The lobby of Little Andromeda is packed to the brim with eager attendees, and I am poured the world's largest glass of wine for an absurdly reasonable price. A friend volunteering for WORD Christchurch Festival meets me with no ticket and decides to loiter in hopes of a no-show spare seat. I mention this to my audience neighbour once I'm seated, who turns out to be a benevolent local politician willing to hand over their spare ticket.
There's a slight thrill to name drop at the door, and a shout of familiarity from my ticketless friend; "Oh, that's my neighbour!" This combination of accidental community and a tart wine gives us the sense of 1986 Wellington being alive and well in Little Andromeda, and the raucous audience cheered as Kate Camp took the stage.
One of Aotearoa's finest poets, Kate has also made waves for her viciously real and honest memoir writing with 2022's You Probably Think This Song Is About You. Frank, funny, and honest are words that come to mind when I read Camp's work – though she may argue on the honesty of her 14-year-old self in light of her latest release, the bombastic and form challenging Leather and Chains: My 1986 Diary published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Part memoir, epistolary piece, and internal time-travelling philosophical dialogue; Leather and Chains doesn’t fit into a genre neatly, but it does so with style.
Leather and Chains consists of an introductory essay and then the meat of the piece: Camp’s 1986 diary entries and her responses to each entry in 2024 when this work began taking shape, before closing with another essay. It's a slick, smooth piece of work, marked by Camp's classic frankness about what she's experienced in her turbulent teens and twenties – The Diary, as she refers to it, represented to her the beginning of this turbulence, as she chronicles her smoking, drinking, and dodgy romantic endeavours.
Kate takes the stage in a classic 80s look, a spotted rara skirt, big denim jacket, and a scarf tied askew in her hair. Later in the show, we're given a costume change as Camp reminds us that the 80s look was aspirational but not attainable for her and her mates; "New Zealand was a fortress! Import restrictions meant things like Dr Martens or acid wash jeans were only attainable through an overseas trip, so you had to make do with a school uniform skirt, artfully altered with scissors, a trenchcoat or duster from the opshop over the top, and as many pins as you could manage."
The show begins with Kate discussing The Diary, her relationship with it as a piece of personal mythology and foundational in her mind as the beginning of her relationships with alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and unhealthy romantic dynamics. She hadn't read The Diary in full, only sections for the "Bad Diaries" shows run by Verb Wellington, starting in 2018. Kate's thoughts on The Diary are endless, but centre on the idea of it being an endlessly renewable work, a marker of time and a period of her life where things began to change drastically. Camp and her peers followed the examples they saw in media, from their parents, and the general rebellion that is natural to pursue in your teen years, marking the change from your child life to one more serious, more structured, but also full of freedom and the chance to muck up and wear that muck up as a badge of experience, added to the anecdote rolodex. Kate warns the audience, to a mixture of cheering and worried murmurs, that there will be audience participation. Uh oh.
We're treated to a "Greatest Hits":
January 11th: "Soft touch, I want a lover with a slow hand. I want somebody, not just anybody. HELP. Cameron, Do you care? Am I special?....When Cameron, when will you be mine?" Camp introduces us to Cameron in her first entry, and he's treated as the object of her thoughts in many of the entries, but her closer readings and responses throughout "Leather and Chains" reveal she had a variety of concerns, delights, and interests, but she seemed to funnel them into this one talisman of frustration, Cameron as a receptacle to direct her energy.
January 12th: "Cameron, when will you be mine. Ha ha!! NOW, THEN & Maybe onwards...." Camp comments here on the great ironies held in the diary, where she can go from wretched to overjoyed in the space of 24 hours,
February 23rd: "Went with Cameron. Yes I know, but he made the first move (& the second) I reminded him of our past relationship and its bitter ending. He smiled. I reminded him of Emma. He laughed. A short, bitter, sad laugh. He says I matter more. I see the truth in his eyes. He says he loves me. I hear the lies in his voice...I hate Cameron and I love him. Xx Kate" Camp here reminds us that the past relationship and its bitter ending is only 3 weeks prior, and Cameron has been dating her best friend Emma in the time since.
May 5th: " Went into town with Emma after school. Decided I was sexually frustrated. Cameron... Graeme. I don't think I want him (I might but I'm not sure) but I sure as hell want him to want me!... Leather & Chains (PLEASE!!!) xx Kate " One of the curiosities of Leather and Chains is how little of it Camp remembers – and this includes Graeme, mentioned often by Camp’s 1986 diary, but who she holds no memory of. "Who the **** is Graeme? I don't want to know, it would be disappointing."
September 29th: "Felix gave me a Greenpeace badge.... Went into central library & Learnt how to use the micro-fiche...Came home, talked to Emma and watched the Far Pavilions before bed." This section gets the biggest aww from the audience as the micro-fiche is mentioned, and Camp describes this section as “Solid-gold 80s”, full of her main concerns and past times that exist now as markers of the era.
December 16th: "...Your ambition is as transparent as the cells in which you live and the children find the holes in your bureaucratic sieve. Thanks Leather thanks chains xx Kate" This section at the end of the entry gets some emphatic clicks from the audience, and Camp comments on how she feels; "In the pantheon of bad teenage writing...it's up there."
Camp closes her first set of readings and lets us know it's now time for audience participation, again to a chorus of cheers and some worried groans. Each seat in the audience had a small piece of paper placed on it, with the book cover on the front and a quintessential 1986 word on the back cover, and Kate pulls us into a game of 1986 bingo, calling out your word and a story you associate with it. The first bingo is "Protest Badge", and Camp recounts for us her badges that studded her jean jacket, from Greenpeace to “Free Nelson Mandela”, with a later amendment to his date of release in 1990.
Though I wasn't there for 1986, I shout out my word; "Walkman", and my association; listening to The Rocky Horror Picture Show on repeat in my bedroom, age 5 or 6. I understood none of the contents, but the dishevelled glamour of the characters were second only to Beetlejuice and Labyrinth in my heart. My answer gets an aww, considering the recent passing of Tim Curry, but also as a point of nostalgia for the room, reminiscing for a time when Rocky Horror was at its zenith. As a film, it was a shared experience for people, and not nearly so out of reach as Dr Martens or acid wash jeans for the suburban kiwi rebel trying to find their community and engage in some tangible counterculture.
Another answer was Pretty in Pink, which for one gentleman in the audience conjures fond memories of his favourite teacher when he was twelve, and the pink dress she wore leading to an "awakening" of sorts. For Kate, Pretty in Pink was a classic film she enjoyed with her friends, a more glam version of the drinking in bars and hanging out in friends' workplaces for them to emulate.
We go through some more readings of The Diary, and we get our biggest laughs for Camp’s description of her mother and father’s parenting style: “The 1986 parent was a noun, not a verb.” Considering the chaos going on in The Diary, it sounds like a fair assessment. Camp was somehow able to be out all night, smoking like a chimney, and engaging in a lot more drinking than I would have thought was possible without severe liver problems for a 13/14 year old girl. Even with suffering some of the consequences of being on loose reins, she sympathises with her parents as being; “Two flawed individuals going through the shittiest year of their lives”, and after asking her mother what she thought of all the running around, her mother responded; “I just wanted to get out of the way of you girls so you could express yourselves.” Despite Camp’s feelings on how parts of her life unfolded, that support to be herself, find her passions, and get into scrapes without necessarily fearing them certainly must be a part of what makes her such a confident, honest writer and speaker, endlessly scratching at her well of experience to pull out anything of interest and then dissect, through both her poetry and prose.
This section also gets the biggest gasp from the audience after a reveal about Cameron, her main romantic interest throughout 1986. I’ll keep it as a surprise for readers, but as Camp closed her performance she spoke about the sheer irrelevance of Cameron to The Diary – “He’s the Moby Dick! It’s about him, but it’s not really about him at all.” Leather and Chains does devote a lot of time to Camp’s feelings about Cameron, but ultimately the work is about her life and the awkward, exciting transition from being a child to a young adult and navigating the uncertainty of a grown-up world. Cameron was there, in the waters around her, but Camp had the ship and the foresight to steer herself from chaos to change, and eventually to share those stories here with us at the WORD Christchurch Festival.
Camp’s final thoughts lean on the idea of keeping another diary, but ultimately finding that while her 1986 diary was less a record of the stuff of life, what people spoke about and what was important to remember, it’s importance to her life and as a piece of work is its ephemerality, the understanding one can’t return to a time or a place even if it holds a meticulous record. Camp describes it as “A version of reality, the shape of my life before it changed and evolved to a new shape.”
Leather and Chains: Live! celebrated a gem of a title, and Camp’s readings created a gem of an event; we all leave Little Andromeda feeling a little more protective of our younger selves, as well as wishing we’d used our diaries more.
Leather and Chains forever! XX
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