A sook in the suburbs
After many decades playing in other people’s backing bands, Auckland musician Dominic Blaazer releases a solo album well worth the wait. Grant Smithies reports.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Auckland musician Dominic Blaazer has featured in a host of local bands that have resolutely refused to become household names: The Trains, A Riot of Colour, The Peter Stuyvesant Hitlist, Smoothy, Ghost Town.
And he has played with a bunch more that anyone with even a passing interest in NZ music has heard: The Chills, Dimmer, The Clean, Garageland, Goldenhorse, Don McGlashan, SJD, the Topp Twins.
A master of guitar, piano and many other instruments, Blaazer has spent much of his career making other people sound good.
But there comes a time when a perennial side-man must stand centrestage. Blaazer has finally stepped into the spotlight with a kick-a.. solo album called The Lights of Te Atatu.
The bridesmaid has become a bride at last. I picture him up there in his Auckland living room - pictured on the album cover - wearing a fetching veil, the carpet at his feet littered with confetti.
‘‘Well, the thing about being a bridesmaid for so long is that you learn how to throw a really good wedding,’’ says Blaazer, who has a faint trace of an English accent, despite being born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica.
‘‘And that’s what I’ve done, really. I’ve learned things from every other musician I’ve ever played with then put those things into practice on my own record.’’
It’s an album of thoughtful and romantic piano ballads - surely the most unfashionable musical genre this side of the polka.
‘‘You could be right. It’s certainly not music many are making in New Zealand right now. But the songs themselves are very adaptable. They’re not chained to their instruments in any way. I’ll get up and perform these songs with an electric guitar or play them on a ukulele in the car.’’
And yet, really, it’s the gorgeous arrangements that make this record so very special.
Baby, What Can I Say is the album standout, with a big meaty drum-beat supporting trembling strings, and that sort of fuzzy faux-sitar guitar sound you associate with early 70s soul acts like The Stylistics.
Blaazer’s voice is all tender hurt and warm regret, and when it lifts up into his high register on the chorus, well… your heart might just break at how pretty it is.
‘‘Well, I grew up on soul songs like The Stylistics and Eddie Holman’s Lonely Girl, which were on the radio when we moved from Jamaica to Britain in the early 70s. Those sorts of sounds never leave you after they dig in so deeply when you’re young.’’
Blaazer played in a scattering of well-regarded indie bands in London during the 1980s before moving to NZ in the early 90s. Having featured in more bands than you’ve had hot dinners, he seems adept at almost any style, but his tastes lean towards the romantic, bless him.
Just listen to this stuff! I Never Said That I’d Be True hauls in a sax player to decorate the back end of the tune, just like they used to do in those glorious pocket symphony radio ballads during the early 70s.
And friendship anthem Whatever You Need has burnished Burt Bacharach flugelhorns buffing up the melody, just so. Lovely is what it is.
‘‘Well, I deeply love Burt. Some people talk about him as a guilty pleasure, but I feel no guilt at all. I once flew to Hawaii to see him play... I even got to meet him afterwards.’’
As a fellow Bacharach fanboy, I can relate. Certainly, Blaazer’s record takes many leaves from the book of Burt: the elegant mixture of subtle and ornate instrumentation, the unexpected chord shifts, the amorphous sense of yearning.
On many of these songs, Blaazer’s voice recalls Elton John. I mean… really early Elton; back when he was good. ‘‘I’m a late arriver to Elton, really. I purposely avoided listening to him for years; I was a white bespectacled piano player and thought I’d get slaughtered if people could make too easy a comparison. But now I end up sounding like him regardless!’’ He laughs.
‘‘What can you do?’’
What he can do, hopefully, is keep making unfashionably lovely pop records just like this. The fact that so many of these songs hark back to the late 60s/ early 70s is a big plus in my books.
This was a time when many pop songwriters poured a lorry-load of love and care and brass and strings into three-minute radio songs.
And you have to admire Blaazer’s determination to throw not just the kitchen sink but also the fridge, dishwasher and dining table at a song if he thinks it can bear the load.
A prime example is The Reason I Care which starts out as a dark wee ditty, slightly sinister and swaggering as if drunk, then gradually accumulates swelling strings, a sax solo, righteous gospel pianos, blasts of electric guitar, even a talk-over section.
‘‘Ah, yes. The sad fact is that at the top of the lyric sheet I had written in big letters to myself: ‘Must not get too big!’’’
He cracks up. ‘‘But yeah - I thought I contained it alright, in the end. If I’d really gone all out, there might have been elephants and dancing girls, too…’’
Other songs pare things back to great effect. Over simple strums and shuffling snares, Simple Love lists endless permutations of affection, the complexity of our emotional lives becoming increasingly evident with each new addition to the list.
‘‘Yes, well, that songs took as long to write and it took to play, really. It just fell out of the guitar, fully formed.’’
Most of the album was written ‘‘over the past year or so during our Wednesday night soul jams’’ with Blaazer’s backing band, The Sugar Hits.
The oldest song, Gang Brawl ,is crammed with insider music-biz jokes, and sounds like something a cynical early 70s star - John Lennon, perhaps, or Harry Nilsson - might play if they strolled into a New York City piano bar and commandeered the keyboard. It even contains unironic use of that most geriatric of dance terms: ‘‘boogie’’.
Elsewhere, the album reinforces the notion that love’s not always easy. Baby Says She Cares examines a difficult relationship, the wounded singer pondering a lover’s deceit over a glorious country-soul arrangement that sounds as if it was beamed in from 1971.
The title track, too, is a pearler, despite the odds. In the entire history of recorded music, has there ever been a more wilfully suburban song title than The Lights of Te Atatu?
I mean - not just The Lights of Auckland, but the Lights of freakin’ Te Atatu! It’s a tale of lost love, the lights in question viewed through his tears, reflected in the sea, gleaming like diamonds.
He is a sook in the suburbs, and I love him for that.
‘‘And I don’t even live in Te Atatu!’’ wails Blaazer in mock apology.
‘‘But that place is a steady presence in my life. As I was walking around my neighbourhood with our dearly departed terrier, who’s on the album cover, the lights of Te Atatu were the thing I could often see most clearly. Those lights would look very different at different times, but what they always told me was that I was where I wanted to be. If I could see the lights of Te Atatu, I was at home.’’
❚ The Lights Of Te Atatu
is available now on Bandcamp and vinyl LP (dominicblaazer.net)