Feature - Upfront
Chris Hocquard
by Matt Nippert
Mikey Havoc’s 95bFM breakfast show attracts a fair number of cheeky and deviant listeners, if calls to Chris Hocquard’s weekly Lawline segment are any indication. They ask the kinds of questions that would give most legal types fits, but Hocquard, an entertainment lawyer by trade, keeps his perspective.
What’s the most outrageous call you’ve taken? The funniest ones are always young kids from the Shore with attitudes and brains and cheekiness and fast cars and disrespect for authority. They’re usually complaining about the police, and usually you can understand why the police have biffed them – because they’re cheeky little shits – but it varies. The funniest was a young kid whose story started out so innocently: “I’ve been victimised.” It turns out that he’s just thrown a thundercracker into the boot of his stepfather’s brand-new BMW and set fire to the whole thing. But it started with: “My stepfather hit me, what can I do about it?”
What happens to the legal status of party pills when the government finally gets around to banning them? In theory, there will be a six-month transition period during which it will be illegal to buy them, but if you’ve got them you’re entitled to use them. And at the end of that period, if you’ve got any left, you’re supposed to flush them. Or you could see this as a stockpiling period, too. If I was a party-pill manufacturer, and I knew the law was about to change, I would be making sure I had a lot of stock on the market the week before – you wouldn’t want to run out, would you?
Are you planning to stockpile before the ban comes into force? They never really worked for me. I tried them and just got a blinding headache.
Will I get into legal trouble scalping Rod Stewart tickets? This is one of those great urban myths: there is no law against it. I personally don’t have a problem with ticket scalping. If you want to go to something badly enough, you can buy a ticket – although you might have to pay through the nose.
How did you get into entertainment law? Initially I was a “general practitioner” with a bent towards commercial property, but I went to the UK and arrived at the time that the property market crashed, so I became a child-abuse specialist. I was a prosecutor for specialist child-abuse teams in London off and on for four and a half years.
Sounds grim. Yeah, it was really grim. I completely understand social-worker burnout, and the one thing it taught me is that I don’t want to do that again. So I came back to New Zealand. I’ve always liked music and I’ve always liked people around the music industry, and it was logical: “I’ve got a law degree, I’m stuck with it, I don’t want to retrain, what can I do? Oh, I know, I’ll be an entertainment lawyer.”
Are the stereotypes of the industry – financially illiterate artists versus suit-clad corporate sharks – true? Yeah, pretty much. [Laughs] Not really, all of those things you’ve got to scale back and remember we’re in New Zealand with only four million people. The music industry model itself is an exploitation model. It’s based on taking creative endeavours and exploiting them. And most creatives aren’t well-equipped to survive this process.
Are the music companies well-equipped to survive the age of digital downloads? We have grown a generation of kids who aren’t particularly interested in paying for music. In a survey done not long ago they asked a range of teenagers, “What are you prepared to pay to download music?” And the answer was: “What do you mean, pay?” The recording industry, instead of embracing the technology, tried to fight it and that drove it underground, so they lost control. I’m not sure how they’re going to get it back.
So, kids using the internet are responsible for the drop in album sales? There was an enormous amount of fat in that for a long, long time, and people are just over it. The funny thing is, they’re still prepared to pay enormous amounts of money for games, and DVD prices are holding up. [Music companies] have a real problem – their PR needs to improve dramatically. Somehow the music industry has turned into ogres and no one really minds ripping them off.
