Alex Casey talks to Goodnight Nurse frontman Joel Little about getting the band back together and digging out his old skinny jeans.
Joel Little doesn’t know what to wear. “How tight do my pants need to be?” he ponders, less than a week out from Goodnight Nurse returning to the stage after a 13 year hiatus. “I am in full dad mode now, I’m gonna have to look deep in the drawers and figure something out.” Now in his 40s and wearing a decidedly un-punk vintage Titanic T-shirt, he’s barely recognisable as the skinny jean-wearing frontman, all studded belts, sweatbands and nail polish, who rose out of a coffin in ‘Death Goes to Disco’, or brooded beneath a jagged fringe in ‘Our Song’.
Of course, these days Joel Little is known for much more than the greatest hits of Goodnight Nurse. The Grammy Award-winning producer most famously worked with a teenage Ella Yelich-O’Connor to create the first earth-shattering Lorde album Pure Heroine, and has credits next to the likes of Taylor Swift, Sam Smith, Khalid, Olivia Rodrigo, Ellie Goulding, Tove Lo and many more. His most recent venture is Big Fan, a multi-million dollar studio offering everything from summer residencies to venue space to support the local music industry.
But today, we aren’t talking about any of that. In a couple of day’s time, Goodnight Nurse will be returning to the stage for the first time in over a decade to open for My Chemical Romance at Western Springs. Estimated crowd size? 17,000 people. “Yeah… that’s a lot for our first live gig in 13 years,” he laughs. Since the reunion was announced, he says he has been inundated with messages from fans sharing memories from Goodnight Nurse gigs. “I genuinely hadn’t realised that people still cared that much about Goodnight Nurse after all this time.”
The band formed during Little’s gap year after finishing high school in 2001. He was tossing up between studying music or journalism when he started a new band with Jaden Parkes, who shared his obsession with the SoCal punk music scene. “NOFX, Lagwagon, Sum 41, Taking Back Sunday, Jimmy Eat World, Blink 182 – we just loved all of that,” Little recalls. They put a “bassist wanted” flier up outside Shadows, the student bar at the University of Auckland, Paul Taite answered the call, and Goodnight Nurse was formed.
As for the name? It was never supposed to stick. Parks came up with it after watching a Warriors game, and hearing one of the commentators jibe “and that’s goodnight nurse,” Little recalls. “It was one of those things where we were like, OK, this is good enough for now and we’re definitely gonna change it before it’s too late.’” He admits it is a “terrible” origin story, and the band spent years making up elaborate stories and “big, long winded lies” about what Goodnight Nurse actually meant. “But the original story is truly just as boring as that,” he laughs.
The pop punk sound of Goodnight Nurse, complete with heavy SoCal accents, emerged just as the “emo” subculture crept into mainstream New Zealand. Teenagers dressed in black, long dark fringes covering their kohl-rimmed eyes, and only logged off Tumblr and MySpace to lurk outside the Burger King on Auckland’s Queen Street, or at “The Hack” in Christchurch. The mainstream success of bands like Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance meant more people called themselves emo than ever before, causing friction between the “real” emos and the “fake” posers.
Despite these eyeliner-wearing, black-clad teenagers turning up in droves to see Goodnight Nurse at all ages gigs, Little says they never considered themselves an emo band. “We would play into it a bit with some of the lyrics, but our songs always had a bit of humour to them. There was the whole fringe thing, but I guess that’s just what all the bands were doing back then.” Even calling themselves pop punk was fraught at the time. “Back then, it was frowned upon to even use the word punk unless you were like, a really serious punk band,” he explains.
“We always said we were a punk influenced pop rock band, just because we felt like we had to kind of tread carefully around the real scenesters.” As a result, Little says that they were never fully accepted by any local music scene. He chuckles as he remembers the online forum PunkAs, where hundreds of anonymous users would regularly “bag out” the music of Goodnight Nurse. “We were too poppy for the New Zealand punk scene, and then we were too punky for the mainstream – we were just in this weird middle ground where we didn’t fit in.”
But a lot of young people who also felt like they didn’t fit in gravitated towards Goodnight Nurse, and the band released two studio albums and 11 singles from 2003-2009. Playing shows like Edgefest, Homegrown, the Boost Mobile Tour and the 2007 Big Day Out, Little remembers feeling “always just so stoked” to be playing pop punk to big crowds. “When we first started we were just obsessed with that kind of music and making that kind of music,” he recalls. “It really felt like we were on an adventure, just trying to make the most of it.”
Their highest-charting single ‘Our Song’, written about Little’s late grandfather, remains his favourite Goodnight Nurse song to return to. “That song means a lot to me, it feels really good to play that and sing about him again.” Little recently travelled to the Italian town where his grandfather had escaped to and spent time as a prisoner of war, and met the family that took him in. During what was an “incredible, emotional day”, Little was asked to sing ‘Our Song’ in memory of his granddad Archie.
“There were no instruments or anything, so I had to sing it acapella and it was very intense. Everyone was crying, it was a really beautiful thing,” he says. “I hadn’t even thought about that song for years, all the while this little family in this little town in Italy have been listening to it all these years later. It’s funny, I never really kind of thought of Goodnight Nurse as having that sort of power to make people feel like that.”
In 2010, after two albums and several shifting band members, the band announced that they were going on an “indefinite hiatus”. Little still remembers when he knew it was time to move on. “It was this one show that we played in Nelson, and I was on stage in the middle of a song and telling people to like put your hands in the air and waving from side to side,” he says. “But I remember this sudden feeling of not being in the moment at all and thinking ‘man, this is weird that I’m doing this and everything just feels strange’.”
Little says he barely picked up a guitar for years after Goodnight Nurse called it quits. “There was a long period, especially after Lorde, where I was writing everything on synths and keyboards and stuff,” he says. “But it did start to creep in back over time.” Working as a producer in the US, he says he would introduce Goodnight Nurse to artists he was collaborating with “once I got to know them a bit”, but hastily adds that “it wasn’t like I was bringing it up all time or anything.”
The Goodnight Nurse YouTube channel, which he has long forgotten the login details to, is a particular treasure trove. “Lots of embarrassing content on there,” he grins. “I don’t know how we managed it but we somehow made 10 music videos.”
Through all the awards and accolades that were to follow Little in his post-Goodnight Nurse career, the band was always in the back of his mind. “Ever since we went on out on our so-called indefinite hiatus, I’d always said we’ll get back together for my 40th.” Little turned 40 just this year, coinciding perfectly with an offer that had come from promoter Campbell Smith. “He just texted me and was like, ‘if I put an offer forward, would Goodnight Nurse consider opening for My Chemical Romance?’ It was really weird timing.”
“I was like, ‘well, first of all, the offer would have to be good. And then second of all, I would just have to see if we’re physically capable of doing it’.” he laughs. “I haven’t sung that high in a while, and I don’t know if I can palm mute on my guitar that fast anymore.”
The first rehearsal, only a couple of months ago, took place at Little’s venue Big Fan. “Jaden and I got together just to relearn a couple of songs and see if the old magic was still there.” As soon as they started playing, Little says that it was like no time had passed at all. “The muscle memory with the songs was surprisingly good, I’d just sort of see where my hands started to lead and it was often to the right places.” The first rehearsal ended with a revelation: “Shit, maybe we could actually pull this thing off?”
Reuniting for this one-off show also presented another opportunity for Goodnight Nurse to finish something they started in 2006. The unfinished Serpent Queen trilogy began as a “pisstake”, says Little, with Part One on their first album Always and Never and Part Two on 2008’s Keep Me on Your Side. “We were just having a laugh, calling it ‘All Hail the Serpent Queen (Part One of Three)’ because it was just funny to us,” he says.
“But every couple of months, somebody will email me aggressively saying, ‘I guess we’re not getting a Part Three of the trilogy are we?’”
The opportunity to reunite for one night only also provided a chance for Little to see the trilogy through and play the whole thing in its entirety at Saturday night’s show. The pisstake-named ‘All Hail the Serpent Queen (Part Three) (Holy Hell!)’ was released just last week, and Little says he is stoked with the conclusion. “It was so fun to have just written a straight up pop punk song because I haven’t done that since 2008,” he says. “It was funny, when I first recorded the vocals, Jaden came in and said ‘it’s not nasal enough’ and he was totally right.”
With only days to go before they open for My Chemical Romance (who they also, cosmically, played before on the mainstage at the 2007 Big Day Out), Little says he is “pumped” to return to the stage. “I’ve been thinking about how a lot of our fans were 14 or 15 years old when we were at our peak, and how that’s such an important and formative time of your life.” Now all those fans are all in their 30s, but Little is aware that all old experiences and emotions “stick in people’s brains” and will forever be entwined with the songs of Goodnight Nurse.
“Yeah, the nostalgia is definitely real with Goodnight Nurse,” he laughs. “I’m just going to enjoy it and soak it all in. It’s a huge crowd and we’ll be playing all these old songs and just enjoying seeing everyone’s faces.” Lets just hope he can actually see them behind all the long fringes.