copyright Camera Obscura Records and the Ptolemaic Terrascope. Thanks to Tony Dale for permission to reproduce this interview
An Alastair Galbraith record exists in that place between sleep and full awakening where bright flashes of sound and image tumble over each other in a race to form the most unlikely and quixotic conjunctions. Orchestrated on analog four track with the lost art of an Alchemist, musical and lyrical sketches enter the world, exist for only long enough to say and do what needs to be said and done, and vanish back into the hypnagogic world from whence they came. The reality they leave behind is slightly less consensual than it was prior to their passage. This is a truly liberating psychedelic music because of its refusal to adhere to conventional rock notions of structure, duration and the use of instruments. Guitars may be strummed into a violent storm, or sound like obscure and fragile eastern instruments on fated modal journeys. Violins mourn and scrape in forward and reverse. Vocals whisper and rail and multiply alarmingly, magnetic cries into the void. Lyrics map out dark childhood recollections, almost medieval characters, and many things way to strange to get a grip on. The journey from the juvenilia of The Rip to the mastery of 'Morse' and 'Talisman', is one of the most intriguing undertaken by any musician from the New Zealand underground, and is truly Xpressway's greatest gift to the world. Talking to Alastair is very much like listening to these records, a sense of wonder envelops the conversation and time contracts as the mundane concerns of the world are left behind for a while. A planned 20 minute phone call becomes a hour, and what you have to discuss seems barely touched. I pulled some salient conversations out a massive transcript for this portrait, and started by asking Alastair about early memories of wanting to be a musician:
AG. When I was either five or six I apparently expressed an interest to my parents that I wanted to play the violin. They didn't take me seriously because of my age, but apparently I was very insistent, like (mimics an obstreperous child) '...no, I want to play the violin!'. Eventually they enrolled me in violin lessons with a private teacher and I totally took to it. I think it was much like the kind of thing I do now, because it was a solo occupation. Playing the violin was something I could do by myself, and it was an escrape from whatever kinds of pressures a six year old feels, bearing in mind that I was not a particularly happy or well-adjusted child. I find it strange to say this as an adult now, but I know its true; the violin was form of relaxation therapy and meditation, and I used to completely get into what I was playing. Even the very simple, banal exercises they give to young children so that they can find their pitch, understand rhythm, and so on, utterly entranced me and I could do them for hours and forget where I was. So that was the first musical thing that I remember.
And when did you take up guitar?
Quite a lot later. When I was ten I took one guitar class for one hour at school and learned to play 'What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor' of all things. Later that day I stuck a thorn into the teacher who taught me that on the guitar. I got into terrible trouble over that (laughs). It was completely out-of-the-blue with that random sense of angst children feel. I just went up and stabbed him with a thorn while he was talking to the class. It was out-of-character, since I was very well behaved most of the time. I played the violin until I was fourteen, going through the Royal School of Music grade system, and I got stuck on grade seven, couldn't get past it for some reason. I gave it up then, because my music teacher was starting to say to my parents 'I think he's on drugs' (which at that time was absolutely untrue), and 'he's terribly, terribly vague and wilful, I can't get through to him and can't teach him any more'. So that was the end of that. I even stopped playing the violin, and didn't touch an instrument until a year or so later. When I was fifteen, I talked to my best friend Robert Muir, and we decided we wanted to start a rock band, just like that and apropos of nothing really. I bought a very cheap guitar and a tiny practice amp, and he bought a cheap bass and no amp and we used to plug them both into my amp, and I'd write little bits of songs.
Thus The Rip was born?
Thus the awful Rip was born, yes.
What were you listening to at the time?
Prior to The Rip it was mainly the classical music I was playing on the violin. I also did an embarrassing stint, from age ten to about age twelve, as a choirboy (laughs), and listened to a lot of church choral music, and some of that really appealed to me, particularly the very early composers like Palastrina and Byrd, very simple with no accompaniment, as well as modern stuff like Benjamin Britten. The desire to start a rock band was mainly due to seeing The Clean live. I seem to recall they played every Sunday for six weeks during one school holidays in this tiny wooden suburban hall in an out-of-the-way, semi-upmarket suburb in Dunedin. These 'dances' as they were called, happened in the afternoons from three to six or so, and were run by the local police rugby club! The Clean didn't inspire me the first few times, but there was something about their stage presence, or I suppose at that stage I thought of it as lack of stage presence, that did get through to me. They seemed to be completely normal people, paradoxically both relaxed and intensely into what they were doing. I thought 'that's how I feel - when I want to play music I feel how they look'. I didn't know you could do that. I thought you needed fancy clothes and a special heroic kind of stance to perform. Instead they had these amazing, stirring songs. Sometimes when hearing them live there were moments without end. It transported me.
Many strands of what is now a recognisably New Zealand sound seems to have originated with The Clean, and especially David Kilgour's guitar sound...
The sound of it! It was amazingly trebly. I never got over how wonderfully sharp it was, and how it seemed that two-thirds of the sound was just his guitar. You could hear the drums and you could hear the bass, but most of the sound was this beautifully simple tubey guitar sound, in clanging rolling, perfectly formed waves.
And besides The Clean?
We were lucky, we had this 'groovy' teacher at the straight all-boys school I went to, and he used to be part of a Juke Box Jury on the radio. He had a kind of alternative bent. One of the school clubs I joined was a record club, and used to have give-aways of the promotional records he received. We would win, or he would recommend to us, interesting mainly British alternative music, and he introduced me to the Sex Pistols. I guess I would have been about fourteen, and definitely the energy of the Sex Pistols really captivated me, as did the Buzzcocks (this was 1980).
The Rip self-released a cassette in 1983, called 'The Holy Room' I believe?
It was horrible! I really, sincerely, genuinely do not have a copy and haven't had a copy since about 1988. I don't know who would, hopefully no-one. We had the covers printed with a wooden block. That was just stuff we recorded in our practice room of the time. In those days it was very difficult to get a gig in Dunedin. There was really only one pub, The Empire, that alternative bands ever played at, and to get in there we got to know this man who styled himself 'The Earl of Dunedin', and who used to walk around in a silk dressing gown and pontificate about everything, slavishly copying Malcolm Maclaren. He was a hideous man, and it helped to have attractive females in your band to get a gig. We didn't have any. Eventually we got a support slot for our first gig, I think it was for Sneaky Feelings. Robbie and I turned up, but our drummer at the time, Nicholas, was not allowed to come. We were fifteen and he was fourteen, and his mother decided that fourteen was just too young to be in a pub. He phoned us about ten minutes before we had to start to tell us. We appealed to the bands that were playing with us, and someone said that they would drum for us. So this guy proceeded to massacre the two songs we had to play (we decided the rest of them were awful). He hadn't heard the songs and played a really loud, wild drum piece to them. Before this, he had been eating some kind of hash and honey mixture and he was totally out-of-it. We were deeply embarrassed and I swore never to play live again.
Fortunately, Wayne Elsey from The Stones and later The Doublehappys was there and asked me to come and sit on the steps with him, and just...blew me away. He told me that I had something, something that he couldn't really describe, not a great musical talent or instrumental proficiency, more of a spirit that he could see when I played, and that I had to keep doing it. He offered to help me any way he could, and he actually did that over the next few months. He got Robbie a better bass, let us use their practice space, got us gigs supporting The Stones and just encouraged us the whole time, saving us from a very, very short career.
Who played what on the ' A Timeless Peace' EP (Flying Nun, 1984), and how did that come about?
I sang, played the guitar and violin, Robbie Muir played bass, and Geoff Harford played drums. We were taken to a very upmarket studio in Christchurch for that. Flying Nun didn't initially want to release anything by us. Hamish Kilgour was working for Roger Shepard at that time, and he somehow persuaded Roger that it was worth releasing what we were doing. We then entered this Battle of the Bands and ended up winning it. We said to Flying Nun that we would pay for he actual recording of an EP with the money from that, if they would pay for production costs. I think that is what finally persuaded Roger to release it.
Listening to that EP I can hear echoes of what Postcard Records of Scotland were doing with Josef K, Orange Juice, and the first Go-Betweens single. 'The Holy Room' reminds me Josef K, and 'De Rezske and Dylan' seems to have elements of early Go-Betweens. Was that sort of thing on the turntable around the time?
Wow, no, I hadn't heard those at the or writing those songs. I didn't hear the Go-Betweens until about a year later when I left home and moved into my first flat, and Bruce Russell first played them to me, us being flat-mates at that time.
It was three years until the next and final release by The Rip, 'Stormed Port'. What was happening during those years?
The Rip was still the perennial support band. We were afraid to take what seemed to be the massive step of headlining our own gig. Instead we were the cheapest support act in town, so were assured of getting a lot of actual gigs. We were playing two nights every second or third weekend, and we slowly just got tired of it. We were both at university and we were more free to tour than our drummer, who had a full time job. And Robbie and I felt that the songs we were writing weren't really band stuff, not so fast and angry any more. Without knowing it I was starting to worry about how they would be orchestrated to sound like songs a band could play. I didn't know how the drums should go, and in the end the best thing seemed to be for there to be no drums, and not to have to worry about that problem, or worry about it being in any way danceable or energetic.
Peter Jefferies and Graeme Jefferies (This Kind of Punishment) came into town about three months before 'Stormed Port' was recorded, and I had just bought one of only three copies of TKOP's 'Beard of Bees' that made it to Dunedin and was so inspired by it! I went along to their gig, cheered wildly and talked to them afterwards, and we immediately hit it off as people. Peter said that he had heard of The Rip and had heard one or two things he really liked. He also said he was moving to Dunedin in a few months and was keen produce and engineer the next Rip thing. He had a strong philosophy, which he wanted me to adopt, that recording in a professional studio and paying a lot of money was a very bad idea. Graeme had a four-track, and he suggested that we could record on that. By the time he got back to Dunedin we were playing our last gig. Peter talked to me and was keen for me to do it solo, and just call it a Rip record. They had a flat above the 'New Joy Ice Cream Shop', and we worked late at night when they weren't using it for recording 'In the Same Room'. It was freezing, only a one-bar heater for warmth. We would have a few smokes and cups of sugary white tea, masses of coffee and eat gingernut biscuits, they didn't have any healthy food in the place. We would get so inspired. Peter could talk to me in those days like we were revolutionaries, and what we were doing was really important, at least to us, and if no other line was being crossed we were crossing lines within our own lives. He would press all the buttons, and I still didn't have much idea of what he was doing, but I could hear that the results were so much more like what I thought I had done than the studio sound of the first EP.
'Stormed Port' sounded recognisably of a style that you developed from then on, and Peter Jefferies had a lot to do with figuring out that aesthetic?
That is the first one that hasn't continued to embarrass me. Most people I knew at the time didn't know anything about either home or studio recording. Hardly anyone had the gear for home recording, or how to set it up and use it; and as for recording in a studio, you couldn't do it yourself, you had to get some engineer who of course wouldn't bother to explain what he was doing, so both sides were a mystery. The technical aesthetic of 'Stormed Port' is his and Graeme's, and they explained a fair bit of the mystery of home recording to me.
Was the solo Syd Barrett an influence on 'Stormed Port'?
I had heard Syd Barrett, again through Bruce Russell's record collection, and I loved what I heard, I loved his lyrical abandon more than the music or the way it was recorded. But that wasn't something that I felt at all able to do at the point of 'Stormed Port'. I felt much more confined, and everything was much more formulated; I couldn't be that free, so it has been surprising to hear Barrett's name mentioned again and again in reviews and so forth.
What was the inspiration for 'Entropic Carol'?
There is a remnant of the punk era that I almost forget. Both Robbie and I as each other's best friends through childhood and adolescence shared a feeling that we loved punk because it had a feeling of despair that we understood really well. We'd be walking to school and we'd go 'what the fuck is the point' and stop off in the bushes and smoke cigarettes for half the day sitting on these huge leaves with this really untimely feeling that we were very, very old and jaded at age fourteen (laughs), and that life was a hopeless affair. 'Entropic Carol' is about one of those mornings.
And there is a touch of the occult in the backwards-played 'Wrecked Wee Hymn'?
That started with a mistake. After Peter had begun to record the thing, there was some kind of hiatus. I know that 'In the Same Room' was a very difficult record. It was their last and it was just the two brothers working on it and living together. 'Stormed Port' ground to a halt for a couple of months, and at exactly that point I sat a friends warehouse for them and they had a portastudio they let me use. One day I put on my own home cassette of what we had done so far and I put it in backwards and at the wrong speed. Basically that was 'Wrecked Wee Hymn', although to it I added a couple of forwards violin tracks and slowed it as much as it would go. Although it happened by accident, it was a piece of luck. There is an occult thing about it, I was surprised and scared hearing my voice backwards, singing in a language I didn't know, with a mirrored mood.
'Starless Road' seems to have a specific and personal intent, and it strikes me that it holds a great deal of meaning for you, because it reappeared on the 'Hurry on Down' cassette and the Plagal Grind EP. Who was it written to?
It was written for Wayne Elsey. When he died in an accident he was only nineteen or twenty, and I was younger. I realised what he had done for me, in that I wouldn't have carried on making music without that initial boost from him. It is honestly true that the very last thing he said to me before he had to go off on the tour on which he died was 'you have to want to live...look I've just given up smoking...you have to want to'. When somebody, for whatever reason, says this really positive thing to you and then dies, your last contact with them is like a gift from them to you. The middle verse of 'Starless Road' which goes 'You said that you'd seen stars/on a stretch of starless road', came from when The Rip and The Doublehappys were on tour together. He, the driver and I were the only people awake in a van in the middle of the night. We were drinking whisky and he looked at all the reflective dots down the center of the road, and, being drunk, said 'look at all the stars in the road!'. I very pragmatically said to him 'those are not stars, they're those reflective dots'. That song still works for me as a connection to my self and my past when I am playing it live.
The next thing that came out was the 'Hurry On Down' cassette on Xpressway. How did the two versions of that come about?
One side of it was recorded live at a gig to benefit the Regent Theatre, a large theatre in Dunedin that the owners never stopped doing up. They would get musicians to play for nothing for 24 hours over a Friday and Saturday. It was a chance to play to a horribly mainstream audience of people browsing through second hand books that had also been donated to the theatre. I really stupidly agreed to do a 3am performance and went to sleep and woke up at 2:30am and went down there with Bruce. He recorded the whole thing, but I was under the influence of something very strange, I can't remember what, and when I listen to it I can tell that I wasn't fully awake. The other side was a result of Bruce coming to the warehouse where I was living at that time and asking me if I'd written any songs. I said I'd written about eight or nine and he said 'play them all to me'. I played them one after the other for him and he recorded them on a walkman. I honestly thought he was recording them for personal listening, but he released it! It was good of him, but within a few months of it being out I said to him that I never really knew at the time it was recorded that he was going to release it, and that I would quite like a go at giving him something slightly better, and so there was a first and second edition. Just prior to this, a friend who was an elderly woman I used to do gardening for (and I had known since I was twelve) had asked me out of the blue what I would most like materialistically, and I thought for a while and said 'a four-track recording machine'. Later, she came back into the room with a cheque that was almost enough to buy a second hand one. So I was learning how to record myself at that point and was able to give Bruce slightly better versions of some of the songs.
Looking back with today's perspective, Plagal Grind almost seems like a supergroup of the New Zealand underground. Was the band set up as a long-term thing, or just to record the Xpressway EP?
The EP came quite late (end of 1988), when we finally realised, after about a year-and-a-half of being a band, that we had never released anything. Plagal Grind itself came about in an odd way. I'd decided that couldn't live in New Zealand any more, and I wanted to live in Australia. In November 1986 I went off to live in Melbourne by myself. On the way to Melbourne, I took a train to Dunedin Christchurch and stayed with Graeme Jefferies for a while, and suggested I put down a song on his four-track as we had done with 'Stormed Port' a year earlier, and that he would finish it off later. So I put down 'Timebomb' and 'Bravely, Bravely', and during the period I was in Australia, he sent me two or three cassettes of different mixes of what he added to them, basically large guitar washes of sound.
When I came back to New Zealand in February 1987, after quite a surreal time in Melbourne, he said 'let's start a band, and we'll call it the Cake Kitchen, and you play the violin and I'll play the guitar...it'll be a duo'. I was really keen to play with him, but part of the plan was for me to to live in Christchurch and live in his warehouse. I didn't really want any more strangeness. I wanted to be back in my home town of Dunedin so I said no. I went back to Dunedin and within a few days Peter Jefferies said roughly the same thing, 'let's start a band, I'm dying to play drums again and you play guitar'. Graeme came down and we decided to form a band with the three of us, and came up with the name Plagal Grind. After only two days of just talking about what we were going to do, it was clear that Peter and Graeme weren't getting on, and, like a divorcing couple, they asked me to choose which of them I wanted to go with! As Bruce Russell said to me at the time 'this is the worst can of worms you ever opened, Alastair' (laughs). But it was a nasty scene, and in the end I chose Peter because he was going to be in Dunedin, Graeme left and it took a while to patch things up.
Peter suggested this guitarist that he had done an experimental album ("At Swim Two Birds") with, namely Jono Lonie, and we formed the first Plagal Grind. Jono Lonie played in a super-psychedelic guitar style with heaps of space effects, like sounds of seagulls crying on the beach and so on, but it was a little bit much for the songs. In the end we probably fairly unkindly just dumped him and got Robbie Muir to play the bass, sort of the Rip with Peter on drums and songs maybe a little better. David Mitchell came up to us after a gig (at that point the 3Ds hadn't quite started) and said 'I like those songs, I hear weird sea shanties in them and I want to play the bits that I hear in my head that go with them and make them like old, wild, fucked sea shanties', and he did. That was the line up that lasted for about a year and a bit and recorded the Plagal Grind EP. Bruce applied for a grant to the New Zealand Arts Council to release it because he had no money to release vinyl. It was such a nightmare finding a company that could do it, and the company we found just fucked around for ages.
The Plagal Grind EP has the first in a great series of David Mitchell covers.
Yeah, but Bruce objected to it when he first saw it saying 'there are eleven penises on this cover!' (laughs).
How were those solo songs worked up into band form?
I'd write the structure was for what I would play, and all the lyrics. Peter would get me to play it over a number of times until he had worked out what he was going to do on the drums. The others would play along by ear until they found what they wanted to do. It was not a case of me directing them. That method applied for at least the first year of that second line-up, but towards the end of Plagal Grind I definitely had firmer opinions about what I wanted and would, for instance, say to Peter things like 'can you try and drum this one like it's backwards and cantering and slipping sometimes' and I felt really uncomfortable doing that, telling them what to do. I was shy at getting across what I wanted and ended up saving complex tracks to do by myself at a later date. That is probably what has put me off being in a band ever since.
The Plagal Grind EP has a wonderfully jagged and immediate sound. How was a typical track recorded, for example 'Receivership'?
It started out as a live version of the song recorded onto four-track in a 60 foot long wooden room downstairs in the warehouse I was living in, one track for drums, one for bass and one for each guitar. Then we would take the four track stuff to the new Fish Street Studios and dump the tracks onto eight track and add a couple of tracks of vocals and extra guitar tracks from myself and David. When the eight tracks were done we mixed them on this very dodgy desk, but it was very exciting.
'Midnight Blue Vision' has a very Indian raga feel about it. How did that evolve?
Again that was a backwards accident. I never labelled working reel-to-reel tapes, and often because there are were labels I would put them on backwards, and think I'm listening to something that I've done and find it's actually, as you say, almost Indian sounding. With 'Midnight Blue Vision' it was not a matter of looking for that effect, more of stumbling on and thinking that I could turn it into a song. Since then, I have stopped having 'accidents', and have looked for them.
What do you think is the legacy of Xpressway?
It was a very down time before Xpressway was forced into being by the generosity of Bruce's response to the dumping of all the perceived non-commercial side of the Flying Nun stable, which happened over a short period of time. People would approach Flying Nun with a proposal for their next project and be told 'no, we don't want to do that', and yet not be told that they had been dropped. It happened to Peter and Graeme Jefferies at the same time that it happened to me and The Terminals. Bruce got this idea that as long as we didn't mind recording really basically and only releasing cassettes with Xeroxed covers he could take up the slack, and we would at last have a chance to get something back for what we had done, and would actually see (admittedly small) amounts of money. He would provide, as voluntary work, his own statements for the various acts on the label. It was always just for those people who had no other outlet for music he really liked...friends. It worked pretty well. He said that we were a collective yet he did by far the lion's share of the work, closely followed by Peter who took up a lot of the mastering side. My only real input apart from folding some covers was to turn another attempt to live overseas into a kind of roving representative tour for the label. Rather than taking a lot of clean clothes when I went to travel around Europe with no money, I took a back-pack of Xpressway cassettes and went to every store in every city I visited and asked them to at least listen to the stuff. I stumbled upon Avalanche Records in Edinburgh. The guy who owned the store listened to what I had, and liked it so much he set up a couple of thing straight away which culminated in our first overseas release, the 'Xpressway Pile-Up' compilation, and also a deal for Snapper, and later a posthumous release for the Doublehappys' 'How Much Time Left Please'.
In terms of legacy, when the Europeans and Americans first heard the early Flying Nun stuff, part of what grabbed their attention was the sound, how immediately it was recorded, and the degree to which the people who were playing it seemed to feel passionately about it. By the time Xpressway needed to come into being, a lot of that had faded from the output of the Flying Nun catalogue and Bruce seemed to have found it again. You can hear in those Xpressway releases that there is nothing trying to be what it's not, or seeking favour in any particular court.
Were are up to 1991 and the 'Gaudy Light' EP. That was licensed by Xpressway to Siltbreeze. How did that come about?
I'm still not absolutely clear on it, except that Bruce had sent Tom and Mac at Siltbreeze the 'Hurry On Down' cassette, and they must have asked him whether I would be interested in doing a 7". At that point I had begun to write shorter songs, and rather than it being a single it ended up as a five track EP.
The EP seemed very much about characters of almost mythical stature, 'John of the Palsied Eye', the protagonist of 'Gaudy Light', 'Mrs Blucher', ' Warden Tye'. What were you trying to achieve with this EP?
'John of the Palsied Eye' was partly about the proprietor of the Empire Hotel in Dunedin, where as I mentioned, a lot of the bands in Dunedin played. He was a lurid, red-faced old drunkard who used to talk to people in this horrible, sleazy, conspiratorial way. At the end of the song he fell down the stairs and died. 'Mrs Blucher' was about a German woman, Helga, who entered into a marriage of convenience with Bruce Blucher (from Trash) so that she could stay in the country. After they got married she became my girlfriend (laughs), and it became a kind of standing joke, that I was having an affair with Bruce's wife. 'Warden Tye' is an odd song, not so much about a character, more about thinking sometimes that everyone and everything is so fake, and then turning around and questioning myself: 'aren't I, wouldn't I do the same thing?'. So it is about the constant desire to reach out of that state where you would compromise yourself.
>> go to part 2 of the Alastair Galbraith interview