The luck of the Jordans
Who loves who the most?
Despite 27 years between them, Jordan Luck and Jordan Mooney have an undeniable kinship which goes way further than a taste for sharp suits.
Swaggering for the camera in Auckland’s iconic Kings Arms pub, the duo, both self-declared extroverts with a love of the limelight, are in their element.
“Let’s go beak to beak,” declares Jordan Luck, lead singer of ’80s rockers The Exponents, one of New Zealand’s most-loved bands.
The other Jordan, an actor who stars in Outrageous Fortune prequel series Westside and Netflix fantasy drama The Legend of Monkey, willingly obliges, before effortlessly hoisting his nimble 28-year-old frame on to the bar ledge.
“Oh, to be young,” sighs Jordan senior, who has played dozens of gigs in the historic venue, sadly due to be demolished later this year. “They say time speeds up as you get older, but it doesn’t at all. It slows down.”
The Canadian-born, Geraldine-raised singer, now based in Christchurch after splitting from wife Rita earlier this year, has done a lot of living in his 54 years – from opening for David Bowie to getting kicked off tour with Australian band The Divinyls.
Clocking up 18 Top 40 hits, including “Victoria” and “Why Does Love Do This to Me?”, with its iconic “I don’t know-- oh-oh-oh” chorus, the band’s camaraderie and colourful rock’n’roll antics are precisely why director Danny Mulheron decided to make a movie about the group originally known as The Dance Exponents.
Charting the small-town South Island boys’ rise from naïve rural rockers to charttopping Kiwi icons, The Dance Exponents: Why Does Love?, which screens on TVNZ 1 on July 16, stars actor Jordan as the eccentric, irrepressible Mr Luck.
“I was on a boat in the South of France when I found out I’d got the part,” recalls the younger Jordan, who had already travelled to India, Slovenia, Germany, Greece and England. “I did my audition on the boat. It was hot, I was drinking beer, with a nice tan, just cruising on the French Riviera, and there was nothing to lose. I was either going to play the lead in a great film or keep travelling the world.”
Striking a chord
Back home, the music legend was delighted to find out the talented actor who shared his name and his rock’n’roll attitude would be playing him.
“We’d actually met a few months before,” he tells. “Jordan was with a mutual friend I bumped into outside the Q Theatre after I’d been to see a show. So when I was looking at the cast list and I saw Jordan’s name, I couldn’t have prognosticated a finer actor to play me!”
Set in the ’80s, the movie called for a stellar costume department for Jordan’s wonky, slightly off-kilter punk look, including a tartan kilt, bleach-blond hair and a studded red leather jacket.
“It was just astonishing,” says Jordan senior of the 63 costume changes in the movie. “It was like stepping back in time into my wardrobe. Of course, that was impossible – most of my stuff got stolen or lost, or nicked by fans. But if I hadn’t known any better, I’d have sworn they were my clothes.
“It was the same watching Jordan. It was like looking at my ’80s doppelgänger. F***ing ’ell!” he grins. “He sings good too.”
The younger Jordan is the son of actors who run a Hamilton theatre and he started treading the boards when he was just 11.
“I knew a little about The Exponents, but I didn’t know their stuff that well and there wasn’t much footage from those days,” tells the star, who counts Dolly Parton, ABBA and avant-garde sex kitten Peaches among his favourite musicians.
“It’s just quintessentially Kiwi,” he says. “It wasn’t about cracking the overseas market – it was about doing what they loved in New Zealand. That’s why they did all those pub gigs. I was at the rugby a couple of weeks ago and they were all singing ‘Victoria’, which was also the song Team NZ sang to celebrate winning the America’s Cup. But the story is as much about the band’s friendship as their music.”
Poignantly, the film is dedicated to former Exponents members Steve “Fingers” Cowan, who passed away suddenly in his sleep following an asthma attack in 1986, and guitarist Chris Sheehan, who lost his battle with cancer in 2014.
“I think, like a lot of us, they would be having a laugh that we’ve had a movie made about us,” grins the elder Jordan. “It was such a special time. And unlike music today, we didn’t get hardly any radio playback, so it was all about playing live.”
His face breaks into a sheepish grin as he recalls being kicked off a tour with The Divinyls.
“They had a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy. First one was I nicked some of their beer. Second one was I used the singer’s toilet – there was about five to choose from – and the third, I think, was that we were meant to go off stage left and I went off right!”
Famed for his boozy excess, rocker Jordan famously quit drinking for a year to collect a rumoured $12,500 from his bandmates, who didn’t believe he could go sober for 365 days straight.
Today, performing live in Kiwi pubs and exotic locales like Goa and Argentina – “fact-finding missions my girlfriend keeps taking me on” – keeps him in check.
“I’m happy at the moment – yeah, I really am,” he muses. “I still can’t believe after all these years that I get to stand on stage and sing for a job. Even if I do sometimes get recognised for not being me! I’ve had people come up thinking I was Graham Brazier, Don McGlashan, even Sam Hunt and Dave Dobbyn! But I’m very happy being Jordan Luck, thank you very much.”