Don McGlashan: Touching the Green, Green Grass of Home - Music in New Zealand journal (2000)
originally printed in "Music in New Zealand" journal (written by Matthew Bannister, date unknown),
reprinted from: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/4842/MB_gall.html
Classical music, film music, rock music, theatre, dance, TV, experimental - Don McGlashan has done it all. He's certainly one of the most versatile New Zealand musicians of his generation. He has excelled at all of them and, at the age of 40, he's at the height of his powers, presently balancing a career in rock music with the Mutton Birds with teaching at Unitec and acting as musical director for the Auckland Millennium event.
After graduating with BA in English and Music in 1981 from Auckland University, he played French horn and percussion in the Auckland Symphonia 1979-82, while also being a member of the From Scratch Percussion Group from 1979-86. The group performed in Edinburgh, London, the Paris and Sydney Biennales, New York, Singapore, Tokyo, the South Pacific Arts Festival in Papua New Guinea, and on many tours of New Zealand and Australia. They also recorded three albums.
He was drummer, singer and main writer with the rock band Blam Blam Blam 1980-82, during which time his song 'Don't Fight It, Marsha, It's Bigger Than Both of Us' was named 'Song of the Year' in the 1982 New Zealand Recording Industry Awards.
He was a writer/performer in The Front Lawn with actor Harry Sinclair from 1985-90, combining songs, instrumental pieces, dance, theatre and film. They performed twice at the Edinburgh Festival, in 1988 and 1989, winning The Independent newspaper's theatre award for the festival in 1988, and in both years winning inclusion in the 'Pick of the Fringe' season at London's Donmar Warehouse. They also performed in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. The group's piece The Reason for Breakfast was described as 'brilliant' by the New York Times. The Front Lawn made two albums of songs (winning three 1989 New Zealand Recording Industry Awards) and three short films. Two of these, Walk Short and The Lounge Bar were purchased and screened by Channel 4 in Britain, and The Lounge Bar was a finalist in the 1989 American Film Festival.
With Harry Sinclair and a group of Auckland theatre performers including Jennifer Ward-Lealand, Michael Hurst, Inside Out Theatre Company and the Topp Twins, McGlashan co-founded Auckland's Watershed Theatre in 1990. He was heavily involved in the developing and programming of the venue in its first years.
He has been singer and main songwriter in The Mutton Birds from 1991 to the present. The group has released four albums; all of which have made the New Zealand top ten. They have had two top five singles and one, 'The Heater' which debuted at No.1. McGlashan's song 'Anchor Me' won the APRA Silver Scroll, the country's top songwriting award, in 1994. The group signed to Virgin Records UK in 1995, and lived in London from that year to 1999, touring all over the world. Don McGlashan has also written music for film and television, including the TVNZ drama series Mortimer's Patch (where he shared composing duties with Wayne Laird and Keith Hunter) (1979), the children's TV series Terry and the Gunrunners (1985); the feature films Other Halves (1984), and Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table (1990). He also composed and arranged several fanfares and incidental pieces for the 1990 Commonwealth Games, and was assistant musical director of the opening ceremony.
In 1993 he composed and arranged an eight-minute piece for orchestra, choir and soprano for the 1993 NZ Expo Pavilion in Seville. The piece, a setting of part of Allen Curnow's 'Landfall In Unknown Seas' was performed by Kiri Te Kanawa and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Matthew Bannister caught up with him in Auckland, where he now lives with his wife and two children:
Matthew Bannister: Tell us about the Mutton Birds' most recent album. When was it released and by whom?
Don McGlashan: The new album's called Rain, Steam & Speed. It came out in May 1999 on shhh! Records (our manager Steve Hedges' new label) and in New Zealand through EMI Virgin.
MB: Who played on it? Who's in the band now?
DM: Ross (Burge) played drums and percussion. I played guitars, euphonium, some keyboards; Alan (Gregg) played bass on most tracks, Chris Sheehan lead guitars, acoustics, and also bass on a couple of tracks. Tony Fisher (from Sheffield) sang most of the backing vocals (he'd just joined the band on bass around the time of the recording). David Mitchell from the 3D's played e-bow guitar on one song, and a pedal-steel player from Edinburgh, Stuart Nesbit (the Proclaimers, Scottish neo-country band The Felsons) played on another.
MB: Why have you come back to live in New Zealand?
DM: I decided that I didn't want to tour so much any more - for my own family reasons. Therefore the band had to switch to a different mode if the other guys were agreeable. They were, which is great. Then came the question of where to live. It seemed, for me, easier to build a life around song-writing and part-time work in New Zealand, rather than anywhere else. The kids are still at the age when moving them is an adventure rather than a trauma. The reputation of the band is growing steadily in the UK. I think we've proved that we're better than most of what's around in Britain (especially with this new album, which has received the best reviews of anything we've ever done). I believe we can become a scarcer commodity over there without losing the friends we've made. Location for writing is a reason, too but I don't know about that one yet.
MB: How will you make a living?
DM: I've been offered a few hours a week teaching. I'm in charge of putting together the music for the Auckland Millennium show-so there's quite a lot of organising to be done there. Keeping communication going with the other band members and our manager in England, and the record companies here and in Australia takes some time as well. The main thing though is to settle in, catch up with old friends and then see what the next batch of songs turns out like.
MB: What do you think you've achieved in your time in the UK?
DM: We've stayed together as a band - which is important to me because I feel that bands can do more in some ways than singer-songwriters. I'm not sure I understand the difference entirely, but there's the sense of support that the other band members give me as a writer - the sense of their stakeholding in the songs. And the fact that I've never wanted to change styles and players with every record; I've always been more interested in the development of ideas than the development of the packaging. I think if we'd stayed in New Zealand we would have broken up by now, and perhaps I would be off down the singer-songwriter road. So, by staying together, we've made perhaps two albums that we wouldn't have made. We've also proved that we are as good as we thought we were, the reviews and audience numbers have certainly given us that. Finally, if things pan out as we hope they will from now on, the bigger audience (and the strong UK-based management) that we gained by going overseas should make it possible for us to keep performing and recording as a band, even though we're living in different countries.
MB: How will the band continue with some of the band members living in the UK?
DM: The plan is to tour once a year in Australia and New Zealand, and once a year in the UK, recording when and where we can in that schedule.
MB: Do you think of yourself as a New Zealand artist? If so, how does it inform your work?
DM: Yes, I do see myself as a New Zealand artist. However I look at this place, my own and my ancestors' memories fill up the corners of the frame-shading and cross-hatching with stories and lives that are linked to my own. After nearly four years away, I feel I understand some things about Britain - but I know that sense of understanding will always be distant, theoretical-like learning to swim from a book. I'll always know more about this country, because this is where I'm from. It's also for someone else to analyse really. The Finn brothers, the Swingers, the Flying Nun bands, Alistair Riddell, Dave Dobbyn - all provided me with the most transcendent experiences of my teen years. I didn't get out to much live stuff from overseas so the most important contacts with live music came from here. As I've got older, Aussies like Paul Kelly and Nick Cave have meant a lot to me as well. I think, musically, I often find myself daydreaming about being surrounded by those people - drawing on my notions of how they would do things - how they would solve a particular problem in a song or an arrangement.
MB: Do you see yourself as working in a specific artistic tradition, musical, literary, whatever?
DM: I guess that's what 'working in a tradition' might mean. Also, all of the band members (until very recently) have been New Zealand musicians, who have grown up with those ways of doing things too. Even Tony, our new bass player - he's English, but we've almost got him to play like Paul Kean, Jane Dodd or Tim Mahon.
MB: The new album appears to be less directly New Zealand-oriented than your earlier material.
DM: I don't agree. I think it's very much so. There are no place names, sure. But 'Envy Of Angels', the song, is strongly about a road north of Auckland, that my father and I used to drive along when I was a teenager. 'While You Sleep' is set in a flat in Herne Bay, Auckland. 'Along The Boundary' is about a beach in the Hauraki Gulf, 'Like This Train' is about the Silver Fern heading north. I think Alan wrote 'Come Around' in Kingsland, Auckland, where he was living at the time (initially there were lines about buses and taxis, with the fares in New Zealand dollars). However, 'Trouble With You' seems very North Finchley, London, to me -and that song seems to be one of the emotional centres of the record. Envy Of Angels is certainly a less outgoing record than the previous two. The first years in London were a very introverted and rather miserable time for me. I felt I'd lead everyone on a wild goose chase over there, and, in spite of the big record deal and all the flash tours, I seemed powerless to make a good environment for my family, and powerless to stop the band falling apart. Unreconstructed male bread-winner self-doubt collided with an inability to communicate with, or motivate an increasingly disgruntled group of people - and my writing dried up completely, the first time that had ever happened to me. Not a good look, considering as it seemed everything depended on what I was about to write. For a few months all I turned out was various versions of 'Trouble With You', a much longer, rambling version of 'Jackie's Song' (which everyone hated) and a few forced pop songs which hopefully will never see the light of day. The turning point was songs like 'Envy Of Angels' and 'Boundary'. I had to go back and remember why I wanted to write songs and be in a band in the first place. That done, my confidence started to come back. Nothing was easy on that record though. 'While You Sleep' nearly got binned because no-one in the band seemed to like it. I'm glad it hung in there.
MB: It also seems to move away from the dramatic towards the personal.
DM: Well, see the above answer, I suppose.
MB: Are you conscious of any recurring themes or subject areas in your work? To give an example, 'Call For Help', 'White Valiant' and 'Too Close To The Sun'. These songs are also musically related. Is the song 'Envy Of Angels' the culmination of that cycle?
DM: Fear of falling off the edge, of what's just outside the lights of the town, has always been something I've felt like writing about. I guess it comes from growing up in a fairly safe, quiet suburb in Auckland and spending so much time driving up and down the country in bands in my early twenties. Not so much in awe of the beauty of the land-more rattled by the sheer emptiness of it. Hopefully as I've got older I've learned to stop banging on about being afraid of things. 'Envy Of Angels' is related, in my mind, to 'A Thing Well Made'- rather than to the others.
MB: You're as much a writer as a musician. Are there any authors you feel have influenced your work at all?
DM: I love to read, but I'd hate to say I'm influenced by this or that writer. I'm very conscious of film. I think it would overburden the songs to say that one was influenced by a specific film or book.
MB: I was thinking that the songs deal with characters and situations in a semi-novelistic manner.
DM: Some of the songs do get a bit top heavy with content. I do want to tell a story and I don't think it would be fair to blame any particular author for that. It was more listening when I was a teenager to songwriters like Joni Mitchell, who were capable of setting scenes, taking the listener through a scene in quite a filmic way. There's that great song on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which starts off, 'Heat waves on the runway as the wheels touch down/He takes the baggage off the carousel/He takes a taxi into town' [The song is called 'Harry's House - Centerpiece']. That sort of economy of story telling as a series of shots. Harry Chapin wrote a song about a guy who holes himself up in a church tower, called 'The Sniper'. Tom Rapp of Pearls before Swine was also an influence.
MB: Some people in New Zealand have derided the Mutton Birds as being musically conservative. How would you respond to that?
DM: I'd be disappointed if people in New Zealand didn't deride us for something or other. I think we've had a very good run critically. The charge of being conservative is one I'm happy to accept - partly my desire to gradually evolve into someone who is trying to find some essential approach to writing simple lasting songs, not to end up with people saying 'Wow, that's innovative', but with them really taking a song to heart. It's necessary to limit myself. I wouldn't prescribe it for others but it's been necessary for me... working in a band is a process of subtracting the bits that no longer fit everybody's ideas of how the music should sound. The set of things that everyone feels comfortable with is necessarily refined, has shrunk. There's a small number of things I'd rather focus on and find a few things that I can get really right. It's been a gradual process of growing up. Being older is a process of becoming more focused. Some of the bands I like best, like Crazy Horse - every note is instinctively right but you wouldn't call it innovative.
MB: You have outlets in other areas. Does that mean you don't feel the same need to experiment in the rock format?
DM: I've done maybe three film scores since I've been in the Mutton Birds. It's generally 'applied' music; it's not done for the sake of it. I've never thought of myself as a serious composer. When I do a commission, it's like there's a four-minute scene where say, the Romans invade Gaul - theatre music.
MB: Tell me more about the Millennium project.
DM: Well I'm the musical director which is pretty strange after eight years playing in a band to suddenly have to coordinate all the aspects. Some of the music's being commissioned. I'm writing some of it, collaborating with Douglas Wright on a piece for the beginning with a dance company put together specifically for the event. Thankfully Vivaldi's already written some of that one for me. It's going to be a great show. Mike Mizrahi and Marie Adams (the directors) have wonderful ideas and it's enlightened of the powers that be to let us loose on an event of this scale.
MB: How do you approach composing for an orchestra?
DM: I might start on piano but through doing film scores I usually work with sequencers and scoring software. That sort of technology enables me to write parts. I can use the sequencer to hear the whole orchestra playing at the right tempo. It doesn't orchestrate for you, though. I did a brass band piece for the 1990 Commonwealth Games and an orchestral piece with the NZSO and Kiri Te Kanawa for the Seville Expo, so I've had a bit of experience. Orchestras still scare me. I played in one at University - they're worse than film crews in terms of a large number of highly qualified people with knife-edge critical faculties all waiting for you to make a mistake. I love it in theory, but I prefer working with small groups.
MB: Do you ever do solo performances?
DM: I've done one or two, playing at my kids' school on benefit night. It feels really strange playing Mutton Birds songs without looking round to see Ross pulling faces. The band is still going and I don't want people to get the impression they can get Mutton Birds songs by calling me up. It would dilute what we are.
MB: Do you have any particular feelings about writing 'love songs'? I was thinking there seems to be a New Zealand tradition of anti-love songs, e.g. Neil Finn's 'Message To My Girl' to Chris Knox's 'Not Given Lightly' etc.
DM: The new album's got some songs about love on it. David Byrne (Talking Heads) said that if you're not really sure of yourself you should work with micro-topics -a subject you can hold in your hand. Love is a very big thing - and in tandem with the standard Kiwi male reticence ... 'Anchor Me' is a love song and so is 'While You Sleep' but they're both about the state of being in love rather than 'I love you'.
MB: 'Anchor Me' seems like a reversal of your usual style.
DM: Well it relates to songs like 'The Heater' ... a kind of heightened magical state. 'Straight to Your Head' is like that too. It probably comes from reading lots of stories to my children about magic. I read a lot of fantasy books as a child. 'Anchor Me' started as a story about a magician who lived under the sea.
MB: It's got all that Shakespeare in it too.
DM: That phrase at the front, 'Full fathom five', has been used a lot. There's a Dave Dee Dozy Mick and Titch song that uses it. It's not that high-falutin' really. Also the idea of the sea, danger and vastness - like my Scottish ancestors getting into boats and coming to New Zealand. It must have been like going to Mars. But it's also a love song, asking the one you love to hold you in a state of peril. Love songs to do with the sea tend to be rather wishy-washy. But if you've lived near the sea you know the sea is nothing like that. So 'Anchor Me' is about love as perilous but it's also about saying I want more of that peril.
MB: The Front Lawn was optimistic whereas the Mutton Birds, lyrically at least, aren't. Fair comment?
DM: I don't think so. The Front Lawn were quite often funny but that was often a by-product of the style we chose to perform in rather than the content. The Reason for Breakfast was a piece about forgetting the simplest ritual, about how terrible losing that flimsy fabric that makes us human might be if we were to forget it. It's also about what happens in a place like New Zealand where kids can grow up in an absence of ritual, an absence of behaviour that has meaning in other parts of the world.
MB: Wasn't it about trying to create meaning as well then?
DM: 'Breakfast' was really absurd. Some of the shows were funnier than the others. A piece like The Washing Machine was really quite brutal, where someone ends up with a perverse lust for a piece of whiteware. .. pretty horrific. People found it funny but it was a response to Rogernomics. The whole rhythm of the show revolved around the cycle of a normal washing machine which was working on stage while the show was on. It was connected to the water supply in each theatre we were at. There was no sound (music) except for the hum of the washing machine. Pretty minimal. As for the Mutton Birds, I don't think you could call the latest album pessimistic. On some tracks on Envy of Angels the self-pity quotient was getting up there - it was a function of what we were going through in Britain at the time. You have to be honest when you're making an album. There's a lot of songs on Rain Steam and Speed which have a redemptive quality and even in old songs like 'Dominion Road' I think there's a sense of hope.
MB: So now you're back in New Zealand, do you think you'll try writing any political or social commentary?
DM: When I was starting writing songs I spent a lot of time imitating people around me who wrote political stuff like Richard von Sturmer who wrote the lyrics for 'There is No Depression in New Zealand', adopting a really negative character and letting him reveal himself through what he says. 'Queen's English' is like that but for some reason I don't want to do that so much any more. Randy Newman does it well. There's always layers and you're searching for the heart of the character, where it lies.
MB: A lot of Newman's songs deal with anger at some level. Is that something you want to express?
DM: It's difficult to write a good angry song and be consistent. I've not done a lot of them. Angry songs have to be written fast and I don't write songs fast. A song like 'Goodbye Drug' was written really fast though and I like that. It's got a kind of resigned anger - it's a bit of a departure for me, musically too. You've got the slide guitar and the swing rhythm, the relaxed, open-ended structure. It's not as tightly structured as some of my songs. Yeah I've written a few angry songs but then I've rejected them because they don't seem to stack up. I don't believe them after a while.
MB: Is it because they alienate people?
DM: I've no idea. I write songs to please myself.
MB: What's your favourite of your own songs and why?
DM: Well, there's songs that people talk about when they come up to you after the gig - ones that seem to resonate for a long time.
MB: On the Mutton Birds fan email site (cardwell@connexus.net.au) they talk a lot about 'White Valiant'.
DM: Yeah, I still like that song. It was the first one, before the band. The riff came to me between songs at a Blam Blam Blam gig. I picked up the bass and started playing. Then it turned into a completely different song that was a demo for the first Front Lawn record. It was called 'The Telephone Song', about a guy who likes to telephone this woman when he knows she's not going to be home because the phone is ringing in her apartment and he feels like he's getting close to her somehow. It had that kind of distant, obsessive, short story quality. The characters in the songs-it's like taking your family on the road with you and each night you introduce them to a different audience. Certain family members grow up or change, certain members are closely related. There are ways that songs like 'Envy of Angels' and 'A Thing Well Made' talk to each other. They've both got the euphonium. Because it's kind of a mournful instrument it's unlikely I'm going to write something fast and joyful on it. If I'd learnt the piccolo that whole face of the Mutton Birds might be different. When I think of melodies for the euphonium it tends to throw a cast, a particular light over the whole piece. In 'A Thing Well Made' the whole story is related very flat but there's a sense of something terrible approaching...
MB: Perhaps it supplies the poignancy that's missing from the character's mindset?
DM: Yes, because he's not aware of what his acts or omissions are creating and I guess I was thinking along the lines of culpability. In the aftermath of Aramoana you couldn't help but think that what happened belonged to all of us in some way - the idea that a normal day in someone's life could be part of a chain of events which leads to this happening, whether it's the one who sells him the gun or the school teacher who takes no notice of the odd child in the class. 'A Thing Well Made' actually started off being about women and men: how men perhaps live in the world of things and women in the world of people. That's an aspect that tended to fall away as I worked on it more.
MB: That's a theme of a lot of your songs, like 'In My Room', which is about a male narrator and how he arranges his possessions around him as a kind of barrier and the woman who gets through his defences.
DM: That's true.
MB: What do you think of the production of your records? Which sound best?
DM: I'm hopeless with that. I fancied myself as knowing a lot about production when we made the first Mutton Birds record, like using Casiotone on 'Big Fish'. I forced everyone in the band to play to click tracks. Why? I just felt that was the way to make a solid strong rhythmic pop record - I did that with 'Salty 'too. We weren't playing in time when we started so it was probably good discipline but it was an obsession I got into through being out of pop music for so long. When I was a drummer in Blam Blam Blam I wouldn't have been seen dead playing with a click. It can make things a bit soulless. But then I had that long period of film scores and writing stuff for the Front Lawn shows that was all sequenced. You develop a mistrust of live rhythm players - even though I ended up with the best drummer the country has ever produced in Ross Burge. I was obsessed with accuracy. The songs had to have the best engine beneath them. It also came from the steady pulse work I'd been doing with From Scratch and the Laura Dean Dancers which was really anal as far as pulse went. In Laura Dean we had two drummers - we toured all over the world with three or four metronomes with flashing lights mounted on the music stands and we'd be playing these really complicated patterns in 7/8 and 9/8 and we'd do one tempo like 132bpm for 70 repeats and then we'd switch to the next metronome to the right at 140bpm and do 20 repeats on that. That kind of obsession was really knocked out of me by the Envy of Angels recording process because by that stage the band was in revolt anyway. They weren't that interested in doing what I said anymore. We had a producer (Hugh Jones) who was really adamant that the stuff could breath. He was tough on Ross too, as he was on all of us. There were one or two one-take songs but some involved cutting different takes together. Rain Steam & Speed was almost all one-take tracks because we'd played so much. By then we'd arrived at an incarnation of the band that knew each other so well it became hard for us to go out of time.
MB: The Mutton Bird's rhythmic style seemed to be set pretty early.
DM: I guess it seemed like a solid rhythmic vessel to put a bunch of ideas into. It was a case of paring away things I didn't quite believe, like other kinds of rhythms which sound too suave or too ironic or too clever, which is bizarre considering I've done so much rhythmic work but I guess the part of me that wants to write good songs and the part of me that likes fancy rhythms are separate.
MB: Are you a populist?
DM: I always enjoyed it when a crowd of people get into what we do.
MB: You're not fussy about what crowd of people it is?
DM: No. The audience for any kind of art making in a country like this is small enough without affecting to appeal to an elite. Even when I was in From Scratch, which was quite esoteric - there are no singles on From Scratch records - the part that I enjoyed the most was the people getting off on it. That we could do a show based on abstract mathematical ideas with no words, involving notions of circularity and balance people couldn't put into words what moved them but they were moved anyway.
back to contents
Muttonbirds Still In Harmony - Christchurch Press (1999)
- Angela Crompton
Having a band staying together for the best part of a decade is no mean feat in today's music world, says Don McGlashan of the Mutton Birds. To meet the music industry's demands while maintaining the impetus which kept a band operating was too hard for many groups, the songwriter-musician said in a telephone interview last week.
"The music industry is based on product. But the band stays together because of a love for a sound, an idea."
McGlashan, a name associated with earlier groups like Blam Blam Blam and the Front Lawn, has been the main Mutton Birds' man since it formed in 1991. Drummer Ross Burge is the only other original member.
"There's been line-up changes, but it hasn't really affected the fact it still feels like the (Mutton Birds) band ... the new people are definitely strong partners in the idea."
Original lead guitarist David Long was with the group when it made London its base in 1995. He quit in 1996 and another Kiwi expatriate, Chris Sheehan stepped in. He was unable to come back home for the current Mutton Birds' tour, which started in Invercargill last night and continues north with gigs in the Dunedin Glenroy Auditorium tonight and Oamaru's Opera House tomorrow. Instead, former Dunedin musician Matthew Bannister, ex-Sneaky Feelings and Dribbling Darts, is filling in.
"Matthew's a songwriter I've always respected - and a great guitarist," McGlashan, who plays guitar and euphonium, said. Years ago, he and Bannister shared an Auckland practice room and the Dribbling Darts bass player Alan Gregg even switched ships to join the Mutton Birds for while.
The fourth Mutton Bird member is English bass player / vocalist Tony Fisher and he, Burge and Sheehan remain based in Britain. McGlashan, however, returned to live in Auckland a few months ago.
After four years of living in London, I wanted to live a more normal life ... see my kids more often," he said.
The world felt as if it was getting smaller, anyway, as technology advanced, living on the other side of it from the rest of the band was not a major problem. The band's constant touring in recent years had been wearing them all down, so it was decided to limit live performances to two big tours a year - one in Britain, one in New Zealand. The next question to answer was: "Where is the best place to live?"
McGlashan chose New Zealand. "I can look after the kids, write songs, tour less and stop living like there's a war on."
The Mutton Birds' latest album, Rain Steam and Speed, was recorded in London after he had made the decision to move home and the music reflected the happiness he was feeling, he said.
"It's probably the most joyful thing we've ever made. It was a really good time in the studio with everyone really firing ... part of it was knowing what I was going to do."
He feels confident the band has established a foundation which allows it to keep growing at a pace everyone feels comfortable with. He laughed, though, when asked if other New Zealand musicians could take heart from the Mutton Birds' example and not feel they had to move to more heavily populated places to be part of the international music scene.
"I'm probably the last person to ask in terms of a sensible career path," he said. "But if you're reaching an audience and you're touring and making records you feel good about, you're winning on many counts."
Success in the music industry for many people involved jumping through many industry hoops.
"The industry doesn't have any time for 'developing' people or helping people work towards doing their best work: it's just about product.
"So, you have to fight your own self-preservation battle and everyone's got to do that in a different way."
Sharing time on stage with the Mutton Birds during its tour is Tim Finn (ex-Split Enz).
back to contents
Home Again, Naturally - Real Groove (June 1999)
- John Russell
Half a world away, in late 1997, the Mutton Birds were dropped by their English record label, Virgin UK, and they dropped longtime manager, failed Sweetwaters promoter Daniel Keighley. Two years on, the band's fourth studio album, Rain, Steam and Speed has just been unveiled here and a local tour is planned in several months' time. Don McGlashan, back home since March, tells Real Groove, "Cocaine helps you get to the gig faster."
When the Mutton Birds arrived in the UK in 1994, I guess Britpop was at its peak.
"It was. The spurious war between Blur and Oasis was being puffed up by all the tabloids and every day you'd have a new picture of some atrocity perpetrated by Liam Gallagher. But there were good things happening around the edges of it, like Supergrass, I Should Coco had just come out. We were doing a few European festivals and we got to see all the UK bands playing."
Did it feel like a fortuitous time to be arriving?
"Only in that there were a lot of guitar bands around and lots of songs, people were talking about songs. It was pretty obvious that people were really high on a 'shades of empire' type nationalism, which we couldn't ever have anything to do with. After a while we stopped buying records and stopped looking at the UK scene 'cause it seemed as though there were a lot of pointless, directionless fads out there - you'd get a band like Menswear being touted as the band that was gonna save English music, but they hadn't even had a single out."
With so much other good music going on in the UK, why did you choose to blank everything?
"To make good songs you've got to go inside yourself and try to crystalise a feeling that you've had. Then it's got to jump through all of the hoops on the way to turning into a record without the feeling disappearing. If you try to do that, but you're always looking over your shoulder at what some magazine might say or what your record company might think, then you're going to trip up and produce something that's thin and shortlived. We're lucky that we're not swayed by anything that goes on outside of the band."
You didn't get into the dance scene then? No drum 'n' bass...
"Not me. There's so much stuff going on and I'm sure there's really neat people working on dance music, but it's not a scene that I've ever had affinity with."
England's still swimming in ecstasy, what did you make of that?
"It certainly leads to a submissive, short attention span sort of culture. I think that Britain displays more of a cocaine/amphetamine culture in its music and youth culture nowadays. London runs on cocaine and that's kind of ugly. What Frank Zappa said, that marijuana makes you hate your parents but cocaine turns you into your parents is exactly right. It turns you into the most penny-pinching, self-involved, back-biting egotist. Cocaine helps you get to the gig faster but in the end, drugs don't write the songs. Movements in music come from the same places that movements in film or literature or painting come from, they come from the world."
In London, you had a mixed time being signed to Virgin UK.
"When we got to London we got signed by Virgin very quick. There was a period of about a year where they were making the right noises and saying they were gonna keep us for a few albums. In spite of the general short termism of the industry, they were gonna look on us as something that would grow, despite the fact that we were rather ordinary and ungimmicky. After a lot of travelling and having a lot of money thrown our way, it became obvious that we were the wrong people for them and they were the wrong people for us. When the split with Virgin actually came, I think we were just really thrilled to discover that we had stayed a band."
The Mutton Birds were lauded by the UK music press, but you never got the radio play that would have moved the band beyond a cult following.
"Yeah, it's not something that I lie awake at night and worry about now, because I've come to the realisation that there's never really any cast-iron notion of what success is in this industry. We've been doing this for a living for eight years, we've reached a lot of people and our audience continues to grow in the UK. That's a level of success that we're happy with because we're in control of it."
Overall, was the four years away worthwhile and enjoyable?
"I hated it for the first three years, partly because everyone was on each other's case; the pressures of working under Virgin, disagreements about management and disagreements about the direction of the band were divisive. That coincided with a writer's block on my part and unreconstructed male breadwinner angst. But once I realised that no hit tune was going to suddenly come down out of the sky and solve everyone's problems, and once the situation with Virgin cleared and our management changed, things started to look up. Then a bit after that we made the decision to come back to New Zealand."
Why did you part ways with Daniel Keighley?
"He left and came back to Now Zealand for family reasons, that was what he said and we had no reason to doubt that. I think at that stage he was already planning Sweetwaters. There were aspects of him leaving that weren't satisfactory from our perspective, but I can't go into because we're still sorting out some paperwork with him that will safeguard us in the future. It was a terrible shock to see what happened [at Sweetwaters]. He's an aspirational manager rather than a practical one. He was always a great one for ends justifying means and I don't agree with that way of looking at things."
Were any major lessons learnt whilst you were overseas?
'If I've learnt anything from being away, I've learnt that in the interests of sanity, the less time that I can spend thinking about or being in contact with the music industry the better. It doesn't actually have very much to do with music."
Any views on the local industry as it stands?
"I don't know that there's that much that can be done short of attaching New Zealand to a giant tug and pulling it off the coast of Santa Barbra or plonking it down somewhere in the Irish Sea. In a place like England, there's a natural tendency for the industry to roam around looking for a new place to shine its big spotlight on. And once [music journalists] start to go to little towns and write pieces about how a tiny backwater can produce such amazing songs, the next step is that the people who write those songs have to get in a van and drive to a big place over the border and sell those songs - they become part of the bigger picture. It's at that point where New Zealand bands always fall down because they can't get in a van and drive anywhere. That's what fucks people up. But I've just [got] back, it's too early for me to start coming up with remedies for anything."
What expectations do you have for the new album? You've been out of sight for a while.
"I don't have any expectations. People's attention spans are quite short here because there's a lot happening and if you've been out of the picture for a while you're deemed to have disappeared. But there's enough people who follow what we're doing and a lot of people quite looking forward to (Rain, Steam and Speed). We've been really lucky with the amount of interest that has remained here, considering how much energy we've put into the UK and Europe in the last few years."
Having settled with his wife and two kids in the Auckland suburb of Eden Terrace, McGlashan admits it will take some time to acclimatize to a stable existence where he'll sleep in the same bed every night. He's got at least until September to get back in the groove, before the Mutton Birds embark on a New Zealand tour and further ahead, a UK jaunt next February.
"Until then, hopefully I can just look after the children and write songs."
back to contents
Don discusses 'Jackie's Song' (1999)
"Jackie's Song came from an old idea I had about a dialogue between two soldiers, or shipwreck survivors - one who has to leave (or is about to die) and one who must remain. The context came into my mind as I was reading a book on the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s - thinking about the predicament of the (mainly Irish and Scots) soldiers in the British army who found themselves in New Zealand, in impossible terrain facing the hardest indigenous force ever encountered by the colonisers. I also meant it to be about the seductive/coercive power of old songs. How they can lead people into battles that aren't their own; how they can perpetuate ideas that should long ago have been buried (the Omagh bombing had just happened when I started putting the pieces of this song together).
None of this is necessary to make sense of the song. It can be taken as just a love song/farewell song from one friend to another - in the tradition of battlefield farewell songs."
back to contents
Songs, Senses & Small Mercies - Southland Times (September 1999)
An unglamorous band with glorious songs, The Mutton Birds play at the Embassy Theatre in Invercargill tomorrow. Michael Fallow sounds out singer-songwriter Don McGlashan.
The All Blacks versus England. It's 16-all. Through our television sets we hear thousands of English voices burst into another chorus of Swing Low Sweet Chariot. By way of reedy reply from at least one Invercargill living room couch comes a snatch from a Mutton Birds song.
When the chariot won't swing low enough...
It seemed appropriate, which it shouldn't really. The song in question, Small Mercies, was written by Don McGlashan as a delicate, keening, deeply thankful and comforting piece. Nothing aggressive about it. You wouldn't think so to hear the couch version. McGlashan doesn't mind when we do this to his beautifully crafted songs. He remembers a story Dave Dobbyn told him.
"Dave was in London once, playing for a room full of pissed Kiwis. Which is often the case in London. He was singing 'Whaling' and got to the line 'I feel like Jonah ...' Whoops. He'd conjured up an icon bigger than any mere Biblical prophet.
"Suddenly they'd changed from being respectful audience savouring his songs into something more like a 21st party, and he'd turned into the entertainment for a 21st party. Not that Dave would complain about that..."
It's just a New Zealand thing. And if people sometimes entirely misinterpret his songs, McGlashan reminds himself that for each one he sends out with a clear meaning, there's one that is evocative of something even he struggles to pin down. Songs that make sense as expressions of feeling, rather than of thoughts. Mind you, that hardly explains the engineering student from Lincoln who once enthused to McGlashan about The Mutton Birds 'A Thing Well Made'. So good to hear a song about craftsmanship and pride in your work, the student said. He'd rather missed the intended point, that the appreciative viewpoint turned out to be that of a Christchurch sporting goods salesman who was sending off automatic weaponry to Aramoana's mass killer David Gray.
McGlashan has returned to New Zealand after four years based in England to find that his homeland feels different.
"It seems to have gone further down the road towards individualism and away from a sense of shared, collective future. A lot of people, I think, feel more anxious and more left to their own devices." Mind you, this new viewpoint could be due to nothing more than him becoming a grownup. Even so, he detects a yearning among us for a less doctrinaire government, which he believes election-minded politicians are chasing as a vote catcher.
"So it could be that at last we might get back to policies that look after the less fortunate... and outlying areas don't lose all their services ... and, you know, market forces don't drive every aspect of our lives."
An anti-1984 attitude? Sounds good to him, but he's not yet convinced the parties are doing any more than paying lip service.
His band, meanwhile, remains celebrated in a less than stellar way. It has enough good reviews from weighty publications to fill a guitar case - "Robust, sad melodies and beautifully weighted arrangements" (Q Magazine); "The classic purity of the melodies ... is at times breathtaking" (The Sunday Times); "Unpretentious ingenuity, freshly-baked-this-morning melodies and dark pensive lyrics" (The Times). McGlashan squirms at a reminder that critics tend to underscore the view that the band ought to sell more CDs and be more famous. Rub it in, why don't they. As he sees it, The Mutton Birds are doing all right, with audiences in several different countries and a new management in England, Shhhh Records, which is "still keen to fight the good fight."
McGlashan's songs have a strong sense of place and, because he's a New Zealander, that means a strong sense of this place. They are crafted, melting beauties and tensions into odd alloys that are sometimes exultant, sometimes understated, sometimes almost both. Streets ahead of most radio fodder, then?
"Uh, it wouldn't be appropriate for me at my age to be wagging my finger at young people's pop music," McGlashan says. "Pop music has lots of functions in this world, and a perfectly good one is to make you feel like tapping your steering wheel as you're driving to work. But in with that there are other songs which somehow reflect the world that you live in. If these resonate with somebody listening, then good ...
"I'm always really heartened when I listen to radio charts. Somewhere in there you'll find something that couldn't have been written by a machine. Something with a real idea behind it. It's got sharp edges that would have been smoothed off by the record company, if they could."
Mutton Birds songs evoke Dominion Road on a wet day. The warmth of a heater in a dank flat. White Valiants. They seek stories behind waterfalls and behind old monuments. You could call it folk music, he agrees.
"It's not very fashionable now, but neither am I. And I'm quite happy to be who I am."
McGlashan is also well pleased to have Tim Finn as a special guest for tomorrow's performance in Invercargill.
"The last time I played with Tim I was with Blam Blam Blam and we were supporting Split Enz. We were incredibly intimidated by them all but Tim was a generous spirit. Still is."
The main man of the Mutton Birds is also acutely aware that he's heading back into genuine muttonbird territory. And yes, he has tasted them.
"Do they still have the Muttonbird ball? Yeah? Maybe they need a band..."
back to contents
Fashion Victim Gathers Speed - NZ Sunday Star Times (1999)
- Grant Smithies
Don McGlashan is about as fashionable as the specials bin at Farmers. He sounds somewhat taken aback with this observation during a conversation about the Mutton Birds' latest album Rain, Steam and Speed.
But I don't mean "unfashionable" in a negative way. It's just the Mutton Birds, whether live or on record, seldom get adjectives like "cool", "hip" or "avant-garde" thrown their way. Like Crowded House or Elvis Costello and the Attractions, they occupy the "serious songwriter with backing band" basket, and so must settle for more measured prose about their "immaculate craftsmanship", suggesting their music's more for beard-stroking audiophiles than trend-conscious pop kids.
"Well, Robbie Williams has very carefully crafted songs, and his whole image is very carefully put together. He's really fashionable with certain people," says the recently returned to New Zealand after four years in Great Britain McGlashan. "There are many ways of looking at fashion. It's not just one check-list that arrives from heaven and gets ticked off by the select few in another country and then gradually filters down to New Zealand.
"To me, real fashion is whatever creative people want to do; whatever pushes their buttons. Opening a magazine and being told you ought to go out and buy a particular record this week, and then being told the next week you're not supposed to like it any more - if that's being fashionable, then I wouldn't aspire to it."
Anyone opening magazines like Q and Mojo lately, or British papers like The Times or the Guardian, have been told to go out and buy Rain, Steam and Speed. After the more expansive (and expensive) sonics of their previous album Envy Of Angels, recorded with major label backing before Virgin UK dropped the band for "poor sales", the album has a tougher, more stripped-back sound.
The Brits have called it a 'pop masterpiece', with one of the blokes from Radiohead naming The Mutton Birds as his favourite band, yet critics here seem to be putting a bob each way.
Perhaps their appreciation has been dulled by over-familiarity with McGlashan's thematic interests and writing style? Whatever the critics say, he believes Rain, Steam & Speed is the band's best record. "With Envy Of Angels we had a lot more money to spend but weren't awfully happy as a band. This new record is more similar to our first album, in that we decided how we wanted it to sound and who we wanted to work with, without having to justify our decisions to the record company. And I think these songs spring from a much stronger set of ideas."
Ahh, the songs. Carefully crafted? With meticulously built arrangements? "Well, half the people in the music industry are trying to make lasting, meaningful songs which describe the world the way they see it, which is a really ancient notion. Meanwhile, the other half are being marketed as a disposable fashion item.
"Sometimes those two sets intersect and in the middle you'll have a really fantastic band that's making music to last but who're lucky enough to be doing it at the right time and be marketed by the right people so it takes off. That's been us at various times in our career," he adds philosophically. "Maybe this will be another one of those times."
After spending more than 20 years touring in various bands, including Blam Blam Blam, McGlashan has decided to get a life. While the rest of the band remains in the UK, he's brought his family back to Auckland. He'll get more time to relax, write and be a more available father to his two children. The band will re-unite to record and tour, here and in the UK, at least once a year.
With a month-long tour kicking off this week, punters from Auckland to Invercargill will get a chance to evaluate the Mutton Birds' salty new sound. "It's always interesting to play small towns everyone else avoids," says McGlashan. "We played in Timaru once and all the males stood about ten feet away with their backs to us and all their girlfriends stood facing them, and therefore us, but they had to look over their boyfriends' shoulders to see us. Now that," he laughs, "was interesting."
back to contents
Mutton Bird Up In the Air - NZ Herald (18th November 1999)
THE MUTTON BIRDS' UK TOUR DIARY BY DON McGLASHAN, part 1
On tour again. Will we have enough rehearsal time? Will Andrew Claridge, who's stepping in on guitar, fit in? Will anybody come to the shows?
First things first, though. The plane has to take off - in spite of it being impossible. They know it's impossible, that's why they get you drunk. It makes up for the sinister rattling sounds and the bad-tempered stewardesses and, anyway, it's traditional to consume all the booze and peanuts they can throw at you, at least on the leg to LA. Everyone knows that.
"The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign." Really? Why couldn't someone else do it? Shouldn't he be flying the plane?
Calm down. I wonder if anyone, ever, has locked an aeroplane toilet door behind them without thinking, "I bet they can see me from the cockpit," and scanning the ceiling for the hidden camera.
Back in my seat, and the in-flight TV news is brilliantly inconsequential.
Here's a must-see: an item on an international finger-skateboarding competition. The thrill of flesh on 2mm plywood; the squeak of tiny wheels; the high-fives after a particularly tricky manoeuvre ... I'm so engrossed in that, I miss another impossibility. We cross the dateline and suddenly it's yesterday. Who are they trying to kid?
I begin to suspect that they're moving the seats together incrementally, a few millimetres at a time, so we won't notice. I'm sure my knees weren't touching the back of the seat in front when we left Auckland. I make a note to check in LA to see if they've sneaked in an extra row at the back of the plane.
It's been a long time since that bag of peanuts. What else is there to do?
The stuff you're given to read on aeroplanes is meant to relax you, make you feel affluent and sophisticated. There's a magazine called Long Haul Mail or something, full of the most amazing junk that you'd only want if you already owned everything remotely useful that had ever been invented - a CD player for the shower; an automatic rotating tie rack; a home snow-maker that connects to your garden hose.
Imagining buying these things makes me feel less empty-handed, more attached to the world, even though I'm stuck inside a metal tube 10,000m above the ocean, with no eftpos terminal in sight.
Brief touchdown in the US. Coffee, a magazine and a muffin costs a withering $NZ30. I sell the snow-maker to a passing religious zealot. He rips me off good.
Finally I get to London. I stay for the first few days in Wembley with Ross Burge, drummer. Even after four years living in this city, it all now seems unfamiliar; seething, exhausting, overwhelming.
Getting to Andrew's place takes an hour-and-a-half, which is most of the available daylight. He sounds great, though. Incoherent with jetiag, I dredge up everything we might play and a lot that we won't, but fail to find anything that he hasn't learned thoroughly. Aye, it's a wild and crazy idea, Captain, but it might just work.
Back down in the underground, the walls of the stations are covered with travel advertisements for places that the tube riders can escape to in their imaginations. Places filled with space and light, like the place I've just come from. That's impossible too, but I'm here.
back to contents
Cocoon Breaks Open After Night Caught in the Storm - NZ Herald (25th November 1999)
THE MUTTON BIRDS' UK TOUR DIARY BY DON McGLASHAN, part 2
Steve, our manager, has found us a practice room in the centre of London. It's more light and dry than the place we always used in Holloway Rd, but it still has pin-boards covered with the familiar tragic ads: "Kick-ass bass player wanted for up-and-coming band. Influences: Suede, the Beastie Boys and Janis Joplin. No time-wasters."
After a few days I go to stay with friends in my old neighbourhood, which means I'm coming into the city on the Northern Line again.
Rehearsals finished, we leave for five shows in Wales, Scotland and the North. The first gig is in Wrexham, North Wales. On the way, in the traffic jams around Birmingham, we pass a median strip with a stunted outcrop of shrubbery on it. Almost hidden in the bushes, we can see a tent, with gas bottle and TV aerial. Surrounded by miles of busy exhaust pipes, it's a strange symbol of grit and eccentricity.
Wrexham is pretty, if you don't count the people. It's Friday night, and I'd forgotten how large Northern lads and lasses like to squeeze themselves into undersize bits of latex and leather, get lathered, then stagger around looking for a fight, or someone to go home with, or both. We keep our heads down.
The gig goes well. Ross [the drummer] has given up smoking, and he's as wired as a suspension bridge.
That, and the energy that Andrew [the new guitarist] is bringing to the songs, makes us louder than we've ever been. While You Sleep is so full on that no one could sleep through it without industrial sedatives.
We drive north the next morning, through Cumbria, and heather the colour of rust. Dry stone walls marking divisions between long-dead neighbours - occasionally a tiny cottage with smoke curling from a chimney.
It reminds me of Central Otago, but I know it's the other way round. Generations of Britons went out and peopled the world, and we grew up stuck in their homesickness like ants in honey.
Onstage at the Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh, I'm having a bad gig. I can't hear which notes to tune to in the squalling, rumbling storm of each song; can't remember how to stand or think of anything to say to the audience. And yet the place is full and jumping, and people come up to me afterwards and rave to me about how it's the best they've seen us in the five years they've been following the band.
Scottish thriller-writer Ian Rankin collars me to tell me he's named his next book after The Falls, a song from our latest album. He's excited, speedy and wants to tell me the whole plot right there and then. Unable to quite follow his accent, and still cloth-headed from the gig, I mutter thanks and flee to the hotel.
In the morning I skip the traditional Scottish continental breakfast and go for a run up the Royal Mile, down past the railway station, across Princes St, to the New Town. To my right, every long street finishes in the pale, grey sea at Leith. The castle rises histrionically out of the rock like a Lord Of The Rings promo still.
We load the gear up the icy cobblestones and drive south on the A702 through tiny villages that seem to have grown out of the hillsides.
I drift in and out of the traveller's constant daydream: What would it be like to live in that house; to know that place with the kind of soft, easy knowledge that piles up, like leaves, over time? So that what looks (from the van) just like a hill, a church, a stream - becomes The Hill, The Church, The Stream ...
But we're round the next bend now, and suddenly in beech trees, nearly bare in the waterlogged fields, but catching the sun with their last remaining bits of orange and yellow.
I feel myself coming out of my normal early-tour cocoon (worried my voice won't hold, not coming out to the pub after the gig, not saying much in the van ...) It hits me, as it always does about now, that this is not really a job; I should be paying someone to let me do this.
back to contents
It's the Grand Old Puke from York - NZ Herald (9th December 1999)
THE MUTTON BIRDS' UK TOUR DIARY BY DON McGLASHAN, part 3
We are on the road to York. It's almost dark, so it must be mid-morning. After staying the night in a bleak truck stop on the Manchester ring road, we're on the M62, in the rain.
York is an old, walled city, with buildings leaning at crazy angles and cheery signs saying: "So-and-so was martyred on this spot in 1342." The flooding has hit hard. The Travelodge carpets squelch with river water as we check in.
The travelling has made me thirsty so I drink water from the tap in the room, forgetting I'm not supposed to do that. The pub is old. Although there are no obvious traces of 14th-century lynchings, the walls bear evidence of evil goings-on. I'm talking of tribute bands, and we seem to have stumbled on the motherlode: the Jamm, the Rolling Clones, T Rextasy, Fleetwood Back and, my favourite, By Jovi.
In a dark corner, there's a poster for a band called Crowded Trousers (what sort of show is that?)
Over generous after-gig whiskies, the promoter tells us about an outfit called Rock Bitch (a sister act to Crowded Trousers?) who play at the venue regularly. Their show-stopper seems to be "throwing the golden condom," a witty parody of wedding reception bouquet tossing, in which the punter who catches the condom gets to go up on stage and ... (At this point I start to feel ill, but don't immediately connect it with drinking York water.)
By Sheffield the following night, I'm a pale green. I stagger through soundcheck, have to crawl under a pile of old backdrops to sleep before the gig, then manage four and a half songs before falling off the side of the stage and puking into a rubbish bin.
I black out, and wake in London the next day, to hear that the entire Sheffield audience refused to have their money back, but promised to come to the next gig instead.
They do just that. The Flower Pot pub in Derby is loaded to the rafters, and the show is blistering. It feels like we're hitting our stride; Ross and Andrew throw musical challenges to each other with the swagger of TV wrestlers; new sections of songs appear out of nowhere, teeter on the brink of falling apart, then come back together in unrepeatably inspired ways. And I manage to keep my lunch down. Everyone's so happy afterwards that the gear seems to load itself into the van.
Back in London, we do some interviews and live acoustic songs at Bush House for the BBC, then drive to Cardiff for another radio session. There's a momentary break in the showers, but the sun's not coming out because it'll be dark soon, and anyway, he wasn't given enough notice.
The M4 is flanked with fields of bagged Christmas trees, ready to be trucked in their millions to hardware superstores all over the country. The beautiful single arc of the Severn Bridge into Wales is spoiled only by the weird shade of hospital green that all the steelwork is painted. I try not to think of Sheffield.
All the signs are suddenly bilingual. "Newport" is "Casnewydd," "Services" is "Gwasanaethau." Suddenly I'm spouting Dylan Thomas and demanding that we stop for a pint of stout with an egg in it. The rest of the band remember Sheffield, and they decide it's a bad idea.
The gig, at the Toucan Club, is just as good as Derby. Queen's English seems to go on for half an hour, we're having so much fun with it.
It's two days after Wales is defeated by the Springboks; the pub dinner lounge is filled with a South African supporters club barking triumphantly at each other in Afrikaans, so we take our after-gig party back to the hotel.
The next morning, we wander around the town looking for breakfast. Cardiff swims in a grey light, as if all the people and buildings are in a giant fish tank that needs a good clean. There are just a few more shows left before the big one, Shepherds Bush Empire in London. That seems to be selling out already, so, with a spring in our step, it's one last look around, then back in the van.
back to contents
Brighton Rocks Towards Finale - NZ Herald (16th December 1999)
THE MUTTON BIRDS' UK TOUR DIARY BY DON McGLASHAN, part 4
Brighton is the next gig, and I'm getting the train down early to see some friends. First I have to walk to the tube and take the Northern line to Victoria, a journey of about 12km which takes about as long as driving from Auckland to Hamilton. When we lived in London, I used to write a lot of songs on these trains.
Once through the outer suburbs, all the London lines choose their points to dive underground, away from light, parks and supermarkets and into the murky subconscious of the city. On the Northern line it happens after East Finchley and it seems to involve a time change as well. The next stop, Highgate, has tiled walls that look like they haven't been touched since the Blitz. Then Archway, Tufnell Park, Kentish Town, Camden, where the carriage suddenly fills with noise and colour (ah, the real London - pink hair, leather thigh-boots, Union Jack skirts - and that's only the Spanish schoolchildren), then under the West End to change at Embankment for Victoria Station.
I buy a ticket to Eastbourne. I doze off as we trundle through Clapham, and hear ancestral voices in strange, 19th-century inflections welcoming me back, making odd, clipped speeches of post-colonial forgiveness and reconciliation, except they're not. It's the conductor saying that, because of flooding all over the Southeast, the train will divide at the next stop. The front two carriages will go to Brighton, the back two to Eastbourne, the one marked "S" will stand still, and any left over will become exhibits in a transport museum in Scunthorpe. I feel like a penguin on a disintegrating ice-floe, and the uniformed staff all seem to be Croatian refugees, whose command of English extends to "No," but a bunch of elderly, hair-netted women come to my rescue. "The 10.15 always divides, luv. Has done ever since the War. You come with us - we'll see you right." They do, and I get to Jevington village to meet my friends, and then on to Brighton in time for soundcheck.
We rehearse a new song, Stay Hungry, and decide to put it in the set. It's not really finished but sometimes it's good to throw songs into the water and see if they swim, before they get too sure of themselves. It works. Big smiles in the audience tell us it was the right time to try it.
Back in London, and the final gig at Shepherd's Bush. The Empire sits at one end of Shepherd's Bush Green, with an incongruous, decaying grandeur, like an old Shakespearean actor standing in line to use an ATM. Inside, the venue is much bigger than the others we've played in the past month. There are staff hovering to plug things in for us, tune our guitars and tape our leads to the floor so we don't trip on them.
At soundcheck, we finally agree on the song list after tinkering with it all through the tour. I want to start with Envy Of Angels - mainly because it doesn't fit anywhere else in the set and I'd hate to leave it out. Ross thinks it's too wimpy. I say he can choose the songs for the first encore if he'll let me choose the opener. After the normal amount of swearing at the umpires and throwing our racquets on the ground, we walk up to the net and shake hands.
Before the gig, the nerves kick in. Standing in the wings with Tony and Andrew, watching the support acts, we can see it's a full house. The punters are noisy and good-natured and steam rises from them, thickening the tunnels of light that slant down towards the stage.
Andrew tells me he's just noticed he's been pacing continuously for the past half-hour. He reckons this is the biggest headline audience he's ever played to. I'm glad he's excited, it helps me to get my own butterflies in order.
Suddenly we're on. The little red lights on the amps are glowing, and I'm watching myself standing, listening for the sound of drumsticks clicking together. Ross' voice sounds calm, quiet, and far away as he counts in Envy Of Angels ...
back to contents
Don McGlashan - Home Alone - NZ Musician magazine (April 1999)
By Jennifer Scott
When Don McGlashan of The Mutton Birds tucks his children in at night, the bedtime stories he spins - like his songs - are no doubt filled with a plethora of weird and wonderful characters.
I get this impression when talking to him about how the single Pulled Along By Love from the band's fourth album, 'Rain, Steam & Speed' was recorded.
McGlashan talks enthusiastically about recording it at London's Blackwing studios, a grimy, ghostly converted church. I speculate that the joy was in the acoustics of the old building but am corrected: "It was more the sense that something slimy might crawl out of an alcove," he says gleefully.
McGlashan recently returned to New Zealand from a four-year stint in the UK. Here he will stay while the rest of the band, drummer Ross Burge, guitarist Chris Sheehan (ex-Exponents) and new bassist Tony Fisher, stay in London.
McGlashan's return is the latest in a series of changes for the band, but one McGlashan does not see as a terminal problem. In fact, he says if anything, this geographical difference will make the band more prolific.
"From my perspective, I'm now in a situation where my family can be more comfortable, I'm touring less and I'm home more and have got more time to write which is going to result in more albums, not less."
'Rain, Steam & Speed' was recorded last year in London and released in the UK on the band's own label, shhhh! records, the band having been dumped by Virgin UK owing to sales of the third album, 'Envy of Angels' not meeting the company's expectations. McGlashan says rather than being a kick in the gut, Virgin UK's action came as a sigh of relief for the band.
"Most bands think that major label involvement is going to be some kind of heaven. You struggle away on earth and suddenly an A&R person with wings comes down and carries you up into the clouds, and from then on there's nothing to worry about. You're completely creatively free and you've got lots of time to spend wasting in cafes. But it doesn't work like that because major labels are not organised around music. They're organised around selling and foisting stuff on people that should know better."
While they appreciated the money Virgin UK put into 'Envy of Angels' at the time, they are pleased to now have complete creative control, and although the album will be released through Virgin in New Zealand, McGlashan says he is pleased that the band can relegate the whole 'major label episode' to the past.
"The 'major label episode' is kind of a cliche. Most bands that we know speak of their 'major label episode' as you would talk about a really ill-advised affair with someone. It's somebody that didn't really suit you and you roll your eyes and go what was I thinking of?"
Ironically, since losing major label support the band's UK fanbase has increased considerably and McGlashan says he understands 'Rain, Steam & Speed' is selling faster than 'Envy of Angels' in the UK and there are some leftover benefits from the Virgin experience.
"Everything we got on the major label, like the little plastic dividers in all the major retail chains saying The Mutton Birds, they're still there and our visibility hasn't decreased, it's increased."
Although he is decidedly sick of it now, four years of continuous touring around the UK paid off for the band and McGlashan says the band has tried to capture this live appeal on 'Rain, Steam & Speed'.
"The record was made very quickly and in a really organic way because we knew we didn't have all that much time in the studio, and we'd been touring a lot so we knew we were playing well. We wanted to get in there and actually get the atmosphere down without it evaporating. That was the task of the record."
The album was engineered by Sam Gibson (Crowded House, The Stereo Bus, Garageland) and produced by the band.
"The reviews so far in the UK - not that I take any notice them of course (smiles) - are pretty unanimous in saying that it's the best thing we've ever done, and I agree with them."
Indeed the album, except for the single Pulled Along By Love, has a very stripped down, almost folkish sound. Although he has since left the band to tour with Bic Runga, Alan Gregg played most of the bass parts on the album and other guests include fellow ex-pat David Mitchell (3Ds) playing guitar on Jackie's Song and Scottish pedal steel player and - McGlashan says - demon tequila drinker, Stuart Nesbitt on Goodbye Drug.
McGlashan himself experimented with new sounds, using an e-bow for the first time with his guitar on As Close As This."I'd never used one before and so it kept falling off and so when we finished the take I said 'Okay, I think I know what I'm doing now' and the others were all like, 'No! Leave it the way it is', so we have. The e-bow usually has this continuous tone but on this track you can hear it stop and start as I drop it and cuss at it."
One of the most obvious things about McGlashan is that in spite of everything that has happened he still loves being a Mutton Bird and is more than pleased with what the band has achieved.
"We went overseas so we could keep going as band. We decided that we needed to make more records and if there was a chance that we could make them on a bigger scale and reach more people, then we could keep the band going longer, make more records and do more shows. It wasn't a burning ambition to get out and make it ... when we left we had no idea we were going to be away so long. As far as we were concerned we were on a world tour but more and more it appeared we would have to stay there (in the UK) to take the opportunities as they came up.
"As far as we're concerned we have a really big audience. Apart from Crowded House and Pauly Fuemana I don't think anyone has reached as many people as we have. I don't know of any other New Zealand bands who have got two four star reviews in Q Magazine."
The band will tour New Zealand and Australia in May to promote the album and then McGlashan plans to return to teaching music part-time - and of course to write heaps of songs.
"We've done pretty well out of music and the royalties from The Mutton Birds keep coming. There are aspects of the job which I feel tempted to complain about often but really, when you stand back and look at it, most musicians should thank their lucky stars for being able to be able to basically show off in front of a whole lot of people and be paid for it. I've got no complaints."
back to contents
They're Using Our Name Over There
excerpt from an article on www.stuff.co.nz about the inspiration NZ has on other countries
"At least one slice of Kiwi life has appealed to a very
specific overseas audience. Songs from the Mutton
Birds feature in books by Ian Rankin and Christopher
Brookmyre - both Scottish, both thriller writers.
The latter will use direct quotes from the songs "The
Heater" and "Envy of Angels" in a book due out next
February. He says the band's songs are inspirational.
"Sometimes these songs have struck a chord with me
because they echoed a sentiment I was already
considering, and other times because they offer a way
of looking at something that hadn't occurred to me
before."
Don McGlashan, front man for the Mutton Birds, says
Rankin made a direct approach after a gig in Scotland.
"He said he was a huge fan and did we mind if he named
a book after one of our songs ("The Falls") and we'd
both had so much lager it seemed like a great idea -
it still seems like a great idea, even without the
lager."
McGlashan is at a loss to explain the band's author
appeal.
"I don't have a clue. I just think it's the perverse
likes and dislikes of the individuals involved. Maybe
they're searching for something exotic to put in their
book, but I don't think it's that. I hope it's not
that. I think it's more that these guys liked the
atmosphere of what we were doing and they wanted to
have some."
back to contents
Swanndri Song - NZ Listener (1999)
I'm sorry, but it just is. It is probably one of the worst names in the world for one of the best pop groups. The Mutton Birds. I mean, if there is a Naming Baby book for bands, then I think Don McGlashan must have got his copy from the Planet Zog, where the sky's made out of green flannel suiting, and if you want an extreme sport, try breathing out in unison. Why, it makes his previous incarnation, the Front Lawn, sound positively sexy and hillocky with mystery (did the turf move for you?).
Why not the Pukekos? Or the Keas? Or the Kakas? They could have called themselves the Sandhoppers - it's got that chipper, insecty thing going for it. And the Nikaus is awfully nice (try it with me and see). Or hang on - they could have been the Singing Swanndris. But no, they're the Muttonbirds. I mean, let's face it, boys, no one else in the world even wants to eat mutton, let alone listen to it.
Still, it's all part of McGlashan's deadpan irony, that curious Kiwi humour that pretends to have had a charisma bypass but which, not so deep inside, is bubbling away with more black weirdnesses than you could shake a geranium at. And some of it was nicely on show in National Radio's 'The Muttonbirds', airing in the late-Friday-night music spot - like, f'rinstance, McGlashan's phobia of the young army wives pushing prams around his London neighbourhood - "all really strapping and athletic-looking and all about 18. Quite fearsome!" Absolutely.
Makes my unreasoning fear of axe-murderers and rabid Social Welfare Ministers look pretty silly, I can tell you.
The programme concentrated entirely on the songs from the latest album, Rain, Steam and Speed, interrupted only by McGlashan's own words - so it's just as well he's one of the few rock musicians with anything interesting to say. Songs, he pointed out, "don't have all of that paraphernalia of importance that other kinds of art have. There's no marbled foyer to walk through on your way to a song." And what songs! Lyrics like these: "The trees are all tangled up and they're the wrong shade of green / And the birds laugh like drunken garrison girls." A guitar-ry, dense-textured drone that suddenly flowers into something quite lovely and then heads back to being a drone again. Bit like life really, if you must have a moral out of it.
So how does he do it, bless him? "Flat speech," said McGlashan. "Sad chords." Hearts razored into little shreds. Ah, those sweet, suffering lads with their sensibilities all a-shiver.
Somebody give 'em a swanndri, quick. - Jane Hurley
back to contents
Great Tunes With Strings Attached - Dominion Post (September 1999)
- Pete Barnao
Trying to re-arrange Kiwi pop songs for a band with full orchestral backing would leave many musicians feeling caught between a rock and a very hard place. Especially if the songs are your own and your formal music training is a fading memory.
This is the challenge for Muttonbirds frontman Don McGlashan when his band joins forces with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for a concert in Martinborough this month.
The Muttonbirds will play four of their best-known songs with the orchestra at the Concert in the Vines at Alana Estate. The collaboration follows the orchestra's teaming with Split Enz for the ENZSO concerts and recordings. But McGlashan says this gig is more about creating an orchestral backing than heavily reworking the songs.
The Muttonbirds songwriter, who studied music at university and played French horn for the Auckland Sinfonia, is arranging one of the songs, Queen's English, himself. He admits the task is "pretty scary".
"This approach of having the band playing at the same time as the orchestra is quite different. A rock and roll band is necessarily louder than a whole violin section. We have to work out a way of doing it without annoying the orchestra."
The project has highlighted different writing techniques and musical cultures - between an orchestra's formality and the improvised ways of bands, McGlashan says he has enjoyed delving back into his formal training while touring to promoting (sic) the album, Rain, Steam & Speed. He puts the main musical challenge down to "the tyranny of the printed page."
"If you stand in front of an orchestra, you can't really say, 'hey, that doesn't work, let's try this' like you do in a band. The orchestra is such a huge mass of highly trained people, all sitting there with the clock ticking. But there's an enormous respect among rock musicians for classical performers [and] I think a lot of people in orchestras have a lot of respect for rock and roll musicians, who can be spontaneous and relaxed and play without music."
McGlashan has asked composer Gareth Farr to arranged Muttonbirds favourites Anchor Me and Dominion Road for the collaboration. The show will be conducted by Kenneth Young, the NZSO's principal tuba and a former resident conductor, who will arrange a concert version of Nature. Young, too, is relishing the challenge.
"It gives the orchestra a chance to play a style of music we're not used to playing. The idea is not to get in the way, too much, of the rock band, but trying to enhance the sound. It's about adding an extra orchestral texture to the song."
Young, who played with the orchestra in the ENZSO shows says the real challenge lies with the sound manager, who has [to] achieve a balance between the band and the orchestra. Tickets to the concert are $45 and numbers are limited to 5000.
back to contents
The Don of Song - New Zealand Herald (22nd May 1999)
There are plenty of chapters in the Don McGlashan songbook. Russell Baillie looks at what's behind the lyrics.
It would be easy just to turn up to Don McGlashan's place and talk shop. After all, there's been plenty happening. His band the Mutton Birds, a 90s Kiwi rock institution based for the past four years in London, have put out a fourth album, Rain Steam and Speed. It's the first record since they split with Virgin Records in Britain and they've now gone out on their own label. It also marks other changes, with bassist Alan Gregg departing part-way through the recording and being replaced by Englishman Tony Fisher. And it's the first to feature the guitars of onetime Exponent Chris Sheehan, who took the place of co-founder David Long shortly after the late 1996 album Envy of Angels. It also marks a new stage in the Mutton Birds set-up, as McGlashan and family have recently returned to Auckland to live. The other three, including drummer Ross Burge, will remain based in Britain but get together for recording and touring - a New Zealand tour is booked for September. It might sound like a winding-down, but McGlashan doesn't see it that way. "I don't have much time for spending the rest of my life knocking on doors in Britain trying to get on Top of the Pops or anything like that," he says. "I no longer think that sort of behaviour is necessary for being where we want to be. Where we are now is with more albums in us but a clear decision not to be going up and down the M1 every second week." And there's evidence the band has established a solid fan base Up Over. In the McGlashans' Kingsland hallway is a poster from the band's sellout February show at London's 1800-capacity Shepherd's Bush Empire. The album, released through their own label shhhh! (and picked up by Virgin Records NZ for release here) has won many and glowing reviews in the Brit rock press. But that's the shop talk. We have other plans for McGlashan on this cold night. We have designs on his body of work. For, like Neil Finn and Dave Dobbyn, McGlashan's back pages now form one of the great New Zealand songbooks. Its chapters stretch from the angular artpop of Blam Blam Blam, the comedy-song-theatre-movie multi-hyphenate of the Front Lawn, or the askew and often cinematic pop'n'folk- rock of the Mutton Birds. There have been songs which come delivered in character with a story to tell, or as RS&S increasingly shows - speak from McGlashan's own heart and personal observations. He's long had a great eye and ear for songs set against a New Zealand backdrop, whether urban (the upbeat ones like Dominion Road) or rural (the slow broodings of White Valiant). And the onetime Blams drummer, From Scratch percussionist and Angel at My Table soundtrack composer turned Mutton Birds singer-guitarist, also remains undoubtedly the best euphonium player in rock'n'roll today. But it is that body of work we have to dissect. So we have come armed with CDR of 10 McGlashan tracks. Songs we think are among his best. His very own "this is your songwriting life." Let's press "play."
Track One: Pulled Along by Love - The first single from the new album. Swings from churning guitars to a sweetly giddy chorus. Lyrics sparked by crowd-watching on the London Underground. Not the first time he's found inspiration in trains or other public transport. "I guess it was just looking at that train and seeing just a mass of people ... suddenly got knocked over by the enormity of the fact that there is an enormous engine driving each of these individual people. Or one engine driving them. "I heard it on ZM in the car today. I turned it up really loudly. I punched the air. I swerved. I changed lanes. I upset people in later model cars. But what more you can do?"
Track Two: When You Come Back Home - A track - and single - from the 1989 album Songs from the Front Lawn. Exuberant ode to domesticity with a folky/brassy backing written with Lawn offsider Harry Sinclair while playing a season in Melbourne. "I never thought this song worked really well. It was always fun to play live - we would do it at the end of a Front Lawn show. But I never thought we made a very good record of it. We'd been in Melbourne for quite a long time. Paul Kelly's Gossip was stuck permanently in the malfunctioning cassette player. The car had something wrong with the fuel line. So the Melbourne streets, the heat, that album Gossip and the smell of petrol are just mixed up all together. Whenever I hear songs from that period it all comes flooding back."
Track Three: Andy - The saddest, loveliest track of Songs from The Front Lawn. Acoustic strumming propels a song set on Takapuna Beach, where a one-sided conversation is taking place. Had some lyrical steerage from Sinclair, but autobiographical. "Yeah this is really about my brother who we lost when I was about 15 ... it's not really an attempt to create a story too far away from that. Front Lawn is probably the only time I have ever really collaborated with other people. I have collaborated a few times in Mutton Birds, but it's generally not to do with the sense of a song or where the song is coming from."
Track Four: White Valiant - Brilliantly creepy, automotively-referenced track from Mutton Birds self-titled 1992 debut album. Flip side to Dominion Road. "This is one of my favourite Mutton Birds songs. The riff was written at the end of Blam Blam Blam and then it briefly surfaced in a Front Lawn song called the Telephone Song. I kind of knew where I wanted it to go."
Track Five: Anchor Me - Nautically-themed emotive and anthemic ballad. A single off the 1994 album, Salty. "I remember writing it and coming to the practice room with the verses and the bridge very clear in my head but no idea for the chorus, and playing it to the band and improvising the chorus ... and they all said: 'It's got to be like that, that's the song, what are you talking about?' I always thought the chorus was way too simple an idea. But when you make mistakes sometimes you get good songs out of them.
Track Six: While You Sleep - Insomniac's love song of dreamy tune and wiry guitars from the 1996 Envy of Angels. "This is probably one of my favourite songs, but what Tom Waits would call a redheaded stepchild. That's what Dave Dobbyn told me - the songs that refused to behave are the redheaded stepchildren. The band thought the structure was really wonky and didn't go anywhere and the producer wanted it off the record. "But this song really grew as we played it. It became something that felt like the centre of what we did."
Track Seven: Envy of Angels - Title track which closes the album on a contemplative note over a propulsive guitar jangle suggesting open roads and wide horizons. Features very nice euphonium solo. "This song is a letter to my Dad, really. It's about driving along roads north of Auckland with him as a teenager and having him point out the march of progress up the bays in pragmatic but generally glowing terms because he's an engineer and involved with the growth of suburbs ... he looks upon that with approval and I didn't then. I just saw, arrogantly as a teenager, more and more empty lives and more ugly carports. It took me years to go away, grow up, and come back before I realised I was one of them. I grew up in the shadow of an ugly carport. And what's wrong with that?"
Track Eight: Last Year's Shoes - Lilting mid-tempo chiming charmer from half way through RS&S. Not the first McGlashan song to mention footwear. "This song is about reaching out to somebody. It's about shedding an old skin and it was just the image of shoes. I went out to Piha and sat in this bach and it was the first thing to come. There was only me, the cicadas, the long-drop, and I was still writing when I went to the long-drop. The cicadas explains 'leaves hissing static' in the beginning of that song. It's got all the landscape."
Track Nine: Ray - At six and a half minutes, the longest Mutton Birds song from the end of RS&S. Starts small and intimate. Ends big and strident. "This was the redheaded stepchild of this album. It wouldn't sit still. It's just a direct song to somebody. Who? Can't say, but nobody called Ray. I've always wanted to write a song called Ray because it's such a nice word. It's quite strange for the Mutton Birds' songs to have a big outro - and that outro [on the album] is nowhere near full length. It was eight or nine minutes when we played it."
Track Ten: Don't Fight It Marsha, It's Bigger Than Both of Us - The heftily named classic Blam Blam Blam single with the peculiar lyrics - "there's five blue figures in a white circle" among others - from 1981. Arguably, where it all started. "I still like the kind of knife-edge quality of it, but compared to the Mutton Birds this sounds really young and nervous. "This one came out of nowhere. It is sort of an imitation of early Talking Heads lyric approaches where you have a really unsympathetic character standing up and stating his case - like Psycho Killer. I was listening to Talking Heads quite a bit and XTC. I don't know where 'five blue figures in a white circle' came from. "Some people come up and psychoanalyse that song. Somebody came up with a numerological reading of it. Completely off-beam but interesting."
back to contents
Q&A with Don McGlashan - Newcastle Herald (18th November 1999)
Full name: Donald Vain McGlashan. It's an old Scottish name.
Date of birth: July 18th 1959
Earliest memory: Eating a nasturtium, or it could have been a hydrangea. I was only two years old, so I didn't know the difference. They both have long names and they both taste bloody awful.
Childhood pin-up: I was into sailing, so it was probably some great yachtie like Paul Elstrom or Lou D'Altuget. I actually represented New Zealand in cherub racing when I was 18.
Silliest thing you've done: Swimming naked in the Auckland Domain duck pond in the middle of winter.
Bravest thing you've done: Have children. I've got one of each (Louis and Pearl).
Is image all about hair: Yeah, I've got good hair... and it's still red!
Favourite indulgence: Single-malt whisky.
Worst habit: Staying up all night to finish songs. I do that a lot and it screws me up for days.
Three things you would take to a deserted island: My wife (Marianne) and two children.
Favourite kitchen appliance: The coffee-maker.
If a movie was made of your life, who would play you: I would like to say Harrison Ford, but it would probably end up being Richard Dreyfuss.
Whom do you most admire: Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Tea of coffee: Coffee, black and short.
back to contents
Free as a Bird - Sunday Times Culture (10th January 1999)
They were dropped by Virgin, but, judging by the Mutton Birds' new album, it is the record company's loss. ANDREW SMITH meets New Zealand's finest.
We have previously remarked upon the mysterious ability of some American groups to stand onstage in cruddy jeans and their dads' geeky cast-off shirts, yet create an impression that they are the coolest hep cats you will ever see. Unfortunately, the Mutton Birds are from New Zealand and they don't have that ability. They may be the least cool, most tragically unhip guitar band in Britain right now, but what they do have, in Don McGlashan, is one of our most intelligent songwriters and poetic lyricists. McGlashan frowns at any mention of fellow Kiwis Crowded House or the antipodean tradition of clear, concise, unashamedly classic songwriting, but the Mutton Birds are superb exponents of that currently undervalued, underpractised art.
The quartet formed in Auckland nearly eight years ago. They first came to Britain in 1995, and have since spent more time here than anywhere else. Before that, McGlashan had acted in an extremely well-travelled comic acting troupe called The Front Lawn, who went to Edinburgh and performed seasons at the Donmar Warehouse in London and elsewhere. He also played drums with a touring dance company ("weird, trippy, minimal stuff') during a year he spent living in New York and composed the music for Jane Campion's fine breakthrough film, An Angel at My Table. Towards the end of his time with The Front Lawn (1985-90), however, McGlashan began to catch himself looking forward to the few songs they included in their show. He decided that it was time to return to music full time.
Let me tell you why I'm glad he did. You can say anything with prose that you can say in poetry. We value the latter because we recognise that to communicate a thought or feeling in five words is five times more powerful than using 25. This is also the reason why a three-minute pop song such as Freda Payne's Band of Gold, or Stevie Wonder's I Was Made to Love Her, or Ray Davies's Waterloo Sunset, Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren, or Nick Cave's (Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For? can be as emotionally enriching as a symphony or a soaring Coltrane improvisation. To those of us who grew up with it, the pop song is a magical and esoteric medium. Many artists stumble across one good pop song in their career - often for no apparent reason - but few bring anything to it with consistency.
We're not going to claim that any of McGlashan's songs are in the same class as those mentioned above, but Envy of Angels, the Mutton Birds album that Virgin released in 1997, was clearly the work of a very considerable songwriting talent. There were no frills, no flash, nothing unnecessary; the music was pure and simple and in harmony with the words. Particularly enchanting were tunes such as She's Been Talking, which began "At the high tide line / Driftwood and shells / That's where she said we could leave our clothes / Where the moonlight dissolves on the wet sand...", then opened into a brilliant evocation of the paranoia and uncertainty that is never far away in a new relationship. McGlashan could pull off a dizzy love song such as While You Sleep without resorting to a single cliche, and a humorous number such as April without cloying.
Needless to say, Envy of Angels didn't chime in with anything else that was happening in 1997 and failed to sell in very great quantities. Surprisingly, this was enough to persuade Virgin to drop the band, but, having got this far, they weren't abo
One of Don McGlashan's haunting songs is set in south Taranaki during Titokowaru's War of 1868-69. But it took a while to get there.