True to form with the other WORD events I went to this year this was another sold out event which is not all that surprising when it features such a Kiwi icon as Dave Dobbyn although he was one of the few speakers not directly promoting a specific work.
The host of the talk was Mike Hall, a well-known musician in his own right as well as the director of member services at APRA AMCOS. He was an exceptional speaker/host who kept the conversation flowing well but was also able to sit back and let Dave tell his stories for the most part of the talk.
A large portion of the talk was about the music scene in New Zealand which was very illuminating. Having grown up listening to Kiwi music from that era, and Dave Dobbyn’s work in particular, I always had it in my mind that local music was as popular then as it is now and all of those songs were instant classics. To hear Dave tell it however that was not the case.
He told us the stories of how he was having to sneak his songs into the set of covers that the band would play due to the fact that there was very little appetite for local music. Even on the local radio stations, there was pushback against playing too much New Zealand music He also described a slightly complicated and dubious method the studio would use to test songs on the radio. What recording time in a studio he and his band did get was the result of winning a battle of the bands competition for which the prize was time in the recording studio. Even legends have to start somewhere.
One of the best parts of events like this is it provides the speaker more time and space to go into more detail. We were treated to a lot of the hacks that Dave used as a young musician such as using a 40 Gallon drum as an amp when he didn’t have equipment on hand and even the ones he uses now, such as using a metronome tempo to write his music to.
Dave also covered his motivations at various points in his musical career ranging from the typical teenage motivation (girls) to more societal ones (writing Welcome Home due to his outrage at seeing neo-nazis at an immigrant protest). He also explained some of his more general motivations such as wondering how other people feel and seeing what gets a reaction.
During the conversation a heavy discussion revolved around the time Dave spent in Los Angeles immediately after the Rodney King riots, during this time he knocked over a flowerpot onto Elvis’s Hollywood star, and produced an album the record label described as “unreleaseable” leading to his self-described ‘year of vodka’. After this he played the song Belltower from said unreleaseable album Lament for the numb and then turned the topic to the album Twist which he described as an antidote to the bitterness he experienced after his turn in America.
There was a lot more discussed that I can’t cover here so I would highly recommend seeing Dave Dobbyn perform or speak if you get the chance and I will sign off with some advice he gave which I may have taken too much to heart when it came to producing this write up:
“God sends us writer's block so we can shut the hell up and listen.”
Tom
Tūranga
More Dave Dobbyn
Find music by Dave Dobbyn in the library collection
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