Loving the avian
Verlaines Bird-Dog
FLYING NUN, 1987 “A German review of the 1985 Flying Nun compilation Tuatara said that ‘Flying Nun is the best independent record company on the planet right now.’ And we pretty much said, ‘Tell us something we don’t know,’” says Graeme Downes of the Verlaines. The New Zealand label also caused a stir in the UK with The Clean, The Chills, Tall Dwarfs, The Bats and the Verlaines all garnering enthusiastic press coverage. Overall, their songs were melodic but idiosyncratically structured, with a lean sound that cut through the gloss and bombast of the mid ’80s. Downes’ hometown of Dunedin had a particularly fertile live scene. “Martin Phillipps [of The Chills] lived next door and so it was fiercely competitive but in a positive way,” he says. “When someone wrote a song that broke a barrier, everyone went ‘must try harder’ – and did.” As a child Downes had been entranced by the ’60s pop of Burt Bacharach and Phil Spector, but “fell out of love with it” and became a devotee of classical music, learning oboe, piano, violin and viola. But after seeing The Clean play a lunchtime concert at his high school in 1979, and a live show by Phillipps’ pre-Chills group, The Same, he had a change of heart and decided to form a band. “I just thought, Well, I’m interested in poetry and I’m interested in music, and maybe this a cool way to put the two things together.” So he borrowed his dad’s nylon string guitar and taught himself to play, forming the Verlaines in 1981. Downes bought an electric guitar and developed a highly original compositional style of post-punk tunefulness with unexpected twists and chord changes. On their 1985 debut album, Hallelujah All The Way Home, the three-piece (Downes, Jane Dodd on bass and Robbie Yeats on drums) play the hard-edged, knotty songs occasionally augmented by strings, brass and winds. Like its predecessor, 1987’s Bird-Dog was written and thoroughly rehearsed before recording, Downes collaborating with Dodd on the bass lines while Yeats was given a freer role. “Meticulously planned down to the hour”, is how Downes describes the sessions. He was studying for a music degree and reveals that many of the songs on the album were informed by classical music, in a way that was almost the inverse of progressive rock. “Bird Dog and Icarus Missed are sonatas for a rock band,” he explains. “But I don’t particularly like prog rock. It’s like the Paganini thing, mining the virtuoso aspect of classical music. I write in a much more organisation-conscious kind of way.” Icarus Missed features Dodd’s brother Tim playing multiple bassoon parts. Downes notes that it is constructed from some 60 different chords and voicings, but like Bacharach’s use of unusual time signatures, and odd chords and key changes, his own approach is ultimately to serve the music. “It’s not about showing off. Some songs are OK with three chords, but some require that many to achieve themselves,” he says. Slow Sad Love Song is the first song Downes ever wrote, on the nylon string guitar in about half an hour, prompted by the suicide of a school friend. On the album, it’s a raw, furiously strummed bloodletting and climaxes in a “very George Martin-esque way” with a huge crescendo of guitars, and a tape collage of strings recorded at the sessions. Stylistically, Bird-Dog veers between these rawer tracks and relaxed fare like Only Dream Left with its gentle swing and brilliantly arranged saxes. The title
“WE THOUGHT WE’D COLLECTIVELY BUILT SOMETHING MAGNIFICENT ONLY TO LOSE IT.”
Graham Downes
track is like a drinking song with a singalong chorus augmented by oom-pahing tuba, but the lyrics hint at a darkness behind the celebration. Understandably, the Dunedin scene had been hit by the deaths of Chills’ drummer Martyn Bull and Wayne Elsey of DoubleHappys, and groups splitting or going into remission. “We thought we’d collectively built something magnificent only to lose it,” says Downes. “That song is placed towards the end of the album in a kind of a ‘paradise lost’ situation, to which C.D. Jimmy Jazz And Me is the antidote.” The latter six-minute song, which closes Bird-Dog, is the group’s most glorious moment, with its joyous, fugue-like sections of strings and brass. Downes: “The lyrics are all about extricating oneself from crappy situations and typical of a lot of Dunedin scene songs, the instrumental sections communicate just as much as the rest of the song.” Downes is now a senior lecturer in music at Otago University – he’s also orchestrating songs by Dunedin bands for the Tally Ho! recording project – while the Verlaines have continued to record and have gradually morphed into the version that’s currently working on a new LP titled Dunedin Spleen. But he has long since realised that with New Zealand’s geographical isolation and his academic activities, the Verlaines could never be about achieving fame, and says, “I’m just happy to create.” At the Wellington Festival this March, the Bird-Dog line-up reformed to play the album in its entirety. “It was amazing to be able to do that,” says Downes. “We’ve also remastered it and Flying Nun are going to re-release it… the material just doesn’t seem to age.”
Mike Barnes