The best coffee in town (possibly) - foxymoron

moments doesn’t it? Can’t remember. Hope all
this doesn’t sound too much like ‘Children’s
World’ in New Idea.
Sum up ‘shit jobs’ for us if you will. I
literally had a job shovelling shit once, back
in Masterton. How do you subsidise your
music making? Do you make a living out of
your various musical skills?
One of my shit jobs was doing sound for body
building competitions at Sky City Theatre. I’ve
actually done it 4 times. 2 profession comps
(steroids allowed) and two amateur comps
(steroid testing). The competition heats start
at 9am and you work all day, then have a 7pm-
12:00 show at night, usually hosted by Clint
Brown. The fuckin disgusting creatures leave
brown syrup over everything, toilet seats, doorhandles
and it fuckin’ reeks, you can’t escape
it. They don’t eat for days before the comp, and
THEN they drink red wine (or grape juice) to
make themselves more ripped. Most of them
are so weak you could flick them over. But the
worst thing about the job was this; they all (180-
250 of them) brought individual CASSETTES with
their muscle posing routine music on it. At 8am
they would line up in a big long cue up to the
mixing desk at the back. 200 fucked, smashed,
no level, mega level cassettes, handed to
you by the reeking creatures with all sorts of
insane instructions. One year, some monkey’s
cassette wasn’t cued up properly and it played
a gangsta rap song full of bad language. He
was disqualified and the NEXT year he came
up with his cassette in his bulging hand and
told me if I didn’t get it right this year he would
‘waste me’. I decided to replace his cue with
a Mexican mariachi cd, but a workmate found
out and successfully inserted and played the
correct cassette by knocking me to the floor.
The audience are allowed to eat in the theatre
all day, that’s 800 muscle builders friends and
family eating non-stop for 8 hours and trashing
the place.
How is your film work going? Are you
still making short films? When are we
going to see ‘Aphid Adventure 2’?
I found CATMAN the other day; I thought it was
lost forever. CATMAN involves me as a half
cat, half man, tortured by an evil princess who
burns off all my fur rendering me naked and in
a meningicocular frenzy.
Sounds wild, have you seen Cabin Fever,
some hard out necrosis in that.
No, I haven’t.
You should check it out; the scene where the
girl shaves her legs is a personal favourite.
Who have you worked with on this album?
Was it the usual suspects (Gilbert, Miriam,
Jeff, Hell Hammer Bailey)? Or have you
bought in some new talent?
Gilbert and Miriam sing on OH BABY BEAR and
GOLDENMAN. It was a cast of thousands bro.
Rupert played the piano on OH BABY BEAR. The
piano was outside on his 1938 Ford flatbed
truck in Glenfield. Recording piano outside in
the rain was good fun.
I thought I recognised the soulful sounds of
the Laurence siblings, (Auckland’s answer
to the Carpenters) was the rain intentional
or incidental? I love that behind the music
shit, I saw this cool doco once about the
making of the sergeant peppers album with
George Martin, fucken ruled! Any other
recording anecdotes you can share?
During the vocals on ‘You’re Watching me’, I
was sitting down and whacking my legs with
a drumstick sized metal bar to keep in the
groove. When I finished my takes, I realised
that I’d completely battered my legs. This was
at Neil Finn’s studio and Neil and Dave Dobbyn
wandered into control room and I had my pants
around my ankles with massive black bruises
all over my thighs. Humiliation and art is a
potent combination.
I thought I’d better have a listen to the
album before we caught up, so I chucked
it on at work. A couple of my colleagues
inquired as to what the fuck this wacky shit
was, do you think that the shear normality
of some of your lyrical subject matter
(shopping at Silverdale, etc) is strange to
people in this age of gun toting and angst
ridden entertainment or do you think that
such comments are justified and you really
are a fucken weirdo?
You tell your fuckin’ friends to lighten up. The
grim aspects of the world have always been a
wonky mix of dullness and brutality.
Highlighting the banalities of ordinary NZ
life, whilst living in this “age of gun toting” is
historically important, because it’s the boring
things that become most interesting over time
- the generalities of war remain the same over
the ages, we find the dull things about our
lives embarrassing and I believe the best art is
mostly concerned with humiliation (as opposed
with being cool etc.) Therefore documenting
dullness within music is a good way of staying
interesting over time, that and a good story.
I didn’t say they were my friends, but I’ll
pass that on. I’m sure they’ll ponder it a
lengthy spell before settling into celebrity
Treasure Island this week.
Humiliation you say, the artist’s or the
audience’s? Cause if all it takes is to make
a fuckwit out of oneself you better start
calling me Pablo Picasso!
Do you ever think back on earlier times of your
life and wish that you had done a shit on the
stage at prize giving at school or that kind of
thing? Well, I figure that at the end of ones life,
one probably looks back at everything that has
happened in his life as if it were some kind of
lucid dream where one could have augmented
circumstances with ridiculous and selfhumiliating
behaviour. I guess I don’t want to
arrive at my deathbed thinking, ‘Shit, it was all
a dream, I could have had my photo taken up on
top of the old Kiwi bacon factory, with the tip of
the Kiwi’s beak up my arse and blood running
down my legs’.
If there’s one thing I’m certain of Ed it’s
that I’ll die alone with a plethora of regrets,
however, whether doing a shit on stage in
front of my school will be one of them, I’m
not entirely sure.
If you had won top marks in the school for
Home Ec in the fifth form, and when you walked
up to receive your prize (a cookbook) the entire
school and their parents laughed at you, you
might think differently. Cunts.
Have you ever seen ‘Hated’ the story of GG
Allen and the Murder Junkies? Sounds like
it might be right up your alley.
As a matter of fact I have. That scene of him at
the end in the coffin all slashed up still gives
me nightmares. His good old pen pal John Gacy
would have been either giggling or weeping, it’s
hard to know.
The Beatles or Queen?
I listened to Queen’s greatest hits a couple of
weeks ago.
Fucken rules aye! You got a favourite track?
Mine are ‘Seven seas of rye’ and ‘Fat bottom
girls’, the irony of the later is masterful! Or
do you think that Fred actually got into big
fat Fanny? (she was such a naughty nanny)