The only time I saw New Zealand band Children’s Hour

There were many arms to the New Zealand music scene in the early ‘80s: the pure jangly pop of Dunedin based bands, The Chills and Sneaky Feelings; the extreme hard edged aggression of The Gordons; and then there was Skeptics, who fell in the middle somewhere, an unworldly concoction of 1980s production values and brutal industrial grooves.

If we were to place Children’s Hour in that spectrum we might observe that they had very few pure pop elements at all, though on the single Washed Away, for example, you can hear Chris Mathews' unique pop aesthetic pushing above the sheer power of the four-piece. It was leading him away from the sideshow aspect of being one of the most brutal bands in NZ, a band who wanted to be The Gordons, as he has stated himself,[1] and on to the more varied melodic pastures of the grossly under-valued unit, This Kind of Punishment (TKP).

I only saw Children’s Hour once I believe and it was in Dunedin at the Union Hall. It was a true musical highlight, one of those key moments that is still with me whenever I play today. It was around 1984 or 1985 so I was 20 years old and desperately trying to learn how to play the drums. Somehow I just could not equate what I was hearing with what I was actually seeing: the band were relentlessly tight, almost military-like compared to Dunedin bands at the time, and their sound was colossal. There seemed to be some kind of group-mind working onstage that was incrementing the sum of the four parts. It was a powerful incendiary magic.

A huge part of the Children’s Hour sound and general power was their drummer, Bevan Sweeney. He became my new drum hero after Robbie Yeats of The Verlaines and Hamish Kilgour of The Clean. I was completely flummoxed hearing Sweeney that first time because he seemed so different to both Kilgour and Yeats. I had always been instructed that to imitate Hamish I would have to smoke lots of marijuana, and perhaps it was true. Maybe that was the way to get nearer to his transcendental, psychedelic, Mo Tucker beat; however, hallucinogenics were never going to help me get anywhere near Bevan Sweeney’s concept. He seemed like an octopus, his single strokes rolls flailing all over the kit, often originating from the floor tom, but played in an almost linear fashion using hi-hat punctuations at unusual spots in the bar. Somehow he was also constantly varying those virtuosic drum orchestrations throughout the song, following the actual song structure perfectly, but always grooving.  The actual moments when he played a typical Dunedin rock and roll groove were few and far between: there always seemed to be something more going on. Because of this I just could not really grasp what he was doing at the time; in truth it seemed from another world that I had not been allowed access to at that point.

Listening to Flesh, the 1983 Flying Nun released Children’s Hour E.P. after many years is still poignant and brings back some old memories of that concert. The band range on the E.P. from the minor key, floor tom driven death-march of songs like Caroline’s Dream, Slaughter House, and Looking for The Sun, to the more common punk 2/4 of Go Slow. However, even on Go Slow there is something unusual: the band suddenly stops at 2.’26,” halves the tempo and Chris Matthews begins to sing in much more personal way, slowly accelerating the tempo back to the original. Sure, there are tenuous links on this recording to bands like Joy Division, but immediately on that first E.P. we can also hear Mathews’ original compositional voice, a voice that would strengthen and develop even more in This Kind of Punishment.

[1]  This was stated in an interview which appears in the link below: http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/utr/interviewMore/CID/265/N/Childrens-Hour-Chris-Matthews.utr

Album Review: Untimely Meditations (2012) The Verlaines.

The Verlaines have released nine albums and I hope to blog about all of them at some time in the future. I will be starting today with their most recent album, Untimely Meditations. Here is a list of their albums to date.

1. Hallelujah All The Way Home (1985)

2. Bird Dog (1987)

3. Some Disenchanted Evening (1989)

4. Ready To Fly (1991)

5. Way Out Where (1993)

6. Over the Moon (1996)

7. Pot Boiler (2007)

8. Corporate Moronic (2009)

9. Untimely Meditations (2012)

Having been part of The Verlaines inner circle for a very brief period I have always taken great interest in Downes’ work. The real sign of an artist for me is development over a long career and Downes has always changed, though non-fans may not detect this. As a huge fan myself it has never concerned me greatly that some others don’t seem to easily understand Downes’ music. Indeed, I suspect it has never been of much concern to Downes either. If he had ever entertained corporate type success it may have been a brief flirtation a long time ago, perhaps around the time of the aptly titled Ready to Fly (1991) album. Not long after the two Slash Record’s releases, Downes entered a ten-year period without releasing anything. One suspects such a drought must have hurt Downes, for he has always written his music out of a deep artistic necessity. When one considers that the first Verlaines’ album, Hallelujah All The Way Home (1985), is now officially over thirty years old, one begins to realise how long and hard Downes has worked.

Downes is one of the strongest lyric writers that New Zealand has ever produced in my opinion and even on Crisis after Crisis, released in 1982[1], his lyrics were different from the rest of the Dunedin pack. They were poetic, almost Shakespearian.

Girls I've written poetry for before cease to exist.

Your eyes just bleed before the sun; love's slashed her wrists.

So I write of a girl from who knows where, with dark brown skin and Dürer's hair.

Who knows what love, what hate, what lies beyond those saddened, violet eyes.

Untimely Meditations is the latest Verlaines’ album and it is a complex and dark affair. There is no surprise in that: death and romance have always been constant themes in Downes’ lyrics, even if often shrouded under heavy metaphor and allusion. However, now on Untimely Meditations, something has changed in the lyric department: the bed covers seem removed somehow. On James, Jimmy, Nuisance, Hemi, obviously referencing NZ poet James. K. Baxter in the title, Downes laments,

Hard drinking poets grow stern in heaven

And get there before they’re forty-seven.

Is Downes using the allegory of Baxter’s life to elicit possible sympathy for Baxter, or is he in fact talking directly about himself? The answer is never clearly given, consistent with the general lack of obvious self-pity in Downes’ oeuvre in general. One suspects that the light chains that once locked the younger Downes into more hidden confessions are now largely removed. Downes memorably told me many years ago that a fine line exists between truth and wankery in a song lyric. What he meant by that, I believe, is that continually harping on about your own pain in lyrical form is not sophisticated and it quickly becomes quite boring to the listener. Downes’ statement made me view songwriting in a completely different light.

In the black comedy, On the Patches, Downes again talks honestly about difficult subjects. He discusses the possible price of artistic dedication without some kind of chemical help.

Off the fags the booze is next

Our livers wrecked our minds are in a mess

But we’re learning to like ourselves again

The most important change for me on this album; however, is not in the more obviously personal lyrical content, it is in the new concept of orchestration present here. This was always hinted at in his earlier work, but now it has been fully realised to the extent that even the intricate lead guitar lines present on the album have been fully scored: fitted contrapuntally to mimic, harmonise, copy, or foreshadow the phrases of other instruments such as trumpets and trombones. In fact, it almost seems incorrect to call Tom Healy a lead guitar player on this album–there are almost no conventional guitar solos on this record at all. I believe he has read 90% of them from a music sheet.

The influence of the computer on this orchestration has been critical here. The Sibelius software, that Downes and many other New Zealand composers like John Psathas now use, has revolutionised the composer’s lot in many ways. It means that Downes can treat each pop song as a mini-symphony, planning every sonic utterance exactly, but most importantly it means he can listen back to his arrangements before recording them.

This has created a world that is unlike anything I have ever heard before. It retains the roots that have driven Downes from the beginning – essentially a fusion of Velvet Underground thrash with classical orchestration (when he could somehow afford the extra musicians). This unusual fusion, present on Bird Dog (1987) and Hallelujah All the Way Home (1985), proved instantly successful, and it stamped Downes’ albums as quite distinct from other Dunedin bands of the era.

Today, Downes has different and deeper resources than before, and he is doing exactly what would have been expected of him if he had had such resources in the past. He is turning his pop songs into deliberate mini-symphonies and is smashing the concept of what a rock band can actually be. His alternative rock and punk roots were always certain, but now I long to see where he will take his compositions as he fuses those roots with his classical education.

Surely, it must almost be time to hear a full album of his originals backed by a symphony orchestra?  I await such an album with bated breath.

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[1] A four sided E.P first released in 1982 by Flying Nun (DUN-1) which featured the music of The Verlaines, Sneaky Feelings, The Chills, and The Stones