For a band which enjoyed a hit single, recorded just one album, then fell apart almost 50 years ago, myths, misinformation and questions still surround Auckland’s Space Waltz. Not least is: were they even a band?
They were introduced as such on September 1, 1974, when they appeared on television talent show New Faces performing Out on the Street, an outrageously confident appearance in which singer Alastair Riddell – mascara, lipstick, salacious grin, camp strut – shocked many in the audience at home.
And legend has it judges Nick Karavias, Howard Morrison, Paddy O’Donnell and Phil Warren didn’t get them at all.
Yet the evidence – gathered by University of Otago academic and glam-rock aficionado Ian Chapman in a small, detailed book on the band – shows general if cautious approval by the judges, Warren saying, “Great impact, potential, originality … I think they’ve got a great future.”
In the final, they performed the difficult Beautiful Boy to lesser success, coming sixth. But by then, Out On The Street was a hit.
However, the subsequent album was presented as Space Waltz by Alastair Riddell, with him on the cover. The band – guitarist Greg Clark, bassist Peter Cuddihy, drummer Brent Eccles and keyboard player Tony Raynor (later Eddie, his surname Rayner misspelt) – were relegated to the back.
Eccles was shocked by the attribution, but “just got on with it”; Cuddihy “didn’t want to get caught up in any angst”; Clark had no problem and Rayner – Chapman uses the incorrect “Raynor” throughout – was taken aback but by then he was in Split Enz.
Riddell said the musicians were there to get his songs recorded.
Chapman analyses what brought them together, the cover – designed as a gatefold so all were intended to appear together – and the songs.
As a fanboy (“I cannot feign impartiality”), he’s uncritical of an album that divided commentators but was a turning point where local rock uncoupled from mainstream pop.
Space Waltz now return with the album Victory, which drops four of the original songs (notably the eight minute-plus Seabird and Love the Way He Smiles), includes uncannily faithful re-recordings of five (Out on the Street and the Roxy Music-influenced Fräulein Love among them) and adds new songs by the original band with extra guitarist Solomon Cole.
Where the original album had complex, mouth-filling and occasionally melodramatic lyrics alluding to sci-fi and gender themes, Victory is contemporary rock jettisoning prog-glam in favour of something more earthy (Hard Work) and tougher (Last of the Golden Weather).
The Bowie-Roxy influences that sometimes unfairly dogged the debut (the still-enjoyable Angel and proto-New Wave Scars of Love) are evident in the new What Good Does It Do Me and heroic ballad Rule the World.
Overall, Victory is a coherent amalgam of old and new that, despite flat spots (Blessing and a Curse), resolves unfinished business for Space Waltz.
In John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a character says, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Legends sell better.
Chapman and Victory sell both. And Space Waltz are a band.
Space Waltz, by Ian Chapman (33⅓ Oceania/Bloomsbury Academic), Space Waltz’s Victory album and the original album remastered (on vinyl and CD) are available now and Eddie Rayner correctly attributed.
