Her debut EP just picked up a Taite award and she believes in fairy tales, but Byllie-jean’s feet remain anchored in the whenua, whānau, gumboots and an eccentric house truck called Haumi. Photograph by Tawhainga Butt
There is a picture of the singer-songwriter and storyteller Byllie-jean on her Instagram account in which she wears a sparkly velour frock with a tapestry-like meadow of blue and pink and silver flowers. She has accessorised her glamorous frock with a pair of Red Band gumboots.
Gumboots are not cool. Gumboots are definitely not sexy. She once said that she was “too old to be branded as sexy, so I can’t be marketed that way. People say, ‘Oh, you’re a grandmother and solo mother out there doing your thing.’”
How very patronising. “Yes. I mean, on the one hand it’s beautiful because I acknowledge that when you have kuia status – where you’ve got grandchildren – it’s a beautiful time of life. So there’s that respectful part but there’s also society and the music industry. The music industry is what is patronising because I know men aren’t being asked these questions. They’re not being asked what they’re wearing.”
So, my banging on about her Red Bands might have earned me a black mark. Too bad. I tell her she should be recruited as a model for Red Bands. She manages to make rubber boots both cool and sexy, which is quite a fashion feat. So I’m marketing her and her Red Bands as sexy and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it. “Thank you. Thank you. That’s a great compliment. Probably the best I’ve received in a long time.”
Last month, she won a Taite Music Prize, for Best Independent Debut, for her EP Filter. She is chuffed. “I really am. You always imagine: what if I did win? But in my heart I didn’t think I would win. How the system’s set up isn’t usually in favour of people like me.”
People like her? “Māori for one, woman second, and an older woman at that. Like, I’m not 23.”
I know how old she is because I asked. But you can mind your own business. “I’m not ashamed of my age. I love growing older and I love the age I’m at. But I also don’t want it to always be the constant focus.”
However, she also wants to encourage other musicians who are “around this age and older”. It’s tricky then. “You dance.” But also, “It means nothing, It’s merely a number. It’s a construct. And I don’t want to try to buy into the construct.”
She lives in Tauranga, in a rented house, with flatmates. She has a much-loved, quite bonkers, house truck called Haumi. Where’s Haumi now? “Oh, she’s out the window. She’s parked in the drive.”
“She’s an over-cabbed … Nissan Atlas 1987 and she’s custom-built by an old engineer. Well, he’s actually dead now, but he was an engineer and he took the cab off the truck and then built it all out of aluminium in the back.
“She’s very unique and eccentric. I can’t just lend her out to people because she’s just got so many tricks. This button has to be turned on to do this thing and that thing has to be shut to do that.”
She bought Haumi because she was sick of the uncertainty of being able to be turfed out of rental houses willy-nilly. Having Haumi means she can just jump in the van and take off. “She’s eccentric and complicated but very joyful.”
We are talking about a truck while really talking about her. In what ways is she eccentric? “I don’t know. To me, I’m just me. Then I find that I’m weird because other people think I’m weird.”
In many ways, she says, she is “pretty conservative, really. I spend a lot of time just reading and writing. Even though I spend a lot of time at wānanga and working with people on projects, I’m also quite a loner. I spend a lot of time in the bush. I don’t really spend time partying.”
Shunning social media
She once had a complicated dream, which became the song Desperate Fools, in which she was walking down a road with a whole bunch of kids, all of whom were hers, and saw a woman with a posh hair-do and a beautiful red coat. And she realised the woman was also her.
I don’t know what to make of this, but she does, sort of. Let’s settle for weird. Neither of us minds weird. We are both weird, we agree, because I shun social media and she would like to shun social media. “I don’t care what I had for dinner last night and I don’t care what anyone else had for dinner.”
She can’t altogether ignore social media because she’s an artist, and is there any use making music if nobody hears it? It’s a dilemma. She wrote, on Instagram, of course, “Social media sounds like clanging symbols to me, lol. But as it turns out, artists have to be promoters and publishers these days and I’ve got a musical art piece to release soon. So here I am and here we go.”
In real life, by the way, Byllie-jean has three kids, now grown-ups. “We like each other as human beings. It’s quite amazing.” I asked an amazingly stupid question: Is there a papa? She says, almost managing to avoid sarcasm, “Yes, there is a papa. We’re not together any more but he is definitely beloved. He lives in Gisborne, He’s a Ngāti Porou man.”
She is Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga and Ngāti Pahauwera. She was born in a tiny former gold-mining settlement called Blacks Point, on the West Coast, in a little rickety house her mother named Emmanuel, beside the Inangahua River. Her family are fundamentalist Christians. “I guess people would probably recognise that [as] the hand-clappy, born-again Christian type.”
Her dad was a road worker, a digger driver and a coal miner. He also invents things. I saw a picture of him. He’s wearing a Harley Davidson shirt and a hat with shark’s teeth around the brim. He looks like a tough guy. “He’s a gentle giant.”
Her mum is “very little. She’s a little, short Māori woman. She does karakia every morning at 5am, always has and always will, for every single person in the family. She’s bold.” She was a community worker, in the cervical cancer field, for 20 years and is now a cleaner.
Byllie-jean is no longer a member of the church but, she says, she has the utmost respect for her family’s beliefs. She adores her parents. “They’re absolute cuties. They spend a lot of time on the land, doing gardening. They are old-school, hard-working folk who are absolute darlings.” She has a brother.
In addition to being church-based, her upbringing was where she began singing. “Pretty earthy, pretty wholesome outdoorsy lifestyle; a hard-working lifestyle.” She had horses and spent a lot of time “riding in the boondocks, in the hills by myself”. She lived sometimes with her auntie, who still lives in nearby Reefton, and still cooks on a coal range.
As a kid, she was both “dreamy” and a bit stroppy. She used to also start fights for the hell of it. She chucked rocks at other kids and started physical fights, although she insists she never hurt anyone. Still, bloody hell: I was already a bit frightened of her, I say, after watching her freaky, spooky music videos. She has a fondness for scary, unreadable masks, which look as though they might have been conjured by the costume designers for Black Mirror.
Called to the land
Those videos are definitely weird. They are deliberately slightly sinister. In one, she is wearing what appears to be long, witchy, green hair. She says all the outfits came from op shops and the green hair “was kind of like a tatty cape-type thing. I just put it over my head and it looks like hair, it looks like a veil”.
She likes playing dress-ups and “being arty and creative. It was one of my favourite videos to make because we had no money, so there was zero expectation. And also, I feel like I’m so underground and I’m a nobody and we always joke that 10 people will watch it and two of them will be our mothers.”
What does being underground mean? “Well, I guess I’m not in any of the festival line-ups at this point. I’m not played on mainstream radio. It definitely is pop music but it’s not mainstream pop. And so, yeah, it’s quite underground. I don’t have 100,000 followers. I haven’t done a world tour.”
Does she want any of those things? “Not the world tour.” Well, she’s got all those dream kids to look after. “Ha. Yes, I do. I’m just giving birth all the time … But this is actually true. I am called to this whenua. I know that. I also have my whānau here, which I’m deeply committed to. I’m in hundreds and hundreds of committed relationships with my family and my hapū and my iwi and my language and, yes, this land. It consumes my time and my life and I love it. So, therefore, I don’t really desire to go gallivanting around the countryside.”
We always joke that 10 people will watch it and two of them will be our mothers.
She might be getting a bit famous. Her family think she might be famous one day. Since winning the award, she meets people who have “read an article, seen a thing. I don’t know the power of the internet. So it’s really hard to say. But I mean, I’m getting an interview with the Listener right now!” Oh well, she’s definitely famous then. She laughs and says she’s not “closed off to opportunities. I mean, who knows? There might be a lovely indigenous festival someone invites me to. But to answer your question fully, I don’t have a deep desire to be top of the charts.”
If she did, she says she would have “sold myself in a different way, if that makes sense. I would have sold the sex thing a lot better. I would have promoted myself in a different way.”
I don’t know. I reckon she’s doing pretty well with the sexy thing. Consider those Red Bands. Also, she’s got quite sexy, quite scary hair. She has a lot of hair. “Yes. Yes, I do. I was called Ngā Bush when I was a kid. Yeah, the hair is difficult. It just wants to do its own thing. It’s not curly, it’s not straight. It’s just its own thing. It’s pretty hard to manage.”
Fairies and magic
She has promoted herself as “a Māori artist who tells hip-hop fairy tales of indie soul”. She believes in fairies. She believes in patupaiarehe. “Which is kupu Māori for sort of like fairy folk. But not the ones with wings that dance around little flowers. Like the Māori version of a fairy, which is another being, I suppose, that lives in the forest.” She has never seen one. “No. I don’t know if they’re there any more. I’m not sure. I’ve definitely heard … I think maybe I’ve just heard the whispering of the trees, the kōrero of the tūpuna in the ngahere, maybe. But I don’t think I’ve seen patupaiarehe.”
Perhaps they’re not meant to be seen. “I think with this new world they’ve probably all retreated somewhere, for the most part. Anyway, what I mean by fairy tales is all that magical crap. Ha, ha. I don’t think it’s crap. And magical’s a silly word.” She prefers wairua. Which is what she’s “trying to talk about with a hip-hop beat behind it”.
Does she believe in fairies or does she just want to believe in fairies? “I do believe in patupaiarehe. I believe in the wairua realm. I believe there are other forms of beings because of the experiences I’ve had in my life.”
These experiences, she says, are “very private. I also want to be very careful about how I word them. They’re kind of hard to talk about. And I don’t want to sound like I’m some sort of spiritual guru, either!”
She is a lot of things: fabulously good fun, sharp as cut glass, cleverer than a monkey. A fairy-tale hip-hop maker. A slightly scary, madly hairy, witchy fairy. Magical is not, it turns out in my dictionary of Byllie-jean, a silly word.