No more eulogies any time soon, I said, before saying yes to another one.
The deceased was my old friend Doug Hood, ONZM, who had finally succumbed to the predations of his cancers. Doug had been too sick to travel to Dunedin for the funeral of Martin Phillipps, whose life in music he had done so much to foster. The last time I saw Martin was when I took him to visit Doug in hospital. The memory of what Doug said that day – he asked me to look after Martin – broke me when I recalled it at Martin’s service.
Doug, as I have written in these pages before, was the kind of individual all cultures need: one who labours so that others can shine, who sees what needs doing and works out how to do it. The ear he had honed mixing live bands shaped the sound of Flying Nun Records’ early releases – including, of course, The Clean’s Boodle Boodle Boodle EP.
The service at the Grey Lynn RSC, not far from the ramshackle Legion of Frontiersmen hall where Boodle was recorded, began with the EP’s final track, Point That Thing Somewhere Else. Forty-odd years on, I observed, it still sounds miraculous. But there was another story to tell about it.
Not long after the EP was recorded, Joe Wylie, an artist with a countercultural bent who once drew Scooby-Doo for Hanna-Barbera, came into a job as director of animation on what would become the short film Te Rerenga Wairua. It was an ambitious project technically – Joe was leading a stable of animators with very different styles who’d signed up to a job scheme – and culturally. This was a group of mostly Pākehā film-makers trying to capture the great Māori mythology of what happens when we die.
A few voices were raised against the film when it premiered in 1984. None of them, Joe recalled later, were Māori, and he was subsequently asked by Dalvanius to create the futuristic sleeve art for the Pātea Māori Club’s Poi E album, which is now held by Te Papa.
What no one grasped at the time was that at the heart of the film was indeed a son of Ngāpuhi, bringing the culture he was creating to the rohe he came from.
Doug recorded Chris Knox’s strange musical backdrop to the film and, because he despaired of the quality of sound libraries of the time, its sound effects – everything from cicadas to passing buses. It was also Doug who suggested using an instrumental mix of Point That Thing, from the original four-track tape in his care, to score the climactic scene where the spirits of the dead depart from Cape Reinga, Te Rerenga Wairua. “Pure inspiration,” Joe would recall much later. “Entirely Doug’s.”
What even his friends didn’t know was that Doug was, through his mother, Dulcie Flavell, Ngāpuhi. In today’s musical community, it is common enough to stand up and recite your pepeha, but he was part of a generation of New Zealanders who lost their identity because it was considered better not to speak of it. Yet, there in the story of the convict who washed up here in the 1840s, married a chief’s daughter and founded a Northland dynasty, and the garrulous Irish lawyers and activists on his father Don’s side, was the man himself, with all his great virtues and flaws.
Te Rerenga Wairua and its psychedelic climax stayed with people who saw it, me included. Decades later, when I was on the board that established NZ On Screen, I couldn’t remember the name, but described it and asked if it could be tracked down. It eventually was and Joe was able to tell more of its story. You can go to NZ On Screen and watch it in that knowledge, and you should.
Haere ra, Doug. Haere, haere, haere ki Te Rerenga Wairua.
