Urlich’s NZ rock chic strikes chord
Musician Margaret Urlich’s distinctively late 80s style danced into the lives of many, including North & South editor
Sydney, late 1989. I was all at sea. For three years, I had embraced much of what made Sydney so liveable back then. I was employed on a News Limited paper on higher pay than I could have hoped for in Auckland. I had a boyfriend, a flat by the beach, it was sunny most of the time. I even liked VB.
But the longer I stayed, the more I needed to centre myself on being a New Zealander. Bouts of homesickness would rise up, making me despondent and unsure about where I should be. Sydney was at that stage familiar and also, so foreign. Work was tough, I swung between loving and loathing it.
Increasingly thin-skinned by the sheep-shagger ‘‘banter’’, on the worst days, I’d go at lunchtime to the Anglican Māori church not far from News Limited’s Surry Hills fortress and have a cleansing cry among the reassuring tukutuku and familiar iconography. I mostly loved living in Sydney but it wasn’t me, it wasn’t home. It was then that Margaret Urlich danced into my life.
I’m guessing I would have heard her first on a local pop radio station. I had listened to her first band, Peking Man, in Auckland and knew she was part of the When the Cat’s Away supergroup. But once I heard – and importantly, saw – Escaping, the first track released from her debut solo album, Safety in Numbers, she took my whole attention. She had a beautiful voice, that was evident. But it was with the video that I found what I hadn’t known I needed. She had that voice and the style I wanted. ‘‘ Oh, starry eyes am I. . . ’’
She was from home, and look! She was ruling Australia with her short dark hair, crop tops and leather jackets.
She wasn’t your Aussie rock chick. She was Aotearoa rock chic. In a town of tans, cleavage and blonde manes, she gave me more confidence not to follow the pack. I had evolved my own style to a point, but Escaping was a template I could work to. I watched and learned, noting how her clothes skimmed rather than clung to her frame and let her move.
Margaret had a sophistication that felt both of the moment and above it. In the video for Escaping she wears a perfect matte red lip and a black shirt with ribbon embroidery detail on the collar. I scoured Sydney for a shirt just like it. It wasn’t to be found – for reasons I have just discovered – so I had to settle for a white one, with black detailing on the collar. My colouring doesn’t sit well with the red lip so I skipped that bit.
My hair was long but six months later, I went for broke with a short chop. Not quite as edgy as Margaret’s cut, but she made me bolder in my choices.
Later in the same video she wears a black halter cropped top and high-waisted black pants. I had a version of that kit too, cribbed from the Margaret playbook.
This was the era of music videos as pop culture art, and where the worlds of New Zealand music, fashion and media converged. Music videos held as much influence on how we wanted to dress as fashion magazines.
Kerry Brown, a hugely talented Kiwi photographer, shot a lot of fashion at the time as well as photographing and directing videos for musicians like Crowded House, Sisters Underground, Dave Dobbyn and Moana and the Moa Hunters. Audioculture (New Zealand’s essential archive of popular music history) says it was Brown who took the photos of Margaret that were used to market her album Safety in Numbers (fellow New Zealander Polly Walker would shoot the cover portrait).
I also didn’t know – pre-internet, if you didn’t know, you didn’t know – that Megan Douglas was the stylist who dressed Margaret for both the album shoots and publicity stills. Given my own favourite clothes not too long before Escaping were a pencil skirt and a black dress by Megan’s Obscure Desires label, this makes even more sense now than it did three decades ago. Megan may have even made that black shirt with the embroidered detail, which explains why I couldn’t find it on a rack in Sydney.
More hits spun off that first album, and other albums followed. Margaret ruled, the best-selling Australasian female artist of the day. Plaid shirts flew in from Seattle, jeans acquired more rips. The 80s rolled over into the 90s. Margaret’s look changed, her career evolved; mine too.
But in 1990, with Margaret playing on my yellow Sony Walkman and a chunky black belt cinching the waist on my paperbag jeans, I found my feet in Sydney and it became my home, happily, for years to come.
‘‘ I put my heart upon the shelf, hiding inside myself, what am I doing? No use in faking, fool for the taking, there’s no more escaping you... ’’ Thank you Margaret. You were there when I needed you most.