Melody makers on Island time
Rmike.alexander@fairfaxmedia.co.nz DEREK Solomon is the singer, guitarist, songwriter and leader of The Solomon Cole Band, whose debut album Bruises is one of the year’s best. Who is Solomon Cole? He is the fictitious character at the centre of all the songs on the album Bruises. He is a lazy rock’n’roll appropriation of Solomon Burke (whose comeback album made by Joe Henry is still a big influence) and the magic of Cole Porter, who my mother used to love.
What’s going on on Waiheke? Is it no longer the preserve of the pinot-drinking artistes?
Dunedin once had Flying Nun, Wellington had its bed of amazing New Zealand musicians, Lyttelton has produced Marlon and The Eastern and now it’s Waiheke Island’s turn. The fourth most beautiful island to live on (according to Lonely Planet) has its own scene and micro-industry with everything to gain and nothing to lose. Albums by The Solomon Cole Band, Aaron Carpenter and The Revelators, Oyawa & The Waiheke International Soul Orchestra are to be released in 2016-2017. The bourgeois wine set sit perfectly next to a rather productive bohemian rock’n’roll music scene.
Did you Dione, Lee and Miss Sophia all meet on the island?
No, Lee, Sophia and I released albums previously via Jayrem Records for an Auckland band called PAYOLA. Years later we found ourselves all moving to beautiful surroundings of Waiheke and decided the time was right to do more records, once we met the ‘‘wonderful and very beautiful Dione Denize’’.
Are you more of a bluesman and where does this influences come from?
No, I’m not a bluesman, in the purist sense. I’m as much a musical magpie as anyone that lifts, coerces and cuckolds everything I’ve ever loved into one big gumbo. I amas much Son House and Robert Johnson as I am the sonic wall of Bailter Space, the jagged stylings of Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), or blues trickery of Jimmy Page and Angus Young. It’s all in there somewhere and Bruises, the album, contains all of it, in one way or another. It has its inception back to when I was 13 with a tennis racket, a mirror and a little tape deck my uncle had with a cassette in it that played the opening refrain of Whole Lotta love for the first time and I was off running.
Bruises is an interesting title. Do you have any – physical or emotional?
Sure, Bruises was the song that was a point of difference for us as a band where we knew we could do anything within the confines of our own simplicity. Forwardmoving, brooding, dark and powerful, the song was everything we are and where we want to go further. But it had the melancholy that we all carry, or that I carry, as any artist does. I like dark and terrible stories told from beautiful mouths and Bruises is that – part Biblical, part a message to the darkness of my mother’s past (‘‘Mary I hear you weeping through my door’’), part the little ink blots of life no one dares speak of anymore. It was the only title for this record.