Womad a means to an Enz for Chunn
Music man, author and mental health advocate Mike Chunn talks to Virginia Winder about his life and a new book.
Mike Chunn’s happy place is on stage. The former bass guitarist for Split Enz and Citizen Band, suffered from debilitating agoraphobia for 18 years, but has always felt safe standing in front of an audience.
‘‘I adore the stage. If someone said to me ‘there’s a stage over there, do you want to live the rest of your life on it?’ I would say yes, as long as people kept coming in and looking at me doing something.’’
On March 15, he’ll be on the Kunming Stage at Womad for the World of Words talking about his latest book,
He’s never been to Womad in New Plymouth but did attend the event in Auckland during the late 1990s.
A Sharp Left Turn, written in a flowing, stream of consciousness style, tells the tale of a lad who found solace in the music rooms at Sacred Heart College in Auckland, was buoyed by supportive parents, Von and Jerry, discovered comfort in playing music, but off stage, especially travelling, lived with a distressing mental illness.
The book has a happy ending – he is proud of his 11 years as the boss of Apra New Zealand, revamping the ‘‘shadowy’’ organisation into a dedicated advocate for New Zealand musicians, upping its earnings from $4 million to $11 million and transforming the Silver Scroll Awards into a ‘‘beautiful party’’.
Although Mike has never written a song himself, he leaps at the chance to write books.
He is the author of Stranger than Fiction: The life and times of Split Enz, published in 1992. His latest publication is a boisterous book, best read wearing headphones, a music streaming service at your fingertips to follow the soundtrack of a song-filled life.
In his early days, Mike was a boarder at Sacred Heart College in Auckland, a school that has produced a star-studded line-up of musicians, including the beginning of Split Enz. In his year was a teenager called Brian Timothy Finn, then came Mike’s brother Geoffrey and Tim’s younger brother Neil, who was at the school for a short
stint. Another bunch came later – Dave Dobbyn, Rikki and Ian Morris and Peter Urlich.
‘‘There were just two clumps of lads who were magnetically drawn together like mercury blobs.’’
Split Enz was a terrific and terrible time for Mike, who relied on tranquillisers to survive international flights, travelling beyond Auckland and to quell vomit-inducing panic attacks. He told no-one.
Mike couldn’t even confess the truth to his dad Jerry, a doctor. But he did ask for medication to help with stage fright, which of course, he never had.
It all became too much for him on a trip from New Zealand to the UK via Los Angeles, where he was meant to stop, pick up a guitar and carry on.
At LA, he wasn’t allowed to enter the country because he didn’t have a visa, even though Split Enz had not long finished touring there.
That also meant he couldn’t access his suitcase, which held his mind-soothing medication. He would have to fly to the UK without being dosed up on Serepax, a tranquilliser prescribed by his dad.
‘‘Having no pills is a bit like being in the trenches in World War I and the guy says, OK, we’re counting down, 10 to 1, ‘but sergeant I haven’t got a rifle or anything’, tough, don’t worry about it, you can’t get it because you haven’t got a visa, so you go over with your bare hands,’’ he says.
‘‘I had no choice but to board that plane and at the end of that flight I was so ravaged, I thought ‘I just can’t go on’.’’
In London, he quit the band. ‘‘Luckily, it wasn’t hard to say ‘I can’t do it anymore’.’’
Home in Auckland, the bass guitarist joined his brother Geoff (vocals, guitar, main songwriter) to form Citizen Band, along with guitarist Greg Clark and drummer Brent Eccles.
In 1996, a book was released called Seven Voices: Tales of Madness and Mirth in which Mike talked about his years of living with a mental illness.
‘‘That’s when I came out and the Mental Health Foundation asked me to be in the Like Minds, Like Mine television campaign where everyone saw me.’’
He also speaks candidly about his mental anguish in A Sharp Left Turn written mostly on quiet Sunday afternoons, between November 2018 and May 2019. Sitting on a Scandinavian chair his dad used in his allergy clinic, Mike worked at a tiny table and wrote on an i-Book, a five-year diary filled with brief notes at his side.
When he was writing, Mike was never alone. ‘‘I’ve always got my father figuratively looking down on me, because I thought he was a wonderful writer..’’