Don McGlashan's Diary Of A Mutton Bird - Summer Tour '98(Feb/March 98)

(The New Zealand Herald printed
an edit of this article in March.
Here's the full version.)

It must be Canadian Airlines. Every amplified message from the flight deck comes through twice - first in English, then in hard, flat Québecois. In spite of this, taking off from London feels good. We're climbing up above the weather, away from the constant sense of waiting in a queue for something to happen. All of us (me, Alan Gregg, Ross Burge, our new management Steve Hedges and Susan Glasgow) are tired from a gruelling round of gigs through January - Exeter, Northampton, Bath, Cambridge, Brighton - but when the free drinks and peanuts come round, there's more than just the normal rush to dull the senses against the irritations of travelling together. Having no record company has lifted a weight from us; sent us well and truly down "the road less travelled by", and it's making all the difference.

Arriving in Auckland, sitting at the lights surrounded by pristine four-wheel drives, we read a billboard which says: "There's no such thing as an unfair advantage, unless it's you that doesn't have it". Not a motto to build a civilised city on, but it seems to fit just now. It's a harsher, more red-necked place than we left. And behind the billboards and half-finished apartment blocks, it's more fragile as well. The electricity has failed, and the sewage and transport systems might not be far behind. Friends seem more resigned and helpless about the state of things than I remember them to be, too. How does that happen? Would I feel that way if I was still living here? Does the rest of the country feel the same?

We have a chance to find out. We are flown to Our Nation's Capital to help open the much derided Te Papa. We meet David Long, and give him a chance to remember the songs after a year out of the band, then on the opening day we play a set for the crowds outside the museum, before joining the noisy tide of people flowing through the huge glass doors. There's too many distractions to really lose ourselves in the exhibits - but it's great to watch Dalvanius and The Patea Maori Club giving Po I E several lusty seeing-to's while they're waiting for their timeslot. Wellington also brings discussions with friends who tell me that the evident failure of so many of the current experiments in privatisation is because they weren't "pure" enough, they didn't go far enough, they were held back by the carpings of the few remaining bleeding hearts. My old lines of argument - lacking the bondofill and paint of regular use - fail the new, more stringent, N.Z. warrant of fitness.

We have a couple of weeks off after Te Papa. Ross and Alan go to Levin, Wanganui and Palmerston North to see family, Dave stays in Wellington to work on music for the Festival, and I go to Piha to a borrowed bach to write some songs. I spend hours looking at Lion Rock. There's a commemorative plaque screwed to the basalt, carrying the names of the locals killed in the World Wars. I'm thinking about memorials, and how we decide where they should be. What makes one place on the map more appropriate than another to hold our names once we're not here any more? I think of Auckland expanding silently on the map like spilled liquid. More and more people who feel they won't leave an imprint on the place; they can't change anything; their names aren't written on any rocks. I thaw out eventually, though, and churn out two or three songs full of sun and cicadas.

The cable failure means that we don't know how many people have booked for the Power Station show, but in the end it's fine. The room's pretty busy for Stereobus, who sound great, and there's a full house by the time we come on. It's one of the best gigs we've done for ages. David plays like a banshee - all that volume bottled up for a year comes out in big sheets of guitar noise, and Ross' grin coming off stage is the size of the harbour bridge. Two days later, we do a "secret" acoustic gig at the former Classic porno Cinema on Queen Street. Matthew Bannister joins us to sing his "Not To Take Sides". The ghosts of old patrons rustle their dirty raincoats approvingly, or maybe it's the clattering of diesel generators outside.

The organisers of the "Summer Hummer" free outdoor concert in Masterton aren't leaving anything to chance. A fifty-seater coach with uniformed driver arrives to take the five of us from Wellington airport to Masterton. Plenty of room to stretch out, then, through the Hutt Valley and over the Rimutakas. New manager Steve (who up till now thought Muswell Hill in London was steep) clings to the upholstery, rigid with vertigo. Alan and I "van surf" - a skill we taught ourselves on long hauls in Australia and Canada. We stop at the "Pie In The Sky" tearooms (I wish I'd thought of that name), before cruising down into the plains, and the quiet, watchful gravity of towns like Featherston, Carterton, Greytown. The gig is very good. About 8,000 people in high spirits fill the sports ground with the Tararuas peering down to see what the noise is all about.

We bus back to Wellington for another "secret" gig - this time at the Bodega. It's packed to the gunwales - no secrets in this town. We get Wayne Mason on stage to help us with "Nature", and it goes off, as they say. Sound maestro Paul Crowther mixes with one hand and records the show with the other. Malcolm Ibell sautées us artistically with the four available lights, while providing an important liquid conduit for club owner Fraser's hospitality.

Then it's on to Christchurch for another outdoor show. It's good to meet the Bats again, and watch their set as Hagley Park gradually fills up with couples, families and a smattering of that peculiarly Cantabrian species of crusty maniac. After we play, a huge crowd wants us to sign CDs, T-shirts, arms and backs. We head to Dave Yetton's place for drinks with the Bats and Stereobus. Much later I seem to remember an old friend almost convincing me to come to a starlit dance party in the wilderness at Arthur's Pass. However tempted, there's an early plane to catch. We say goodbye to Dave Long in Wellington, and it's on to Auckland to pack for another thirty hour trip to Blighty.

I pull out the songs I wrote at Piha again before stowing them in my suitcase. In London, there's a park near to where we stay, full of wrought-iron benches donated by long dead park- lovers (or so the small brass plates say). When you sit down you feel supported by those people. Their small act of generosity takes the weight off your feet for a bit. It isn't the grand, terrible sacrifice that got the names up on Lion Rock - but there's something that links those two acts of naming. An ad-man's slogan on a billboard, a plaque on a rock, a name on a park bench. Maybe there's another song in there. I'll leave the ideas to settle for a while. In the meantime I decide that one day I'd like to have my name on a park bench by a beach somewhere here.

Don McGlashan 1998