The morning after the night before for the big winner at Wednesday's New Zealand Post Book Awards.
Chris Bourke
Writer and broadcaster Chris Bourke is going to be in Melbourne this weekend watching Randy Newman in concert. He bought his ticket in anticipation of needing consolation after yesterday’s New Zealand Post Book Awards. Instead, his book Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964 swept the board, winning the overall Book of the Year award, as well as the General Non-Fiction and People’s Choice awards. Bourke spoke to the Listener this morning at 9.00am.
Hello. Hello. I hope you can get some sense out of me.
The last time I saw you it was 12.30am and you were crossing a bar with a bottle of champagne in your hand. Was it 12.30?
It was. Well, we stayed a bit longer than that.
So, a good night. It was good, yeah. It totally blew me away, really.
Did you go into the night confident? No, I didn’t, really. I don’t know what it is. I’ve been a bridesmaid a few times, so you go in thinking it’s a lottery from here on in. I’ve been a judge and a few things, and there’s always some playing off between judges until people come around to a unified point of view …
You’re talking yourself down now. [Laughs] But I didn’t go in expecting that.
In one of your three speeches, you credited the designers of the book, and the look of the book was the envy of a lot of other writers, I know. Was that something you really had to fight for from your publisher, AUP? No, not at all. Having worked in magazines and books for a long time, I kind of knew what I wanted and I gave [AUP director] Sam Elworthy the book Jazz by Ken Burn and they really went with it. I came up with all the pictures but they did such a beautiful job of making it work. It looks like a lovely package. It almost seems gift-wrapped because of [cover designer] Spencer Levine’s [paper] belly band [around the book]. Which I know probably retailers don’t like because they get damaged. They had the idea of doing a montage on the cover and Spencer really put all the extra miles in there to get that right. It was a really intense three months of editing and layout, and they’d send [designer Katrina Duncan’s] layouts down each day and I’d just think, “Oh, wow, she’s picked just the right photos for that spot.”
When I spoke to you in October just before the book came out, one of the things you said was, “It’s the arrogance of the baby-boomer generation that they invented fun. I’m quietly confident people will pick up this book and think, ‘This is amazing. Wow, I can’t believe all this happened here.’” Your confidence would seem to have been borne out by the interest in and popularity of the book, including the People’s Choice Award. Yeah, I think so. All those images really suggest the liveliness of it and you think, “Wow, our grandparents were part of that. They look so stylish, I wish was there.” I think that’s been the reaction because that’s my reaction.
What sort of people have been buying the book? Have they been older, or baby-boomers like you say, or even younger people? I think they’re baby-boomers buying it for their aged parents who might not be able to read very well any more and they’re really buying it for themselves. Their parents have a warm fuzzy looking through the pictures and their children, in their forties through to their sixties, actually revel in it themselves.
The awards would seem like something of a two-fingered gesture towards all those post-war official histories you spoke about in our October interview that just completely ignored the dance bands you write about. You know, it still goes on. Something happened just the other day and I was thinking, “Oh God, get a grip.” As much as I love orchestral music and I love classical music, there is still this perception of popular music as if it’s not to be taken seriously. Because it’s all about fun, and it should be, it’s not considered proper.
With these awards, the literary establishment at least has embraced the notion – albeit the pre-1964 notion – of popular music. Social history has been covered well in recent years but this area just wasn’t tapped. Somehow music got forgotten. And yet that’s where New Zealanders met and courted and started their families.
James Shelley – the “Prof” – will be turning in his grave. Yeah, exactly – we played jazz before seven o’clock this morning.
You spoke about your mum last night and have done so before in connection with the book and how it grew out of the music stories she didn’t tell you. What did she make of the stories you ended up unearthing and telling in Blue Smoke? I wish I could give you something good there but it took me so long to write the book that her eyesight had gone by the time it came out. She can’t really get a lot from it. She can look at the pictures and that’s about it.
Oh no. Somebody should read it to her. Yeah. I’ve given her the Radio New Zealand Concert series I did to listen to and she’s loving that.
You spent a long time on the book. How many years all told? Four.
But it was gestating over a longer period than that. It was really a lot of things coming together. One of the big things was at Radio New Zealand they asked me to finish a documentary that had been started – the first interviews had been done – with Eldred Stebbing. So I went to interview Eldred. I used to live around the corner from him in Herne Bay, and that’s like living around the corner from Abbey Road. I’d walk past every day and think, “Ray Columbus has been through there, and all those.” A huge history. Hello Sailor and Th’Dudes. The Stebbings kind of kept to themselves, but I had this opportunity to talk to him, and he was in his late eighties and I realised there was this great connection. He recorded Artie Shaw during the war when he came out here, right through to Dave Dobbyn in the 80s. I’d always felt there was this baton passing from musician to musician. I just realised that that thing that had been gestating [with me] for 30 years, it had to be done now. It had been Ray Harris – the Listener’s jazz critic from about the mid-50s through to about 1983, who I interviewed when I was a student at university – talking about the musical life of Wellington during the war and after the war that really sowed the seed. The wonderful stories about the streets you walk in. In Ghuznee St, there was this bar called the Foresters’ Arms that my brother went to once and my dad said, “Well, that’s a place to go if you’re intent on a criminal career.” So criminals used to be in the public bar, and in the house bar (it was six o’clock closing) on Fridays between five and six the jazz guys would all congregate there. They’d all rush there after their jobs and they’d find gigs for the weekend. This would happen right through the late 50s. One day there propping up the bar was Jimmy Rushing, who was in town singing with the Eddie Condon band. You just think, “Wow, this is our city.” You think about Memphis and New Orleans and these wonderful juke joints, but we had real characters here. There last night, we were on the Wellington Town Hall stage, and you think, “Well, there’s a photo in the book of Johnny Cooper, the Maori Cowboy, introducing rock and roll to the jazzers at one of those festivals at the town hall, those jazz festivals where slowly rock and roll had to be included as it became more popular.”
It’s a big book. But could it have been a bigger one? Were there lots of stories you weren’t able to fit in? I did 50 interviews but I didn’t use that much of the interview material, partly because the older people get they don’t give good flowing quotes. They were great to set the scene and help me put everything in context, but the idea of doing a Nick Tosches book of wonderful outrageous stories would be difficult for two reasons. One is that this generation doesn’t really talk about that, they are too reserved, they are too gentlemanly, to really give you the stories of bad behaviour. The other thing is it wasn’t really appropriate for the book, there needed to be a kind of very straight historical approach to it, to start the ball rolling for others. About five years ago, when I got started, I ran into [writer] Peter Wells, and he said, “Oh, that’ll be great for novelists,” to kind of know what the world was like. It’s so easy to get things wrong when there’s nowhere to check what that actual world was like. A novelist can have an electric guitar in the 30s. That kind of thing. I’m really hoping that New Zealand’s novels about the past, it’ll be useful for them, and also for music students. Now, the universities do popular music, but back [when I studied] they didn’t. Now, they’ve got a text to work from.
Obviously, there were all the stories you unearthed while you were researching the book, but since the book has been published, has it, as it were, smoked out some other musicians to contact you? It’s mainly their children, really, who have contacted me. A few elderly musicians. I got a lovely letter from a guy who sounded like he was the Zelig of Wellington in the 40s and 50s. He drew me a picture of a map of Wellington where Ruru Karaitiana had flatted and described going to parties with singalongs. That was a great letter from an older guy. Even last night, certain people said, “Oh, my granddad’s in your book.” The way so many Maori musicians came to the surface in the research, I really get the feedback from that, too, from their relatives. It really puts things in place for them, that they’ve got this great heritage.
It’s in the nature of publishing that a successful book begets follow-ups of some description, at the behest of publishers usually. Is there a Blue Smoke 2 out there? I’ve got some ideas for much simpler books from material from this that would be great to share. Particularly, the anecdotal stories. I could put those together and you could have a fun book of first-person music stories over many generations. One of my favourite books is George Melly’s Owning Up. It’s about being in a jazz band in 50s Britain on the road before the motorways existed. You’re heading up to Liverpool when it’s a long, long drive and you’re staying in dodgy bed and breakfasts where the landlady wants to get her leg over and you’re eating in greasy spoons and all that kind of world. And there’s the personalities of the musicians. That’s one thing, the behaviour thing. At my book launch, this wonderful character Merv Thomas, who was in the first prominent rock and roll band here, said, “Oh, this book is so wonderful, but there’s none of the bitchiness that exists.” You know, “Oh, have they got that gig? Shit,” or, “He’s getting all the work.” But they don’t talk like that when they’re in their eighties. They don’t diss each other.
What about a Blue Smoke CD? I’d love to. I think that’ll happen eventually. The problem with providing a free CD with the book was the rights. In that so much of the music was interpretations of standards from overseas. They’re still owned by overseas publishers and the amount of material you could get the rights to through just contacts and the families wanting it to be there was very limited. Then you’ve got the problem of, “Okay, we’ve got the rights to this stuff, how much of it is actually of a quality we can put it on a CD?” There are so many hurdles. But the material is in the Alexander Turnbull Library now and I think it will turn up online in the long term, as rights become available. That would be great, to read my book, say, and listen to an excerpt online.
You did manage to let people hear the music with your Radio New Zealand Concert series. There’s another one coming up, four parts again. It starts on August 28, Sundays at 7pm. And hopefully the shows will turn up on National in the future. The new series covers the vinyl period. From 1955 onward. Comedy and cabaret and small jazz combos. The start of rock and roll.
A Blue Smoke concert might be a good thing. Are there enough of the musicians left to do that? I think so. And there’s all these wonderful jazz schools now. I would love to do a tribute to these guys with a few of them who are still playing, who’ve still got their lips [laughs]. They did a Maori showband tribute in October last year in Auckland. But yeah, at one of the festivals I think we need to seize the moment and do this.
Could you see yourself on the stage playing piano? Well, yeah, now I want to get back into the lessons. And cure that phobia of playing in front of people. One thing that original interview with Ray Harris did 30 years ago, I wanted to interview boogie woogie piano players of Wellington, these old guys with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, and Ray said, “Well, you know you can put a boogie on this and you can put a boogie on that and after the second song everyone’s running from the room.” And I realised what a dull genre it is, really. It’s lovely technically to play, but I’d love to be able to have a repertoire of tunes for people.
Do you think you might have been a musician in another life? Yeah, in another life. It wasn’t really encouraged.
And if that life had been during the years of Blue Smoke, which period or genre would you have liked to play in? The Freddie Gore band. A big band with arrangements that were cutting edge. That’s the thing with rock and roll piano, it’s fun to listen to but … I’ve just read the Nicky Hopkins biography (Nicky Hopkins is one of my heroes). You’re playing in triplets all the time. All it does is build up your forearms.
BLUE SMOKE: THE LOST DAWN OF NEW ZEALAND POPULAR MUSIC 1918-1964, by Chris Bourke (AUP, $59.99).