When my prostate surgery recovery took a rodeo turn, friends pitched in. Asked them: in your Fourth Form year, what was your favorite song. (Year 10, in new money, if you're wondering. Also the music came in vinyl or tiny transistor.)
Finlay Macdonald
Uncle Dave has been poorly and has called for help with his newsletter. “Nurse!” he cried. Instead, he got me. Why he couldn’t type lying down with a catheter in his bladder and a drip in his arm is a mystery, he should harden up. Or not, perhaps. Anyway, having blithely volunteered to step into the breach I awaited the brief. Uncle Dave addresses matters of weight in this newsletter, and I anticipated he would want the same from his understudies: pandemic responses, bike lanes, pop-up leaders, who is dismal and who is not … Eventually it arrived. “If it were , for example nominate your favourite song of your fourth form year, is that something you might be interested in?’ Reader, I have left the punctuation and sentence structure as it was, in deference to the house style herein. I repeated, “Sure, look forward to the brief.’ He responded, “Well then, how about precisely that…”
Turns out, this isn’t as simple as shouting about Mike Hosking or recounting tales of yore from the damp-carpeted lounge bars of the mighty DB hotel empire. (“None taken,” I hear the proprietor mutter.) First of all, I’d have to do some research. When the hell was I in the fourth form? So long ago it wasn’t called Year 10 for starters. Turns out it was 1976 – don’t do the maths – and once I got thinking and googling it all came rushing back at me like the kind of dream you have at that age. I dug around in the back of a storage cupboard and found the boxes of vinyl I’ve kept, even though most of it has long been unplayable due to accretions of dust, blunt needle damage, beer and probably the residue of a thousand Rizla papers. Thank you, Uncle Dave, for this trip down turntable lane.
My God, though, the 1970s were a good time to be a teenager discovering music. I try to remember what it was actually like back then – no internet obviously, nothing digital, not even much money with which to buy records, which made every trip to the record store a heavy-duty mission. Armed with whatever I’d read in Creem magazine or some rock encyclopedia I’d been reading like a novel, or with some track still etched in my synapses from Hauraki or, what, The Grunt Machine or Radio with Pictures? Whatever was on. Hours flipping through the albums in alphabetically arranged bins, poring over the cover art, reading the liner notes, fretting lest my few hard-saved dollars might be wasted on something that didn’t really and truly and fully and uncompromisingly rock. At 14, such a good age, it was about all that mattered.
Anyway, ’76 was a pretty fucking vintage year, I have to say. We’d really only just graduated from intermediate school, when Ziggy-era Bowie jostled with 20 Solid Gold Hits for our eardrums and pocket money. Great training. By the fourth form we were ready. We were critics, fans, air guitar virtuosos, all that. It was a wonderful year, a transition period from great old school rockers to a next generation of cool kids and then the glimmering dawn of punk. The Steve Miller Band released Fly Like An Eagle, the first Ramones album landed, Bob Seger’s teen angst masterpiece Night Moves hit us where it hurt, Rastaman Vibration throbbed from older siblings’ bedrooms, Tom Petty debuted, so did Blondie, so did Joan Armatrading, Lynyrd Skynyrd came out with their incredible live One More From the Road, Hotel California fought More Than a Feilding (sorry, Feeling) for control of AM radio ridge, and Bowie returned with Station to Station. I mean, come on. There was tons more (Graham Parker! Patti Smith!) as there is every year, but it felt like an embarrassment of riches, even at the time.
But this is a cop out, right? Uncle Dave wants me to name one song. One song that evokes a sense of time and place and age and, if I’m honest, stupidity and naivety and proper uncoolness. Well, there was one song that, in retrospect, pretty much summed the year up. It was so ubiquitous it might as well have been handed out on street corners and distributed by government decree to every home. The weird thing, though, was that until it hit the radio we’d never even heard of the artist, even though it came from a live album, which even idiots like us knew is what you release when you’re already famous. But Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” from Frampton Comes Alive pretty much sums up the fourth form for me. A question without a question mark. My 1976 in a song. Surprising, ridiculous, thrilling, joyous, long, live …you didn’t want it to end.
Paul Brislen
Write about your favourite track when you were in the fourth form, he said. It’ll be easy, he said.
Well buster, it’s not as straightforward as all that is it because I was arriving on a jet plane and the only radio station the rental car (A “Hold On” I think it was called) could pick up was 1ZB and the songs … they were few and far between.
Plus it was so bloody long ago I have to resort to Wikipedia and LinkedIn to try to remember what we were doing then.
The USS Texas arrived in Auckland the same time we did and we got to watch one determined deck hand sit in the McDonald’s on Queen Street sucking down his Big Mac and refusing to be intimidated by the dozens of people just staring at him. DD Smash won big at the music awards with Outlook for Thursday but damned if I’m going to pick that or Maxine (Sorry, Sharon) because they were just on every radio that year and every one of the team of only 3,264,800 as we were then could sing them off by heart.
Plus it wasn’t my music, you know? I’d just left a school in the old country that once taught several members of Duran Duran. I owned one album (by Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and one single (Video Killed the Radio Star) and the perm/mullet combo of Sir Dave Dobbyn wasn’t going to sway my auditory canals.
No, I’m going to pretend I’m younger and go instead for the Bard of Dominion Road, Don McGlashan and that good bloke Harry Sinclair and the album I insisted my mates back home listen to (they didn’t because how could you in 1989) Songs from the Front Lawn.
This is New Zealand music at its finest – songs you can sing to, stories being told, places being pinned to the map in a way that said “We are here”.
But what to choose?
David needs cheering up so maybe it should be How You Doing? so he can sing along with the bit about Hamilton. Or the Theme from the Lounge Bar because it has that awesome line about the blood changing direction in your veins which is so good. Or Claude Rains, because the nuclear war stuff was pretty fucking real back then.
There can be only one, so I shall opt for Tomorrow Night, that ode to the great OE, that fucking perfect song from its opening notes on a melodica to the girl from the Hutt Valley talking loud in a Kiwi accent all the way to Oriental Bay standing there in the sunlight…
If anything can get you out of bed and pissing in the wind it’s this song.
Get well, mate!
Russell Brown
My fourth form year, 1977, was the year of the punk rock revolution. I read about it eagerly in the newspaper before I heard it, and when I heard it, it came in wild, tantalising snatches. One night, crouched over the radio in my bedroom, I tuned into a faint signal from Radio Hauraki in Auckland: "the Sex Pistols", I heard the man say. The signal vanished before I could really process what I'd heard.
Then, a month or two later, I wandered into the fifth form common room at Burnside High, where they had a stereo, and heard, at rebellious volume, what I realised must surely be 'Anarchy in the UK'. Steve Jones' guitar, fat and roaring like nothing I'd heard before. Are you even allowed to sound like that? I thought to myself, excited and perhaps a bit rattled. I was on my way.
Well, actually.
While the above is all true, it would be misleading to say these early rumours of the revolution were actually my favourite records in the fourth form, if only because the internet hadn't been invented and I had no way of hearing them in full. They didn't feature on my primary music discovery platforms: Casey Kasem's American Top 40, and my buddy John's older brother Gerard's record collection.
It would be another year before I heard Casey play Patti Smith's version of 'Because the Night' and had another what the hell was that moment. (I was so stunned I didn't record it and had to sit there with my finger anxiously poised over the button the following week.) And while there was a cornucopia of mainstream 70s rock available to be taped from brother Gerard's collection, he had not discovered punk rock. (We did find his copy of Steal This Book, which was a trip, but that's another story.)
A perusal of the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1977 indicates that Casey did introduce me to quite a number of songs I love to this day. Thelma Houston singing 'Don't Leave Me This Way', the Steve Miller Band's 'Fly Like An Eagle' and 'Jet Airliner', the slinky southern boogie of Atlanta Rhythm Section's 'So Into You', Rose Royce's 'Car Wash'. I have all those on vinyl and I play them to confused old people in suburban bars. 'The Theme from Rocky' hasn't stayed with me in quite the same way, but I have a memory of playing it as an inspiration before going to an exam.
And then of course, there was 'Dancing Queen'. 1977 was right in the middle of the years when it was essentially compulsory to listen to Abba in New Zealand. I'm sure Abba records were subsidised by the taxpayer and may even have been delivered to every home, like the Mazengarb Report. Technically, it wasn't illegal to not listen to Abba, but the social sanction was sufficiently severe that you didn't really want to be caught not doing it.
But mostly my listening was my press-pause-then-go cassette compilations from Casey's show, where you always ended up with a few songs you didn't really want (I heard Kansas's 'Dust in the Wind' more times than was fair or reasonable) – and the tapes from brother Gerard. Gerard liked his heavy rock, so there were Uriah Heep's terrible records and Deep Purple's Made in Japan from 1972 – which, of course, included 'Smoke on the Water'.
And then there was the Supertramp. I deny ever listening to Supertramp. The album covers burned into my brain are false memories, implanted by aliens. Please, let's just move on.
Which brings us to the The Eagles. I am old enough now to understand that The Eagles were merely the airbrushed, processed, cocaine-fuelled representation of a country-rock phenomenon pioneered by their betters. But to be honest, I've always found Little Feat unbearable, and Hotel California the album is replete with smoothly-crafted bangers like 'Life in the Fast Lane'. People talk about 'New Kid in Town' as a soft-rock classic, but it was always 'The Last Resort' that gave me feelings. And then, of course, there was the title track, a mysterious indictment of consumerism with a legendary guitar coda that you – yes, you – can hear in your head as you read this.
To be honest, 'Hotel California' was probably the song I played myself the most in 1977. But we all get to burnish our histories, so I'm anointing the 20th biggest selling single in New Zealand in 1977. The song I danced to in a classroom that year. The song that gave me a what the hell is this feeling that has never really abided. One of the greatest records ever made. A song that will be played at the conclusion of my funeral, as the mourners rise and find their rhythm and dance around my mortal remains in a celebration of love, community and life itself. Take it away, Donna ...
Sue Orr
I own every 20 Solid Gold Hits album between 1 and 28. I’ve told the kids – if I drop dead unexpectedly, the fiscally smart thing to do would be to bags the Crown Lynn but the albums are actually what you’ll need to get you through the dark days. Start on Volume One, and dance out your grief to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep (track 17) and you can’t skip any songs, not even L’amour est l’enfant de la libertē (13) or Ernie’s Fastest Milkcart in the West (14).
T-R-I-G-G-E-R...
Dave and I have history, when it comes to teenage anthems. One New Year’s Eve, a few years back now, the pair of us performed the entire Volume One album by a seaside fire, roaring surf a steady drumbeat. When I say performed, he worked the Spotify, and I sang and did track-specific interpretive dance. By around 2am I was Susan Partridge and I Think I Love You (15). Karren, Adrian, Liz and Pete had all snuck away to bed some time around Candida (10).
The year of my fourth form was 1976, which means Twenty Solid Gold Hits Vol 14. I just looked through the songs on that record and it was obvious immediately that the winner was Play That Funky Music by Wild Cherry (14). Who can remain seated, when that opening guitar riff belches out of the speaker? I think of those white boys playing down the music til they died and my thoughts drift uncomfortably to the 1976 Hauraki Plains College disco and a near-brush with suspension after a Quench bottle full of some foul mix of alchohol and Raro, with my surname taped to the bottom of it, was discovered hidden in a girls’ toilet cistern. Always name your school gear, and I did, and it could have been my undoing, had there not been others families with the same surname at the school. Prove it’s mine, Miss, and she couldn’t.
I had a beautiful old Ultimate bakelite valve radio by my bed. Late at night, it candleglowed my dark room. Outside, cows snuffled behind the hedge. Inside, I turned that dial up and down the old AM spectrum, shuffling through corridors of static into parlours hosting talkback and classical music and Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. Sometime that year, on one of those nights, the static cleared and my skin prickled as a deep gutteral voice growled Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. I stopped spinning the dial. Recognised the song – Gloria, by Van Morrison – but this was something different; the rising thrum of sexual longing of a woman, for a woman. I’d discovered Patti Smith and when she uh uh made her mine, I was hers.
I was hers through Horses, then Twelve, then Radio Ethiopia, and all the albums that followed. I bedgrudingly shared her with Robert Mapplethorpe when his explicit photo exhibition came to New Zealand in 1995. I’m still hers. Her books line my shelves and I will never stop craving the blunt-force trauma of her brittle words and music. Here she is, singing Gloria to me, but you can listen too.
Jacinda Ardern
David Street Primary School, Morrinsville 1985 -1991
Now, the Prime Minister. Have I lined up a music memory from her too? No, but Sue’s memories from the North Island dairy plains reminded me that I got a great Edgecumbe earthquake story from Jacinda Ardern when I wrote the Bullrush book.
There were Primers in the swimming pool - so we all just ran to the windows to watch the primers get sloshed around. That is my enduring memory of the Edgecumbe earthquake. Dog eat dog, that's what primary school is.
I definitely remember it being a good shake. My teacher, Miss Maude, was holding this heavy duty boombox and dropped it as soon as the earth started shaking. Just froze. While we all ran for cover.
So she was no use?
No. No use. But she didn't stop us watching the Primers, so that was good.
Sloshing primers! Don’t tell me the PM lacks a sense of adventure. Okay, one more bit of nostalgia and then it’s time for a dawn service.
MTAF reader, friend of the planet and truffle whisperer Gareth Renowden - hi Gareth! -was in touch with some innocent sixties music memories.
Gareth Renowden
Mr Slack Is Unwell (not in a Jeffrey Bernard sort of way)
Ah yes, the fourth form. I’d like to say I remember it well, but I don’t. I remember the music and the first proper girlfriend, who was - to my eternal gratitude - a great deal less than proper. The memory of her mother returning home and knocking on the bedroom door (locked, fortunately) where we were “listening to records” can still send shivers down what passes for a spine in these my later years.
We did listen to music. A cover story it may have been, but at least it was a clearly audible one. Unfortunately, the FPG was not possessed of either good taste or an extensive record collection, and her record player was rudimentary enough that there was no way I was going to bring my records round and have the grooves routed out to unplayability. She liked, loved even, Marmalade and Love Affair, two terminally uncool - to the emergent music snob that was me - late 60s pop groups. My fourth form soundtrack was The Beatles’ White Album, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake by the Small Faces, Cream were saying Goodbye, Led Zeppelin were saying hello, and Pink Floyd were offering More. By the time the fifth form arrived, I would be one of those greatcoat clad youths carrying a copy of Hot Rats under one arm as a means of advertising one’s hip music credentials. Too young to have long hair, too old to teenybop.
The only LP the FPG possessed was The Everlasting Love Affair. Her record player had no auto stacker thingy for singles, and leaping up every three minutes to change the record was, how shall I put this - not conducive to continuity. It therefore became the soundtrack to some of my favourite formative experiences. The album opens with Love Affair’s big hit single (with a bullet!) Everlasting Love, on which they admitted having played no instruments.
In those more innocent times, the press presented this as a scandal, and it certainly didn’t do much for their credibility with me. The only member of the band on the hit is the lead singer, Steve Ellis who had, and perhaps still has, a strong voice reminiscent of Steve Marriott. He was their saving grace.
That song is good enough to stand on its own, and pitched Love Affair into a decent if short career. But the song that I remember best is a stone-cold classic. A bit pedestrian compared with the Nashville Teens original, not so laid back as Mercury Rev, but solid. Love Affair’s Tobacco Road hits the spot. Just not the one I usually failed to find.
Ruth Spencer
So far the Friends Of David Delving Eruditely Rearward (FODDER) Society have tended towards the mid 70’s in their 4th form nostalgia. Disco, glam rock, it’s all cool - you could name almost anything from the era and maintain your cachet. I, however, was busy being born, and so I missed it. My only real-life memory of 70s music was being scared of the cat one from KISS. I’m still edgy about mimes.
My 4th form year was 1990. Yes, that 1990, the one of the Sesqui. “It’s Sesqui 1990, in the Land of the Long White Cloud!” we sang, because who needs lyrics when you can be literal. To our mild surprise the Kotuku was suddenly our new national symbol. The white heron, gracious and magical - we were told that you’d be lucky to see one in your lifetime, and then one came to live on my Mum’s roof and ate all her goldfish. An ungainly seconds-bin flamingo flailing over the fence when shouted at, as a national symbol it seemed kind of okay.
I was thirteen for most of that year. I was deeply in love with Jon Bon Jovi and my life size poster of him which I still have. Two copies of. Fight me, he’s beautiful. The charts were amazing: Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love, which my sister Kristen had on a Be Your Own Popstar cassette tape, an early and mind-blowing iteration of karaoke with the instrumental versions on side B. Madonna’s Vogue, which was in exactly the same key as the test pattern tone. Remember the test pattern tone? It went OOOOOOOOOH just like that bit before ‘Let your body move to the music’ on exactly the same note. I memorised the periodic table to the spoken bit from Vogue. The world made more sense in 1990.
My most solid musical memory of that year is 4th form camp. We went to Lake Rotoiti, the one in Marlborough, because I’m from Blenheim. Some kind of weird government-issue yellow-beige concrete dorm facility with bunk beds. I played Penelope Sheep (a pun on Penelope Barr) in a weather report skit which absolutely killed. “Everyone in Taupo smoked weed today, so there’s a high over the North Island (hysterical laughter). All the girls on camp at Lake Rotoiti got their periods so there’s a depression over the top of the South Island (rolling in the aisles).” We didn’t have Tik Tok, the bar was lower.
What I remember most clearly is the girls who were brave and sure of themselves, and brought their tape players and music with them. I would never have been confident enough to say, hey, let’s all listen to MY mixtape, which is just as well because I only had one and it had Phantom of the Opera on it and was given to me at 12 by my friend Catherine Smart who understands people. But the cool girls knew what was cool, and so the soundtrack to 4th form camp was the gaspy Kiss by Prince, and Strokin’ by Clarence Carter Weeks. You’ll remember Clarence from such other hits as …oh. ‘I’m strokin’ to the east, I’m strokin’ to the west, I’m strokin’ to the woman that I love the best. I be STROKIN’’. It gets worse after that. Don’t WAP me.
Linda Burgess
The 4th form. The year that my parents got the stereogram, which came with a free record of a train that crossed captivatingly from the left speaker to the right.
1963: in the early months of that year that I spent jammed up against the stereogram, I sang my way through my parents’ newly acquired collection. Younger than Springtime and Whenever I feel Afraid and Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plains and On the street where you live. If I was feeling pretentious, there was someone tinkling Chopin.
Around the May holidays I discovered boys – well, one who looked like Bobby Vee – various other Bobbies, and Gene Pitney.
Though mostly I could only afford singles, it meant I no longer had to completely rely on the Lever Hit Parade and the Sunset Show. The Beach Boys, and Lesley Gore who only got to sing about crying at her party because her Dad owned the studio. Little Peggy March, the Crystals, and Billy Fury who, my Dad said, had a skull that looked like you could crack it like an eggshell.
1963, the year of the Stereogram.
And something in the world had shifted. We’d got The Beatles.
If you had to choose a year to be 14, there is no better.
Simon Wilson
I went to one of those schools where the boys were allowed to wear their hair long, at least until my 5th form year, when the principal, ex-military, decided he’d had enough of all this Little Red Schoolbook hippie nonsense and reintroduced hair regulations.
He lined all the boys up in the quad outside and told us our hair could not touch our collars. Why couldn’t we be more like Colin Meads. This was 1971, the year the British and Irish Lions toured and, Meads and Brian Lohore aside, most of the players on both sides had big shaggy mops. The Welsh fullback J.P.R. Williams had hair so long, he wore a headband when he played.
We stood there, chins sunk onto undeniably un-Meads-like chests, the collars of our shirts pulled back between our shoulder blades, and still a good half of us failed the test. The principal gave up.
The year before that, my fourth-form year, the music was blues rock, which we listened to at lunchtimes in a biology lab. The school’s official Blues Club. Eric Clapton was King and John Mayall was God, or possibly it was the other way round.
I didn’t know much about it. My tastes had worked their way through the Beatles, the Small Faces, the Monkees and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. True name. When the White Album came out, back in 1968, we’d gathered at my friend Neil’s home – where there was a record player in a basement rumpus room – and solemnly agreed the rumours were nonsense and the Beatles would never disband.
Most of us then were already growing our hair, mostly moptop style. Neil, though, had hair so groomed and set he’d have made Rod Stewart jealous.
In the biology lab the older kids, the serious ones who did know about the music, mined the 60s far more than they grabbed at the latest. There was the actual blues of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. Also Otis Redding singing The Dock of the Bay, Grace Slick with White Rabbit and Wooden Ships. So many revelations.
The bands most of us liked best, I think, were the Butterfield Blues Band, Blind Faith and all the others in their orbit. Al Kooper singing Season of the Witch with Stephen Stills on guitar; Stevie Winwood singing the super-jazzy Low Spark of the High-heeled Boys, with Traffic, both songs coming in at a gloriously expansive 11 minutes plus.
Those guys, to use the technically correct descriptor, were the coolest cats.
We sat around and listened. Talked about where to buy greatcoats. Watched the glass case full of cockroaches. We didn’t play. I don’t remember that any of us could play, although everyone had learned a bit of guitar or piano.
The kids who could play came two years later and were in my brother’s class. Nick Bollinger, Stephen Jessup and others: the great garage band that graduated into Rough Justice with the late, great Rick Bryant, and into the Windy City Strugglers, Holidaymakers, Tombolas, Hulamen ... they were the real deal.
My brother played drums with them for a while, sometimes in the front room at our house. I was proximate to grungy glory.
Nobody, by the way, should die before they hear Jessup play Be Mine Tonight on the electric ukelele. Th’ Dudes, filtered through the Wellington International Ukelele Orchestra.
Jamie Belich was there, fully bearded in the fourth form. Jeremy Coney was in the seventh form when I was in the third, a gangly and disinterested prefect towering over us all at the third form social. And whether it was Clapton or Mayall who was king, the undisputed queen of the school, our own teenage Gloria Steinem, was Catherine Delahunty.
Lindsey Dawson
You’re all so deliciously young with your 14-year-old memories – talking of your teenage lives in the 80s and 90s, making out you’re old already.
I was 14 in 1959. Now that’s old.
As I scrolled through the top 100 list for songs that had drilled their way into my fourth form mind, I was startled by how many lyrics I could come up with.
You won’t know them.
“Seven little girls, sitting in the back seat, huggin’ and a’kissin’ with Fred.” (Paul Evans and the Curls.) Once heard, never forgotten.
“He wears tan shoes with pink shoelaces, a polka-dot vest and, man oh man...” (Dodie Stevens.)
“There’s someone sneakin’ round the corner, could that someone be Mac the Knife?” (Bobby Darin.) You probably do know that one. It’s a classic now. Wildly popular, it won Darin ‘Record of the Year’ at the Grammy Awards in ’59. I doubt I knew about the Grammies. I knew hardly anything, unless it was in Seventeen magazine.
The 50s were were a quiet decade in Auckland. The dullness of it! My biggest moment had been being propped up in the hedge at our house and madly waving a wee union Jack at Liz and Phil as their shiny car glided along our road during the ’53 Royal Tour.
In ’59, there were small excitements. My brother and I went to a neighbour’s house where Garth, the local nerd – though the word was not yet invented – had rigged up some kind of crystal-set gizmo on which could be heard the sound of the very first Sputnik satellite. As it passed high over Upland Road, Auckland, New Zealand, The World, we sat in Garth’s bedroom and heard it going beep-beep-beep. The Russians were saying, listen, we are number one!
Not to be outdone, the Americans stuffed two monkeys into tubes and sent them into space in a Jupiter rocket that same year, to see if they might survive. They did. But little Miss Able then died in an operation to remove electrodes from her head. I didn’t know that. Just look at how they even strapped down her tail. Animal rights activists were furious. I didn’t know that either.
In ’59 I walked with thousands over the grand new, brand new Auckland Harbour Bridge on its opening day, strolling high up on those squitty little four lanes that would be so quickly be seen as inadequate. When I Googled to make sure it happened that year, I read that four men had fallen to their death during the build. I didn’t know that.
That night I went to my ballroom dancing class in a shed somewhere in Remuera, to learn how to a quickstep, waltz and foxtrot, essential social skills in the 50s. Everyone went to Johnny’s. It was an institution. My mum was keen on me having the right shoes and bought me an expensive pair of clunky silver things with an ankle strap and fat heels. They cost five pounds, which 10 years later would become known as $10 when decimal currency changed our world.
I hated them wth a passion and guiltily smuggled in another pair of old shoes so as not to have to endure the shame of the chunky heels.
Mostly, I was a dumb teenager sporting a pony tail, full skirts with stiff petticoats, and pedal-pushers (translation: under-knee pants). A total virgin. The year before, one of the naughty school tribe in the back row had secretly showed me a piece of paper with a four-letter word on it. A strange kind of word starting with F. I’d not seen it before, had no idea what it meant. I was that wholesome.
And yet our music world was full of moony loving and longing and kissing, as Frankie Avalon crooned, “Venus, oh Venus, make my dreams come true”. Only Bobby Darin’s lyrics about shark teeth and blood and cement bags by the dock disturbed our romantic vibe. I didn’t even know who Mack was, or why he had a knife.
A shop in Vulcan Lane had listening booths upstairs, high up under the roof, where you could go up for a proper listen (and maybe a quick pash, if you were with a keen kind of boy) to see if you might actually buy a 78rpm disc for your home gramophone.
It was nearly all American. Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, The Platters, The Drifters. Hardly any girls. Connie Francis, Sarah Vaughan. Press Play with their songs now and I’m right back there, awash with innocence, not knowing that soon my folks would take me on a little trip to Sydney and I’d thrill to the startling sight of Chubby Checker making the crowd roar in Rushcutters Stadium with Let’s Twist Again.
Now we were getting somewhere. Fox-trotting was over, and a singing man still had to wear a suit and tie, but things were beginning to loosen up. In two years the Beatles would push out their first hit, Love Me Do. A new time was coming.
Dallas Graham
Aaahh my fourth form year was so lucky to coincide with 1969...what a year for Rock! The film Easy Rider came out and turned a lot of people onto its excellent soundtrack featuring the Byrds "Wasn't Born to Follow" and the Band's "The Weight" (a cover version) among other gems..
Then Woodstock came along with another scorching soundtrack album with Joe Cocker, Richie Havens, Crosby Stills and Nash, Ten Years After (inspired guitar heroics from Alvin Lee) The Who and a host of others..
If that wasn't enough The Beatles recorded Get Back which came out a year later as Let It Be and the magnificent Abbey Road (possibly their finest achievement)..
Late that year Lennon brought out his controversial single "The Ballad of John & Yoko". A version was allowed on NZ radio with the word "Christ" bleeped out..
My local record shop in Marton was run by a staunch Catholic lady. Imagine my grief when I discovered all the 45s of the song ruined by her taking a nail to it with deep grooves making the song unplayable.
I bought it anyway for ten cents because the flip side was playable —George Harrison's "Old Brown Shoe"!!
Vague Craig
I was supposed to be born mid-January of Wednesday's MTAF Lindsey Dawson's fourth form year but Mum stubbornly endeavoured to have me on her birthday early in March. I arrived one week early. Or five late, depending on your point of view. Time was consistently relative in 1959.
I still remember the occasion. Well, alright, I remember memories of the most traumatic event I ever experienced. A recalling of a repeated nightmare to be more completely accurate. The only nightmare I ever dreamed, yet I dreamed it many times.
I barely am, drifting in that space between asleep and awake. Colourless. Sightless. Suspended warm and weightless, a slow bass and soft susurration as of surf on a beach. Perhaps shelly or pebbled. Then comes a sudden crushing weight. A pounding like drums. Pulsing waves of pressure as if I'm in a bed so huge that I'm being crushed by the weight of the blankets. No, now it is so small that the sheets are constricting and binding me. Pendulating to and fro between those two sensations, when. Oh, cold! Sudden burning as if my entire skin is on fire and I snap awake, arms and legs struggling tangled in bedding, heart racing. It's just a dream. The nightmare. Again.
It seemed to arrive in times of stress, whenever I experienced inner conflict or confusion or when my id and my ego did battle. It first came late in 1962. I was almost four years old when my divorced mother accepted employment and would leave her only child in the care of a neighbour during the day. The other children there would, echoing their parents, label me "bastard" a weighty word in those days. It was a far more frequent visitor during the two and a half years of bed-wetting after my step father arrived when I was four (and a half). Sometimes it accompanied gifts, such as the forty six warts that grew on my hands and fingers soon after I started school. The frequency of this recurring nightmare decreased as I grew older and, I believe, my subconscious and conscious selves began to learn how to live with each other.
"Oh, wow, Rick, man, that's really heavy, man" as Nigel Planer will say in 1982 on colour TV.
There were no nightmares in 1974. I had repeated standard four when we moved to the shore from west Auckland, so I was fifteen in fourth form. It meant, while I was only two months older than Chris, on sports day when I ran second in the 100 200 & 400 metre races it was against fifth formers instead of he and my other classmates. Why do adults have weird rules just to make things suck? Chris's Dad built an extension on our house the year before so my brother Don had his own room now. The wiring was done weekends by an electrician from the Post Office Workshop through my Dad's job as a PSG chauffeur which would occasionally require him driving Piggy Muldoon between Hatfield Beach and Auckland Airport but more often involved driving mail vans and trucks. The Mellors across the roads' Dad built their extension himself. Started it in '74, completed in '75, financed with a bank loan which was repaid via 1974's brand new ACC by way of a lump sum for the fingers he removed from his left hand with his skill saw while cutting the skirting boards right at the end of it.
Cigarettes could be bought in packs of ten, or individually for 5 cents from some dairies. Sobranie Black Russians were pungent while you smoked them but left less detectable odour lingering about your person after. School dances were shunned, birthday parties were in. Parents would be banished. Everyone brought one album, and some a portion of booze, usually pilfered, for the tropical punch bowl. Could be anything. In it went, and on went the first LP. A few drinks. Chips, dips. Nuts and pretzels. Maybe a game of spin the bottle - kisses in the dark. Some dancing, mostly lounging, bean bags were frequent furniture. Someone would light a joint. The first four times that I tried marijuana nothing happened at all. The fifth had me laughing until my abdomen and face hurt. Buddha.
1974. So many wonderful albums were released that year. Casey Kasem's AT 40 countdown still filled hours of radio every weekend. Maria Muldaur sang the camels to sleep at the oasis and Jim Croce said he loved us in a song beyond the grave. Bachman-Turner Overdrive rocked me to my feet as they stammered that I ain't seen nothing yet.
I don't recall if it was the Doctor himself, Barry Jenkin, to whom I was listening through headphones on my ghettoblaster that particular night in 1974 as I was dialed into Radio Hauraki in my bedroom. I do know I tuned in to his evening shifts as often as I could throughout his tenure there and he definitely influenced my musical tastes by introducing artists years before they were mainstream and some I doubt I would ever have heard of otherwise. From the first synthesized wind gusts through my headphones to the abrupt and humorous end, this is undoubtedly the song (pair) that had the most influence upon me in 1974. It was at least 6 months before I heard it again, as it took that long to import the LP, after finding a record store that would.
Catherine Robertson
Fourth form was the last year I was ugly. By fifth form, the gap in the teeth had grown together and my mono-brow had grown apart. Thanks to a perm, my brutally straight bob-mullet became a mass of curls and I got to wear it in pigtails, a lifelong dream. But that was all to come. In 1980, aged fourteen, I was still an unprepossessing goober. All I had going for me were a decent brain and an overwhelming desire to please, which meant I was a quiet, diligent student.
Not that my form teacher cared. Mrs Napier, also our French teacher, was a wizened misanthrope, and so sarcastic, cruel and dismissive that Nicky Won presented her with a poster outlining the international rights of the child. Mrs Napier resigned after term one, and we got a substitute teacher who wore kaftans and was hilarious.
Being a goober, I had zero street acumen. The cool girls dressed like Sharon O’Neill, with a ton of black eyeliner, tight jeans and choppy-layered long hair. I had a floral corduroy pinafore that my mother had made me and the aforementioned bob-mullet.
Needless to say, I was not down with the pop songs, either. My parents had been part of a cult-like religious organisation, and though they had resigned from it before I was born, they were still somewhat crushed under its yoke. No alcohol, no socialising and the only radio music we listened to was on Radio NZ. Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon dreaming the impossible dream and living in little boxes on the hillside. The Seekers. And Roger Whittaker. My dad had classical music albums and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. (OK, I do like The Lonely Bull.) My mother had Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits. (If you don’t like Wichita Lineman, you are a monster.)
For my fourteenth birthday, I was given a tape deck. Plastic and red with a handle. The tape I most remember listening to was the soundtrack to the film of Jesus Christ Superstar. When I am vexed with politicians spouting neo-liberal bollocks, I channel Ted Neely in full screech: “My-y temple should be a house of prayer. But you have made it a de-en of thee-eeves!!”
I also somehow acquired a small blue transistor radio. I used to lie on the bed and hold it to my ear, twiddling the dial between 2ZB, 2ZM and Radio Windy. This was in the days when stations played every damn thing, pop, country and weird novelty songs from the 1950s – “I said, ‘Don’t look, Ethel!’ Too late. She already got a free shot.” I remember too many of these lyrics, as you can see.
What was on the hit parade in 1980? I had to Google. Yikes – It’s Hard to be Humble by Mac Davis was the 14th bestselling single in NZ that year! I remember all the lyrics to this, too, goddamn it!
The good ones: Cruisin’ (Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam) by Mike Nesmith, whose mother invented Twink. The Flying Lizards Money and Split Enz I Got You. AtomicBlondie, and Master Blaster Stevie Wonder. The Pretenders Brass in Pocket.
These songs were highlights in what was otherwise an entirely underwhelming year for me. But 1981 was coming, with pigtails, greater academic success (99% for School C English – peeyow) and a fabulous Scottish form teacher with a name that would live in legend – Ms Herron-McBean.
I leave you with the 41st bestselling single of 1980 in NZ – in tribute to all of us who were once (and might still be) socially awkward goobers.
Dave Veart
4th Form, Onehunga High School, 1965.
How honest will I be? We reinvent ourselves, I have anyway… should probably leave out the residual 4th form attachment to Gilbert and Sullivan… But then I always like a song with a good narrative. Bob Dylan would replace G & S pretty soon.
Surf songs? Admit to the Beach Boys? While the UK rockers seemed hipper, (until Good Vibrations at least) sunny 1960s Auckland seemed closer to California Girls than pasty Londoners or Liverpudlians. The Doors were to nail this connection. Sitting 50+ years later next to a giant mural of the Lizard King himself looking out from Venice Beach at the same Pacific Ocean I surfed on the other side of the world reaffirmed this. Pacific cities.
Car songs. Onehunga, car culture, in a country where cars were kept going forever boys at least were expected to know their way around an engine. The Beach Boys’ Shut Down while recorded a couple of years before was still on our radar, lyrics so petrolhead enriched that it is hard for anyone who wasn’t involved with cars at the time to have much idea of what it is about… ‘Pedal’s to the floor/Hear the dual quads drink/And now the 413’s lead is starting to shrink.’
Girl Groups. I was enthralled, product of a huge pile of 45s bequeathed to us by my older girl cousins, the best bit being that they had made them into booklets plastered with photos cut from fan magazines. My first 14 year old sight of the Ronettes moved me even before I played Be My Baby. The Supremes at the height of their powers, a quick google crib tells me Baby Love was sitting on the Lever Hit Parade at the beginning of 1965. I can still hum it, (not very well).
Reading through the hit parade charts of that year I can see popular music was a broad church, television star Lorne Greene from Bonanza growling ‘Ringo’ (no not the Beatles drummer), and tipsy crooner Dean Martin sharing slots with The Rolling Stones and the Zombies, ‘She’s not there’. Music your parents liked and music they didn’t understand.
Where did we hear it all? Pop charts, the Sunset Show, Lever Hit Parade and a long wire aerial and the Big Radio pulling in the Big Aussies ‘2UW-in-Sydney-Boom-Boom!’. And Let’s Go with ‘Mrs Sinclair’s little boy Pete’, go-go dancers and heaps of local talent, part of the protected-fully-employed world we lived in, but New Zealand bands all the same, often playing covers of overseas hits we wouldn’t hear about until years later.
Mostly it was records, begged, borrowed and perhaps occasionally stolen, (beware the record without its sleeve!) It was 45s at first and later LPs in stereo which challenged our family record player which required a few pennies balanced on the back end of the pick-up arm to create a counter-weight and so hear the multi tracks rather than ploughing through them.
Records. I was amused years later to read of the famous Mick and Keef meeting sealed by Mick’s arm full of rare blues albums. I think I carried ‘Blonde on Blonde’ around for a few weeks in hope of similar encounters.
1965, so have to deal with the Beatles and the Stones plus all the other Brits who changed the way we listened. I was probably not allowed into town alone at 13 so missed the Beatles in 1964 also missed the Stones 1965 Auckland Concert but saw them the next year. Sadly I can remember very little of this, my first big concert. I’ve forgotten a few later ones as well but that is not time but a bit of overpreparation.
Then their lyrics, our role models.
The boys, Mick: Time is on My Side, ‘You're searching for good times/ But just wait and see/You'll come running back etc.’ John (?): She’s a Woman, ‘My love don't give me presents/ I know that she's no peasant’. What?
The girls, Ronnie: ‘The night we met I knew I needed you so/ And if I had the chance I'd never let you go/ So won't you say you love me’. Diana: ‘…But all you do is treat me bad/ Break my heart and leave me sad/ Tell me, what did I do wrong?’
We all had a bit to learn, still do, still do.
Bob appeared in the first paragraph of this musical memoire and I’ll end with him. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, my first purchased 45, it changed my world and obliterated Gilbert and Sullivan forever.
Plus I’m still here and so is he with his ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways.’
Bitamusic:
Mark Easterbrook
Fourth Form, Tikipunga High School, Whangarei, 1989. You’re a happy nerd at an economically deprived school in a recession-hit city at the tail end of a rough decade. You live in a bubble, wrapped up in your own head, bobbing along oblivious to how tough the world around you is.
You live on a sheep farm, surrounded by your dad’s country albums and listen to KCC FM. Years later, a man in a wine bar will tell you he named it, and that it stands for Kauri Coast to Coast. But you won’t know this yet.
The music reviews in the Northern Advocate sometimes hint at something beyond the edges of the mainstream, but for you it’s still out of sight. You know the golden oldies, or what’s on the radio Top 40. It’s the same stuff that gets spun at the school social. Bobby Brown and Poison and Madonna.
So much incredible music lands this year, but you’re not ready for it. Doolittle, but you won’t know it until you’re 16 and in love with a Pixies fan. De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising is out but you’ll get to it 30 years late. The Cure put out Disintegration and 3 years from now you will listen to it on endless repeat. You won’t know Nirvana’s Bleachexists until the year grunge breaks. Then you’ll be all flannel shirts and Gen X irony. Right now you’re just a straight kid earning credit in a straight world.
Paul’s Boutique. The Real Thing. Pretty Hate Machine. Don’t Tell a Soul. Who would you be if you heard them straight away? How would you have heard them, with no one to point you in their direction? You’ll never know.
But you hear one song on release that makes you feel a way you’ve never really felt before. Free Fallin’ from Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever. It makes something in you gently ache. It tells a cryptic story that you don’t understand, sounding like loss you’ve never experienced. It feels like the end of something you missed the start of. Free Fallin’ tugs at some melancholy thread, the line running through you that will eventually tie itself to Bill Callahan and The Mountain Goats and Wilco and all those songs that will one day get you through actual pain. This song cracks something open and it won’t close.
So you ride your bike to town, maybe, or get a ride with mum. You head to the dark interior of Musicor, across the pedestrian mall from the menswear store where you find your first part time job, later the same year, after your PE teacher tells the manager that you’re a good kid. You buy Tom Petty.
You take it home and put it in your tape deck. One of those ones that plays both sides on a loop. You play it until the tape stretches, Petty’s pain in those long vowels dragged out even further out. That crack exposing the inside of your heart doesn’t get any wider, yet. But the sad song faver has got you good.
Michael Smythe
1960, 4B, Wellington College. Music master Rudolf (Rhubarb) Radford. Favourite song for lusty lads: Kipling’s poem The Road to Mandalay. Was he attempting to lift our gaze beyond our horizon or processing our adolescent urges as we contemplated the Burma girl a-settin’ and possibilities somewheres east of Suez… where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst …? It comes to mind when Myanmar is in the news.
When it came to music my twin brother John and I had grown up in the shadow of our five-years-older big brother Brian. He would listen to Selwyn Toogood presenting The Lever Hit Parade then sit down at the piano and play the latest tune right through with both hands. Around 1956 Brian bought an RCA/Victor 78rpm record with Elvis singing Hound Dog on one side and Don’t Be Cruel on the other. His avid consumption of 45rpm vinyl began soon after. I recall wondering why Elvis was calling for Uhmore sugar; Uh huh uh; Mm mm mm, mm, yay, yay, yay ... Then I read the label.
Arriving as “turdies” at Wellington College in 1959 we were even more in the shadow of big brother Brian. He had been in the A classes all the way through. The year before we turned up he had been in the First XI and the First XV as well as Head Prefect and Regimental Sergeant Major at cadets — and he was leading his 3-piece Delta dance band! How do you follow an act like that? Theatre was a point of difference. At the end of 1959 we trod the boards at the State Opera House as the twins of the Lost Boys in the Wellington Repertory production of Peter Pan with prim Alma Johnson as our Wendy. (The following year Alma became the first female continuity announcer on New Zealand television.)
We rode the peas-in-a-pod advantage on stage for a year or three. In 1960 we were thrust between the footlights and curtain of the St James Theatre clad in red tunics and white tights to herald the start of the Boy Scout Gang Show. Pretending to play trumpets was our one-and-only instrumental performance. The redness spread to our faces when someone chose to inform us that the white tights under the bright lights were, um, a bit revealing.
Cross-dressing was considered less fraught than bringing in the Girl Guides at Boy Scout Gang Shows. I’m not sure these bathing beauties were riding along on the crest of a wave.
For the Wellington Repertory Robin Hood pantomime David Tinkham wrote us in as the avenging sons of Much the Miller — Much and Too Much. At Wellington College we were Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky in a production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General.
Popular music was centre stage in our first week at Wellington College – a top-level witch hunt was conducted to find the perpetrators of the daring but dastardly deed of requesting The Mole in The Hole on the Sunday request session on behalf of a string of masters’ nicknames including Fish, Loony, Inky, Baldy, Foxy, Horsey, Chook, Cheese and Rhubarb. The culprits were suspended. Only Horsey Bradly knew how to defuse such student smartarsery. He would greet each new cohort lined up in the corridor, open the door, and say, “Alright foals, into the stable.”
By the fourth form we had accepted that friendships we had established with the Queen Margaret’s girls — Jenny, Janet and Valerie — sharing the carriage on our electric unit commute from Khandallah to the city were purely platonic. The more remote Sharon Crosby got on at Simla Crescent. Shirley McGregor lit up the carriage with her wide smile and sparkling eyes when she entered at Awarua Street. (Shirley later joined the Blerta band and, in the original Goodbye Pork Pie, played Sue — the purpose of the major Mini road trip to bloody Invercargill.) Our Queen Mags female friends, now expanded beyond the commuter cluster, were pleased to be our partners at our college dances though.
That’s me dancing with Janet, with young Burton Silver of future Bogor fame behind me. We may have been dancing to The Librettos. And here we are a year later with (who was that gorgeous redhead?) and Libby. The evidence shows that each and every girl got leid.
Our problem was that the girls we wanted to know more, um, intimately were not into our years-old testosterone-driven favourites Great Balls of Fire (Jerry-Lee Lewis) or Tutti Frutti offering A Wop bop b-luma b-lop bam boom (Little Richard).
Our young women friends eschewed red-blooded Little for wimpy-limp Cliff and we languished in his shadow. They probably felt empowered by, while we empathised with, Cliff’s September 1960 New Zealand chart-topper Please Don’t Tease(appropriately preceded by Brian Hyland’s Itsi Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini).
Then Cliff’s backing band, The Shadows, swept Please Don’t Tease off the top spot with their Apache instrumental. We identified with its fluctuations between spacious lovelorn longing and headlong galloping urgency.
Jane Palmer
My musical heritage is not impressive. Rock and roll seemed to have missed my parents entirely; my father once said he couldn’t name a single Elvis song. But there was certainly music in my childhood. My first memory is dancing to Do the Blue Beat before kindergarten. When I was 10 my parents took me to see Cilla Black at the Auckland Town Hall. Craig Scott was the opening act. It was heaven.
Cilla and the Seekers were all we listened to at home. They are all my brother listens to still. According to the song lists, we had the lot up to 1969. I can sing along to them all, even though I pretend I can’t. I’ve never been great at science, but I’d love to understand how exactly the brain hardwires the songs of your teenage years so you will never forget a single word. I’ve warned my boys that they will one day embarrass their kids by singing along to Kanye and Lil Uzi Vert, but they’ll do it anyway.
On the first day of high school in 1974, we had a “find out about your classmates” quiz, and swapped our answers with the girl next to us. I can still see the look of horror on the face of the girl next to me when she read that my favourite singer was Cilla Black. We were never friends.
I was too shy and nerdy to be one of the cool kids, but I realised I had a lot to catch up on. Sunday afternoons were spent in my bedroom, with the door shut and curtains closed, listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. My sister bought Hot August Night and I got Elton John’s Greatest Hits for my birthday. I could talk about David Bowie songs with confidence. I knew music made in the 70s! I had arrived.
Google says the number 1 songs in New Zealand in 1975 started with John Hanlon’s Lovely Lady and ended with Freddie Fender’s Wasted Days and Wasted Nights, with very little to recommend itself in between. That pretty much sums up my recollections of 1975. But the fourth form is the best school year: you’re not the lowly new girl and there are no exams, so it’s possible to develop new interests.
At a single sex school, our only interest was the opposite sex. I had no idea how to meet, much less speak to a boy, but I knew I’d get there one day. Meanwhile, there was 10cc.
Mark Graham
The Greatest Rock Anthem of All Time and Maybe Longer
1975 was the year New Zealand changed forever. It was the year of Jaws, Young Frankenstein, The Godfather Part II and Tommy. It was the year Fleetwood Mac released their seminal album full of angst and marital strife - the first record I ever bought.
The Eagles were huge, Elton John, Barry Manilow, The Carpenters, and ABBA (I still abide with the Dude when if comes to ABBA, I’m afraid). It was the year I lost myself in headphone silence to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’. Pol Pot began his reign of abject terror, Idi Amin was halfway through his.
It was the year the Americans left Vietnam.
Muldoon became Prime Minister as ‘Rob’s Mob’ reacted against the hapless Bill Rowling and the establishing of Maori cultural resurgence. With his belligerence and his Mob, Muldoon was every bit the proto-Trump, all to culminate in the Tour Protests and the Queen St Riot, the collapse of the economy and his fall from grace a decade later.
And it was the year of the Hikoi.
The Hikoi proclaimed the nation’s future by calling on the nation to honour its past. From that irritant, the pearl, a ‘new’ New Zealand – Aotearoa – has begun to form into its beautiful and frightening new identity, while the late-era Muldoonists try to stop it with abuse and vitriol and division. But they cannot stop this taonga being created.
I, of course, had no idea any of this was happening.
As a spotty-faced 14 year old my focus was on my sport, the launch of TV2, girls, and music, not necessarily in that order.
Despite the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd, the song to end all songs captured my imagination – and still does. This grand, epic, ambitious extravaganza, like no other song before or since; a song that generations of kids around the world have grown up singing, loudly, together – and still do, operatic falsettos, staccato lyrics, interspersed with screaming licks that spawned a plethora of air guitar heroes – it doesn’t matter what your musical tastes are because this, this, this is the song that rules them all, the greatest rock anthem ever, and probably the greatest song ever.
Power ballad, operetta, hard rock and over all this, the vocal talents of one the most gifted and tortured virtuoso ever to have strutted a stage. When released, it defied paradigms, smashed expectations, mashed ancient and modern music, and if your friends don’t sing along with you whenever it comes on the stereo, well why are you still even friends with them?
It charted twice, the second time after the bloody singer died! It was Voted ‘the Song of the Millennium’, and the ‘No.1 Song of All Time’ as chosen by the Guinness Book of World Records (well, of course they would). Nothing before or since compares to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Nothing.
“I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramouche, Scaramouche,
will you do the fandango…”
Tell me you’re not now in full swing.
Sara Barham
You know how it is. You’re noodling on Twitter, then you realise another tremendous More Than A Feilding has come out. And our friend Dave lets rip! Those absolute bastards, aiming their bile and selfishness at Kiri.
I potter over to the DMs to suggest a potential 4th Form Song columnist to DS. We get nattering about this and that. We’ve probably been doing that for getting towards 20 years, I realise, since the days of Public Address, thank you @PublicAddress. I reckon that was our early Twitter, don’t you think @dimsie? Dave went to school with my first serious met-at-library-school boyfriend, and said bf was mentioned in passing in one of those Public Address columns. “Dave!” I shouted, connectingly. We’ve even met in person a couple of times over the years, in the Wellington public Koru sector Club maelstrom.
Somehow in the nattering, Dave asks if *I’d* like to do a column. Ulp, I said, maybe, it might be hopeless! But here I am. Thinking about the 4th Form Song, and the ridiculous birthday coming up next week. It’s me and Barack this year…
Dave and I agreed that you get thinking more and more about the long time ago, and where you’ve come from. This morning (I’m getting to the 4th Form bit, I promise) I learned that Jan Tucker died, aged 80, an amazing community advocate in Port Chalmers, 21 years on Community Boards. She was my 4th Form Phys Ed teacher. I was absolutely hopeless. Me and reading and pronouncing French were like this. Phys Ed, no way. Always the last to get picked etc. Mortifying. I pictured Jan, bent over double, hooting with laughter, following my attempt at a vault over that wooden horse box thing, where I didn’t actually manage to get my hands on the box, and just boinged off the little round trampoline straight up in the air and over. She couldn’t contain herself. I wasn’t exactly sure of the joke. The odd miniest of mini cotton gingham phys ed skirts didn’t help, I expect.
I bought my first proper teenager LP that year, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Legendary. Knew all the words etc. Earlier LPs I’m proud to say mostly were Donny and/or all The Osmonds. Loved him and them. My siblings and I (yes, even Martin) look back fondly on that music – check out Crazy Horses (1972), for a laugh.
Looking at all the top 4th Form Songs, it comes rushing back. The little blue Panasonic transistor always on Radio 4X0. Mark Williams – loved him, not mad keen on the Yesterday song; Kraftwerk, Autobahn – I was learning German that year, actually liked that. (Scarily, MrBeee is a huge fan, so now I hear far too much of them); omg, The Hustle, definitely was into that, loved dancing, but was uncool at that too; Wings – Listen To What The Man Said – very much liked.
The last bit of the conversation with Dave last night was me saying “this is my current song on evocative repeat” – being Alan Parsons Project, Some Other Time. It’s lush and rich, it’s got gorgeous vocals, I don’t remember knowing of it when it came out but now I love it. I would have chosen 10CC’s I’m Not In Love for my best song of the year, with its moodiness, yearning, lush music, but Jane Palmer, a woman of a similar vintage and obviously with excellent taste, chose it on Tuesday.
I move across the aisle then, to The Eagles and “One of These Nights” – telling a story I wasn’t ready for for quite a few more years, but I loved it. Just don’t tell @johnjcampbell…
Jaq Tweedie
FOURTH FORM 1981
I spent my childhood behind a wall. It was David Bowie who cracked it. He nailed me with a brilliant one-liner, an intimate joke just between him and thirteen year old me.
While my newly wed sister tended to her new baby I sat alone on the new leather sofa in her new Lockwood house watching Fashion - the new release on Ready To Roll - and David looked straight into my eyes with a conspiratorial snaggle-toothed smirk and sang
The people from good homes are talking this year.
I laughed aloud as a snooty blonde lady plopped a big red pill into a cup of tea. I was trapped in a Good Home and I didn’t belong there. I felt seen.
My parent’s house had no television, no computer, no video games - no screens at all. I had no friends and I didn’t want any. I had books and music and that was enough.
My reading had always been unrestricted - I devoured everything - but since I was four my musical knowledge had been carefully cultured by “the best piano teacher on the North Shore”, the draconian Miss Mary Nathan. Hours of practice every day, before and after school. Forbidden to listen to any music except Classical. Forbidden to play any music that wasn’t written on staves. Miss Nathan scorned “playing by ear” for endless scales, arpeggios and Dvorak exercises. The Bach 48 was my bible.
The hothouse had started to splinter when my mother looked up from her orchids and said “Don’t worry about making friends at high school, that’s not why you’re there. Just be yourself.” I was already a strange weed, but now I leaned into it. I danced alone at the Third Form social to a woman with a bored crisp English accent intoning
Money don’t get everything it’s true. What it don’t get I can’t use, I want MONEY!
while the Flying Lizards shook the beat out of a cutlery drawer. As the third form ended I was weird and I was happy. And then the balloon went up.
The first day of fourth form I was dropped into a B stream class away from any girls I knew. By lunchtime my best friend Alison - who’d spent New Years Eve alone with me and a marathon of her Bowie and Pink Floyd albums - had a brand new best friend. Devastated, I realised that grading systems and human affections were completely arbitrary. I’d always been a loner, but now I became a rebel. I started playing by ear.
After 10 years of playing the piano every single day I finally learned something without written music, by picking the notes out myself. Pink Floyd “Nobody Home” was the perfect track for a newly minted cynic. It had all the things I wanted in my life. A television playing background noise - with thirteen channels! A bag with a toothbrush and a comb in, a favourite satin shirt, a grand piano. The orchestra swelled under the emotion I already felt - a strong urge to fly and nowhere to fly to. I had everything and nothing, but now I had made this song my own, with my own hands, and I could play it anywhere. Maybe one day a heckler would scream at me to play it.
I’ve got a little black book with my poems in...
Pink Floyd “Nobody Home”
David Bowie “Fashion”
The Flying Lizards “Money”.
