Upfront
Don McGlashan
by Philip Matthews
Songwriter.
“The music that I’m enjoying now is very stripped back, music that goes back to where music comes from – a way of talking, a way of communicating,” says Don McGlashan. “Anchor Me”, “White Valiant”, “The Heater”, “Dominion Rd” … McGlashan wrote these and other entries in the canon of great New Zealand songs while in the Mutton Birds and further classics in earlier bands the Front Lawn and Blam Blam Blam. But he’s an unassuming guy and it makes sense that while someone else is having a top 10 hit with a song of his (“Bathe in the River” performed by Hollie Smith and the Mt Raskil Preservation Society), he quietly slips out his first solo album, Warm Hand, on independent label Arch Hill Recordings.
Arch Hill is an indie. Did you shop Warm Hand around the majors? I did shop it. I just didn’t meet anybody who was excited. The market has changed and major labels are tightening their belts because they’re under threat. They may have to downsize their cars a little, which would be a terrible thing.
Your sales history must be good – I would have thought they’d jump at the chance to release it. Maybe I’m difficult to work with.
Why Arch Hill? They were keen and interested and passionate and I love the roster. When I first met with Ben [Howe, label boss], he was talking about record launches that would involve other Arch Hill acts. It sounded like a great evening to be part of. In my experience, being involved with major labels hasn’t really been about community. You’d be lucky if you’d meet another band, partly because it’s not done for a band to turn up at the label unless it’s very ceremonial. Better to keep the artist at arm’s length. Ben doesn’t really have an office, so that problem doesn’t exist.
The Mutton Birds had a big UK following. Any chance of a release there? We’re not talking about that yet. The guy who used to manage the Mutton Birds, he lives in France. He’s keen. The idea would be to get my new band over there, but I’m not that keen to do that while my kids are at the age they’re at [14 and 11].
Did it feel like a sacrifice to come home in 1999, when the Mutton Birds were still getting decent audiences there? No, enough people had left the band for some of the joy to go out of it. I’d hit a brick wall as far as songwriting went, and I’d come through that somehow and arrived at the decision that this is all I ever wanted to do. Everything else was superfluous – the industry could do what it liked. I needed to be at a place where my family was happy and I could still write.
At a recent Wellington Arts Festival panel, you called yourself a “neo-traditionalist” and took an extreme position against modern sampling technology. I had a hangover, so I came in with a fundamentalist anti-sampling viewpoint, which I regret a little bit now, but me getting on my high horse got a few people on to theirs, which made for interesting theatre. What I find alarming, and what I was trying to say on the day, is that all the distractions of music technology and the plethora of choices rob us of stillness, rob us of thought. I’ve been writing songs for years and years. I should be finding it easier now, but with emails and computers distracting me, it’s harder and harder to find peace and stillness, to be awake and really listen to the world. And my job is to do that – to be peaceful and see what’s in there. I don’t know how everybody else handles it, who just have normal jobs. Maybe there’s never any stillness for anybody any more. There are a lot of people with a vested interest in keeping us distracted, so they can sell us stuff we don’t need.
There are permanent soundtracks. Your phone plays music. Your phone takes a photo … My phone takes a photograph of my inner thigh at regular intervals and sends it to somebody I don’t know.
The new song “Passenger 26” seems to revisit the rural-menace feel of “White Valiant”. There’s something very New Zealand about that. We have a myth that we’re a rural people, that we’re at home wandering down an empty country road, whereas an empty country road is too alarming for most of us to handle. I travelled a lot in bands. In Blam Blam Blam we walked down a lot of country roads, because the van didn’t go very well. We were three boys from comfort-able homes on the North Shore. Suddenly we were in the backblocks with nothing to sustain us. That feeling has stayed with me.
So, about your entries in the canon of great New Zealand songs: “Anchor Me”, “White Valiant”, “The Heater”, “Dominion Rd” … None of them were hits. Well, “The Heater” was number one. “Dominion Rd” never made the top 20. But that’s not important. That’s about timing and whether the “Crazy Frog” happens to be out that week. I’m in the top 10 right now …
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