Feature
Linn of Paua
by Diana Wichtel
Linn Lorkin’s “singing, dancing redhead blast” comes to a town near you.
Linn Lorkin -– pianist, actress, songbird, once, briefly, a jailbird – is quite subdued in person. “I’m actually very shy. I’m one of those artists if someone rejects me over the phone I’ll go, ‘Oh, okay, that’s all right, sorry to have bothered you.’”
But when she opens her mouth to sing, she accelerates from diffident to diva in a beat. We’re barely in the door of the creative, rented Grey Lynn chaos Lorkin calls home before she’s giving us the reflex razzle dazzle:
“This is the Kiwiana Linn Lorkin Show
Two happy hours from go to whoa
With Auntie Betty, Cousin Bill, Marmite sandwiches and cordial …
It’s a singing, dancing redhead blast
White hot piano, all-star cast …”
It may be just a reporter across a dining-room table, but an audience is an audience. The performance is delivered like a welcoming present. Or, perhaps, an offering to the gods of pre-tour publicity. Lorkin has a CD to flog. The above ditty is its freshly minted theme for the accom-panying Kiwiana show, playing small-town New Zealand from this month. All-star cast: Lorkin, Kiwiana co-producer Anna Rugis and Lorkin’s long-time partner in life and art, Herschel Herscher.
Lorkin and Herscher have done everything from French cabaret to neo-Pacific show band to producing records under their Rouge label. Most improbably for a girl from Tokoroa, Lorkin stars with Herscher in the Jews Brothers Band, a high-voltage, Klezmerish happening playing a festival, wedding or bar mitzvah near you. Go to their website to hear samples of such foot-stompers as “Dunkin’ Bagels”. And to read critics’ kamikaze attempts to describe the band’s vibe: “Stratospheric levels of talent and borderline insanity … It’s like Mum on acid.”
That description will serve for Lorkin, too. She is a mum, to computer programmer Joseph Herscher. “He’s good at art and music but he wanted to be able to earn money. Because if you grow up with artists or musicians …”
She’s also, when she gets going, a start-ling mix of Kiwi reticence, New York chutzpah, Gallic sophistication (MA in French) and bare-faced, indigenous kitsch. The cover of Kiwiana, designed by Joseph, features Lorkin in paua, with a head-dress seemingly made of pine-apple chunks. Carmen Miranda meets Watties. Disappointingly, it turns out to be kowhai.
There’s an occasional tinge of Europe – “Fun-tastic!” – in her vowels. But her lyrics are unashamedly local. “It’s got dairies,” go the lyrics to “K Road”, “and a cemetery”. You have to be fearless to rhyme “smart, eh” with “cafe latte”.
The result is charmingly naive, in an ironic sort of way. “Oh, thank you for recognising that!” shrieks Lorkin. Not every-one gets the joke. Although she’s been hailed as a national treasure, some see her as cultural cringe. “There’s a reviewer in Christchurch who gave me one and a half stars,” fumes Lorkin. “The plastic paua strip along the CD case says it all,” he apparently wrote. Lorkin soon put him straight. “I said it’s not plastic paua for a start. It’s sourced from Riverton and I put every piece on myself!”
So the real deal, then. Lorkin’s voice can range from seductive and a little roguish to a cry for help. Names like Blossom Dearie and Edith Piaf get used. She’s got a devoted following, especially since her fabulous 1986 song “Family at the Beach” – “with a stretcher for you and a Lilo for meeee” – struck a chord with anyone who ever had an Auntie Dorrie or an Uncle Roy. “You know it was voted the best Kiwi summer song on National Radio? I was absolutely amazed.”
There is a downside. “I must have done it 500 times. At the end of a big Jews Brothers gig, when we’ve just done ‘Hava Nagila’, 20 choruses and people dancing around, and it’s, ‘Oh, could you do “Family at the Beach”?’” She keeps herself interested by doing it different ways. “The other day I did a jazz version,” she says gamely. “No two are the same!”
Trawl through the clippings and you get a few different versions of Lorkin, too, from beret-wearing chanteuse to Pasifika princess. When she recorded “Family at the Beach”, she was Lyn Williamson. Herschel Herscher was always called Hershal. He’s going back to his non-stage name because he’s embarking on a book about, of all things, astronomy.
There are different versions, too, of the time Lorkin found herself banged up in an Italian jail. One story had it that she was mistaken for a prostitute. But no, she was caught with a tiny amount of hash. It was the 70s. She was 28. Her Italian boyfriend wanted some, she knew someone … “I was just so naive … My boyfriend had made friends with an undercover cop who started coming to our piano bar. One of those ghastly sets of circumstances.”
It didn’t help that she stood out somewhat in 70s Naples. “I had a natural red afro, I had my hot-pant outfits, because I’d been living in London, and matching boots.” Small boys made alarmed signs to ward off the evil eye at the sight of her.
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