Subversive as ever
Builders’ architect adds to his canon.
The diverse musical and literary career of Bill Direen (below) has been unique in our cultural landscape. Its breadth includes the Beatin Hearts album of 1983 as the Builders (considered a landmark in New Zealand music) and being writer-in-residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Devonport, Auckland, in 2010.
In 1985, he flirted with pop success with The Alligator Song (“do the alligator”), but there was vocal babble where the guitar solo should have been.
Subversion of genres has been a hallmark of Direen’s work and the text would determine its categorisation, be it pop or poetry, prose or punk.
A cinematic sliver of that intellectual breadth and curiosity was captured in Simon Ogston’s 2017 film A Memory of Others, which explored Direen’s past and paid homage to James K Baxter, Janet Frame and others along the literary axis.
His latest project is Ferocious, which has Direen singing, delivering spoken word and playing various organs, with experimental composer Johannes Contag (of Cloudboy and the Golden Awesome) on drums and guitarist Mark Williams.
The elusive lyrical thread binding the nine discrete pieces on their self-titled debut album is memory, memento mori and collective history. The pieces range from the spoken word of
In the Blue Rain, which delights in assonance and alliteration (“tank-filling rain and the land steaming sickly sane into the hurrying rivers”) to Mason, where Direen declaims RAK Mason’s poem The Young Man Thinks of Sons over staccato and explosive guitars.
Chichicho is bruising, minimalist pop-rock and an open letter to Christchurch (“fingers in the mayoralty, ministers acting like royalty”) and there are multitracked vocal parts creating their own internal dialogue on the haunting You Hear.
There’s also veiled menace (the stalking pace of the disconcerting Perfect Tone), and the beautiful Extraordinary Day is book-ended with a reading from 13th-century manuscript Stryf of the Body and the Gost. Direen’s own words edge towards similar ideas of mortality as he explores the depth behind the ordinary.
Throughout, Contag and Williams provide perfect accompaniments: that funereal beat behind Extraordinary Day, the brittle guitar stabs or sandblasts on the whiteknuckle Handful of Bones.
Ferocious isn’t comfortable and, given what we know about the diverse careers of these musicians, might be a one-off. But let’s hope not.