GOOD OLD-FASHIONED LUCK
I had a cup of earl grey and two samosas, a mince one and a vegetable one. And then, boom! There it was! The riff just appeared in my head, so I took it down to the studio that same morning and we had a crack at it.
The Exponents are hitting the road – and performing as their own support act. It’s a mark of cheekiness that perfectly sums up the band, and frontman Jordan Luck, who, as Grant Smithies discovers, remains one of the hardest-working men in show business more than 40 years into his career.
Forget the recent kerfuffle regarding Shakespeare’s relevance to our fair nation. Disregard, also, the dusty lyricism of Chaucer, Brontë and Keats. Here in Aotearoa, in certain loud and thirsty sections of the community, there’s a preference for rhyming couplets that can be bellowed in crowd formation at parties, gigs and rugby matches.
Case in point: The Exponents, who are about to reform for the gazillionth time for a quick national tour early next year. Their support act? The Dance Exponents, which is the same four guys, playing songs from earlier in their career.
Here’s a band that specialises in a zesty proletarian poetry driven home by electric guitars, beefy basslines, the brisk smac k of drums. Shot through with confusion, yearning and lust, these songs address life’s big questions with impressive brevity and grace.
The listener is invited to ponder anew the peculiar ways you might act when smitten, the woeful romantic partners some people choose, the perplexing absence of Tracey.
All together now: “I don’t knoow … OH WO W O… why does love DO this TO me? I don’t know. I don’t know.” Also: “Victoria, what do you see in him? See-ee in him?” And then, of course: “Tell me what, oh… ever happened to Tracey?”
And these are only three enduring anthems among dozens that have fallen from the pen of Exponents’ frontman, Jordan Luck.
‘Boom! There it was’
“You never kno ww hen a song is going to come to you,” say sLu ck from his home near Akaroa. “Our first hit song Victoria took about five months to write. I had some chords I liked, and then in 1981, me and [Exponents’ guitarist] Brian Jones went flatting, and there w as a woman there called Vickie who’d been getting beaten up by her boyfriend. Those lyrics just tumbled out.”
The band formed that same year, first know nas Dance Exponents, featuring Luck with a luxurious peroxide mullet alongside Jones, bassist David Gent and drummer Michael “Harry” Harallambi. Their debut album, Prayers Be Answered, was released in December 1983, just in time to fatten many a Christmas stocking.
The upcoming tour celebrates 4 0y ears since that record’s release, and punters c an e xpect to hear most of it played liv eea ch night: the album spawned five singles, some of which arrived in Luck’s noggin nearly fully formed. Hit single I’ll Say Goodbye just fell out, he tells me, the creative process fuelled by bergamot tea and deep-fried Indian tucker.
“I was walking down Gibraltar Crescent in Parnell, and there w as a wee deli. I had a cup of earl grey and two samosas, a mince one and a vegetable one. And then, boom! There it was! The riff just appeared in my head, so I took it down to the studio that same morning and w ehada crack at it.”
Bowie, mum and me
They toured relentlessly. At one point the band owned two Bedford vans – a white one bought from The Clean and a red one that once belonged to the Screaming Meemees. To sav eon accommodation costs, the yw ould lay mattresses over the mad jumble of amps, speakers, clothes, golf clubs, tennis racquets and fishing rods and joe out in the vans each night after their gigs.
“Some bands tell you touring is a drag, but w elo ved it,” say sLu c k.“We got to know all the best swimming holes around the country. Dave and Harr yw ould go fishing, and Dave Dobbyn, too, when he toured with
us one time. We’d stop at courses and play golf. We got to know all the decent breakfast places and laundromats around the country.”
The band’s constant touring led to impressiv e re cord sales, which in turn scored them hefty support slots for touring internationals, among them Kiss, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie.
“We’d only been together a fe wy ears when we got the Bowie gig in 1983. We just thought, OK, so this is what happens, you form a band, make a record then open for Bowie!”
Luck’s mum came up from Geraldine for the gig and spent half an hour talking to Bowie backstage.
“Yes, they had things in common. Bowie went to school in Brixton, and my mum taught later at the same school. We opened his Wellington show and also the Auckland one, at Western Springs in front of 86,000 people. Even so, we came off-stage three or four songs early because we had another gig booked the same night at Mainstreet, up the top of Queen St.”
The plan on this upcoming double-header reunion tour is to play key songs from those early Dance Exponents days plus an entire separate set of standouts from the early-90s onwards, after they dropped the “Dance” and became simply “The Exponents”.
Can we expect a return of the classic peroxide mullet? “There has been some discussion about costuming and cut, certainly, but really, in those early years, I changed the way I looked every fortnight. It would be bondage one week, tights the next. There were kilts, and tartan trousers made out of old curtains,” he remembers. “The hair changed a lot, too. Not that we were ever a fashion band, really. We often just wore our street clothes on stage. With both our sound and our look, we were just young dudes, trying stuff out.”
Along the way, their music became simpler, more streamlined. “I don’t think we evolved, as such. It was more a process of… devolution. The earlier songs when I was learning how to write were probably more complex, as I tried to work out how to pull a melody out of the ether and put words to it. I listen to those early songs now and think, Wow. This guy’s good!”
The hardest-working man in showbiz
Exponents bassist Dave Gent believes his old mate Luck has never received his due. “Jordan’s a very melodic, skilful songwriter who knows how to craft catchy pop songs,” says Gent, who pulls over to the side of the road on the way to Dunedin when I call.
“People go, ‘oh, that’s just a party band, with an old-fashioned rock’n’roll frontman’. But entire generations have grown up with the songs Jordan wrote. You had to tour constantly during the 80s and 90s because there was very little radio play, so we spent years on end just hop-scotching around the country. People would go and see bands every Friday and Saturday back then, and we played all the university orientations, too. Everyone was just living their lives, and our songs were the soundtrack to that.”
Gent reckons Luck is probably the hardest-working man in local show business.
“Jordan must have done more live shows than anyone else in New Zealand music history. We often used to play six nights a week in The Exponents, and Jordan’s kept touring for another 20 years playing these songs with his own Jordan Luck Band.”
Luck by name, lucky by nature. Back in Akaroa, Luck says he feels fortunate that there are still substantial crowds wanting to come out and hear him sing.
“I still love doing it. Playing the show itself always feels like the apex of a brilliant day after you’ve got to see a bit of New Zealand then arrived at a city or town where you have a bit of history. You wander around and notice the changes, you know? Some places have grown exponentially since we first started touring there 40 years ago.”
From cradle to grave
I last talked to Luck in 2005, when the band was regrouping in support of the Greatest Hits record. It was going to be their fifth “final tour” back then, which they admitted was “a little bit Spinal Tap”. They joked that they might have to start calling these sporadic reunions the “final, final, FINAL” tour.
But this one is different, reckons Luck. Never before have they focused on the two distinct periods of the band’s lineage, while also covering songs they made when the band included fallen comrades Steve Cowan, Chris Sheehan and Dave Barraclough.
“I am calling it the much-belated post-Covid 40th Anniversary Tour. How’s that sound? And it’ll be a first for us, being our own support act. It’s also cheaper! On the night, I reckon Dance Exponents will have the edge over The Exponents. They were edgier and punkier and speedier, where later on I guess we were more of a pop institution.”
In both incarnations, they made a significant cultural impact. I was reminded of that fact just a few weeks ago, when more than 40,000 punters erupted into a spontaneous rendition of Why Does Love after the Black Ferns won the Rugby World Cup at Eden Park.
“It’s certainly strange to think you’re up there with things like national anthems, as far as how often your songs are sung. What will people be singing in another 40 years, I wonder? I remember some kids telling me they loved Victoria when I was about 40, and thinking, mate – that song’s 20 years old! Now I’m 61, so Victoria’s 40 years old! But for whatever reason, some songs last. Look at people like Cole Porter, or Irving Berlin.”
And then, somewhere in the hills around Akaroa, with no band and just an echoing cellphone for a microphone, Jordan Luck bursts into song.
“Heaven. I’m in Heaven. And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”
We both collapse with laughter.
“… And I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we're out together dancing cheek to cheek…”
That’s a hell of a song, all right.
“Yes, and it’s from the 1930s. It’s nearly 100 years old, but people are still singing it because it has great lyrics and a great melody. Songs stick around because they mean something to people. I hope some of our songs are like that, too.”
The songs are the main thing, he reckons, the band merely the delivery mechanism. So every now and then they reassemble to whip around the land: four good friends happy in their role as human memory triggers for the rest of us.
“Our tours together might be infrequent, but they’re always good fun. And really, why give it up? It’ll probably be like Bob Dylan for us. He’s been playing so long he calls his shows ‘The Never-ending Tour’.”
And then, in the fullness of time, the outro of Why Does Love
will ring out one last time and they will fall exhausted into their graves. Fifteen years ago, when I last interviewed these guys, I suggested The Exponents were such a part of this country’s shared cultural history that when they finally stopped touring Jordan Luck, Dave Gent, Brian Jones and Michael Harallambi would have to be stuffed, mounted and put on display in Te Papa alongside John Britten’s motorbike, Phar Lap’s skeleton, a Buzzy Bee toy and a Kelvinator fridge.
“Ha! Yes, I remember that, and it’s so true! I have no doubt that The Exponents will end up in the national museum one day, in a glass case alongside other dusty creatures from a bygone era like the dodo or the moa.”