SPECIAL FEELING
Andrew Glen (or Giff) Richards and I had become good mates throughout the season, all stemming from a conversation following a game that wasn’t. The referee hadn’t turned up for the June 6th match against Marist St Pats at Cobham Park and we were struggling to get a team on the park in any case. It was called off and we headed straight for the nearby Greta Point Tavern.
The Greta Point in Evans Bay first appeared in the early 1980's, when the Steamship Wharf, originally built in the late 1800's, was converted into bars and a restaurant. The Union Steamship Company had used the wharf as a marine warehouse and laundry. It was historically significant, as it was one of the few surviving examples of 19th century marine industrial warehouses fronting onto the harbour. Facing demolition, the historic building was moved into central Wellington in 2005.
Andrew and I discussed all things musical over a pint of ale and upon discovering that we both had a bend for original music (and both owned guitars), the idea was mooted to have a jam together at some point and see what transpired.
The following day, AK was going to recite from his new book of poetry, at the Wellington Railway Station and Andrew and I went along with a few other “Mixed Veges” to support our captain. Afterward, Andrew came up to my flat in Roseneath and we continued our discussion and played a few albums, mainly Australasian. A guitar may have come out, I can’t recall, but we did agree that we should continue as we both believed there was potential and kinship.
A month or so later after another Sunday afternoon visit, we had our first original entitled “Strangers”, my words, Andrews musical arrangement. A Saturday afternoon jam was quickly arranged, the venue St. Anne’s Hall in Northland. I was on drums, AK bass, Andrew and Brett on guitars. John Campbell turned up and played some harmonica and Stu Beadle came along to see if there was anyway he could make money from managing a “Mixed Veges” rock band.
The answer was an emphatic no. The jam disintegrated into chaos, with absolutely no central core or focus at all. Undeterred, Andrew and I continued on by ourselves. He had a song he was working on called “Fiji Bitter”, written about a mate of his from that country, who had died as the result of an accident. I had “Yesterdays’ Heroes” and “Resolution Street”, title supplied by Justin Harwood, who at the time had just joined Martin Phillips Chills.
(Left) The inaugural jam at St. Anne's Hall, Northland. John Campbell (harmonica), Andrew on drums, myself on bass, Brett Bailey guitar. (Right) PoetryCorp poster for Bats Theatre in Courtenay Place (as it was then). AK at right, beside him celebrated kiwi poet, Aprirana Taylor.
I think my initial intention was for both Andrew and I to play guitars, but as he was clearly light years ahead of me - and I still owned a drum kit - I decided that would do for now to keep the momentum going. We really needed a singer though, first and foremost. We could build the rest around that, but we had tunes and lyrics so a singer was most desirable while everything else was being worked out.
Bugger me. Out of literally the woodwork came my old mate John Oxley Kitching. John and I had known each other since we were little kids, in fact, his parents were my godparents. We had always talked about trying to get a band happening. He was a devout Rolling Stones fan and adored the musical underground, drawn toward the dark, danger and depravity.
He possessed the necessary swagger to be a great frontman and there was no doubt that he could sing, but life for him was a little bit of an anachronism in that the 1970’s were long passed. But he was good looking, positive, looked the part and a had a big heart for rock n’ roll.
Andrew had another wordless composition in hand, that sounded very kiwi. Light and airy, yet driven by a dance beat (following a long introduction), we loved the sound of it. I quickly modified some lyrics that John had penned and the song became “Lady So Blue”, his personal ode to adult life spent with his transgender friends and the whole drug and sex culture of Vivian Street.
We had a few jams and even recorded one of them, with Andrew and I playing in the living room and John strutting around in the hallway. “Lady So Blue, “Strangers, and “Resolution Street” made it onto tape and for an ordinary cassette tape home recording, it sounded promising.
Andrew spent three months in Singapore in early 1988, but said he’d get hold of me when he got back and we’d pick up the reins, if there was still interest. John and I wrote a couple more average songs and then he too announced that he was off again, he was restless and going to try his luck in Sydney.
There he met a Japanese woman, Setsuko, and in 1989 they married and lived in Ibaraki Ken, which borders the Pacific Ocean, northeast of Tokyo. He worked for the family as a landscape gardener. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out for him and when it all fell apart a decade later, he returned to Wellington and lived with his parents in Miramar.
John suffered a heart attack and died in 2010, aged 52. I felt it deeply.
John Oxley 'The Ox' Kitching, 1958-2010
Photographed in Sydney, 1988
The spare upstairs bedroom at 72 Salamanca Road in Kelburn.Andrew at top and myself at bottom were joined by Simon Dibble from Tauranga, on keys and vocals.
Andrew duly returned from Malaysia and kept his promise to contact me. “Fiji Bitter” had been completed and he had a couple of new ideas, one which we turned into “Closer Than My Dreams”. By this stage I was living in a house at 72 Salamanca Road, Kelburn, with Sindy, Jonathan and a young Victoria University architect student from Tauranga, Brendan Gordon.
There was a spare bedroom upstairs, so (until we got the garage sorted to practice in) we moved all our collective band gear in there and started auditioning singers. We had placed advertisements in the windows of all local musical retailers, the first to reply was a Polynesian lady called Nazarene, who had done some singing with Tina Cross. Man did she have some pipes on her! She ripped into “Fiji Bitter” like she owned it and did a pretty good job on “Closer Than My Dreams” also.
A guy I worked with at the Press Bureau, Paul Stocks, had a crack. He looked fantastic, a little like Morrissey with glasses. He was into The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Cocteau Twins and appeared to have all that we were looking for in a front man. Trouble was, unlike Nazarene, he couldn’t sing. And although Nazarene was superb, we didn’t want to go down that Holidaymakers, Ardijah kind of route.
Brendan suggested a friend of his from Tauranga, who had also moved to Wellington that year to attend Victoria University and was studying musical composition. Simon Noel Dibble was a month shy of his eighteenth birthday, when he turned up one Sunday, keyboards under his arm and said that his friend had mentioned to him that a couple of guys were trying to put a band together.
He sat and listened as Andrew and I ran through our repertoire, shyly adding the odd keyboard part and suggesting a few minor changes here and there. Half an hour or so had passed before he announced; “I’ve got a couple of songs here you might be into?”
The first was a song called “Special Feeling”, which although he had written to be played by a band, he had only previously busked it and then on guitar. But the song definitely had something and had Andrew and I looking both excited and a little nervous. This kid was good.
Whereas “Special Feeling” was emotive and driven by the Am chord, giving it edge and feeling, his other, “Love on a Ledge”, was pure, tongue in cheek, witty pop in the happy key of G. They were the perfect foil for each other. In the space of a couple of hours we had a new member, new songs and a new direction.
As a trio, we spent the next few weeks rehearsing what we had and decided that we’d pretty quickly get some recording happening and subsequently booked time at the University’s Radio Active studios.
“Special Feeling”, “Love on a Ledge” and “Lady So Blue” were the trio selected from our small pile of originals and on August 24th, engineered by Mal McDonald (of Emulsifier fame and now residing in the UK), we spent seven and a half hours recording them on an 8-track desk.
On all three songs Simon handled the lead vocal, Andrew played bass, with myself drumming. Simon played guitar on his two compositions and Andrew on “Lady So Blue”. Andrew played keyboards on both of Simons songs and Simon played that instrument on “Lady So Blue. Andrew added a lead guitar break to “Special Feeling”.
Five nights later, two and a half hours were spent mixing and we walked out of the studio with our first demo recordings. Accomplished on the instrument in his own right, Andrew had played bass on the recordings, but the search began instantly for someone who could play it live so we could start gigging.
By chance, a few days later, I bumped into Shirley Jones in Cuba Mall. I had known her for a year or two, the kid sister of Janice whom I had worked with at an art supply shop in Dixon Street. When Shirley was at Wellington High School, she used to come into the shop after school and hang out. I always admired her passion for music and was aware that she had some natural ability as a bass player. She had left secondary school and was well keen when I offered her the job of playing bass in a fledgling pop/rock band.
Meanwhile, just a block or so away, sister Janice was now working for John Dix, who after some Herculean effort, was very soon to release a book called “Stranded in Paradise”, which would become the definative bible of New Zealand rock n’ roll.
Hurriedly needing a name, I came up with Foot High Garden, which directly or indirectly comes from Lewis Carroll’s book, “Alice in Wonderland”. Befitting the name (which we agreed to keep until a better option was presented), we arranged to be photographed in Wellington’s Botanical Gardens, as fortuitously, it was September and most of the 40,000 Tulips were out and looking resplendent.
​
​
​
On September 22nd, the band were interviewed on Radio Active to promote the recording, the DJ responsible none other than our fellow “Mixed Vege”, John Campbell. Considered the slickest of the songs as recorded, “Special Feeling” was put onto cartridge tape and onto the Radio Active’s rotation playlist, receiving some decent airplay.
Foot High Garden played their debut gig at the home of Andrew’s mate (and another “Mixed Vege”), Geoff Lahood, on October 1st at 5 Arawini Street, Waikanae. Andrew made the official announcement via the party’s photocopied invitation; “At great expense, all the way from Kelburn, Wellington, NZ, Foot High Garden will be playing their debut performance, voted ‘Most Promising Band’ recently by Wellington’s Noise Control Officers.”
The as yet nameless band and Mal McDonald record "Special Feeling", "Love on a Ledge" and "Lady So Blue" at Victoria University's Radio Active Studio, August 1988.
Our photo from the Gardens appeared in the Karori & Western Suburbs News, November 15th edition, under the headline; “Foot High Garden up to their waists in tulips.” The article mentioned that we were finalising plans for a ‘Top of the South’ tour over Christmas/New Year and that we hoped to record an album the following year.
The same week we had headlined the Parkway College Social in Wainuiomata and played a second gig at Geoff’s place in Waikanae. Shirley leaned on Janice who in turn leaned on John and on page 358 of his wonderful new book, we received a mention; “Everybody’s got a tale to tell. From Hercules, a Dannevirke band of the mid-‘70s, to Foot High Garden, a Wellington group formed in 1988. From Waikato’s long-serving rock n’ roll pioneers, The Satellites, to Ugly Noize, Hawkes Bay’s first punk band in 1978.”
New songs came thick and fast. From Simon “Do You Remember?”, “A Different World” and “Falling Off the Edge”. Andrew had “The Beach”, “Joe Adolescent”, “Pictures”, “Dreams of Children” and three wordless tunes, which once I had added lyrics became “Concrete Jungle Fate”, “A Winter Song” and “Yesterday”. The three of us had co-composed one of the better ones, “It’s in Your Eyes.”
(Left) Foot High Garden rehearsing in the Hunter Building at Victoria University and (Right) setting up at the Globe Hotel in Takaka for a gig on January 2nd, 1989, as part of a 'Top of the South' tour undertaken over the New year period.
We did in fact, as mentioned, organise a quick tour of the top of the South Island, well Golden Bay to be exact. Accomodation was provided by my mother who owned a motel block in Pohara and it was there we set up base camp for the first two gigs. Pohara Hall on December 28th and Pohara Beach on New Years Eve.
The tour entourage also included my partner, Yvonne and our road crew of Adam Gatley and Stu Downer. We flew from Wellington to Motueka and then bused over the Marble Mountain to the Bay. In Pohara, the locals called us the “Head High Tackles”, but never were there more obliging and hospitable people, who laid everything on for us. One BBQ aside, where absolutely no one would talk to us. We completed our mini tour on January 2nd, with a gig at the Globe Hotel, down Waitapu Wharf Road.
Upon returning to Wellington, several quantum acts would dominate the landscape. Firstly, Shirley was out. This was pretty much an Andrew decision, I stayed right out of it. I did quickly decide that I would move to bass guitar though and the vacated drum seat was taken up by Adam.
But that was just the first act of 1989, which would turn out to be quite some year.
(Left) A philosophical discussion over a bottle of Mescal in the lounge at Salamanca Road, Gats in foreground, Andrew, myself, Simon and Stu Downer. (Right) The new line up photographed (probably by Yvonne) at the Claire de Lune Fountain at Kelburn Park, January 1989.
The fountain at Kelburn Park, with its spectacular multi-coloured light show, overlooks central Wellington and has been a much-loved feature of the city skyline for generations of Wellingtonians. Its history goes back over 70 years, the pump and motor originally featured at the 1940 Centennial Exhibition and the fountain itself was built shortly afterwards.
Kelburn Park is located between Salamanca Road and the urban motorway. It is a remnant of the original Town Belt that ran from the Botanic Garden to Aro Valley, with walking links between Kelburn, Victoria University and the central business district. The City to Sea walkway passes through the park and the famous Wellington Cable Car passes across its north corner.
A favourite watering hole of mine, Simon and Giff's was the old Bond Street Inn at #20 Bond Street, between Victoria and Willis Streets. It was always a popular student hang out as the beer was cheap (only bettered by $2 jug nights at the Southern Cross).
Before the pub was built in the early 1980's, the site was the location of the original Wellington Motorcycle Centre shop, which is now beside the Embassy Theatre on Kent Terrace. The Bond Street Inn is currently called the Fork & Brewer.
'Scribblers' on the corner of Willis and Boulcott Streets was also popular.
More often than not, Andrew, Simon and I (and Frederick) could be found pissing it up at the Bond Street Inn. The gesture is indicative of a long evening had by all.