‘It’s been a frustrating way to make a record’
From a small hall in Cambridge to global stardom, The Datsuns have certainly found the formula for hard rocking success. If only they could just find themselves in the same part of the world. Grant Smithies reports.
The deep snows of Stockholm have thankfully retreated. You can go outside now without so many layers, into the lengthening days, and wander beside the Baltic Sea in one of Scandinavia’s most beautiful cities.
‘‘Stockholm is somewhere between the megalopolis of London and the New Zealand outdoor vibe,’’ says The Datsuns’ lead singer and bassist Dolf de Borst, who has lived in Sweden for 10 years. My wife was born in Sweden. We were living in London for a long while then suddenly got a bit overwhelmed. Actually, underwhelmed. So we came here.’’
It’s a long way from the self-anointed ‘‘Town of Trees and Champions’’– Cambridge, Waikato, population 20,500 – where de Borst grew up.
Colin Meads. Kylie Bax. Billy T James. Joel Tobeck. Sir Mark Todd. To the list of famous past or present residents of the region we must add de Borst and three 15-year-old schoolmates who used to convene in a disused movie theatre above Cambridge Town Hall and make an unholy ruckus that went on to conquer the world.
‘‘Ha! Yes, that old rehearsal space only cost $60 a month, split between three bands, and (lead guitarist) Christian (Livingstone) was always, like – when are you guys gonna give me the money? We could never quite get it together, even though coming up with $60 between so many people should have been easy.’’
Twenty-something years later, The Datsuns are about to release their seventh album, Eye To Eye .It has had a difficult gestation.
Initial sessions at Auckland’s Roundhead Studios were way back in 2016, then they scattered. Now you have de Borst in Sweden, Livingstone in London, second guitarist Phil Somervell in Thames and Ben Cole – their drummer since 2006 – in Wellington.
‘‘It’s been a frustrating way to make a record,’’ admits de Borst. ‘‘You need to be in the same room and the same headspace to make this kind of music. But we managed it somehow, adding ideas and sounds to those initial recordings over many years from our own home studios.’’
Mixed and mastered by the end of 2019, the finished album was then delayed by matters both joyous (the birth of de Borst’s second child) and grim (the Covid-19 pandemic). ‘‘I am so happy it’s finally gonna get out into the world. People sometimes suggest The Datsuns are still making the same music we were making 20 years ago, but Eye To Eye proves that’s simply not true.’’
Their earliest records were fast and wild, he says, to emulate their hectic live sound. ‘‘But we use the studio differently now, with more background harmonies and experimental structures, and more mid-tempo songs that get different moods going on.’’
Those ‘‘fast and wild’’ early records made quite an impact overseas. British critic John Mulvey attended a London showcase gig in 2002, describing The Datsuns as ‘‘four stick-thin, long-haired, fresh-faced, sinful-souled boys from Cambridge, New Zealand, and the latest genius rock ‘n’ roll band to swarm on London in this astonishing year for music’’.
‘‘Everyone in possession of a cheque-book in the British music industry is clustered round the front of the stage, drooling,’’ Mulvey wrote. ‘‘One major label boss has just flown in from New York on Concord to check out the action.’’
Soon after the release of the band’s self-titled 2002 debut album, The Datsuns appeared on the front cover of New Musical Express, the feature story a froth of superlatives, the lead singer described as ‘‘Knicker-wettingly good-looking, lithe like a young sapling a new standard in cool’’.
In the years that followed, The Datsuns toured the US supporting the White Stripes and The Pixies, recorded a John Peel session for the BBC, opened shows for Metallica, rampaged through Europe and Japan and were proclaimed ‘‘the greatest live band in the world’’ in Kerrang! Magazine. Their second album was produced by John Paul Jones from Led freakin’ Zeppelin.
But the British music press is notoriously fickle. I talked to de Borst about this in 2006, when he was in Amsterdam on tour. ‘‘Magazines that love you one day will decide you’re crap overnight,’’ he told me at the time. ‘‘Sometimes they only loved you in the first place because your music happened to go well with someone’s haircut and their shoes, you know?’’
These days, The Datsuns feel the glow of the media spotlight less often, but de Borst seems happy with that.
‘‘We’ve always just made music we love, music that excites us. And that music grew directly from the records we thrashed growing up in the mid-90s in small-town New Zealand.’’
Dark, po-faced, self-consciously maladjusted, Grunge was in full swing at that time. Fun was shunned. It was ‘‘very uncool’’ to appear energetic on stage.
‘‘That’s why earlier hard rock really appealed, because those bands went wild when they played live. We were like – Yeah! We wanna do that! We checked out classic rock, British glam, Devo – anything decent that had sold enough copies to turn up in a smalltown record store. We would have discovered key bands like The Stooges or The Dead Boys years earlier if we’d lived up in Auckland.’’
Raw 60s garage and psych-rock singles, late 70s punk, New Wave keyboards, souped-up 70s hard rock – all of these musical strands still twine through the new album.
It’s a scream. There are big hairy scuzz-rock riffs and sci-fi synths bolted to machine-gun snare rolls, the whole shebang then strafed with squiggles of lead-guitar squeal. There are songs that sound like Hawkwind playing Deep Purple covers, or Kiss jamming with Motorhead. Hats are doffed to The Ramones, MC5, David Bowie, The Who. The pachouliscented spirit of T.Rex’s Marc Bolan hovers over one mutant electricboogie shuffle.
But there are also slightly less manic tempos now, richer textures and darker lyrics, the latter partly due to de Borst reading a lot of ‘‘weird dystopian science fiction’’, finding strong parallels with what’s happening now, both in wider society and in people’s personal relationships.
‘‘Suspicion is about ‘posttruth’ conspiracy theorising, which sounds very topical even though I wrote it five years ago. I guess some themes just reflect human nature, so they never get old.’’
Elsewhere, de Borst particularly loves Brainwaves, due to the ‘‘mad push and pull’’ between the two guitarists. ‘‘Christian is all over the fretboard like Jimmy Page, while Phil’s more unorthodox and comes up weirder and wilder stuff. I’m lucky to be in a band with such great players, and to have known those guys since we were just kids.’’
Back here in New Zealand, ‘‘Windmill Phil’’ Somervell is also thankful that the band’s early teenage bond still endures. ‘‘Yeah, we couldn’t be closer, even though we all live so far apart these days,’’ he tells me from his home in Thames.
‘‘Me and Dolf started an earlier band when we were 14, then Christian came along a couple of years later. We’ve been through a hell of a lot since then.’’
Somervell has had two kids since 2014’s Deep Sleep album. In those intervening years, different members had ‘‘totally given up on this new record ever getting finished’’. He seems amazed it’s finally here despite the odds, soon to be blowing minds and speakers around the globe.
And like de Borst, Somervell reckons Eye To Eye has taken The Datsuns somewhere new, while still pledging allegiance to the bands they listened to as spotty adolescents in Cambridge.
‘‘Deep Purple, AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin – they’re just huge fun, you know? You’ve got mighty riffs, big warm grooves, cool lead breaks and lyrics with some twisted wit. It’s music that makes you want to laugh and dance at the same time.’’
Dad rock? Perhaps, but in the best possible way. Several songs revolve around demos Somervell cobbled together as a new father in Thames when his kids were really young.
‘‘I didn’t have much time to just sit around playing guitar, so I would blast out a few ideas then go back to looking after my little ones again. But I’d be writing songs in my head the whole time, you know? I’d be running around trying to get my kids to sleep and there’d be this DaDa-DahDAARGHGGG! riff going around and around in my brain until I got another 10 minutes to pick up the guitar again.’’
The Datsuns’ seventh album Eye To Eye is released on Friday, May 28.