Five Months Folk Singing Overseas

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31006, 11 March 1966, Page 12

Five Months Folk Singing Overseas

A Christchurch folk singer, Phil Garland, found that his audiences in Britain, France, South Africa and Australia were keenly interested in New Zealand folk music.

Back from a five-month tour, he said yesterday he felt New Zealand could do a lot to acquaint the world with its traditions by promoting its own folk singers. In Britain, where he had encountered no other folk singers from this country, his songs of the gold rushes and whaling days were well received—in spite of a widespread belief that New Zealand folk music consisted only of Maori songs. “The hardest problem in Britain is that it’s so tough getting a work permit,” Mr Garland said. “You have to get a musician’s work permit to sing full-time, but you can work casually instead, travelling from club to club, getting a meal here and a bed there. “I think this experience is more beneficial than working in a restricted area. By travelling around you can eventually associate yourself with the numbers you’re singing, and get a much closer relationship with your audiences.”

Although New Zealand folk singers could find ready listeners in the countries he visited, thev would have to aim for a high standard, he said.

In a sense, a folk singer had to be slightly “rough and ready”—provided he was completely relaxed and at one with his audience, and believed sincerely in what he was singing. But too casual an approach was not wanted on overseas radio and television.

He also recommended that

those who went overseas paid their return fare in advance. If he had not done this, Mr Garland said, he would probably still be in Britain, stranded, like several young New Zealanders and Australians he met there. Phil Garland, who is aged 24, was already known as a “keen rock ’n’ roll man” at Christ’s College, and abandoned his accountancy studies at the University of Canterbury three years ago to become a pop singer. In Christchurch he sang with “The Saints," and later formed his own pop group, “The Playboys.” After working in Auckland night clubs, he returned to sing in a local coffee lounge for a year and a half before going overseas. He has been folk singing for 18 months. “I had gone the full circle in pop music—from rock, to ballad, then back to beat To put it crudely, I had a gutsful of it. “I found I could express my feelings better through folk music. It requires a lot more intelligence to sing it well than to stand up on a stage wiggling your hips and legs singing rock music.”

Two of Mr Garland’s aims now are to sing folk songs in secondary schools—if he can obtain permission from the Education Department—and to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in the United States next September. “If I could go there as a New Zealand folk singer, singing New Zealand folk songs, maybe I could arouse some interest in that quarter," he said.