Redemption song
Six60 reveal the raw truth about binge-drinking, fights with critics and coming close to quitting
Ayoung band. A small show. Tickets were sold out. Hype was huge. Back in 2010, a few hundred fans had sold out small Wellington venue San Fran to see a new Dunedin band perform based on word-of-mouth hype and one chart-topping single.
Called Six60, the group had broken free of their small-town origins and were gathering steam, putting in the building blocks for what has become a massive and intensely passionate fanbase around the country.
At the time, they didn’t know what was ahead of them, and didn’t realise how big they were destined to become.
The band’s five members, who met playing rugby and flatting together while at the University of Otago, were in the mood to celebrate.
‘‘We’d been drinking since midday,’’ remembers Chris Mac, Six60’s bassist.
‘‘I think it was RTDs... that’s what we used to do. We would just drink and drink and drink. We thought we were Guns N’ Roses. We’d just keep drinking till we got on stage.’’
By the time they arrived at San Fran that night, all of them were so drunk they could barely talk, let alone play their instruments.
Mac winces at the memory. ‘‘These people came to see you play and you can barely get a word out. We were sloppy... we were just s....’’
For some bands, it would be a regular day at the office. Another show, another hangover. Shrug it off and do it again. For Six60, it was a crisis.
At a band meeting afterwards, all of them agreed that if they were going to get bigger, get better, and go further, they had a decision to make.
The alcohol had to go. Frontman Matiu Walters believes the band’s problem with booze was ‘‘out of control’’. ‘‘It was just a carry-on from Dunedin drinking culture,’’ he says.
‘‘We drank because we were just nervous. [We] didn’t really know what we were doing. ‘It was the only way we knew how to perform.’’
That decision was a turning point, one of many the band has faced over the past 12 years.
‘‘That was the wake up call,’’ says Mac. ‘‘We can’t do that.’’
Six60 don’t normally talk like this. A frank, unguarded, uncensored chat to a weekend newspaper about the band’s binge-drinking origins is usually off the cards.
In interviews, the band’s five members – Walters, Mac, drummer Eli Paewai, guitarist Ji Fraser and keyboardist Marlon Gerbes – rarely open up about anything that might put a dent in their clean-cut image.
‘‘There’s a warm blanket knowing that the details of your journey will
never be known,’’ admits Walters. ‘‘No-one’s going to know, so it doesn’t matter.’’
Revealing their hard-living origins is a rare admission to shadows lurking in Six60’s past. It’s those parts of their history they don’t often talk about – not between themselves, and definitely not to media.
Putting it all into a film? In the past, that would have been out of the question.
But the band’s admission to binge-drinking is just one of many surprise inclusions in their hardhitting new documentary, Six60: Till the Lights Go Out.
Due in theatres on November 26, the two-hour film is a warts-and-all depiction of the journey of New Zealand’s biggest band.
It will dispel widely-held notions that Six60’s rise to the top has been smooth sailing.
For fans, there is plenty of behind-the-scenes footage to savour.
The film covers the group’s early years, playing rugby during the day and music at night at drunken house parties and bars around Dunedin, before hitting the road and hitting it big with popular early singles like Don’t Forget Your Roots.
Their rise is captured in all its glory, and many moments show how good life can be in the band.
Glitzy footage of tours playing to fans in farflung places, studio sessions with big-name American superstars, and their record-breaking first show at Western Springs, are all included in the film.
Along the way, each band member is followed back to their hometown.
Paewai reveals he drove his family crazy with his constant drumming.
Gerbes has a coffee with his dad around the kitchen table to discuss his father’s ties to the Mongrel Mob.
And early footage of Fraser shows him endlessly practising guitar in his bedroom as a teenager.
But, as Mac warns, ‘‘this is not a puff piece’’.
Six60 wouldn’t have agreed to do the film if it didn’t include all of the rough stuff, says Walters.
That means the film reveals things many fans may not know about their favourite band.
How a falling out with their German record label left their relationships in tatters and the band ready to call it quits.
It covers the scars left by Kiwi music critics who dismissed the band’s sound as ‘‘BBQ reggae’’ – a term the band slams as ‘‘racist’’.
And it reveals why fans will never hear the results of a high-profile 2015 songwriting session with American super-producer Pharrell Williams.
In the film’s most emotional moments, the tragic balcony collapse at a backyard Dunedin gig in 2016 is covered.
The incident severely injured fan Bailley Unahi, leaving her paralysed from the waist down and unable to walk.
Mac calls the film ‘‘a redemptive story... of some guys... making some mistakes and growing constantly... figuring out their demons and s....’’
When cameras started rolling, Six60’s five members struggled to talk about much of this.
‘‘I am sure that there were others in the band that took a little longer to warm up to the idea and drop fac¸ades,’’ says Mac.
Many tears flowed during the making of the film.
‘‘There’s a bit of angst that comes with it all,’’ admits Walters.
‘‘We allowed ourselves to say the truth, which was really difficult to do. It was really emotional for all of us.’’
It took one person to get them to finally open up and talk about it all.
‘‘I’m 20 years into my career,’’ says Julia Parnell, a veteran local documentary maker. The director of Till the Lights Go Out smiles, her eyes twinkle, and she says: ‘‘I’ve got some tricks.’’
Sitting in the kitchen of her Kingsland,
Auckland, production company Notable Pictures, Parnell is admitting some of the trade secrets she’s picked up over the past two decades.
She’s revealing how she gets New Zealand music’s biggest and best names to open up to her.
‘‘Getting people to spill their truth [is] a process. It takes time,’’ she says.
‘‘You have to reach into your own heart to tell a great story.’’
Parnell has done this before, for the acclaimed 2019 film The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, which followed the ailing Dunedin musician as he battled hepatitis C.
The disease could have killed Phillipps at any point during the film’s production.
Parnell’s also done it for acts like Dragon and The Exponents in TV documentaries, and covered Lorde, Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn for the Prime TV series Anthems.
It was during the making of that show that she first met Six60.
Up until that point, she wasn’t a fan.
‘‘I make music documentaries about everybody. I’ve interviewed every New Zealand musician, but for whatever reason in my life Six60 wasn’t something I had considered,’’ admits Parnell.
‘‘[I’m] someone who’s a bit more indie in her music tastes.’’
But she saw something in her interview with Walters and Gerbes that sparked an idea.
‘‘Matiu and Marlon really wanted to talk about their success. They were very open,’’ says Parnell. ‘‘I was really surprised... I saw a little window.’’ At the same time, Parnell found out Six60 were attempting to do something no New Zealand band had ever done before – headlining a sellout show at Auckland’s Western Springs Stadium.
‘‘I know enough about New Zealand music and the industry in general to know what a crazy lunatic thing [that is] and how much was at stake,’’ she says.
‘‘That really gave me motivation. That was when the process started of trying to understand who they were.’’ Parnell wondered what their motivation was. ‘‘Having this... obvious determination to do it, the belief to do it, I was like, ‘Where is that coming from? How have they even achieved this?’’’
To do that, Parnell had to conjure up all her tricks to infiltrate the closed loop that Six60 had become.
She admits it wasn’t easy.
She spent time with the band, getting to know them individually and going back to their roots to find out what makes them tick.
‘‘To get inside the pretty tight walls of the biggest band in New Zealand [is] a process, a conversation,’’ she says.
‘‘Having started to get to know them, I started to understand there was a lot more going on here than what one might assume.’’
Without securing funding, she started rolling, filming the band’s reactions as tickets to their Western Springs show went on sale, and planning elaborate coverage of that performance.
She got funding confirmation on the day of the gig, and decided to motivate herself using some of Six60’s methods.
‘‘That’s what Six60 do, they take really big risks, they say, ‘I’m going to achieve this whatever happens’. I was starting to connect with that idea myself.
‘‘How could you not do it at that point? It’s such a big story, it’s New Zealand cultural history being made.’’
She filmed solidly for the next 18 months, sitting in on studio sessions, visiting each member’s families and hometowns, and tracking down Hoani Matenga, a founding member who left to pursue a career in rugby.
Then she put each band member through a gruelling five-hour interview.
‘‘I just wore them down with fatigue,’’ jokes Parnell.
She admits things got emotional. ‘‘There were tears, probably my tears too, I’m a bit of a crier during these things.’’
But she had one aim in mind: to uncover what was driving the band to do what no other New Zealand band could.
‘‘That was the hypothesis: What is making these men want to be so successful?’’
To find out, Parnell had to go back to the start.
‘‘There’s a bit of angst that comes with it all. We allowed ourselves to say the truth, which was really difficult to do. It was really emotional for all of us.’’ Matiu Walters
Chris Mac leans back on a couch, stares at a wall and sighs. He’s sitting above his Kingsland bar in a studio surrounded by his own graffitiinspired art, with a beer in hand.
Mac chooses his words carefully.
‘‘I will always feel some negativity about it,’’ he says.
‘‘There are a lot of things you could say about us and you’d be right. We’re not perfect.
‘‘[But] the things they were saying were incorrect. They were completely missing the mark.’’
Mac’s talking about the criticism the band faced early in their career, which forms a major part of Till the Lights Go Out.
He grits his teeth and spits out a phrase used by critics in early Six60 reviews: ‘‘That racist term, ‘BBQ reggae’.’’
When Six60 released their first album, they felt shunned by the media, who either ignored them, or made fun of them.
Mac says their words don’t hurt any more – but he can still recite the band’s confused first reviews.
‘‘We’d get, on one hand, ‘They’re a paint-bynumbers electronic drum n bass reggae band’. The next review would be, ‘They’re just a BBQ reggae rip-off’.
‘‘Well, which are we? It’s so confusing to me.’’ One review in particular seems to still sting. ‘‘[It] started with, ‘I’ve never heard the album.’ Hear me out: if it was my job to review something, I’d probably listen to it first.’’
In the film, pop star Stan Walker, TV presenter Kanoa Lloyd and music critic Duncan Greive say it became a sick kind of sport to bag the band.
Walker, and Six60, claim much of it was racebased.
But, like the band’s binge-drinking problems, Six60 used that criticism to their advantage.
‘‘Our reaction was, we closed in, we took on a very ‘us vs the world’ mentality,’’ says Walters.
‘‘We’re a band that needs a challenge. We’ve
always been outsiders, we’ve learnt to accept that, and like it and use it to our advantage.’’
Mac agrees that criticism got them to where they are today.
‘‘That might have been one of the first times we really banded together and said, ‘Look we’re not going to get better for anyone else, we’re getting better for us, so I guess, thanks to the overly harsh critics, it seems to have done a good job.
‘‘To have people rally against us, it really only makes us stronger.’’
But they didn’t realise that mindset was a common thread of Six60’s journey until Julia Parnell and her cameras came along.
Mac: ‘‘I don’t think we even knew till we saw the movie.’’
Six60’s five members were on tour in Sydney enjoying a rare day off when their manager announced a surprise. He told them: ‘‘We’re going to the cinema.’’ Confused, the band hopped in a van. Once they got there, the reason became clear.
Parnell had flown over to greet them with a first cut of her Six60 documentary.
She was nervous. So was the band. ‘‘Everyone was a bit quiet,’’ says Mac. ‘‘At that point it was a blank slate to us. We had no idea how we were going to be portrayed.’’
Afterwards, the band was quiet, contemplative. The feedback was positive.
But Mac had some notes.
He told Parnell: ‘‘This band doesn’t look like much fun to be in.’’
Despite having final say on the film, Parnell took that criticism on board and included more footage of the band enjoying their success.
Mac’s comments are a sign the band knows Till the Lights Go Out shows off a side of Six60 they haven’t revealed before.
Despite having an overseas tour scrapped because of Covid-19, the movie comes at a time when the band is in a good place.
They’ve just released a new single, Fade Away, a ‘‘stadium hip-hop anthem’’ produced by Jake Uitti, aka Jake One, the rap producer with Dr Dre, Drake and 50 Cent credits to his name.
They’ll be playing that song on their upcoming summer tour, which takes in stadiums around the country.
And they’re hoping to become the first band to headline a concert at Eden Park – a big challenge considering the massive uphill battle they face against a Mt Eden residents association hellbent on making sure it doesn’t happen.
Walters believes the film arrives at a time when Six60 are in the best possible place they could be to handle any criticism they’re going to get from revealing so much of themselves.
‘‘We’re at the utmost confidence,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s nothing lurking in the shadows between us as a band ... We’re feeling really good.’’
Six60 doesn’t need to do this. They didn’t need to empty all of the skeletons out of the closet.
It begs the question, why now?
Walters says it’s been a healing experience for the band. He points to the therapeutic nature of those interviews with Parnell.
‘‘We have never really allowed ourselves to sit back and reflect on what we’ve done. The movie is a celebration of that, we like that it’s capturing us in this moment.’’
He hopes fans can connect to it through their own experiences.
‘‘I think people will find ... similarities in their own story,’’ he says.
Meanwhile, Auckland’s Civic Theatre is booked for the premiere, and a flight load of fans is taking a pilgrimage from Auckland to Dunedin to watch the film and visit the flat, 660 Castle Street, where Six60 first started.
Both Walters and Mac admit to feeling nerves ahead of the film’s release.
‘‘Now is the time you go, ‘People are going to see this,’’’ agrees Mac.
Walters: ‘‘It’s the story, it’s the truth, and that’s a nervous thing to hand over.’’
Mac: ‘‘The only hesitation is, [what if] people don’t see the redemptive qualities, and only see the bad parts?’’
Six60: Till the Lights Go Out is in cinemas from November 26.