by Alan Pedder | view as PDF

Despite being astronomically famous in her native New Zealand, Bic Runga admits to feeling a bit obscure and insignificant when stepping out on British soil. But with the impending release of her finest album yet in a decade-long career, that could all be about to change. With its old-fashioned jazz stylings combined with Runga’s famously keen sense of melody and wonderfully articulated emotion, Birds is so finely feathered an album that, given the chance to work its magic, will nest inside whichever compartments of your heart are still left open. Alan Pedder went to meet its creator...

Jobsworths, morons and porters lacking any semblance of spatial awareness — yes indeedy, the spirit of Fawlty Towers is alive and well and doing quite nicely thank you very much, even in the swankiest of posh West End hotels. I am greeted by a particularly frustrating interchange with the receptionist during which I repeatedly attempt to explain that, no, I’m not trying to check in as Bic Runga, Bic Runga’s husband or any familial iteration thereof. I’ve just come to visit, I say, for an interview. Blank stare. An in-ter-view, I repeat, waving my dictaphone in a perhaps too slightly crazed a manner. He looks hurriedly down at the desk and fumbles through a small pile of papers for what seems like an age. Then at last he sees it, the note taped to the desk phone — fifteenth floor, suite something or other. Take a seat, he beams, clearly delighted at a job well done. I take care to sit on the least expensive looking chairs, just outside of the raised bar area and opposite the lifts.

Two smartly uniformed men are trying in vain to manoeuvre an empty clothes rail on wheels into one of the narrow metal boxes. Even from my vantage point fifteen feet away, this is clearly not going to happen, but it doesn’t stop them from trying… and trying… and trying some more, jabbering loudly between them. John Cleese would be in stitches. I would have gladly watched for longer as they resort to deconstruction but the phone goes and I’m gestured upstairs. Briefly checking my professional journo to bedraggled longhair ratio in one of lift’s handsome bevelled mirrors — it’s bad — I arrive at floor fourteen in seconds. Strangely, the lift doesn’t go right to the top and the rest is simply pot luck navigation through unfamiliar corridors and up a secret staircase. Narnia, here I come!

I’ve been listening to Bic’s new album Birds for four or so months now since its release in New Zealand and it’s still divulging some secrets of its own. The eleven intricate songs are so delicately nuanced that it took me intensive and repeated listens to dig beneath the richly textured arrangements, past Bic’s ever appealing and distinct manner of phrasing and into the heart of the album. Now I can’t get it out of my head and while I would normally reject outright the notion of a “timeless” new album — frankly, I’m still recovering from the fact that The Independent used that particular adjective to describe James Blunt. I mean, really! — but Birds is one hell of a temptress.

“I’ve always liked the darker songs on the Dusty Springfield records, the Shirley Bassey records, even when I was a little kid. I was really taken by the tragic torch song, and because you have no experience of love or infatuation at four years old, you feel something that’s not unlike fear, you know, when you hear Diamonds Are Forever or one of those spooky love songs,” she explains as we sit a couple of feet apart on superplush sofas. For a more than twenty-times platinum-selling artist (her three studio albums have smashed all sales records back in her homeland) she seems incredibly shy, or perhaps just reticent to talk about herself. In our half hour together, she gets most animated when we chat about sheepdogs and the ideas that drive Wears The Trousers. At these times, when she laughs, there’s no doubt she means it and she exudes a genuine warmth. At other times, she’ll answer my questions without ever meeting my gaze as she twirls the ribbon on her pink frilly blouse around and between her fingers. Sometimes she switches to playing with her hair, now fashioned in a sleek modern bob rather than the feathered fringe and long tresses depicted on the strikingly simple sleeve of the album.

“I just turned thirty,” she explains. “That was a really big thing for me and I got a bit carried away and cut all my hair off. I just thought the old me is gone and it’s good to be a… woman. It really is. I’m so glad my twenties are over, because I hated my twenties more than puberty. I was so awkward. The whole time I felt so self-conscious like I was in a cocoon. But I put a lot of effort into my thirtieth. I took my whole family to China, which is something none of us have ever done even though we’re of Chinese descent. And so seeing the vastness of China for the first time and having that mess of curiosity in my mind satisfied was really quite an experience.”

Quite an experience was also had shortly afterwards when she was chosen to receive the New Zealand Order of Merit (the equivalent of the British MBE) in the Queen’s New Years Honours list. How many thirty year olds can say that? Did she find it weird, being so young? “I actually felt really good about it. I was in there among a big list of people who’ve done really amazing altruistic things or things for their community and things in medicine. So an award for services to music is really nice. Of course, it’s in perspective, it’s just one part of things that are done, but it’s really nice to be regarded in that way. And by law now I can actually pee on the left rear wheel of a horse and cart,” she laughs. Does she plan to test that out? “Er, no, I think I’ll pass,” she smiles.

Birds, then, is the sound of Bic Runga trying to connect with the past and succeeding beautifully. “No one’s really doing any good torch songs in pop music these days. I guess in the Sixties it was their big commercial currency, like their version of the power ballad,” she laughs. The album was recorded mostly live in the studio with a cast of guest musicians that reads like a Who’s Who of New Zealand pop icons (and the odd Australian added in for good measure). Neil Finn, Anika Moa, Benny ‘Boxcar’ Maitland, Tim Arnold of Pluto and Shayne Carter from Straitjacket Fits all contributed in one form or another. “I didn’t feel alone making this record,” she says, “Usually I feel kind of isolated but this time I really allowed myself to ask for help. I had Neil with me though, so that was half the job done. He really is so skilled. He didn’t want to do anything but play the piano on the record, and it wasn’t until he did some backing vocals at the end, as overdubs, that I thought ‘oh my god, you’re Neil Finn and you’re going doo wop on my record’, y’know. I was like, wow, that’s really cool!”

She has high praise too for Moa: “Anika keeps me afloat. She really is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. You know, at any time during a recording, things can take a nosedive and you can really fold when things go wrong, but just to have people around to keep you buoyant and keep you laughing is really helpful. There’s nothing worse than taking a song to a band and having them ruin it, but with this band they weren’t really my songs at all, they were our songs, and that really improved them. There was such a synergy between us as players that the songs just really evolved…”

An unexpected knock at the door distracts us both and after half a minute or so of confusion over who is going to answer it, Bic gets up to greet the intruders. Unbelievably, it’s the porters from downstairs standing proudly in the doorway with the clothes rail now reassembled and shining in the hall. The disappointment on their faces is an absolute picture when Bic explains that she has no idea why they thought she would even want it. Bless them, they must have lugged it piece by piece up the secret staircase and all for scant reward. Visibly tickled, she sits back down laughing and continues to talk about the recording.

Bic and her band of helpers holed up at Monte Cecilia, an old stately home in Auckland, for the month-long recording session. “The house was really beautiful but in a total state of disrepair. It definitely had that kind of faded splendour that we were kinda fascinated by. And it sort of suits the album. If the tragic torch song belongs to any kind of environment, it would be that kind of house in ruin. I really wanted to record the space into the album, record the sound of the room. We were really just hoping for it to sound like nothing hanging on nothing, really sparse, as if it were floating in space. Being called a singer-songwriter doesn’t really say much about your styles, and these days it’s become this kind of innocuous commercial sound and I just didn’t want to make that kind of record.”

Perhaps where Birds is most successful is that the songs are not simply impersonations of torch songs or a facile exercise in being knowingly retro. Genuine tragedy is infused into everything from the vocal to the tender strains of the string octet, inspired by the death of Bic’s father Joe, a former Maori soldier, in early 2005. I ask her whether her outlook has changed at all as a result. “Entirely different,” she nods. “It’s like everything’s suddenly 360 degree vision and not the smallness of the way you see yourself and the world before. But most of all, I’m not scared anymore, you know. I’m not dead so I may as well just get on with being alive. When you’re faced with death, you kinda realise what it really is and that’s there’s plenty of time for being dead. There’s a little part of you that wants to live the life that your parents can’t have anymore and it’s important that the things you do represent them well. The Maori culture is so deep. The experience of his funeral was so traditional and unusual. There’s a lot of protocol, which I was actually learning as I went along, in the way that Maori culture treats the dead. Ancestors are really revered, and there’s this concept that you’re not just yourself, you’re one of a long line of ancestors before and also a long line that come after. So you’re only ever one link in a chain and that’s quite a strong idea. You don’t feel alone and that’s a new one for me and held me in quite good stead.”

Like Rosanne Cash’s recent elegiac album Black Cadillac and Beth Nielsen Chapman’s Sand & Water (1995), Birds is also imbued with gentle rays of hope — for example, the chorus of the radio-friendly album opener, Winning Arrow, begins with the words “cast off your sorrows / the long night will end” — and it’s obvious that Bic took great comfort in having her friends around her. In March and April of last year, she embarked on a world tour supporting Neil and his brother Tim, before heading to Monte Cecilia. I remark on the sense of community spirit that New Zealander musicians seem to have, at least compared with British popmongers, many of whom are only too quick to snipe at each other in the press. “It’s too small in New Zealand to really bitch about anyone,” she laughs. “Y’know, it wouldn’t be a smart thing to do. But I do think we sort of fight to create a community, because I think being a musician can be really difficult and we kind of have to stick together. With this project, for instance, just instigating all these people to come together was, well, not totally normal, but y’know, it wasn’t a shock.”

Of course, in the UK, any artist who becomes as ubiquitous in the charts as Bic Runga has in New Zealand would be instantly subjected to mass ridicule and relentless snidey comments from the press, who seem to delight as much in bringing down our celebrities as they do in making them. Actually, probably more. Has Bic experienced a similar sort of backlash as, say, Coldplay? She laughs, “Not to my face! But actually people have been really good to me, and, you know, I’m always nervous that it’s only a matter of time before they turn. But I’m kind of ready for that these days, I don’t really think it would matter that much now if they did. I think as a musician you have to develop a fairly thick skin! You know, I can’t second guess what’s going to work commercially… it’s not that I don’t care about it, it’s just that it would do my head in if I had to think about what might work. You could try and write something for the radio but it still might not get played and then you’ll just feel silly, being cheesy like that.”

“Maybe I could’ve had a big worldwide hit if I’d worked with this A-list producer or that clever mixer,” she continues. “But I’ve been signed [to Sony] for ten years now and I made the decision to produce myself really early on, whether it was right or wrong, just to do whatever I liked. A friend of mine was working with Jane Campion, the director who made The Piano, a long time ago. He was doing the soundtrack for her and he kept trying to tell her what to do with it and stuff, and she just looked at him and said, ‘my wrong decision is more important than your right decision!’… it was her vision, and even if it was a little bit weird or not quite the norm, at least it’s what she wanted, and I’m the same.”

I ask where her vision will take her next as she has hinted in recent interviews that she might be contemplating a return to the rockier songs of her debut album Drive (1996). “I really like rock ‘n’ roll… I don’t know if I do it well though. I don’t think so,” she shrugs. “But yeah, sometimes it gets really tedious being an earnest singer-songwriter. It’s really boring, even to myself, so sometimes I do just want to rock. To me, the benchmark of rock ‘n’ roll is like Led Zeppelin. I couldn’t do that, but there is something wonderfully free about it. The music I do takes so much control. When I think about women who rock, I think of people like Grace Jones, Debbie Harry… or, well, not in the rock genre, but Yoko Ono. They’re so themselves, you know. Yoko’s amazing, I really love her. I love her art and I even like her singing. It’s amazing that she’s over 70!”

Bic hasn’t played the rockier numbers from Drive for quite some time now, but, to these ears at least, they still sound pretty convincing on record. For now though, the sometimes eerie, often melancholy and utterly beguiling Birds will more than suffice. “I find birds thoroughly creepy, really weird, and certainly in Maori mythology they do come from another place, some strange underworld. Some signify good omens, some bad omens… some signify death…” she pauses thoughtfully for a moment. “The trouble with birds is that there’s no way of knowing quite what they’re thinking!” she laughs.

Birds is released in the UK on May 15th!