None of this is happening in order by the way – I’ve done a couple of things that were kindof early on, but almost everything that happened, happened in the middle, and nobody knows what came before what.

There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s just some stuff that happened.

So that aside, this about the first time we got together.

I can’t remember how we all connected. Andrew and Alan were already doing stuff… Andrew Gordon (manager Richard’s brother) was also there… playing drums? When I turned up I assumed everyone already knew each other – but I think Ian was there for the audition as well. Did we answer adverts? No idea.

I’d just left Uni – moved to Wellington – was living with Susan – my first girlfriend, and the most argumentative critter in the entire universe. She’s still my best friend. We still fight like cats if we’re in the same place for more than a couple of days. I miss the shit out of her.

Anyway – I got my first job as a computer-bod in a bank (they made me wear a tie). After about a month I took a look around at the grown-ups around me, and kindof figured “if I stay here I’m going to turn into one of these people” – so I quit. Started selling hand-made jewellery in the local market, and doing odd little temp jobs. I was listening to The Cult and Led Zeppelin… gradually sliding into the American Paisley Underground thing – The Rain Parade and REM (early, early)… and The Church in Aus.

And somewhere from that, I wound up at Alan’s place in Porirua… And there we were. All of a sudden.

It must have sounded bloody awful – but we must have seen some potential in each other… possibly because we were all quite pretty – could easily have stood in for this lot

Did it click? I think it must have clicked. Most of it was Ian I think – I’ve never really thought that until I started writing this… but he was always conspiratorially persuading us to do stuff we’d never have done on our own. He was gay… 1/2 the time, and had a shadow. The black-sheep – he’d seen quite a lot more of life than the rest of us. I miss him too.

So anyway. Things I can actually remember about the first day:

1) We all drove Minis. It was like The Italian Job with Rickenbackers.

Alan also had a Daimler or a Bentley or something – it literally cost more in gas to get from A to B than flying.

2) I was the only one who hadn’t stolen a car at some point

3) That’s all really. I played a strat through a little transistor amp, with an echo, a wah, a volume-pedal and a fuzz-box. I can kindof visualise where I stood… I had absolutely no idea what I was doing – but every time I did something weird, Ian would say “yea – do that”.

So we kindof clicked I guess. A week later we did it again.

Under Alan’s Mum’s house was a studio that he’d hewn out of rock-hard clay, with pick-axes and shovels and such. Pretty much everything we did in the kiwi phase we did here.

Somewhere down there…

Looks beautiful from a great height… down a 30 year time-tunnel. In the 80s, Porirua was kindof like Compton. It’s main claim to fame was that it was the first place in NZ to have a McDonalds. This was not an accident.

Still, cool little studio. Had a room big enough for a band to rehearse in, and a separate room for the desk etc… an 8-track reel-to-reel type recording setup, a vocal PA… drum kit. All our rehearsing and recording needs.

I’m not sure why, but The Wild Poppies always did infrastructure really well. The whole time we were together, in NZ, England, Wales, we never shared a rehearsal space. In England, we rehearsed in this big open-plan space with 30 ft high ceiling to floor windows overlooking the Thames. You’d have to sell your soul to Satan to get a place like that today. It cost us 5 quid a day – I think Alan managed to charm someone.

Anyway, back to NZ… Ian (The drummer, and resident conjurer of great and terrible ideas) managed to persuade us that it would be all punk and rock and roll etc, take loads of speed and stay awake – nail the whole thing in three days. The problems with this idea were as follows:

1) we didn’t have any speed.

2) without speed, you can’t stay awake for 3 days

3) neighbours etc.

Still. That’s what we decided to do.

It came, it went. I can’t remember if we managed to do it in 3 days. I think we did – we just didn’t stay awake the whole time, and the mixing bit happened about a week later.

I can clearly (only) remember 3 things:

1) At about 4am on the first (or second) night, Ian was recording drums, the rest of us were in the control-room. The main room was filled with this soft, stygian glow – almost dark…. low-watt red floor-lights… so full of pot-smoke that you could hardly see from one side to the other. Vibes man.

At some point, we all became aware of this ethereal figure all dressed in flowing white robes standing in front of the drum-kit. We didn’t know what the fuck it was, so we all just kindof ducked. Ian carried on playing.

It was the old lady from next door – couldn’t stand the noise any more… managed to get in somehow (how tho? FFS). Ian just assumed it was another hallucination so carried on.

It was as spooky as fuck. And hilarious. I’m not sure what happened after that. I slept in the car with my sleeping bag pulled up to my chin, with eyes like saucers, giggling to self in a terrified sort of way.

2) We recorded the whole thing… sat around mixing it etc. It was ok… then we took a week off…

…and when we came back, Andrew had remixed the whole thing, and it sounded fucking great.

It kindof went from “hobby” to “career” at that point I think. Listening to it now, I don’t even recognise most of it – and I’d only been playing for a couple of years, and we’d only been together for about 6 months… so I’m not so sure it sounds so great now – but it was symptomatic of a time I guess. We were just kids when we recorded this, and I think that possibly shows… and maybe (just maybe) looking down the wrong end of a really long telescope… maybe that isn’t a bad thing.

It has a kind of innocence I think – and that’s why I find it so hard to listen to now. It’s not that it sounds bad, it’s just kindof heart-breaking. I haven’t come full-circle yet.

3) The studio had a proper rock and roll PA – you don’t see them so much now… I’m not sure if the technology has moved on, or if everyone plays quieter… our PA consisted of two massive speaker-stacks that stopped about 1 inch below the ceiling. When we wanted to be, we could be really fucking loud.

On either the 2nd or 3rd night, we’d discovered that we could put this raw-frequency generator through the PA… and make this loooong sound that started off so high-pitched you could hear it, then got lower… high-pitched whistle… down through the mids… into the bass-zone, into sub-sonics so low you couldn’t hear them, but all the cups and plates etc clattered and things fell off shelves.

It was like some sort of experimental WWII sonic-weapon. Everyone else thought it was as funny as fuck – it made me feel like I was going to throw up – seriously physical sub-sonics.

I couldn’t deal with it, so went outside.

From outside, you couldn’t hear the highs or the mids… but the bass made the whole fucking house shake – it sounded like someone had got a giant helicopter filled with gravel and was tipping it over the house.

It was about 4am, and in the peaceful scented air of the kiwi suburban night, every dog within about a 10 mile radius was going utterly and completely insane.

This one was a whole lot scarier.

Bit of background – New Zealand in the 1980s was a lot more violent than it is today. Every Saturday night there would be a punchup in every pub car-park in the whole country. I was once driving past The Red Lion at about 4 in the afternoon and saw this guy, covered in blood, getting the shit kicked out of him by about 20 girls. I once went to a party where one skinhead cut another skinhead’s ear off because he said something bad about his favourite record.

You could get the crap kicked out of you for wearing Doc Martens or a leather jacket.

The general political vibe at the time was coloured by a recent a tour by the (Apartheid Era) South African rugby team that nearly triggered a civil war here – massive protests at every match, most of which turned really violent – by police armed with riot gear, primed for a fight. Thatcher’s Britain, Down-under. At one game somebody dropped a flour-bomb out of an airoplane and hit one of the players. A load of rugby players chased some guy out of a bar – he got in his car to try to get away so they lifted it off the ground so the wheels spun in the air… smashed the windows, hauled him out and kicked the shit out of him.

About a week after the first gig, we got this offer to do a gig at a party in a rugby club at the far end of the Hutt Valley – which to us was serious hill country. These guys we vaguely knew from this punk/skin-head band called Skank Attack were doing it and needed some support, so we said “ok”.

Turns out it was a bikey party – a gang party.

This was back before Harleys were a mid-life crisis thing, and before the gangs had become proper organised-crime businesses. There was one gang over the other side of the country where to be initiated, you had to commit two rapes that got into the papers.

By the time we’d figured out what we’d gotten into, it was too late to get out… we were absolutely shitting ourselves… especially me, because I was there with Susan… we were over-educated, under-employed middle-classed suburban kids, totally in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So we figured out escape-routes and emergency exit plans – which was really just a way of occupying our minds I guess… I’m pretty sure that Ian was loving every minute of it, and ratcheting up the fear as much as he could. It was his idea for us to go full-psychedelic… most bands around that time were into this whole kind of ragged-doom vibe, like Joy Division or Hunters and Collectors… it was post-punk, but only just. Ian thought it would be a good idea to go massively into the whole paisley thing… so I was dressed like this:

Those are my mum’s beads.

The only thing I can remember from the gig, is seeing myself from above – this delicate little flower-child telling a room full of terrifying feral looking blokes to “have a couple of beers and have a good time”, and then playing this set that they must have absolutely hated. About half way through Ian suggested that “maybe we should finish early”… we lasted one more song.

There was about 2 seconds of polite, disgruntled applause, then we fled. To be honest, I think the audience were more relieved by the early finish than we were.

The only physical damage happened out in the car-park… Phil from Skank Attack had pulled the hub-caps off Andrew’s Mum’s car and was sitting cross-legged on the ground battering the hell out of them with drumsticks. He sometimes came across as being a bit unhinged to be fair.

That’s him on the left:

Here’s a thing that Skank Attack did recently (I think)

I think that’s pretty good as it happens. I thought they were bloody awful at the time. Probably better than we were though.

Okay – first things first: We were really young.

I was like 12… ie: 21. That’s young. No idea what we were doing, or why, or whatever.

We’d been rehearsing for about 6 months or so in the basement of Alan’s mum’s place, and somehow (I suppose someone must have asked) landed a gig supporting these guys:

who were this week’s flavour of the month at the time (this was around 1986 I think). I really like that song. It’s kindof like a magazine – you can just kindof dip into it at any point and listen to it for a bit, and then like, flip channels or whatever. So long as you get at least one dose of chorus, which is utterly sublime.

I didn’t love this then like I do now. Mind you, I don’t think I loved anything then like I do now. The binoculars of 20:20 hindsight vision are rose-tinted.

We donated the gig-income to NORML – the marijuana-legalisation/legal-victim-support organisation, and the gig was raided by the police, at random I suppose – there was a lot of that in NZ in the 80s.

All of that was Ian’s idea – he was kindof the high-concept guy who dreamed up most of the big ideas we had – his last big project was to collect enough sleeping pills to move upstairs. He was the drummer… for a while.

So we did this gig – Cricketers in Wellington, NZ – this bleak, weaponised bit of 1970s concrete brutalist architecture, which (weirdly) had a pub in it. It’s still there… waiting to be pulled down I suspect. The 80s were kindof cold. We all hated pretty much everything about the 80s.

Pretty much the only thing I can remember about that gig, apart from my glittery-cheeked girlfriend and the room suddenly being filled with busy-body police, was the light – the lights. The warmth of that. I wasn’t that nervous (okay, a bit), but once on stage, it was being in this wonderful warm bath – all orange and green… red and purple and blue. The sound was probably terrible. The light was fucking gorgeous. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. More light.

Because you can never have too much of that.