Pop CultureDecember 10, 2022

An oral history of The Clean’s Boodle Boodle Boodle EP

Contributing writer

Back in 2017, The Clean won the Taite Music Prize’s Independent Music Classic NZ Record award for their 1981 EP Boodle Boodle Boodle. Hussein Moses talked to the band and those involved to dig up the inside story of a record that became a New Zealand legend.

First published in April 2017.

It was a defining moment in New Zealand music history. In September 1981, The Clean – brothers David and Hamish Kilgour, and Robert Scott – entered a makeshift studio in Auckland’s Arch Hill and emerged with Boodle Boodle Boodle, one of the country’s landmark records that would soon put Dunedin music on the map.

The five-song EP, recorded by Chris Knox and Doug Hood and released on Flying Nun Records, followed the jangly single ‘Tally Ho!’, which had come out that same year and found its way to number 19 in the New Zealand charts. But Boodle would push things even further, eventually peaking within the top five and spending a good six months hanging around on the chart. Not bad for a handful of songs that commercial radio refused to play. Thirty-five years on from its release, the record is still as relevant as ever.

The Clean’s ‘Boodle Boodle Boodle’ EP, November 1981, Flying Nun Records, FN003

Roger Shepherd (founder of Flying Nun Records): The first time I saw The Clean was in 1978 at their first gig in Dunedin supporting The Enemy. I travelled down to see The Enemy, and The Clean just happened to be playing in their first line-up. They were very rough, but kind of interesting in a post-rock way. Then I saw them again in 1981 at the Gladstone in Christchurch. They were clearly the best band in the world without question.

David Kilgour (band member): We were in Auckland and our mother got hold of us and said this guy Roger Shepherd’s trying to get hold of you guys about a recording. So the first time we met Roger was in Auckland. We were there for about a month doing some shows and living in Ponsonby. Roger tracked us down to our house there and that’s how we first met him.

Roger Shepherd: They had gone through a whole lot of different bass players which hadn’t worked out and then they finally found Robert Scott. He was the glue that kept it all together.

Robert Scott (band member): I hadn’t really properly played in any other bands as such. I had sort of mucked around with some guys that I grew up with around out in Mosgiel. But that wasn’t a proper band, it was more cardboard boxes and pianos and acoustic guitars. I was flatting with David’s partner, so he’d be at the flat quite a lot and we started jamming together in 1980. Musically, we got on really well.

The Clean, 1981: Hamish Kilgour, Robert Scott, David Kilgour (Photo: Carol Tippett)

David Kilgour: We were writing all the time. We would get together and we’d just try and write and also try and get better as well. We’d get together three times a week here in Dunedin and rehearse and practice, which looking back now seems quite obsessive. Hamish [Kilgour] and I were pretty hell bent on doing something, so once we met Robert things moved along a lot quicker. We did work pretty hard and we were obsessed with writing all the time. We were never happy with what we had just done, we always had to write more.

Roger Shepherd: They were clearly way ahead of the pack of anything else I’d seen at that stage. Three different songwriters, David’s guitar playing was astoundingly different and unique and original, the songs were great. There was Hamish doing his agitprop thing and Robert’s songs were different again.

David Kilgour: I guess Hamish and I had always felt alienated from society, especially as young teenagers. There was rebelliousness there, but what Hamish used to say back in the day was that the songs are really about paranoia.

Doug Hood (producer/engineer): It was quite a depressing time back then. It was around the time of the Springbok tour and all that. New Zealand wasn’t much of a fun place. But The Clean were pretty much non-political and a breath of fresh air.

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David Kilgour: I’d known Chris Knox and Doug Hood since I was about 15 and Hamish was good friends with them as well. Up to that point, we’d be recording ourselves on a Revox 2-Track and overdubbing and doing stuff like that. Then we heard what Doug and Chris had been doing, especially one track by the Techtones, which Doug had recorded with them. We were quite impressed with that. What really blew my mind was the Tall Dwarfs’ first EP [Three Songs]. Chris and Alec Bathgate had just recorded that and I can always remember listening to that straight off the 4-track before they had mixed it. It just seemed like a logical extension to record with them, really.

Doug Hood: I was Toy Love’s soundman, so I’d had a bit of experience in live mixing. When Chris bought a 4-track, we were living together in Grey Lynn and he started playing around with it. I basically borrowed it off him and I recorded a band called the Techtones and discovered that you could actually mix 16 tracks down to four tracks, which is what we basically did.

Roger Shepherd: They just thought they could record The Clean better on Chris’s 4-track than we could otherwise. The feeling was that there’s five or six songs ready to record; let’s just go with that and make an EP. It takes out the stress of trying to put an album together. That was the great thing about the EP format: a lot of the bands that came after them had an EP’s worth of songs but not an album’s worth, and it reduced the whole stress of recording.

David Kilgour: We were sceptical of going into fancy studios. They seemed a bit alien to us really.

Roger Shepherd: They recorded it in Bond St in that hall that I hope is still there. It cost $750. I paid for it.

Robert Scott: It wasn’t a studio. It was like a Scout den hall. It was very small. It would’ve been ten-by-ten metres, or something like that. There’s was a wee room off to the side that would’ve been the kitchen. Doug and Chris set up the 4-track and soundboard in there and just ran the mic lines out into the main room. We just set up in the main room as though we were playing live.

Roger Shepherd: The misconception is that it was all Chris, but it was very much Doug. It was Chris’ machine, the 4-track. Doug was very much engineering the whole technical side of it and the ins and outs of recording it. Chris was essentially there as another set of ears. He was like another producer, whereas Doug was kind of engineer/producer.

David Kilgour: I worked out that I turned 20 the day before we started recording it. It was an exciting time, of course. We didn’t really know what we were going to produce when we went to make that record. We were never that interested in capturing the band and what it was like live; we were much more interested in producing an interesting record. I wouldn’t say that record has any relation to what we sounded like live at the time, apart from the energy.

Doug Hood: I knew ‘Point That Thing’ was really special and ‘Anything Could Happen’. I don’t know exactly how we got the sound we got on ‘Anything Could Happen’, but for such a basic recording it’s still to this day sounds really fucking good. We had no playback facilities at all. We couldn’t really even listen to anything until we got it home and listened to it on the home stereo.

Robert Scott: ‘Point That Thing Somewhere Else’ stood out for me because it’s such an incredible piece of music, and it’s one of those songs that’s different every time it’s played as well. So capturing a good version of that was great.

David Kilgour: I don’t know what it is about that song. It was a bit of a pivotal moment coming up with that track. Up until that point, we had been playing it as quite a metallic fast track. I think by the time we came to record it, we were a bit tired of that and we just went the opposite way. I think once we had done the guitar overdub, we knew we were onto something pretty special. Actually, when I was doing that guitar overdub, Chris Knox walked into the room where I was recording and sat down and had a fit. I’d never actually been with Chris before when he’d had a fit, so it was a new experience for me. I wasn’t too sure what was going on.

Robert Scott: I was kind of freaked out because I’d never seen anyone have an epileptic fit before and I didn’t know Chris was an epileptic. The others said ‘it’s alright, he’s just having an epileptic fit. He’ll be alright in a few minutes’, and he was. Apparently it can be brought on by excitement and I know Chris was really excited about the way the sessions were going and he felt that something pretty good was getting put down that day. It all added to the craziness of the day.

Robert Scott: We were doing a photo session at Chris Knox’s flat and Carol Tippett was taking photos for press stuff. We were also shooting a video in the bath at the same time and eating grass. So that’s what’s happening in the bath. I’m pretty sure that Chris just did the drawing from a print from that session. That was put forward as a cover idea and we went ‘yeah yeah, sure’. The back is all of our rough ideas of what we could’ve done for the cover.

Roger Shepherd: It was always a great dilemma in Flying Nun circles, what we were going to call a record. That’s why the label’s got a stupid name. I think Barbara Ward, Chris Knox’s partner, came up with Boodle Boodle Boodle as they were just sitting around going ‘what are we going to call it?’ They latched onto it because it just sounded great rather than what it meant. And probably what it means is something to do with money, I suspect. It’s probably some English upper-class phrase like tally-ho, now that I think about it.

Robert Scott: It’s slang for money and it’s also a kind of English gin.

David Kilgour: It was a term that Barbara’s family I think had used as kids. They might’ve used it to fill in swear words perhaps. I can’t actually remember.

Doug Hood: We were all saying it was going to be a real hit and we’d make lots of money and she said ‘yeah, lots of boodle’. And that’s how it got its name.

Excerpt from the insert (Cartoon: Chris Knox)

Roger Shepherd: I couldn’t believe how good it was. I think we might’ve gone for a blat in my Jaguar Mark 2 because it had a decent stereo. I was just blown away by it. It sounded so much better than I thought possible. It finished on ‘Point That Thing Somewhere Else’, which sounds great in the car. It’s a good driving song, that one. It’s a really varied record. I’m just so fond of it. It’s such an important record for Flying Nun and for New Zealand music. It showed the way forward for all the other bands that we worked with afterwards.

David Kilgour: I heard those tracks straight off tape recently for the first time in quite a long time and I was really surprised at how good they sounded. Especially the drums and bass, which were coming off one track. ‘Point That Thing’ and ‘Billy Two’ and ‘Anything Could Happen’ – God, they sound so good and it’s coming off one track. It was kind of astonishing to hear.

Martin Phillipps (The Chills): They caught something special. At the time it was easy to miss the sheer intensity of what The Clean were like. But they did the more sensible thing and recorded those songs played really well in the studio. And that’s what’s going to last – not people’s memories of this gig or that gig, that’s redundant. If you can catch a song that’s going to last longer than you are, that’s special.

Roger Shepherd: It showed all those bands what could be done on a 4-track and it eased a lot of bands that would’ve been freaked out in a studio environment by the expense and the snooty attitude of the people that worked in them. A lot of those bands would’ve reacted really badly to that. It also showed them what the sales potential was. Over time, we’ve probably sold about 20,000 copies of that record. I thought it was good enough to do really well, but it was top five in the charts twice. It was up there before Christmas and then bounced back up after Christmas, so it gives you an idea of just how much interest there was in it and how much people liked it. It sold on a grassroots level of people seeing the band, or people talking about it in record shops or people reading music writers in newspapers and Rip It Up. Commercial radio never played it, so it was a bit of an ‘up yours’ gesture, the whole thing.

Martin Phillipps: It was a pleasant surprise but not totally out of the blue. The Clean toured extensively throughout New Zealand and a lot of audiences who thought they didn’t like that kind of music found that they did and went out and bought the record. It was the grassroots support for the band that paid off for that record.

Doug Hood: I read a comment from Martin Phillipps, where Martin said he finds it really difficult to listen to stuff from back then. But I don’t think you can say that about The Clean. It’s as relevant today as it was thirty-odd years ago.

Robert Scott: I suppose it’s one of those things – fate and all that kind of palaver – just bumping into the right people at the right time and everything conspiring to work out as well as it did. I just consider myself very lucky.

Keep going!

From left to right: George Henare and Gareth Reeves as Dumbledore and Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Matu Ngaropo as George Washington in Hamilton and Akina Edmonds as Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton. (Photos: Supplied, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureDecember 10, 2022

The NZ actors in two of the biggest stage shows on the planet

Sam Brooks

Contributing writer

International stage shows Hamilton and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child are making waves in Melbourne, with a number of New Zealand actors in leading roles. They tell Sam Brooks what it takes to star in productions of this scale.

In downtown Melbourne, eight times a week, thousands of audience members pour out of two theatres barely five minutes’ walk from each other. One of those theatres is playing host to Hamilton, the record-breaking Broadway hip hop musical that tells the story of United States founding father Alexander Hamilton. The other has been completely retrofitted for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the spectacular sequel to the novels that has also, yes, broken records on the West End and Broadway.

The shows share more than a few things in common. One, they’re both deservedly critically acclaimed. Two, they’re spectacles quite unlike anything usually seen on this side of the Tasman (although Hamilton is coming to the less intimate Spark Arena next year). Three, both feature a bunch of New Zealand actors in key roles.

I spoke to four of those actors – Gareth Reeves and George Henare from Harry Potter, and Matu Ngaropo and Akina Edmonds from Hamilton – on their journey from the audition room to the stage, and what it feels like to be important cogs of such beloved, well-oiled machines.

Lyndon Watts, Chloe Zuel, Akina Edmonds and Elandrah Eramiha in the Melbourne production of Hamilton. (Photo: Daniel Boud)

The audition

George Henare has been working consistently for 50 years – a huge feat for an actor in any country, but especially in New Zealand – and so it’s no surprise to learn that he was touring Australia with another major stage show, Aladdin (he played the Sultan), when he got the call about Harry Potter.

“It didn’t really interest me,” he admits. “I started watching some of the movies when they started off and they didn’t interest me one bit. I’ve done so many movies that I know exactly how all the fantasy stuff and all the spooky stuff happens.”

The producers kept at him though, sending him scripts, and one of his co-stars pointed out that the characters he was being asked to read for, Dumbledore and Amos Diggory, were both really great roles, requiring an actor of Henare’s experience and gravitas to carry them off.

He remembers reading the scripts and thinking, “Oh, I suppose…”

To his surprise, he was quickly cast as Dumbledore. The fact that he was a Māori man embodying a character previously played by very British actors Richard Harris and Michael Gambon rolled off him like water of a hippogriffin’s back, he says. “I’ve played Lear, I’ve played Lenin, we’re all human beings.”

It was a bit less of an easy ride for Gareth Reeves, the Christchurch-born, Australian-based actor who plays the title role. He got the casting brief like anyone else, and didn’t think he had a shot at Harry – until he sat down and read the script. “Then it was one of those strange things that happens very rarely, I just knew I could do it. I walked in knowing I could do it. If they didn’t want me it would be because I wasn’t good enough or right for it.”

In the audition scene, Harry presents his son with the blanket his mother had wrapped him in as a baby. Reeves was in the middle of a Sydney-to-Melbourne move so happened to have in his car a blanket his own stepmother had made him from his late father’s clothes. He used the blanket. He got the role.

For Akina Edmonds and Matu Ngaropo, who have key roles in the musical Hamilton, the audition process was more drawn out. Ngaropo missed the initial auditions because he was in the UK performing with the Modern Māori Quartet, but was flown over to audition when he got back home to New Zealand. Then they asked him what role he wanted. He’d seen the show in London, and knew where he would fit in. “Do I really have a choice, I’m pretty sure I don’t have a choice, right?”, he recalls thinking. The casting director stopped playing coy. He’d be coming in for the role of George Washington, first president of the United States of America.

Meanwhile New Zealand-born and raised Akina Edmonds, now a mainstay of Australian musical theatre – she’s been in everything from Sister Act to the Lion King – auditioned for Eliza, the long-suffering wife of Alexander Hamilton, but was asked to come back for the headstrong Angelica Schuyler, Eliza’s sister. She says the whole process felt more like a rehearsal than a standard audition. “Their big thing was there was literally no right way of doing it. They were looking at whatever I made of what they were telling me.”

It’s an experience that Ngaropo also had – he spent a full hour in the audition room with the American team, who oversee the casting for every international production of the show. “I think at this point they know very, very quickly who they want and who they can invest in, because the show’s so specific,” he says. “I felt very instantly that we spoke a similar language.”

Gareth Reeves as Harry Potter in the Melbourne production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Photo: Supplied)

The rehearsals

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is undoubtedly the biggest show Reeves has ever been involved with. That’s saying something – he was in the seven hour epic Angels in America for Silo Theatre in 2013. “You have to box smart with this one, play the long game,” he says of Harry Potter. “You’re very much in service to the story, the production, the characters. There’s so many moving parts, backstage is even more complex.”

It’s one of the most tightly choreographed plays in recent years, each scene change accompanied with the kind of flourish that would be a show-stopping moment in most productions, and almost every movement timed to fit with the Imogen Heap-composed score.

Still, it didn’t phase George Henare, who’s been performing in plays, musicals and operas for half a century – including at Harry Potter’s Melbourne theatre during a 1960s run of Porgy and Bess. “It’s no different to the stuff that I’ve been doing for donkey’s years!” he says of his latest big international stage production.

He’s still awed by the technology involved in the multi-million-dollar production, however. He recalls going to pick up a prop during rehearsal – no spoilers, sorry – to see how it worked, and being sharply told by a stage manager to stand back: “It’s magic! Don’t touch.”

Says Henare of the show: “I often can’t tell how on earth they’re doing things, and they won’t tell me either!”

Rehearsals for Hamilton are famously collaborative, especially compared to most musicals’ extremely prescriptive staging and choreography: an actor needs to stand in the same spot as every other performer in the role, act in the same style, and follow the same steps. That sort of rigour ensures a consistency and continuity of performance, but it doesn’t work for a show that needs to feel as alive as Hamilton does.

At the start of rehearsals, the cast were told to offer as much of themselves as they could to their roles. “There’s an idea with the show that if you just turn up on the day, however you are, and however you feel, that’s enough to do the show,” Ngaropo says (and he’s there more often than not, missing only four shows out of over 100).

Edmonds remembers raising an eyebrow when she heard that from the director. “They always say that, and they end up directing you into the same cue, cue, cue,” she says, “But then you would make offers, and none of them would get stamped on. Then you’d continue to make them, and get to the scary point where you’re bringing all of yourself. It’s quite exposing.”

For half Hamilton’s running time, George Washington is leading an army in the War of Independence against England. Ngaropo, who is Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Rarawa, and Ngāti Porou, was able to bring a unique approach to the role of a military officer. “I understood from my own people’s perspective how we acknowledge war, physically,” he says. “I tried a few things, a few ways I would use the sword that referenced my culture, and the creatives were like, ‘What are you doing?’

“I explained it to them. They went, ‘We’re obsessed. Do whatever you want.’”

Jason Arrow and Matu Ngaropo in Hamilton rehearsals. (Photo: Lisa Maree Williams)

The show

Both Hamilton and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child run like machines. Hamilton alone has 16 understudies and swings, which on its own is a larger cast than you’re likely to see on any professional stage in New Zealand. For the actors, the biggest challenge is not the show itself. It’s having the stamina to keep doing the show, month in and month out – Hamilton has been running in Australia (first in Sydney, now in Melbourne, and soon to be in Brisbane) since March 2021, while Harry Potter has been running, with a break to retool the two-part show into one, since January 2021. Hamilton is a relatively brisk two hours and 20 minutes, while Harry Potter runs for three and a half hours. Both shows play eight times a week.

To keep up with Harry Potter’s demands, Henare utilised a lesson from playing the Sultan in Aladdin, still his longest stretch in a single show. “If you go scene by scene, then it’s no problem whatsoever,” he says. “Don’t think about what you did yesterday or something like that. You just do it as a fresh scene.

“You just have to tune out and just stay in the moment.”

For Reeves, Harry Potter himself, the biggest takeaway has been learning how to manage his health in a long-running show where almost every scene has a stunt, a special effect, and several marks to hit. “The old ‘go-till-you-drop, recover, on to the next gig’ mentality just won’t work here,” he says.

Hamilton’s Ngaropo agrees that pushing yourself to the limit is the worst thing you can do in a production of this size. “We have that old-school creative-collaborative mentality from home, you muck in and you don’t call it off. You just get it done,” he says. That doesn’t work in a show like Hamilton – if you’re sick, you don’t do the show. You call off and get better as soon as you can.”

Another questionable lesson Hamilton has helped Ngaropo unlearn: “We’re taught all through our training, through the institutions at home, that we have to make the moment rather than allow it,” he says. “This has been a massive process in allowing things to happen.”

It’s the closest feeling that Ngaropo has ever got to being a vessel – a conduit for the show to meet the audience, rather than pushing the show out to the audience. “A lot of my process anyway is about making sure that the pathways are clear. Because the skill will be there, but the pathway has to be clear to allow what comes in to flow through and out to serve the moment,” he says.

“It feels like true service.”

Gareth Reeves (middle, with the scar) as Harry Potter in the Melbourne production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Photo: Supplied)

The response

The relationship between performer and audience in shows like these is something special. When people take their seats each night, they likely already know the songs word for word (Hamilton) and have a deep love for the characters (Harry Potter). They know when Angelica Schulyer’s going to hit the high note in ‘Satisfied’, and they know they’re going to see flames shoot out of wands in Harry Potter. The show is the drawcard; the actors are just there to deliver it. (Indeed, the funniest thing about seeing Harry Potter was witnessing George Henare stroll through the crowd afterwards, unrecognisable to fans once out of Dumbledore drag.)

Hamilton’s Edmonds says she hasn’t quite grasped the magnitude of the show, but understands that ultimately she’s just a small cog in a much larger machine. “I don’t really like doing photos at stage door,” she says.“I will stop and chat and sign, but I’ve learned that at the end of the day, the show is the star. If you’re not here to serve the show, then what are you doing?”

The Hamilton phenomenon comes with a sense of responsibility for Ngaropo, who is part of a predominantly POC cast including indigenous and First Nations people from across the Pacific and Australia. Famously, Hamilton features Black and brown actors play white historical figures, and uses hip hop to tell the story of the founding of the United States – making a political point about whose history counts in the process. For Ngaropo and his fellow cast members, the show represents an opportunity to play non-stereotypical, fully-realised lead roles, in a genre, musical theatre, that for decades was rarely open to them.

“If you actually see yourself represented truthfully up there doing the thing that is the phenomenon, it’s so powerful. That’s our responsibility, to deliver that, and represent that, because that’s the actual magic.”

Hamilton plays at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, until January 15 2023, and will play a limited season at Spark Arena, Auckland, from May 26 to June 11 next year. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is currently at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre (and will not be here anytime soon).