TOYLOVE JOHNNY AND THE HOOKERS

Rip It Up, Issue 21, 1 April 1979, Page 9

TOYLOVE JOHNNY AND THE HOOKERS

Terence Kogan

Toy Love and Johnny and the Hookers were almost the same person. They were in fact joined at the elbow until, at a still young and tender age they were struck at an awkward angle by a bus on a school pedestrian crossing. The accident seperated the two entities who eventually grew up in different parts of the country to become the closet Siamese twins of New Zealand rock. They are now destined by fickle fate to play periodic gigs together of such co-mingled musical ferocity and human mirth that even the most casual and blase of onlookers are obliged to mutter to themselves - ‘why surely that is rock’n’roll.’ One such series of state-of-the-art performances took place recently at these venues over a period of thirty-odd hours: The State Theatre wherein lurk the ghosts ofa thousand Chinese movies, The Windsor Castle wherein lurk the ghosts of the Society Jazzmen, and Zwines - the most consummately and irredeemably trashy flowering of NZ punkdom and itself now a ghost. At the State the Hookers were very hot and Toy Love had to work their arses off to finish the night at a raging explosive dead heat. The next afternoon in Parnell it was tooth and claw, the Hookers' galvanizing heartblood R&B and Toy Love’s grubbo-flash sturm and drang picked up a full house and rung it out. Watermelons flew and folk jumped up and down, you could have been there. Everyone was stuffed by sat. night but it was at Zwines when Toy Love’s Paul or Alec broke their umpteenth string of the day that a bunch of ladies and friends stood on stage to sing Flick the Little Fire Engine while things were put right. That too is rock’n’roll. Okay, Toy Love are my favourite NZ rock band and I'd rather go and see them play than anyone else right now. There are lots of reasons .... the great songs they keep writing (“Pull Down The Shades”, "Swimming Pool”, “Fifteen", “Don’t Catch Fire" etc), Chris Knox’s riveting stage presence, their love of classic pop (their "Venus" is dynamite). They are loud, funny, real as hell, and they keep surprising me. And no they aren’t the tightest band in the world but they’re getting tighter. Chris Knox (vocals & occasional watermelon), Mike Dooley (drums!!) and Alec Bathgate (guitar & Johnsons baby powder), were all in Dunedin’s The Enemy, while Paul Kean (bass & jaw bone) and Jane Walker (keyboards & Paul Kean) were once in Ch-ch’s Detroit Haemorrhoids. The original Enemy bassman was Mick and he's got a band in Dunedin called The Heavenly Bodies but that’s got to be another story.