From Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader Vol. 11, Spring 2016

By Richard Langston.

Shayne Carter—to use a term he likes to use himself—is a ‘dude’. He started writing songs when he was 15, sneered his way through punk, grazed the rock heights with Straitjacket Fits, and struck a new groove with Dimmer. He’s never stood still, he’s kept himself and his audience guessing. This summer two small but significant things happened in his life—he returned to live in his hometown of Dunedin after decades of living in Auckland, and he became the owner of his first pair of tramping boots. Oh, and he’s releasing his first album in seven years, a solo record, ‘Offsider’— piano songs based on a period of intense listening to classical music. He spoke to Richard Langston, but only after Shayne had delayed the interview for a few hours so he could indulge one of his other great passions—watching English football on telly…

Who’s your team?

Ah, look, sadly I’ve supported Manchester United since I was a kid, but I’m always really shamed out when I say that because they’re such a cliché team to support… plus I don’t like the fact they can go around and buy everyone’s best players as well.

Do you still play?

I do still play … I did until I came back down to Dunedin…for the Western Springs over-35s. I was a winger when I was younger, and now I’m sort of playing in the hole behind the striker. The plotter… (laughs). I love my football and I’m really glad that my parents took me down to play for Roslyn-Wakari when I was 5. I’ve got great joy from my football. It’s completely divorced from rock’n’roll. I enjoy the team thing, faith in other human beings, and through the years I’ve played with lots of unlikely Dunedin characters too. Played a lot with Graeme Downes (Verlaines), Bob Scott (Bats, Clean) is a really good football player, played quite a bit with Bob, Tex Houston (sound engineer) scored a couple of really good goals for Mornington football club way back in the day.

You’d be ripe to resume playing with those guys wouldn’t you?

Um, there are a few body issues going on these days (laughs). Personally speaking as long as my legs work … Yeah, I love it, it’s brilliant, and it’s a great sanity valve. The great moments on a football field I can remember just as acutely as any stadium rock moment, even though there would’ve been one man and his dog on the sidelines. I guess it’s like a really good jam as long as the band members are there or the team to witness it … it doesn’t really matter who else hears or sees it.

And you’ve got your first pair of tramping boots?

(Laughs). Are you going to publish all this shit man? What’s happened to my bohemian poetic self, sitting in the corner churning over the existential issues, man? You can’t have me on football fields and in tramping boots.

Course we can, it’s about your life… (Laughs)

Yeah, Barbara Ward bought me a pair of tramping boots. She’s a really keen tramper with her partner David (Parker). She shouted me a pair, good on you Barbara. I plan to use them. Look man, just being down in the South Island over summer, just being in all those places, I really felt the lure of the beautiful south. Mate, I don’t need to be fuckin’ walking up and down Ponsonby Road …

Was that a slow dawning thing that you realised … why am I living in Auckland?

To be honest my mother died and I really wanted to go home and be with my family. I guess it’s getting older and all that kind of stuff, man. I don’t need to be standing in a room full of people who are cool, whatever that means. I’ve been on this whole trip too, um, about all that kind of stuff, it’s just not important to me. Wider issues of existence are.

What impact has going back to Dunedin had on your memories?

Yeah look man, I do love nostalgia but I’m not a great nostalgist or living-in-the- past dude, what has been, has been. At the same time I like being around old friends and people who know where you’re from. I’ve got many friends down here who I’ve known since I was a kid. I guess that’s just your hometown right? You know why people are the way they are and you know where everything is. It’s where you come from and got a lot do to with the way you are.

You’ve been playing gigs with some of those musicians you grew up with… Robbie Yeats (Verlaines, Dead C) and Michael Morley (Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, The Weeds, Dead C)…

I love playing with those two dudes, mainly because they’re two really old friends and what I love about music is when you play with people it’s a form of communication. It’s a really special way to communicate with people, this non-verbal, frequently transcendent kind of way.

I suppose you’re known as more of a formalist—more structured …a verse chorus guy…and when you play with those guys there’s no written song to follow…

Look man, I’ve done so much jamming in my life but I’ve just never really done it in public. I’ve had my big classical music trip over the last few years and that’s been a really profound journey for me, just recognising the timelessness of art.

What did you learn about the way those classical composers worked, their work habits?

I love the fact Beethoven got up and counted the same number of coffee beans each day, I can relate to that level of obsession, that OCD-ness. Schubert would get up at daybreak and work through to one o’clock and then go out and carouse about town in all the bars with the loose women of Vienna.

If you’re a creative person who doesn’t have to go to a job, who has to have an internal discipline to do what they do, it’s all about self-motivation. What really impressed me about those great people is they work hard. Talent is only part of the story.

Do you have a pattern to your day, in terms of creating I mean?

Yeah, I’ve always worked hard. I’ve really got into working at dawn, sometimes even getting up and working in the middle of the night, periods where you’re not distracted. I love dawn as a time of day, it’s kind of like a clean slate, a pretty atmospheric magical time of day too…

That’s interesting, one of my favourite songs of yours is ‘Dawn’s Coming In’…is that any relation to the time it was written?

Ah, yeah, that’s kind of a double-barreled one where dawn could actually be the name of a character in the song or could also be a dawning realisation. I’ve always been a fan of ambiguity in my lyrics.

It’s got a brooding quality about it which suggests an ominous start to a day…

Ok, cool, that’s good to hear. That’s one of my favourite lyrics. What I like with my lyrics is to have simple language, which can have one or two or even three meanings. The record that I just did I actually made a commitment to doing that, simple words… little words have more than one meaning whereas big words usually have one specific meaning.

I noticed one of the rough mixes on the boosted campaign video (made to raise money so Shayne could record the album) ‘I Know Not Where I Stand’…the lyrics are stark and arresting…’You there stranger/ who I half recognise/ Where’d you put my name’. It’s called a song of misplaced identity….is that autobiographical or is it much broader than that?

It’s actually about my father being adopted and being a Māori guy who was adopted and not really being that aware of your whakapapa.

I’m curious about that element of you – being tangata whenua and growing up in Dunedin… how you must have felt different to your peers…there’s not a lot of Māori in Dunedin…

That’s true. It’s very white down here. The fact my father was adopted by Pākehā and bought up down here that totally made me feel like someone who’s straddled between two worlds. I don’t know how much I want to talk about it because it’s a personal thing…but it probably has added to my general outsider perspective sure…

It’s fundamental to who you are isn’t it?

Yeah, I don’t need any official sanction for who I am and what’s running through my veins cos I feel that anyway. My Māoridom bro, I do actually feel that in my veins. I just recognise so many parts of me that are that part of me. I love it—it makes me feel proud, it strengthens me as well.

Love my dad, he’s been gone for quite a while now, died quite young. Dad being a brown man in the South Island that was hard for him as well, and being brought up by Pākehā people. It’s the whole colonisation thing, when you get a whole different system imposed on you. His generation was the one where you weren’t supposed to speak the language. He grew up in the period when there was just complete suppression of his history. He was a left-hander as well, so he got his left hand slammed in the desk by the nuns too.

What do you have in your creative space? What are the things you need to hand?

It can be the guitar or Pro Tools sitting on my computer screen. It can be a guitar and pad and paper. You have to force yourself to go to the place where you work, and in ten minutes you’re away. You’ve sunk into your work and it’s all okay.

Generally what comes first? The tune or the words?

If I come across a good phrase or something I’ll jot it down but I don’t write whole lyrics. I’ll have little phrases and little lines that may occur to me which I’ll save for later use, but I pretty much always write the music first.

One lyric I’m curious about ‘Randolph’s Going Home’, that one seems so perfectly counted out, I wondered if that came before the music?

Ah, no. Musically I had the riff for that chorus that was from an old Sparkling Whine tune which was my second band after Bored Games. I’d had that riff sitting around for a few years. ‘Randolph…’ was just a very pure compelled creation, still one of the best songs I’ve written. It wrote itself real quick. I can remember the B-side ‘Hooked, Lined, and Sunken’. I knew we needed a B–side so I wrote that literally before we walked into Chippendale House to record it. The whole record was a kind of an ‘on fire’ record.

Obviously that was about a very traumatic event (the death of his friend and Double Happys band mate, Wayne Elsey) and you’ve talked about your mother’s death being a factor in your return to Dunedin… I wonder if your mother’s death has had an impact on your song writing?

I haven’t written anything since then but yeah whenever you’re struggling with mortality, it’s a time of stocktaking right, also a big reminder what’s important to you—your people, and the people who’re going to be there at the nitty-gritty. I guess I’m old enough now where I’ve been around a lot of death. I feel quite philosophical about it, we’ve all got to do it, but at the same time it can also engender this weird positivity. Maybe it’s not weird; maybe it’s the answer to life, where you just have gratitude about being alive. To be honest, I’ve been in a very positive space.

I thought I’d never see in the same sentence…“Shayne Carter…piano album”…

(Laughs) It’s good to keep them on their toes isn’t it! Mate, I don’t want to be the dude playing the same songs when I was 18. As someone who’s written songs since they were 15 I just need to find new tangents on it. I realised the other day I haven’t put out a record since 2009 but it doesn’t worry me. For a few years around that time I thought I don’t actually want to write a record. I went and looked after Chris (Knox, after his stroke) for two years. It was almost like a holiday from myself cos having written songs for that length of time sometimes you do need that break.

At the same time I went off on my little nerdy trip where I bought these encyclopedias on classical music and swotted them in the privacy of my room for a year and a half. I found this whole block of art and music that’s going to keep me going for the rest of my life, I’m never going to get to the bottom of this shit. It’s a really magical and exciting discovery to make. It felt time to write again.

The pieces of the rough mixes you’ve posted, the vocals sound quite raw, they sound very much like Shayne Carter: they haven’t been tempered by the approach of piano….

That’s what I really wanted to do. I didn’t even want to put effects of them. The fact they could just sit there with no reverb and just sound really good.

As you say, 2009 was the last time you put out an album… was there an element that you’d reached a stage — seven albums and various EPs and 45s — that you could sit back knowing you’d created a body of work, and that’s what any artist wants to do?

Totally. My modus operandi has always been I never play the old songs. Writing songs is hard, well mostly it is. They don’t just gather like shells along Brighton beach. As you get older you do become conscious of a body of work and what you’re going to leave to the world as opposed to just being caught up in writing your next record.

Does it give you satisfaction?

I’ve always been too restless to be satisfied, and I think being not satisfied is part of the reason you keep doing it. If I go back and think about records I think about the songs that suck, but maybe I’ve grown up a bit too in that I can recognise there’s some pearlers there as well. I’m confident I’ve always been able to do it live. That’s my domain, I’m a performer.

When you played a solo show in Wellington last year I remember you saying at the start of the show… “I’m really nervous about this…”

I’m always nervous, if you’re not nervous then you’re being complacent. I can remember back in the day some of the hardcore Flying Nun attitudes or old musicians back home saying going out and touring all that time can’t be good for your art, just playing like a jukebox machine. Bullshit. You actually get inside the material and you get to this level where you don’t actually have to remember how it goes, you’ve gone beyond that. If it’s a good tune you can keep discovering new aspects to it.

What did it mean to you when Straitjacket Fits were inducted into the NZ Music Hall of Fame in 2008… you’ve always been pretty critical of the industry?

I can remember saying in my speech, when I went along there, that it was ironic because when we were actually going we weren’t acknowledged by the industry at all. Radio never played our records. It was like a sweet victory after the fact. I know The Clean was approached to be in the Hall, and they weren’t interested. I can completely respect that, but it was like when the enemy had to acknowledge you, and I like that.

You talked before about swotting classical music for a year and half, did it take you long to write the album?

No, it didn’t take long to write the album, it’s taken me ages to record it, that’s because I’ve been left to my own devices, I’ve had no-one to stop me (laughs). There’s no template for this record, there’s no ‘this is bass, drums and guitar and this goes there’. I didn’t know what went where, so to work out how to put those songs together has been a real pain in the arse. But it would’ve taken me about 6 months to write all the songs and all the lyrics, quite an intense period of work.

It’s very brave — by your own account you couldn’t play the piano very well…

No, I couldn’t play it at all. I’ve told this story before, but it’s true. I bought a book called Piano for Beginners and the first thing was an exercise to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, using all your fingers. I couldn’t actually do it and it would’ve been great to catch this on camera—the moment I picked up the book and threw it to the other side of the room (laughs). How tragic is that? And I’m going to write an album! It’s certainly been a challenge. I still can’t play piano and now I’ve got to go out and play it live. I can play the tunes that I’ve written and I just sat there until I could. It took me hours and hours and hours cos my fingers just didn’t work in that way.

You’ve always created and played by instinct haven’t you?

Yeah, I have no idea what the notes are, what the chords are, but I kind of like minimalism anyway. I knew that I had the chops elsewhere, whether it was my songwriting chops or my singing chops, to make it work. I like the idea of having a limited palette. I’ve used the guitar on the album more as texture. It’s essentially piano and drums and vocals and songs, and just working out what went between—guitar, bass and strings. I wanted to keep it un-busy.

The influence was Schubert’s lieder songs, which are three or four minute tunes. He’d take poems of the day and set them to music. It meant he didn’t have to worry about lyrics. I wanted a poetic vibe to the lyrics too. I went through a huge poetry phase as well, I’d never read a lot of poetry before doing this record… I needed to see good words. Steve Braunias who’s a mate gave me a mother lode of poetry to read. 

I think I had an ignorant prejudice against poetry in the same way that people are prejudiced against opera, and they think it’s this exalted and self-important form. It’s not actually, it’s dealing with the nitty-gritty. Opera’s like that, the great operas, man, they spend heaps of time swilling around in the dirt; the same with poetry—it’s all human experience.

The title of your album is ‘Offsider’…

Yeah. I’m off out of my normal context, it’s out of step. I was also really interested in this Schubert song called ‘Der Doppelgänger’. It’s a great story, this dude goes around and looks up at the light in the window where his lover used to live and he still obsessively goes to that house and looks at it. One night he goes around there, and he sees this figure on the street, it turns to him, and it’s himself, and it’s so ghostly and he says, “Why do you do this to yourself ?”

It’s an amazing tune, Schubert’s best tune. I love the vibe of someone haunting themselves. I love the level of obsession. When you’re talking about that song ‘I know Not Where I Stand’… and a line like ‘You there stranger / who I half recognise/ where’d you put my name?’—that’s in that kind of Der Doppelgänger vibe.

You’re playing solo shows, playing with various people, are you also writing songs again?

No, I’ve just been getting all the pieces together to get this record out. I’ve always done different things. I like the fact I’ve been a backing vocalist on a Bic Runga album, and I’m doing improv with two members of the Dead C. It’s all music, I really enjoy different corners and pockets of it. But I really want to write some songs on my guitar cos I’m over being a dude who’s mystified by the instrument that’s he’s playing! (laughs).