Murray was one of my very best friends for such a long time.
He died around five years ago. He had some kind of aneurysm at a traffic light in Melbourne. He was working delivering Heroin for one of the gangs. They didn’t offer health insurance as part of the plan.
I called Murray up in the hospital. He was semi-conscious but recognised me straight away even though we hadn’t talked for more than a decade.
He spoke in the soothing way he always did: “James…..”
He asked me if I knew when the nurses would be bringing him his Methadone.
It was touch and go.
His wife arrived from the middle east where she had been nursing within a couple of days. Murray pointed her in the direction of the Heroin in his flat.
She overdosed and died.
Murray died too.
Sadness, grief and loss is part of the daily diet of a drug addict, as is ecstasy and joy.
No one really knows what particular bundle will arrive and at what time. Nothing is secure.
Last week in the papers it was reported that a 61 year old psychiatrist was seeking to have a driving conviction pardoned after 40 years or so. He was a notable sort of bloke and had spent time motivating the All Blacks.
But the gig was that every time he travelled to the USA he had to have a “waiver of ineligibility” to enter and when he travelled to Australia he had to declare his conviction which, no doubt, held him up in the line.
“When I do right no one remembers, when I do wrong no one forgets.”
-Paparua Prison Tattoo.
When you have been painted black by part of the government apparatus then you stay black and life becomes difficult at the oddest of times.
The psychiatrist’s appeal for a pardon was not allowed.
We are living in the time of the Orange Jesus where if you have political ‘clout’ you can get away with anything. The old saying is true, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
I don’t expect to be pardoned for my sins. I have a waiver of ineligibility to enter the USA but everytime I go there I am referred to “Secondary” (a second interview) and I must wait sometimes hours to face a grim faced officer who is usually in a sour mood and who watches Clint Eastwood movies over and over in his downtime.
I always get the feeling that what the officer really wants is for me to lose my temper. I feel prodded and pushed and spoken down to. I feel taunted and harassed. It doesn’t matter how old my convictions are (my last one was more than thirty years ago) or how kind I’ve been, nor how successful I have been in business.
I am a bad guy. I don’t know Joe Biden nor Donald Trump. I am just a bad guy.
But I have people who love me even if the bureaucrats don’t. Junkies often love each other in a very deep way. They face common enemies. Sometimes they laugh and they cry together. Murray and I did that. We loved each other.
In light of the fact that The Little Street Art Festival is happening RIGHT NOW, we caught up with Reuben Woods, creative mastermind behind the festy to share some golden insight into the creative scene in Christchurch and just what makes The Little Street Art Festival so epic.
Dive right in.
So, we’re here to talk about the Little Street Art Festival, but for those of us who don’t know, why don’t you give us a bit of background about yourself?
I am the creative director of Watch This Space, we are an Ōtautahi-based urban arts trust – our mission is to champion and celebrate the impact of art on streets by connecting artists and audiences with opportunities to make and experience street art. Personally, I am also a writer and curator, specialising in urban art – in 2023 I curated SHIFT: Urban Art Takeover at Canterbury Museum, which was a once-in-a-lifetime experience!
And where does Little Street Art fit into that / Where did the idea come from?
I love large-scale murals and they have transformed the landscape in cities around the world, but they are also only one aspect of street art’s lineage – many artists add colour to the streets at smaller scales and using different approaches. The Little Street Art Festival is a way to platform those types of expressions – a great accompaniment to mural festivals. We see the Little Street Art Festival as an invitation to look closer, to see art in different ways and to explore how it can become an embedded part of our experience – providing whimsy, wonder, humour, subversion and lots more…
What’s the creative/arts scene feeling like in Christchurch at the moment?
I feel it is in a good place, there is a small community, which makes collaboration and cross-pollination easier. There also seems to be a lot of initiatives to build the infrastructure around the arts, recognising the wider ecosystem. From the urban art perspective, it is really positive – the Council have invested funding into a multi-year programme for street art, which we are lucky enough to be collaborating on with the Flare Ōtautahi Street Art Festival, this is a really massive gesture that acknowledges the impact street continues to have here…
What are you most excited about for this years festival?
I always love getting to talk with artists about their ideas and projects – the nature of this festival means it is more low-key logistically (no scissor lifts or traffic plans), so it really is about the art projects and how to engage the audience. We have Smeagol Doesart subverting the expectations of the historical Arts Centre with his sculptural pieces, Sofiya R is creating a beautiful zine and poster installation on one of the Phantom bollards – which is a perfect synthesis! We have a public comic book by Jay ‘Daken’ Skelton, that unfolds as you follow its path along Manchester Street. Klaudia Bartos is creating some incredible sculptural pieces that will surprise people when they come face-to-face with them, and Razor Taser Laser is completing a series of paintings that playfully riff on our evolving use of language in the digital age. They each have their own unique qualities and I’m excited for them all!
What can the audience expect?
The unexpected! We pride the Little Street Art Festival on engaging with the audience in a variety of ways, including those who don’t know anything about it! We love the way it reminds people to take in your surrounding environment and to see it as a site of potential – to that end we also have walking tours, workshops and an artist panel, as well as a heap of giveaways that will encourage people to get out and about…
Lastly, the good people of Christchurch may have seen your posters dotted around the city, what is it about street posters that works as part of your marketing plan for Little Street?
I think the best thing about street posters is that they exist in the real world – they don’t exist in a digital vacuum – they are tactile and present in our urban landscape – which is the same as our installations – in both cases, we want people to get outside and explore! We really want to shout out the Phantom team for all the support – we see a fantastic kinship between our roots and Phantom’s!
Any final thoughts?
Follow us on socials @thelittlestreetartfestival (Insta and Meta) for more information – all our events and activations are free and accessible (some require bookings, so head to Humanitix) – we love seeing people get inspired, so join in!
Peter Jefferies life in music is the subject of a new biography, The Other Side of Reason, by post-punk historian and writer Andrew Schmidt. It was a book nearly a decade in the making for the pair who were both from small towns – Stratford and Paeroa – which gave them some common ground from the outset. Peter Jefferies spoke to Richard Langston.
Richard: Andrew describes you both as creative country boys from small North Island service towns who found a life in music and art that allowed you to step outside of yourselves…
Peter: Yeah, some of Andrew’s observations have been really interesting for me to read. It sounds weird to say it but in a way Andrew knows more about me that I do. It’s so accurately drawn that I’m interested in it, that’s why I’m glad it’s a biography cos the things I read most are biographies about musicians or artists or actors, basicially people who do creative shit. I like them more than autobiographies because there’s an overview. You’ve got to be really lucky for someone to be that interested in you, and also to have a good enough knowledge of what you do. Andrew’s got that. He wrote a big piece about me for AudioCulture. I love that he’s written the broader picture of the times, and all the stuff that is happening around me.
How did the idea of the book come about?
Mike Wolf from the De Stijl label in the USA had written a blurb to go with Last Great Challenge when they issued it (in 2013) and he said in that no one had written a book about me, and Andrew and I were joking about on Facebook or something, and he made some comment and I said well if you want a book about it, why don’t you write one, and he gets back to me about 10 minutes later and says all right I will. From that point on he took it seriously. The point at which I realised he was the right guy to write the book was when he said Closed Circuit was my best album. Only me and my mum thought that and I don’t think anyone else in the entire world thought that. That’s the best one, and if you want my trilogy it’s that and Electricity and Last Great Challenge.
Andrew’s a thorough researcher and he paints the picture of you growing up in Stratford, and there at primary school with you is Ross Hollands, later of Bird Nest Roys, and a fellow traveller that you meet very early on…
Yes, and I’m still friends with Ross now.
I love the fact that here you are in this small town and one of the first records you buy is the Velvet Underground’s White Light White heat for 99 cents at the Farmers Co-op…
Yeah, absolutely brilliant. They had those stand-up racks that revolve and you can stuff five or six records in each rack and they twirl round. We were in the agriculture section heading towards the bedding section and there was one of those racks and I went and had a look and there was this Velvet Underground record with blobby writing and loud colours, bright purple writing and the Coke bottle mouth on it. I thought it was a compilation; it took a while for me to realise what it was.
Then you were brave enough to put it on at parties…
Yeah (laughs). As it says in the book, you might get through side one if you put it on at the right time. I’d hardly ever make my favourite moment, the second guitar break on “I Heard Her Call My Name’ cos it was normally taken off by the first one y’know. People are saying put on ‘Dreams’ By Fleetwood Mac (laughs).
And your last act at Stratford High School is to play a cover of the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ in the school band…
I only went back to school for my last year because my art teacher, Roger Taberner, was so cool. That year changed me life; he literally taught me how to think. I learned how to make something from nothing, and once you could do it it didn’t matter whether it was music or art or whatever. He knew I was going to pass, not because I was a good artist, but because my ideas were good and I could explain them, I could say why that bunch of photos I’d taken meant something or why that picture of a tap dripping that I’d just drawn had some relevance. At the end of year assembly the headmaster is saying we like to think ahead at Stratford High and I’m thinking what a load of bollocks, you’ve given me nothing but grief over taking art. When the band got up to play they thought we were going to do something from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, that sort of dribble. They didn’t even bother to ask what we were going to play (laughs). We played ‘God Save the Queen’ and it caused mayhem. The kids just went off, the kids are up in their seats pumping the air; the parents were up in the aisles outraged, seriously music could still affect people that much in those days. One of the singers got down to his undies. The deputy principal was purple with rage. That’s how I left school, brilliant (laughs).
Sometimes things could turn nasty, and you nearly got your beans when you played the Lion Tavern in New Plymouth with one of your first bands, Pink Noise…
There were some people the new owner didn’t want in his bar and he wanted us to tell them. Any time there was a difficult job in that band, it was always handed to me. Gordon Rutherford handled the job when the brakes went out on the truck but apart from that, it was always my fucking job. This one guy had just got out of prison and he’d been in as accessory to murder, a serious guy. I had to tell him and his mates the owner wanted them out of the bar, and he said, ‘I’m going to do you’, and he would’ve. I thought he was going to bottle me, but I was lucky he was someone who listened when I met him later. He gave me a chance to explain what had happened, and I told him the owner said you guys are always causing a problem and it was my job to tell you. If you want to thump me go ahead but I’m just the guy who gets stuck with those sorts of jobs all the time. My brother Graeme got the guitar safely out and he’s across the road!
The book outlines how important certain places become to you and one of the first is Dunedin…I know you went to Auckland to art school but you seem to be in sympatico with Dunedin…
I wouldn’t say I ever felt at home in Auckland, I liked it and it was exciting and I met plenty of good people and I had good friends to flat with, Graeme, Brett Jones, Johnny Pierce and Chris Matthews and Andrew Frengley, and Nocturnal Projections did some great shows in Auckland. People like Paul Rose really helped us. In Dunedin I did feel at home; I was part of a community and had a home base. I never thought I’d leave.
One of the real strengths of the book is that it details the Xpressway story …how it happened and how it worked…
Xpressway was an amazing thing to do and yet I almost didn’t realise how amazing it was until it was a damn near over. Starting a cassette label when you’ve been used to making records didn’t seem like it was going to be that big a deal when Bruce Russell first suggested it. But the compilation Pile-Up that was a real door-opener. We couldn’t have made that without each other, Bruce was the public face of us and the networker and and he was brilliant at it, he learnt the lingo really quick.
Xpressway connected you to this international network of like-minded labels and muscians…
Incredible wasn’t it. Pile-Up got us to Europe, and the stuff before that was already getting noticed by magazines like Forced Exposure, and Tim Adams from the Ajax label was making the Dead C releases, This Kind of Punishment, Wreck Small Speakers and Alastair Galbraith. It’s really interesting to see where the Dead C arrived at, I knew Bruce before he was in the band and Michael Morley was in Wreck Small Speakers, and Alastair was in The Rip. Bruce didn’t really have that much ability with technical equipment at that point, that’s what he needed me for to master and do all this stuff. It was already lo-fi so you needed every little bit extra you could drag out of this stuff. It was all going onto a cassette which would blunt it down again. I had a nice McLaren EQer. Peter Gutteridge had the master of Pure and he would put it through my stuff and had it come out the other end.
I understand there was a stack of four cassette machines to make copies of the tapes…
During the day Bruce would be at work and I’d run the copiers, every half hour you’d go in and turn them over.
The Xpressway activity leads to you and Alastair Galbraith and Sandra Bell going to the States for the first time in 1993..you met the writers and label people who’re so enthused by the music….
It was surreal, I’d never been out of the country. This was my introduction to the big wide world, and you can see what a geek I am in the Head in The Clouds documentary that was made about that tour. What a dork! But through all my amazement I still managed to play good shows that make me look like I know what’s going on. We were babes in the woods; there’s America going by at 90 miles an hour and we’re going 30 miles an hour trying to catch up. But we weren’t behind with our sound, they were catching up to us. We were ahead of the game, and I reckon perception of New Zealand music changed. It was the Xpressway and Flying Nun bands who changed it. The only people I reckon from the mainstream who did it were Neil Finn and Don McGlashan cos he went out and did it.
Music has given you great highs and lows, but you couldn’t have taken any other course in life could you?
I was gonna take art until art school fucked it up for me and put me off completely. I was a bit like Syd Barrett. Andrew says I keep comparing myself to Syd. Do I? Maybe I do cos I have all these weird similiarities, he was the same, he wanted to be a painter and ended up doing music. I don’t know if I’ve got the right personality to be a musician in some ways. I ended up fronting a band but I was a Karen Carpenter type; I wanted to hide behind the drums. I didn’t want to front a band, but I had to. I would much rather have been a painter, that’s why I’m enjoying not playing live much and don’t have to be a teacher and I don’t have to run to anybody’s schedule. The first time that’s been the case since I was 17. I’m Mister Lazy now.
One thing that surprised me in the book was that when you lived in Canada in 1997 for a brief period you spent six weeks on the streets in Vancouver…
Yeah, that sucked. I didn’t really know my way around downtown Vancouver that well ; I knew my little part of it, and I didn’t really have the means to sort it out and to stay alive. We went to the Air New Zealand office and they got me home; I’ve always been grateful to the national airline for that.
There were some moments that made me laugh; when you and your mother bet on a horse and it financed the release of a record…a particularly New Zealand moment!
Yes, the Catapult/Fate of the Human Carbine single. My mother Gwen was really good at tactical betting. She had this one horse Sharzamarni she’d taken with the entire field. Sharzamarni won and this other horse, a 96 to 1 outsider, came in second. We got the quinella and it paid $420 and we had $2’s worth, and we had Sharzamarni for a win and it was paying about $8. We might have also had it for a place. We won close to a thousand dollars.
The book also shows how your mother was central to you life…
Absolutely. All the way through. And some people can go ‘oh, you’re a mumma’s boy’, well bugger off! She had an on-going connection with us. We could always lean on her, when our health fucked-out it was back to mum’s, girlfriend went overseas it was back to mum’s, and she sent me $500 to get home when I was on the streets in Vancouver. Not only that she listened to the freakin’ albums and had an opinion about them.
You also took magic mushrooms with her!
Yeah, Gwen had her wild period from her late forties into her early fifties when she started to take some illicit substances. She’d had to dampen it down all the time being married, and then bringing up kids. She’d had to play it straight for so long and she wanted some fun for a change.
I know there was a long period when you gave music away, but you seem to be active again…are you still writing and recording?
My partner Victoria and I are meant to be finishing an album which has been on the go for three years, and there’s a single that I’m doing with a guy called Joey Worton but he’s hurt his hand and can’t play guitar. He’s from Manchester and mates with Peter Hook and all that. That single’s sort of in limbo. The album will go to Grapefruit label if they like it, certainly they get first dibs on it cos they did the album Closed Curcuit. We’ve had to write 17 or 18 songs to get 11 that we think are good enough and even then Victoria wants to do things to one of them. We will get it done. To follow up Closed Circuit it better be good or we better not put it out.
It’s raining in Motueka. It feels like it’s raining all around the world.
A few weeks ago, it was the birthday of one of my all-time best friends, Mike Jones.
I can’t remember how long ago Mike died, but it seems like a long time.
Then a day or two after that it was the birthday of my beautiful daughter, Hope. R.I.P.
Grief is a sneaky thing. It’s there, but you may not know it’s there.
I met Mike when I was 14. My parents had moved to Christchurch from Dunedin and Mike lived over the road at his mother’s dairy. Phyliss, Mike’s mother, sold lots of pies and sandwiches to the railway and cartage workers who worked just right close to the store. Trains would wake us up in the middle of the night. The gasworks were about a quarter mile away. The stench never left us.
Phyliss was a little round Pakeha woman with grey hair and some random hairs that grew off her chin. Phyliss’s eyes almost always gleamed with love. She had two pug dogs, Mickey and Minnie.
Phyllis started work at 5am when she began to make sandwiches for the shop. My favourite was always lettuce, vegemite and some crushed walnuts.
Mike was half Maori. It was said (by Phyliss) that Mike’s father fell into a vat of boiling fat at a whaling station somewhere around Picton.
Mike was a big guy with a huge personality. He had a crook hip and walked with a limp which was barely noticeable.
Me and Mike connected fast over our mutual love of music. He played bass guitar on his Fender Precision Bass. He’d practise day and night and thrust his groin away behind the guitar. He wasn’t a flashy player, but my God he was solid.
When Mike played his acoustic guitar, he’d sing away to an original song that he created called, “Wees and Poos on my little brown head.”
Life was a laugh. We had music day in and day out.
We’d sing together at night. “Have you seen my wife, Mr Jones,
do you know what it’s like on the outside?
Don’t go talking too loud you’ll cause a landslide, Mr Jones…”
I moved into the dairy (my parents lived 30 yards away on Wilson’s Road) to be close to Mike so we could talk music day and night. We shared a very small bedroom.
Each Sunday Mike’s girlfriend, Kay, would come over and stay in bed with him all day. Mike would give her a good rogering. Kay was a sweet little thing.
One day one of my girlfriends came very close to an orgasm in that room. I didn’t stop running until I got to Ferry Road.
Hope, my daughter, was a beautiful woman and all too vulnerable for this world.
Grief doesn’t allow me to say much more about all that. Grief draws a ring around your heart and draws it in real tight.
Lately on television there have been various news items about the notorious mental hospital Lake Alice.
In the Big House I met a few guys who had been sent to Lake Alice for punishment. They tried to rebel. When they returned, they were very damaged goods. There was no place for them in the whole, wide world. They never rebelled again. It just wasn’t
in them.
I was in mental institutions three times between 1974 and 1975. I was in Sunnyside twice when I tried to escape my addiction to Cocaine and Opiates. On the first night in Sunnyside another patient jumped on top of me at 3am and tried to have sex with me.
I was sentenced to the Cherry Farm Mental Hospital in 1975 for a court report. I was put into Villa One which was a treatment villa for alcoholics. I was the first drug addict in the place. Every morning at 8am a nurse would bring me my Methadone, then she would sit in front of me for an hour to make sure I didn’t die.
After a week I was elected Secretary of the Patient’s Committee.
The head shrink said that my problem was that I could not express negative feelings.
After a couple of months one of my visitors was busted for bringing drugs onto the premises. As punishment I was given a shot of some drug whereby I literally could not move. I complained and was given another shot of the same drug.
I couldn’t kick up trouble anymore.
But that’s living in a democracy for you.
Needless to say, I was given a bad court report and went straight to jail.
In jail I found the book that would change my life, “Soledad Brother” by George Jackson. It allowed me to feel angry and that got me through my Lag.
There are lots of things that will piss you off in the world. The new leader of the free world is one of them. The man is a sordid piece of rubbish and we must express negative feelings about him, but we are trapped. I’m sure you know this.
Every time I enter the USA, I must have a “waiver of ineligibility” because of narcotics convictions from more than 40 years ago. This waiver takes months and months to get.
So, we have a convicted felon in charge. This man is loud and belligerent. He will make your ring-gear pucker up.
There are plenty of people in New Zealand who are quiet and belligerent, who think that the world owes them a living, who rip off anyone who comes close. People who would rip the pennies off a blind man’s eyes.
Decades ago, I was in business with a man like this. He was a nightmare. And more about this in my next blog.
Kelly and I have just been downtown in the ’52 Bug. It’s pouring with rain, and ordinarily we don’t take any of my Volkswagens out in wet weather.
The bug ran out of gas, and we had to crawl to a gas station to fill it up. With a 6-volt ignition, it doesn’t pay to have the lights and wipers on as well as the fog lights. The ’52 bug doesn’t have a fuel gauge, which can be difficult at times.
I had to go to my pharmacy and pick up some Prednisone and antibiotics. I’ve not been breathing well. In fact, I have some kind of shadow on my lung, the same as I did when I was eight years old.
When I was eight, my mother told me the doctors were going to try to keep me alive until I was ten years old and then take a lung out. No one seems to know what this meant. My mother was very much in awe of doctors, so it’s possible she misinterpreted everything.
When I was ten, they put me into hospital and the shadow had gone. I never got sick again for years.
Nowadays, we often talk about “Healthy Homes.” I was brought up in a house that had rotten floorboards and a room (a second living room) that was dedicated to coal for the coal range. We lived right by the bush in Dunedin, and it was always damp.
But I’ve always been good at (if I do say so myself) overcoming obstacles in my way. I’ve always gone against the tide.
I often ask Kelly what I should write about in my next blog. This time she said “Coldplay.”
I had to change my clothing.
My chemist is a 45-year-old Mormon, and he took his daughter to see Coldplay over the weekend. This was the very first concert he had ever been to in his whole life, and he loved it.
That’s good enough for me.
Coldplay brings happiness to millions of people, and I can’t criticize that.
I’ve never seen a Mormon dance.
I often write about freedom and the importance of having one’s own views. Bob Dylan once said that no one was free and that even the birds were chained to the sky.
Mao Tse-tung, when he sent Chinese troops to help North Korea in the Korean War, said, “Without the lips the teeth are cold.”
There is nothing worse in this life than to be alone. Solitude has no friends. That is my view.
Yet it is easy enough to feel that one is on one’s own. My mother went to work when I was a kid. There I was all day, lonesome and unable to breathe properly. That is being alone.
My friend “Mad Dog” was alone. He died of a morphine overdose on Christmas Day many years ago. I have not yet stopped crying for him, for his solitude and what he could have been.
In my terror, I surround myself with people. We help each other.
Yesterday a very good friend got in touch with me after several years.
Recent Comments