RED ALERT

Rip It Up, Issue 17, 1 November 1978, Page 18

RED ALERT

BY W. DART

As Phillip Anderson, star of the STD would say, everything takes its toll. And nothing more than trying to be a rock group down under. Red Alert made a brave attempt at doing all kinds of things in a totally unhyped way the same Red Alert Band who bade farewell to the land of the Pohutukawa with a final three sets at the Gluepot last month. Five versatile musicians make up the band. Jan Preston, madonna of the keyboards, jumping from Schubert on an NZBC-TV grand to Dr John and Commander Cody on its electric cousin Tony McMaster, bass player and exviolinist, with his fretless bass. Vocalist Jean McAllister, drummer Stan Mitchell, and guitarist Richard Kennedy, the last man having come down to earth from the Country Fliers. My first encounter with the band was when they were providing musical backing for Red Mole Theatre this was a performance of the show Ghost Rite at the Maidment. The show itself I felt to be the ultimate definition of ennui and boredom, a sort of half-baked Rite of Spring with semi-clad young ladies running hither and thither for the best part of ninety minutes. The bright spot in this performance was the band, whose tightly disciplined performance gave the rambling show the only cohesion it had.

Then at the Easter Show, the Red Mole Troupe was doing their thing for a crowd of mums, dads and little ones recovering from a surfeit of waffles, hot dogs and snowfreeze. Again the band were the high point, leading in

the troupe with a trumpet and drum over a veritable field of dying waffle cones. And lo and behold, Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata suddenly turned up as fairground organ music a brilliant transformation worthy of Ry Cooder’s Tex-Mex “He’ll have to go” or Steeleye Span’s reggae “Spotted Cow”.

The Red Alert Band became a self-operating unit when the Red Mole Theatre departed for the big pie over the seas, and immediately instigated a wide range of musical activities. Amongst these, the most terrifying might seem nightclubbing in Whangarei six hour stints with a repertoire of a hundred odd songs. And yet Preston remembers this as one of the band’s happiest experiences, with regulars returning at the set of sun every night to hear the band play. The million dollar bash, aesthetically speaking, was to be the band's Maidment concert in August which fell on about 250 receptive souls, and was completely ignored by the press, to the intense chagrin of Red Alert. This was a total theatre concept from a spotlighted musical doll playing a Mozart theme, to the group’s version of Bartok’s Perpetuum mobile. And also included was a lot of the group’s own material which may well include some of the strongest material being written in New Zealand at the moment the song “1953” being a good instance. This song attempts to define the fifties and what they mean to us in New Zealand more the spiritual ethos of the period than Monte Carlo milkbars, gobstoppers, Friday night pictures and buses of hot sweaty children going to see the Coronation films.

Jan Preston may have the elan of her academic credentials but all the band are strong and disciplined musicians even if the intuitive approach of some members is far removed from Jan’s precise academic training. And discipline was certainly in evidence at the Gluepot farewell. There in the distance past the $1.50 turnstile were the familiar black figures of Red Alert in a rocking version of "Iko Iko”. Shunning my usual Empire line parfait amour and lemonade for a bourbon, the lure of "The House of Bfue Lights" proved irresistable (although this song was an Andrews sisters number long before Commander Cody came on the scene). And now whither Red Alert? Having departed from Auckland, city of negligible opportunities, the group are now in Los Angeles, city of sin and session musicians. The ultimate destination is Amsterdam, city of sin and barges, and in about a year we can expect them to return to the land of the long white Clud. With the prospect of a record contract in front of them, one should hope. William Dart