DAVE McARTNEY DANCES ON

Rip It Up, 15 December 1983, Page 8

DAVE McARTNEY DANCES ON

Duncan Campbell

About eight years ago, in the early days of Hello Sailor, Dave McArtney was on stage at Shantytown (now Aladdin's, one of Auckland's betterknown nightspots), preparing for the night's performance.

'There was a faulty junction box on.stage. I was holding on to the microphone and my guitar touched the mike stand. The electricity found earth through me. I was thrown about' six feet in the air, the lights were out on stage at the time, so no one saw me. Luckily I managed to kick the mike stand away. But five minutes later I went into delayed shock, and my heart stopped." Graham Brazier had to give McArtney heart massage to revive him, and he spent the rest of the night in hospital. A similar accident killed gifted Scottish guitarist Les Harvey a few years ago. McArtney has been extra careful ever since and has had no repeats. The incident, and the feeling of dying, is recalled in a song on the new Pink Flamingos' album. The Catch: One night I fell into a ring of fire I had this feeling my engine run dry Ooh watcha gonna do When it’s all over.... ('l'm In Heaven')

The rest of the album is on a similarly reflective note, with McArtney taking stock of what was and what might have been. He's an unabashed romantic and a sentimentalist, and The Catch is a graphic dissection of his attitudes and emotions. In talking about these songs, McArtney, normally shy and withdrawn at interviews, is at his most illuminating. 'Wretched Youth' is a sometimes-painful recollection of a younger man, in that gloriously hedonistic suburb referred to by McArtney and his youthful mates as British West Ponsonby': Salad days, I knew they had to end My crime was messing up my life... "I tried to recapture the actual atmosphere of my life in the early 70s. I believe life goes in

seven to 10-year cycles, things repeat themselves and, despite the changes that are meant to happen minute-by-minute, day-by-day, year-by-year, I still believe people remain the same. I tried to recreate through word imagery the feeling that pervaded at that time among my friends, and particularly the people who were involved with Hello Sailor. It's like looking back on all the things that have happened between then and now. For us, it's been a fairly ratshit trail) but I don't want to convey the feeling that it's negative. If anything, it's just the opposite."

The title track is a broad observation on the ironies of life, where something comes along to lift you up, and something else makes an equally strong effort to knock you down. "It's about the duality of human nature, I suppose, or the difficulty of coming to terms with the fact that things don't lock in the w'ay they should. Whenever you're faced with something positive, it means that something negative presents itself, especially in relationships." 'Beauty and the Bottle' admonishes excessive users of alcohol, the message being that the two don't mix. Not that McArtney is on a clean living kick. "As you approach your thirties, you realise the need to put the brakes on, so to speak. I'm not concerned about my own alcohol intake, that's totally out of control (laughter). I'm not a moralist, but I'm concerned with the fact that society does revolve around alcohol, and what sort of society is it, if it needs artificial stimulant to help its members get on, and stop tension? But that's OK, I'm not making a moral judgement, I'm just making fun of it. In a lot of my songs I just toy with words. I've done it here with different brands of alcohol."

'Little Angels' needs no explanation, being a song for the Kings Cross hookers, like Richard Clapton's 'Girls On The Avenue'. For people who are classified as the dregs of society, the streetwalkers have attracted more romantic imagery than any other nefarious profession. McArtney's reaction is that of the typically

goggle-eyed Kiwi. Otorohanga was never like this.

'japan Affair' is an exotic arrangement for McArtney, recalling a time about four years ago when he and his girlfriend were trying the macrobiotic diet.

"I had a lot of difficulty trying to reconcile this with the lifestyle that I was leading (giz a Big Mac), and at the same time, I used it as an allegory for our relationship." • ■ T " The Shogun's daughter was to be my girl ' But it burned inside . Just a taste of doubt Her in a .pagoda, l a rock n' roll grave... Footwear has been a consistent rock image throughout its history; Everyone can rattle off at least a few titles that have used boots -or shoes. McArtney's 'Red Boots' is a tribute; to perhaps New Zealand's most famous pair of rock n' roll shoes.

"In those particular red boots I felt I'had confidence, I had a certain amount of grace and firmness, and whenever I wore those red boots, everything was great.. I'm certain that everyone has a feeling about certain types of footwear; it's what you walk on the planet with. I wore these boots just about every night for about 10 years, and then after the last gig that the old Flamingos did last year at Mainstreet, I hung them up in this motel, and that was it." The boots in question, which will be recalled by anyone who saw the Flamingos gig in the old days, are now in the possession of Dick Driver. He -hasn't yet had the nerve to wear them in public.

'Dance On', the current single, is the oldest song on the album, dating back about 10 years, when McArtney first started writing. "I've always looked upon it as a sort of a defiant song, taking a second look at lovers' games, that sort of thing. Every record I do, I like to go back to the early days when I first started writing, take a song and treat it the way I'm playing it at the time, and see how it compares with the rest. I still have quite a few numbers sitting around that I haven't used. Graham (Brazier) does the same."

'Beaches' was co-written with Harry Lyon and Paul Woolright, originally with the Legionnaires in mind.

"That was a song which started off with a title, as opposed to either a lyric or a chorus. The band was just jamming, Paul started off with the bass riff and Harry continued with the bridge, and I just followed it through with the chord structure, the arrangement and the lyrics. I think it has a South Pacific mystique, using the idea of the early sailors, having an undeveloped knowledge of natives and things

like that. It's like us (Hello Sailor) going to LA, throwing ourselves into the torrid post-Manson culture, the acid casualties, and so on."

'Carry On' is a song for survivors, in an age where the Cold War seems colder every day. "I wanted to write something futuristic, from inside the minds of two native New Yorkers after the holocaust, when things are still surviving. I don't necessarily think it's going to be that way, but I do think there's going to be a total breakdown of the economic and spiritual system as we know it. "Revolutions don't matter anymore. You just fight your revolution with a gun now, and most i of them are so subtly backed, by the Russians or the CIA. We're all quite familiar with that now."

Recording of the album started back in January, while McArtney was still a Legionnaire. Demos had been recorded for Polygram, but they weren't prepared to put up the money he wanted, to get sufficient studio time. Ze Disc gave him the freedom he needed, and he spent three hard, expensive months at Harlequin Studios.

"It's a step in the right direction for me. I actually learned a lot, from the technical side of recording. We used the studio to our

advantage, and all the time spent was necessary. All the basic tracks were done in a week, so the rest was agonising over mixing. Sometimes we remixed a track 10 or 15 times, until we were happy with it. I was aiming for a modern sound that was clean and sparse. We did overdo it in some respects, there's a lot. of keyboards, but that's the way I wanted it. A modern, funky and danceable sound."

After the original Flamingos broke up last year in Australia, McArtney decided to have a complete break. He spent two months touring Europe with his girlfriend and didn't even take a guitar with him. On his return, late last year, the Legionnaires were formed, the second band under that name, as a reincarnation of Hello Sailor. McArtney openly admits they were trying to recapture the Good Old Days. "Before I left for Europe, I had spent some time with Graham and Harry and we expressed the interest in playing together again. The day I got back, they were at a rugby test or something. I was at Paul Woolright's place, they turned up and asked me to join. I said yes and we were playing the following weekend. "It was fine for a while and then we got into the same old routine of touring all the time, and I think Graham just wanted to get away from the old syndrome of him, me and Harry, the triad. It doesn't work, it's too intense. I really respect Graham's talent, but he was feeling very inhibited at that stage by what the band represented. Graham has got this 'street kid'

image he wants to maintain, and obviously he has to play with younger players, which I totally agree with.

"We all tried to break away from the whole thing when Hello Sailor broke up. I went and formed my own band, and it was just fine. I think it was just nostalgia that drew us back together. "I'm getting more used to being a leader now. It was a bit of a shock at first, being laid on me so suddenly, but I'm gradually reorientating my attitude as to what is required of me as a frontperson. It's not easy for me, but I do enjoy it." The new Flamingos have been touring for about a month now and are coming together well as a live unit. McArtney and Harry Lyon are the mainstays, with Karen Hill on keyboards, Paul Woolright on bass and Vinnie Buchanan on drums. They'll be very busy over the festive season and have been invited to Sweetwaters, although they've not yet decided whether they'll accept the money offered. McArtney has unhappy memories of last year's festival, when excesses of alcohol and other things led to physical violence.

The band will be working right up till the end of February, when McArtney will be off to Europe again. He's been closely involved with a company which makes ski movies, and did a soundtrack for them last year. He's been invited to attend the Winter Olympics in Yugoslavia as a sound recordist. On the way home he'll do some promotional work in

Australia where CBS will be releasing the album. McArtney is not exactly fond of the Australian music scene, where he's bombed previously, but he's prepared to give it another try like a trouper. He's more interested in touring somewhere a little more exotic, like New Caledonia and other Pacific Islands, which seem to be crying out for some new entertainment. McArtney is philosophical now recalling those salad days when Hello Sailor left for America as brash young men. In some ways he believes attitudes now are healthier than they were then.

"I think we were quite naive, and we were right outside the industry. We should have been a bit more careful and calculating, l ] in the sense r that most bands are | these days, I almost like businessmen, they wanna make it. We weren't like that, we were a bit footloose about our future.

"But we were still very lucky at that stage, we got all the breaks. At that stage, music for us was a counter-cultural thing. I suppose it still is with the punk thing and so forth. But for us it was being a part of a subculture, which drew its inspiration from the night and drugs and things like that. "There were also figureheads, like Elvis and Bowie and Lou Reed, people like that who people followed. That's gone now. People don't treat them as heroes anymore, which I think is great. I think it's terrific that that's happened."