By Richard Langston

As published in Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader Vol. 15, Spring 2017 

Peter Jefferies released his last solo album 16 years ago. After more than two decades in Nocturnal Projections, This Kind of Punishment, and as a solo artist he was finished with music. He gave his piano away, and threw his drums into a skip. He became a music teacher in New Plymouth. But his fans—one fan in particular—would not let him forget he’d made some of the most memorable anad singular music committed to tape in this country. And international indie labels wanted to re-release his records. Richard Langston spoke to Peter about his unlikely renaissance, about some of his most affecting songs, starting with the song that many regard as his finest moment…

Apologies Peter for starting with a song you wrote 30 years ago, ‘Unknown Beach’… but I think of that line, ‘I’m a pale intruder on an unknown beach’, and I think that‘s a pretty good one-line autobiography…

(Laughs). Yeah, okay, fair enough (laughs). Maybe, I dunno. It is self-descriptive, I am talking about me and I was a pale intruder and it was, well I bent the rules slightly, it wasn’t exactly an unknown beach, I knew where I was, but I hadn’t been there before.

It’s an evocative line…and says something about you as an outsider in New Zealand…

Yeah, there’s definitely a bit of that. The song started out more alienated than it finished up. There were half a dozen lines I changed and that changed the nature of the song. I wrote it on Otaki Beach on the way down to Dunedin in 1985 with my girlfriend at the time, Jenny Brooks. Jenny’s sister Mandy was living in a bach on the beach and we arrived from Auckland and it was like that first walk out on the beach. The sun hadn’t gone down but it was nearing the end of the day. We all walked out. I just kinda stood on the beach and had this experience (laughs).

One of the more obvious lines of alienation is, ‘My back to the water/ my feet in the sand’…. This is not a sunny surfing kind of beach song…

No, it’s not. I’m there in a long black coat (laughs). I didn’t take my surfboard.

It sounds like the kind of song John Cale might write if he went to the beach…

That’s a nice thing to say because I’m a big fan of John Cale. The show in Auckland in 1983 at The Gluepot with Tall Dwarfs opening, man that was life changing. It had never occurred to me that, I mean it was at The Gluepot, it was a booze barn, and here’s this guy playing an electric piano and singing not over in the corner like a jazz club or something, he’s the centre of your attention. He’s absolutely riveting—the best concert I’ve ever seen, and Tall Dwarfs opening was perfect, because it was the best show I’ve seen Chris and Alec do. If John Cale hadn’t been brilliant, they’d have upstaged him.

My number one album that influenced me is White Light White Heat, by the Velvet Underground. That changed my idea about sound and when punk rock came along two or three years later in 1977—the first three Sex Pistols singles—which made everything else sound a bit passé—except for White Light White Heat which sounded exactly the same and the Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett which didn’t alter either. Those first two Velvets albums, they were my Beatles.

If you listen to a Peter Jefferies record you get dissonance, you get bone-rattling insistent rhythm on the piano, then you get a moment of release, sometimes pastoral splendour, release from all the tension…

Thank you, I’m glad you acknowledge those songs in the mix ‘cos every now and again I have people say, ‘Aw, your stuff ’s a downer or depressing’, but I think there’s definite moments of release.

Moments of beauty as in ‘Coming Home With You’ on your last album Closed Circuit…

Yeah ‘Coming Home With You’ that’s kind of the other one that I think’s real special, I like that.

There’s five or six songs I can think of like that, but if I want to introduce someone to your music I play them ‘Unknown Beach’…

Yeah, thanks, that’s probably the one I’d pick too. That, or ‘Fate of the Human Carbine’.

‘Unknown Beach’ is such a cinematic song; it’s got reality and dreamscape…

It has.

I think of the line ‘There’s a man on the beach with a white parakeet trying to make his bird go home’…

That actually happened. Parts of the song are dreamscape, the bit about ‘The cranes through the car park’, that’s dreamscape. But the bit about the cockatoo really happened. There was a guy walking his parakeet on a leash along the shoreline, and it didn’t want to go home. I was told that his wife had died a month before and he didn’t come out of the house much, but the one thing he did do was walk the bird. The reality of the moment was probably more profound than the line for me.

There’s a sense of loss in the way you sing the word ‘home’…

Oh, thank you. You like the singing?

It’s perfectly expressed…

Did you see Roger Shepherd’s comments about my singing in his book? He doesn’t like my singing. I can be ‘mannered and monotonous’. Doesn’t cut it with The Rog (laughs). I’ve never had anyone pick on the singing on that album. People have talked about the piano being a bit off-key and a bit wobbly. It was as in tune as we could get it at the end of winter in a Port Chalmers mansion with not lots of heating around the piano. I actually think it’s got my best-ever piano sound. The bit I really notice, if people want to be really exact, the title track the opening three notes, one of those three notes goes ‘boi-inggg’ really badly (laughs), and I tried so many times, I knew it was happening. I must have tried 20 times to get it as good as that. There you go!

I had a chat recently with Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens and in the course of the interview he said to me that he regarded ‘Pink Frost’ as our national anthem…

That’s not a bad call, is it.

And I think of ‘Unknown Beach’ in that sense too, as a song that evokes where we live, a song that seems to grow out of the landscape.

Oh mate, thank you. My wife Steph really likes that one, she thinks it’s my best one. The landscape in New Zealand makes a difference. Part of me would like to go and live somewhere with more landscape than little old New Plymouth. You feel the landscape a lot more if you’re out on the road, especially if you’re by yourself.

Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote an essay on NZ rock called ‘Nothing’s Going to Happen’ on his blog, The Rest is Noise, back in 1995. He regards the song ‘Nothing’s Going to Happen’ as the NZ rock anthem…

So do I. I don’t know what my favourite NZ song is because there’s so many of them, but if you want to know the most important ones, they’re ‘Three Songs’ by the Tall Dwarfs. When Chris and Alex put that out, they flipped the whole thing on its ear: you can do it like this, and you can put it on vinyl. The defining moment in NZ indie music was the release of that record.

Alex Ross says that song’s thrived because it had ‘no expectation or need of international fame’…is that something you relate to?

Yeah. From the first This Kind of Punishment record, there was no expectation, none. Chris Knox basically talked Roger Shepherd into putting out TKP number one. Chris Knox is our Andy Warhol. He shone a light on so many people. You take Chris and Doug out of the equation and the whole thing looks a lot different. I was really lucky. Gordon Rutherford, the Nocturnal’s drummer, bought a 4-track inspired by Chris. My idea for the first TKP album was to just make it and press a 100, and give them away or try and sell them at shows. It was Chris who said no, Flying Nun will put this out. What?? And they did, actually went through three pressings, can you believe that? Actually sold more of TKP 1 than any other TKP record by quite a few.

That record hooked me in, but the one that got into my DNA is Beard of Bees…

The first one was kinda like figuring out what we were doing. Beard of Bees was the first thing that we’d done that I thought hung together, and I liked the whole album. It went up another level.

Is it going to get re-issued? It changes hands for hundreds on Discogs…

Yes it is, later this year.

The album you made in 1987 with Jono Lonie, At Swim 2 Birds, has been re-released by Flying Nun…

I was very pleased with that, I thought they got a great pressing. The new American one is better than the initial one made in Australia, far better, well pleased.

Maybe I’m influenced by where it was recorded, but the album conjures a calm day on the Otago Harbour, that landscape, very still…

Yes, that’s exactly what it was, good weather the whole time we made it. I was out at Jono’s place for a couple of weeks.

Listening to it I see a silver-grey day and a mirror-calm harbour…

Yeah, that’s the one. I find it quite a peaceful record. It’s not easy listening, but there’s a calming aspect to it. The sounds Jono’s able to add make a big difference. A piece like ‘Aerial’, the guitar playing he does is gorgeous. As a colour it would be gold.

And ‘Piano (one)’ and ‘Piano (two)’ are the moments of release…

Yes, I’m quite chuffed with those.

Placing that album between your TKP work and your solo work…you can see the shift…the change

It’s a pretty big shift. If you look at the first TKP records and compare them to the three Nocturnal’s studio records, there’s a big difference: there’s loads more piano and then halfway through, TKP get more rowdy, ‘Five by Four’ and ‘In the Same Room’, and there’s a lot of singing on ‘In The Same Room’, and then suddenly there’s none at all, and it’s an instrumental record and I don’t sing at all—so yeah, that’s a shift.

In terms of structuring a lyric, the master who’s influenced me more than anybody… [is] Colin Newman [from Wire]. The big influence on Beard of Bees was 154. We’d read somewhere they’d written all the music first and the lyrics had to be fitted around it. Four songs for Beard of Bees—‘Trepidation’, ‘Although They Appear’, ‘Turning to Stone’, and ‘Open Denial’—had their music written and the lyrics had to be fitted.

The big influence on 2 Birds is Newman’s Singing Fish. He makes an album where his biggest assets, his words and his voice, he doesn’t use them, he makes an instrumental record. I was just blown away by that. A to Z in 1981-82 was a period in my life where I thought that was the best record ever made.

You can plot your musical course: if the Nocturnals is first base and TKP is second base, At Swim 2 Birds is third base on the way to your first solo record…

Yeah, I’d say so. You make it sound like an understandable journey, which I like the idea of. The part that’s amazing to me is the interest in it.

The ‘Radio Silence’/’Reaching an End’ 45 has also come out this year, 32 years after it was recorded. What that says is the work you’ve done yourself and with others is valued…

It was lovely to have ‘Radio Silence’ come out. To me the holy trinity of Chris Matthews’ songs are ‘Washed Away’, ‘Sleepwalker’ and ‘Radio Silence’. He’s done a lot of great work but my three bedrock immovable favourites are those songs. I can rest easy now; it’s out.

The label that released it is Superior Viaduct, they did Electricity [Peter’s second solo album] as well. Great label, they did The Fall, all those early reissues. Electricity is one of the best re-issues I’ve ever been given. They went all out, the lyrics are all there, its gatefold sleeve, and the inner sleeves are printed blue.

Which brings us to the song ‘Electricity’ which seems to be as much about the power cut that inspired it, and the voltage of creation, the way you write…

Absolutely right. The second verse is all about that.

Those lines …‘Sometimes it makes me write down words before I know what they’re about…’ and, ‘Sometimes it makes me black out,’…

Yeah, it does sometimes. Chris Knox said an epileptic fit is not unlike songwriting: sometimes it’s a fit, sometimes it’s a song. The songs come to me; I receive them. Virtually all the songwriters I like say the same thing. You are a radio receiver, and the songs come out on your own special band, the songs that are meant for you. You hear them and you write them.

Is that the music or the words?

It changes. A song like ‘Don’t Look Down’ on Electricity came through so fast; it was written in about ten minutes. I’m sitting at the piano, pretty much playing it and singing it before I’d even heard it. It happened almost simultaneously, it was unbelievable. ‘Electricity’ wasn’t much different, I got virtually all of it in one rush with the power off, and had to find a pen and paper and scribble it all down frantically.

Another song that says quite a lot about you, or my perception of you, is ‘Age for the Innocent’…I think of the political landscape now…

It’s weathered well. And I actually reckon ‘Domesticia’ has too.

‘Age for the Innocent’ seems like a foolproof protest song…

(Laughs). It’s not an age for the innocent, increasingly so. There are some people who are a lot less innocent, and it seems to me what the more innocent folk are doing is getting increasingly scrutinised and clamped down on and pushed into small boxes, and what the people at the other end are doing is getting alarmingly close to fascism. Ever since Bush brought in the freakin’ Patriot Act, it’s just been alarming. John Lennon’s quote about the world being run by insane people for maniacal reasons—man, he had his finger on the pulse.

The last song you wrote was ‘State of the Nation’ off Closed Circuit released in 2001…

It’s my favourite on that record, and part of why is that if you shut the book now you’re all right mate. There’s some things I like more than others, but none of it is without some sort of integrity. I was able to close the door on it feeling like I’d completed something.

And then Amanda Palmer, your über-fan from the Dresden Dolls in the United States, prises open the door…

She kept trying to get hold me of me, and one day I just thought, stop being so ‘eerr…’ Jefferies. She’d listened to one of my albums—Electricity—felt it enough to list it as one of her ten best albums ever in Rolling Stone. The Dresden Dolls were touring here, and I rang her. She booked a car and came up to meet me. We sat here at my house and it was really something to have someone who was far better known than me accord me that kind of respect. I was amazed. She said we’ve got to do a show. So we rang Vinyl Countdown and said, “Can we play in your shop tomorrow?” (laughs). Forty or so people came to it. She bashed out a few songs on ukulele, and I bashed out a few of mine on guitar and worked out half a dozen songs that we could play together. It was the first time I’d played in ten years, apart from playing for special-needs kids down at Spotswood College.

Then Mike Wolf got hold of me, and said the label De Stijl would love to do a thousand vinyl of Last Great Challenge, and even then it took me a week to make up my mind to do it. Pitchfork made it re-issue of the week, and away I went. Everything’s just happened from there; stuff keeps coming out, people seem to be interested.

I’ve done a few gigs to go with the reissues, and done 3 or 4 new songs. There’s been a nice offer to put out some sort of compilation from the ‘Crossover’ single with Stephen Kilroy to where we are now, including the four songs that haven’t come out. I still work on writing songs regularly with students at school [at Spotswood College in New Plymouth], and that’s where my real interest is.

It’s odd how some musicians and songwriters get overlooked…I always think of you and Bill Direen in that sense…as two of the most overlooked in the last 30 years or so…

Bill Direen is overlooked, damn right. Beatin’ Hearts is a masterpiece, impeccable, just a perfect album. Of all the work he’s done, that’s a ten out of ten. There’s a couple of others scrapping it out for my favourite all-time albums: the first Dimmer album is pretty high on the list. But if you think I’m in the same league as

Bill Direen, then I’m well pleased. I really respect him.

There’s going to be a book about you…by the terrific researcher and writer Andrew Schmidt…

He’s pretty much heard everything I’ve done, a remarkable human being (laughs). He’s been working on it for 2 or 3 years, done a lot of interviews. He’s a meticulous researcher so it’s going to be the real deal. I like stories about songs and I’m hoping we can get a fair bit of that into his book.

Thank you Peter, it’s been a pleasure.