After four decades of making music, Jay Clarkson is releasing a new album Falling Through recorded with her band, The Containers. She spoke to Richard Langston.

R: How are you feeling about the album, Jay?

J: I’m really pleased with it. When it takes a long time to come out, I think it makes it even better. There was Covid and everything, that’s when we started recording, I think just before that. We got together around 2018.

It’s very different from your last album, Spur (2015).

There’s a big difference between a solo album and a band album with me. Kindle (1999 and re-released in 2021) was the first solo one and it was liberating, and I felt comfortable doing it. There was no pressure, and I could just wander into my music room. One time I was waiting for a ride to a party, I had a spare half hour up my sleeve, and that’s how I wrote ‘Wheeling’. 

Spur had a storytelling quality…and it had a very South Island feel to it…

I’d always been wary of theme albums, but I could see a story. She’s driving down gravel roads, and that immediately makes me think of inland. I don’t know who the ‘she’ is – I can’t drive for a start! I have got my learner’s licence, but I’ve never got past that. I was thinking of the Mackenzie Country and Middlemarch and around there. Once I wrote the track ‘Blue Paper’ that really clinched it, this is between two people and are they going to set up a life together in the countryside or not. The album’s more acoustic.

Yes, this new album’s rockier…

Excuse me! When Leather Jacket Records put out the Containers single Children of the Rule/Waikouaiti  Matthias McGregor of the label coined the phrase psychedelic folk which I quite like. But yeah, I guess The Containers Falling Through album is quite rocky.

It seems a strange quirk of your story that your last album and this one have  been released by a fellow who lives in Vienna, Arno Loeffler of Zelle Records.

He came out for the Flying Nun 15^th in 1996, he was a journalist then and living in Lichtenstein. He just fell in love with New Zealand music, the alternative stuff, and he has been coming back every other year. He’s now a very good friend.

I really like the album cover.

I took that photo, and it captured exactly what I wanted to capture and I’m not a photographer. It’s a storage area and we had The Playthings reunion practices over a 2-week period a couple of years ago. We practiced in Dave Toland’s studio that he’s got set up in one of the garages. We were standing outside having a beer, I looked up and thought that light and those shapes and those colours: wow! I didn’t take it thinking about containers, it just looked so cool. There’s a completeness to it.

Did you think at that moment it would make a good album cover?

No, not at all. I just took it because it looked so amazing. I probably scrolled through my phone pictures as I do when I’m thinking of making posters and thought that’d be a good album cover shot. Ah, yeah! My son Sam wasn’t so sure, but I was.

It looks like it was a nor’wester in Christchurch that day…

It probably was, there’s a good chance. That’s one of the things I miss about moving from Christchurch to Dunedin. I’m one of the five percent of people who love nor’westers (laughs). They give some people headaches because they can go on for three days up there.

There’s some experienced Dunedin faces in that practice room photo of the band – Alan Haig (The Chills, Snapper, Pop Art Toasters) and Mike Dooley (The Enemy, Toy Love, Pop Art Toasters, Snapper) …

And Tenzin Mullin who was in a band called Suka. He plays bass and as he gets older, he’s got that lovely blend of not just the rhythm but melody as well. Tenzin was the first musician I played with when I moved to Dunedin. We did a gig at the university at Orientation. 

How did the Containers come about?

Al Haig had stopped playing drums and was playing keyboards and he emailed me to say if you want to have a play, give us a yell. Then a new friend, David Glynn, approached me and he said I hadn’t written a song for ages, and he said go on Jay write a song. Go on I dare you, you know you want to! It did the trick, I had some phrase running through the back of my mind, and it turned out to be, “It never rains on Sunday” for the song ‘Wakey Wakey World’. That’s how it began. I love recording, I love the whole process. Mike Dooley lives around the corner from me in Waikouiti. I said to him do you want to come and have a play, and he said if I like the song I will. So, I sent him the song and he liked it (laughs).

Mike works for Red Cross helping new immigrants find their feet and his work is very much in sympathy with ‘Wakey Wakey World’ which does talk about people on the move in Syria, the line ‘even young children thousands of them without a home’. They were walking across Syria to find somewhere where they could live.

I’d never worked with a keyboard player for a long period of time, and working with Alan was a very enjoyable experience. It lays a bed underneath everything. It can also do melody, I’m a good guitarist but I’m not a lead guitarist, and it adds a particular atmosphere. Mike Dooley drums like Mike Dooley, and when Alan is on fire he’s really on fire. We had a practice yesterday and it was loud, and it was good (laughs). Alan recorded the album at Hawkesbury Villa, and he did a really good job. Nick Roughan and Paul Kean mixed it.

Paul Kean, that’s a name you’ve been associated with for forty years…going back to The Playthings.

(Laughs). Yeah, right from the beginning, we were all friends. When we talk about the Flying Nun family there is still that to a degree, like a bunch of cousins or something. Hey cuzzie bro I’m making this album, do you wanna come and play a bit of harmonica?! (laughs). It’s very warm and no bullshit. 

I notice in the back of the band shot there’s a poster for a They Were Expendable gig from the days of the Star and Garter in Christchurch.

That’s going back. There are musicians that carry on and some that haven’t. Some people do it in their twenties and then get busy with other stuff. I do have gaps, and it usually takes someone to give me a kick up the arse to get me started, someone says come to Edinburgh and play some music okay!

You did that trip with Robert Scott.

Yeah.

The first time I became aware you had a new band and released a single was back in 2020 with the video on YouTube for ‘Far’ set among the Elephant Rocks of the Waitaki Valley.

Paul Kean filmed that, and Kaye Woodward was continuity. I like ‘Far’, once you’ve got a band happening and if we start practicing on a regular basis songs start happening. ‘Far’ came along not long after ‘Wakey Wakey World’. I hadn’t practiced regularly for so long and I didn’t know if I’d have another band again. I have patches where I think I might have written my last song. It’s not a morose thing; it’s just the way it can be. There’s such a difference between practicing regularly and practicing erratically as a composer. Our practice room was at Hawkesbury Farm which used to be Cherry Farm psychiatric hospital. It was one of the old dormitories, it didn’t have bad vibes. They call them villas and there was only one room that gave me the creeps and that was a bathroom with three baths in a row. There was just something creepy about that room. But it was wonderful, wrap around windows with a view of  trees.

I wonder if that was Villa 4 which Peter Olds wrote a poem about with that end line about the snakes in the brass-coloured sky…

Oh, I love Peter Olds’ stuff.

You’ve written poetry  yourself and had short stories published in Landfall; you’re always going to be doing something aren’t you?

Yeah, but I’ve been unwell lately, so I haven’t been so prolific. I want to finish my memoirs; it’s taken quite a long time. I’ve never done a PhD, but it strikes me it’s like doing a bloody PhD (laughs). You have to do your research. Is this true, or isn’t it?

Lyrics always stick in my mind and there’s those lines on ‘Far’, “we don’t know who we are / and that’s the best thing by far”.

I’m quite cosmic and we are spinning on a ball that we can only refer to as space which is a pretty loose term. We can only think so much about that shit and there’s a point where you have to accept it. With writing a poem you pin a certain amount down, but you also leave a few open windows.

An EP of The Playthings live recordings from the Gladstone in 1981 was rereleased in 2023 by Leather Jacket  Records and I hear there’s more to come…

Yeah, Leather Jacket/Flying Nun are going to issue an album with ‘The Big Strain’ EP on one side by They Were Expendable with that cover of the legs sticking out of the car, and on the other side it’ll have the ‘Man With No Desire’ cover and that’ll have Expendables songs on it, the ones that did work cos some of them didn’t. Plus, there’s going to be an updated Jay Clarkson solo of the album that came out in 1986 on vinyl. There’ll also be a CD with even more songs on it. That’s going to be called ‘Collection’.

That must be really gratifying.

It is, it really is. I’ve had stage four cancer; it might be under control now – I’ll find out at the end of the month – but it’s a lovely little tidying up to have these come out. I’ve got a tumour on the roof of my mouth – perfect, huh, being a vocalist. I’ve been having treatment for about 18 months. I wondered if I’d been able to sing but I can. You just turn the mic up a bit more and I sing a bit softer. I was having radio therapy five days a week for six weeks. The team at Dunedin Hospital was bloody marvellous. The tumour’s been blasted away as far as they can tell. I know it sounds cheesy but with The Containers you can totally lose yourself in the music, a big stupid smile on our faces. Right from the start when we got together, we said it’s as much about the camaraderie as it is about the music. The band is no more but we thought let’s get together – with Nazir Nahonoro sitting in on drums for Mike – and play a couple of gigs for the album release. 

To mark the release of Falling Through, Jay Clarkson and the Containers are playing gigs in Dunedin at Pearl Diver March 21 and Christchurch at the Space Academy March 29.