Peter

Rip It Up, Issue 95, 1 June 1985, Page 20

Peter

Keyboardist Peter Allison isn’t particularly animated on stage in fact he tends to look more concerned than expansive. You’d never guess he’s worked as actor. After drama experience at university he worked at Dunedin’s fortune Theatre last year, but there’s been no desire to incorporate the two disciplines: "I suppose you could ... you could really stage it up if you wanted to, but I’d like to keep them separate at the moment.” And a return to acting sometime? “I don’t know if I’d like to be an actor full time. I think it’s a hard way to make a living. But then, so’s this.” The Chills’ playing and practisng schedule has made them all pretty much full time musicians: "I look upon it the same away as going on stage and doing the same show for three weeks in a row. After a while, sometimes you can’t put everything into it, it just kind of runs off. It's hard to make every night a really good night.” Like everyone else, Peter doesn’t know quite what to expect from England: “I can only go on what I’ve heard from people who’ve been there recently and they say there’s not really much happening there. I think we’ve probably got to clean up our stage act a little, cut down the gaps between songs and also find ways of covering if anything goes wrong. At the moment...” In the past, Martin has taken responsibility for much of the musical direction of the Chills, working on arrangements and so on. Peter says things are changing, but "he still does most of the writing as such. I guess we collaborate a bit in the practise side of things. The rest of us haven’t had a good go at writ-

ing. But at the moment I’m prepared to just work on what Martin’s doing I haven’t come up with anything myself that I’m happy with. I try every now and then but I usually throw it away in disgust. There's been so many thousand mediocre songs written that you don’t want to write any more." If things go well for the Chills in Europe, they’ll effectively become “professional musicians"... "Yeah. I don't actually feel worthy of that; technically I think there’s a lot of improvement to be done it’s just whether you get motivated to do it. It was the same with the acting I didn’t feel I wanted to go on unless I improved a lot, and I didn't. It’s just a case of getting yourself doing a bit of hard work." Within the band? "Also individually, I think. And the same with writing the only way you’re going to write a song that you like is by putting in a lot of hard work. If you keep trying, eventually it’s going to work. It’s just a matter of making yourself do it."