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
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