Hallelujah Picassos - Rewind the Hateman book - Amplifier

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Engineer at The Lab, Chris Sinclair, working on Drinking With Judas sessions
and featuring a bunch of happy musical misfits who did this very much in a purely New Zealand way, where kids were bought up on radio that played everything from George Clinton to Bob Marley to The Clash in one bracket. The Picassos arrived in 1988 and Auckland, and indeed, New Zealand, had seen nothing like them. Whereas most of their influencemashing contemporaries combined two, or at most, three of the above musical revolutions together, Hallelujah Picassos took absolutely no prisoners and slammed them all together in an almost violent and ruthless amalgam of joy. And you either loved them or hated them. There was no middle ground. Harold’s performance and Bobbylon’s sweet noise didn’t offer you the non-committal option. I loved them, and found that it was both exhilarating and exhausting to be in their presence. You thrilled at the energy and seductive melody, but found yourself utterly shattered as they walked off… and I’m not a dancer. I can but try to imagine how the band felt. In almost any other nation they’d likely have been adopted by the fringes of the mainstream and done quite well given their look and sound, but in an era when airplay for their sort (y’know: NZ bands) on any radio stations outside of student radio was non-existent, their sales remained steady but unspectacular, driven mostly by live shows. But their influence was undeniable, and a generation of local acts who refused to accept the boundaries that those Pink Floyd and Dire Straits-loving critics defined owe massively to the Picassos, often without realising exactly how much they broke down the barriers of musical conservatism in Auckland and beyond. However their catalogue has languished since then, being largely unavailable, aside from a track here and there, throughout the 21st century. Until now… and this, I guess, is as good a place as any to encourage you to take a leap into the recorded work of one of the most important New Zealand acts of their time. Enjoy. I will. Nick Dwyer (Nick D): Like most other 13 year olds growing up in the eastern suburbs of Auckland at the beginning of the 90’s, I wasn’t really the biggest fan of college. Didn’t mind the learning part so much, at the school I went to, but I never really fitted in. My salvation was a student radio station called bFM. Thanks to having an older brother with incredible music taste, bFM was a part of my life from an early age, but by the time I was 12 I was obsessed. I used to tape shows religiously; Kirk Harding and his Tranquility Bass show, Stinky Jim with Stinky Grooves, the Kiwi music show Freak The Sheep, and I’d spend all my Wednesday afternoons voting for my favourite bands on the Top 5. Thanks to bFM my musical heroes were Kiwi artists and bands. It was weird the sense of pride that I felt, and for me, New Zealand music was the greatest music in the world – and my musical idols were people like Thorazine Shuffle’s Josh Hetherington, Semi Lemon Kola’s Tosh Graham and in my mind the biggest and baddest rock star of them all – Harold from Hallelujah Picassos – aka Roland Rorschach. Man! Even his name sounded kickass. I began collecting New Zealand records earnestly and without a doubt it was Murray Cammick’s Wildside Records that was my favourite. I remember vividly the day that I skipped school, and bussed it all the way to
Page 1 and 2: CONTENTS: STORIES FROM Lisa van der
Page 3: Mostly though it was a smooth ride
Page 7 and 8: town to go and buy a copy of Drinki
Page 9 and 10: on that track. One of my all-time f
Page 11 and 12: God gave us the Four Headed Beast.
Page 14 and 15: Uni Cafe, but one of their performa
Page 16: Stinky Jim: Gotta to be honest, it
Page 19 and 20: The above illustration was done by

Hallelujah Picassos - Rewind the Hateman book - Amplifier

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