it was Asterix and the Soothsayer, which was a show that I wrote the music for, but I remember the van breaking down outside Putāruru, which is a standard place for the van to break down. It’s like most vans can get themselves about that far just on adrenaline. But then the pistons look at each other and realise they really have no business going that far.
I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve actually broken down outside the Putāruru Golf Course. In this instance, it was one of those student breakdowns where it’s just petrol. But then we realised that the van wasn’t registered. The colour of the registration sticker was actually represented in the tour poster. I cut a bit out of the poster and stuck it on and then a cop pulled us over and took one look at it and said, “you know, that’s probably broken a lot of laws”. He mentioned fraud. But he just shook his head and closed his eyes and said, “Just go straight back to Auckland after Christchurch.”
Blam Blam Blam
The North Shore post-punk trio with Mark Bell and Tim Mahon got McGlashan’s songwriting first noticed on tracks like Don’t Fight it Marsha, It’s Bigger than Both of Us. The band was derailed by a tour van accident in 1982 that left Mahon seriously injured. But they first took on the country with Class of ‘81 comrades the Screaming Meemees and the Newmatics on the “Screaming Blam-matic Roadshow.”
We had a really democratic notion that we would swap the bill around each night, which was great on paper, but once we got to the gigs people would start to grumble and say, “We should really be the headliner for this one.” But the one thing we did agree on was that we would dance to each other. So the first band would get up and play and the audience would sort of hang back in that time-honoured shearing-shed-type reticence and we’d be blundering around on the dance floor and laughing at each other.
It was the most glorious feeling. I remember when we joined in on each other’s songs, like the Newmatics had a song called Riot Squad that we’d been involved in recording. We’d usually finish the night with it, then the Newmatics’ show-stopper Land of a Thousand Dances. We’d all get up and go crazy and at the end of the night everybody on stage would be crying and hugging each other. One night, somebody from the audience said, “Steady on, it’s only Palmerston North.” I always remember that.
The tour attracted the attention of the era’s boot-boy contingent.
For some reason we and the Newmatics had a sort of heavy-footwear following. We liked the Clash and English bands from that era. Tim had short hair and was a big guy who jumped around. There were groups of people arriving at the gig with the express intention of fighting with whatever other group they could find.
I was in the middle of my final year of a seven-year BA. I was doing English literature and in the middle of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which is a story about dissolute but moral young chaps getting into healthy fisticuffs with bandits. Every so often I’d do the gig and have to go out into the audience and a fight would start and I’d slip through a wormhole in space and become Tom Jones and wade in. Luckily, nobody was badly hurt. It was all reasonably clean fun.
From Scratch
The art-music percussion-powered group founded in the mid-1970s by Phil Dadson (which remains a going concern today) used racks of PVC pipes, jandal-rubber mallets, and some very big ideas. In McGlashan’s time, they played everywhere from Port Moresby to Paris, occasionally making an exhibition of themselves.
At the South Pacific Arts Festival in Papua New Guinea, a bulldozer would rake the black dust into a rough horseshoe and all the people would come and stand on the edges of these mounds of black dirt. They’d be chewing betel nuts and spitting bright-red juice and all around the crowd was bright red dirt.
Some Pacific Island acts would go out and perform and then Limbs Dance Company – first I’d go out and pick up broken glass from the performing area – and we’d come out carrying our pipes and set them up and play them. The audience just didn’t know how to take it at all. They thought we were a comedy act. [From Scratch member] Geoff Chapple had a slightly different way of moving to the rest of us. So they pegged him as the comedian of the group. He didn’t have to do much. He’d just turn around, look at them and they would all fall about laughing.
When we got to Paris we were like an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. At 10am we would do a performance. We’d walk into the space, lights would dim, we would put down our chalk lines, build the scaffolding, build the pipes, play and then go off and have lunch and do another one at 2pm. We were an art piece at the Museum of Modern Art so that was the rarefied From Scratch.
In the middle was a tour with the wonderful Southern Regional Arts Council – just two vans playing lots of little places you wouldn’t expect From Scratch to play, like Oliver’s Restaurant in Clyde.
It was pretty strange to be driving along with all these pipes. If the pipes were left in the van and got hot, they would change key. They would go flat. You didn’t muck around with them.
Front Lawn
The comedy-theatre-music-film duo with Harry Sinclair, later joined by Jennifer Ward-Lealand, left behind the classic album Songs from the Front Lawn, which featured the McGlashan perennial Andy, and a legacy that influenced Flight of the Conchords. They took the act to Australia, New York and the Edinburgh Festival. At home they toured in a large early 1960s Pontiac Laurentian as big as, well, a lawn. Its previous owners had included the Canadian ambassador to New Zealand.
We made this huge astroturf cover and because the car wasn’t in very good shape it didn’t really matter that we stuck bits of velcro onto the bodywork.
At one stage with the astroturf car we were playing Christchurch and staying way up the hill above Lyttelton, and it had snowed in the night. We got out to get in the car to go to the next gig in Dunedin and the car didn’t have any kind of winter tires.
We asked neighbours, “What do you do when your car is up here and you have to get down there and there’s snow on the road and there’s a sheer drop down to the Pacific?” They said “I dunno. Maybe the important people don’t travel in the car. They just walk behind the car.” So that’s what we did. Our manager, Grant Campbell, insisted on driving – he just sort of let the brake off gingerly and we walked behind, trying to shift the car when it fishtailed slowly out towards the cliff. We took an hour to get down the hill.
After that tour, we bundled up the astroturf cover, put it in a suitcase and thought that we’d never use it any more. We were going to the Melbourne Comedy Festival and were going to be over there for a month. We asked the organisers, “You don’t happen to know anybody who has a Pontiac Laurentian do you?” They said, “As a matter of fact the sound technician working on your show has one and the paintwork is terrible,” … so we drove a different Pontiac Laurentian around Melbourne.
The Mutton Birds
McGlashan’s return to rock’n’roll, after becoming one of New Zealand music’s biggest acts in the 1990s, took him and the band to the UK. There, they found themselves the colonial odd-men-out in the Britpop era. They started out in Auckland as a trio with McGlashan on bass.
We played at the Dogs Bollix and I went to the loo between the two sets. I was in a cubicle and two guys came in and one said, “It’s pretty good. It’s not that sort of pompous, lecturing Front Lawn stuff. It’s actually like a real band.” I stayed in the cubicle for quite a while.
Eventually shifting to the UK, the band clocked up many miles in Britain, Ireland and Europe.
I remember one gig at Whelan’s in Dublin where I came offstage. And there was an Irish guy that had become matey with us. I said to him, “Sorry, that was a terrible gig.”
And he said in his fantastic voice straight out of Joyce’s Ulysses, “There are as many gigs as there are people in the room,” meaning that everybody’s got a different experience. He proceeded to take us out and feed us industrial amounts of Guinness and by the end of the night I remember it as a great gig and I totally lost my overthinking.
We had some great ones, times when we were so tired from the touring that your physical memory would kick in when you played. We once did a gig in England and drove to Belgium and did another gig without stopping then did Belgian TV – a comedy show with incomprehensible Belgian humour. We played some quite dark song like Too Close to the Sun on a set made from fishing nets with a mermaid theme. It was a surreal and very strange time.
The solo and duo years
After the Mutton Birds called it day – barring occasional reunions since – McGlashan eased himself into a solo career which sometimes had him on tour with fellow songwriters Dave Dobbyn and Shayne Carter.
Those kinds of tours become like a long conversation because one of the ideas is you curate each other’s work. You’re not just going “oh I’m in between albums. What am I going to do?” I’m actually going “I love your work and I particularly like that song which you don’t like.” There was a song of Shayne’s that he had more or less disowned and by the end of the tour, he was going “I don’t know why … it must have been about a relationship that I didn’t want to think about.” But it pulled that song back into his focus and he did the same with me.
When I get a bit stuck, and I’m writing, and nothing good’s coming out I always go, “What do I really love? What song? What’s that song for me?” I’m going to not try to write anything of mine. I’m just going to listen to that song all day and work out how to play it and play it … because that’s the only way you get inside the bones of a song … and that’s a great cure.
Doing those tours with Dave and with Shane, I was able to get inside their songs and learn how they tick, and we were able to talk through why we write things in a particular way.
Dave and I have been friends for years and years. We’ve known each other for a very, very long time and we can talk about pretty much anything. We can even talk about our differences in our belief structures. He’s very much the man upstairs guy. I’m much more a pantheistic humanist sort.
Carter, of Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer, also played guitar on McGlashan’s 2022 album Bright November Morning and subsequent tour.
He could tease me about being overly literate. I could tease him about being a posey shoegazer and we got on really well and still do. It was really good in that he could take a break from the crushing burden of being Shayne Carter, because it’s a continual work of art and he’d be the first to agree. He could just be a guy in a band but he’s not just any guy in the band.
We had a lot of talks about this. We talked about the reason that bands aren’t just a songwriter and some people playing what they’re told to play. The reason that they’re better than that is because everything’s been hammered out and argued about. If you have too many yes-people in a band, it all gets pretty bland. The lovely thing about Shayne is he’s as far away from a yes-person as you can get. He’s more of a no-person than a yes-person. Every bit of music is hard won. We all have to agree on it … he brought a huge amount to that album. Shayne, I guess because he was just stepping sideways briefly from his own work, brought some real sinew to it.
And finally, a note on geography and songs
What happens is that audience members develop their own idea about where the song is located. Quite a few people have told me where White Valiant [the early Mutton Birds spooky song set somewhere rural] and I’ve kind of stopped sticking my oar in. I know what I was thinking about, but it doesn’t worry me. I mean, there might be a better location for it.
I think that songs are somewhat like houses. You build a house and then people move their furniture in. As the builder, you don’t really get to knock on the door and say, “That’s not where I thought that sofa should go.” You’ve got to stay out. Over time, people who have squatted in the house – to stretch the metaphor a bit too far – it really becomes theirs. That’s really vindicating because you’ve made a building that people want to live in – that’s even more of a fancy-schmancy metaphor than I would normally use. I like to think of songs as more of a utensil that you use when you go for a drive and you’re at bit of a loss and you need something to sing and tap the steering wheel to.
Don McGlashan’s Take It to the Bridge Tour runs from August 26 to October 7. Details at donmcglashan.com