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The Duckrockers crew (Photo: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)
The Duckrockers crew (Photo: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureOctober 29, 2022

How Duckrockers recreated the infamous 1984 Queen Street riot

The Duckrockers crew (Photo: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)
The Duckrockers crew (Photo: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)

Oscar Kightley faced plenty of obstacles making the Sione’s Wedding prequel. The biggest? Recreating the scene of a DD Smash concert that turned violent.

In December 1984, a concert called Thank God It’s Over! was held in Auckland’s Aotea Square to mark the end of the academic year. Headlined by DD Smash, the free afternoon show erupted in violence when the band’s frontman Dave Dobbyn spotted the cops and reportedly told the crowd: “I wish those riot squad guys would stop wanking and put their little batons away.”

Shops were looted. Windows were smashed. A car was overturned. Fires were lit. Blood was spilled.

Watching this chaos unfold from the West Auckland suburb of Te Atatū was a teenage Oscar Kightley. “I remember being at home watching TV and suddenly there was this eyewitness newsflash,” says the veteran local actor, writer and director. “I was agog, staring at what was unfolding … it was insane. People throwing shit through big plate glass windows, running in and helping themselves to whatever, running off up Queen Street. I’ll never forget that day.”

It’s this moment that Kightley chose to begin his new show Duckrockers, a TV prequel to his hit 2006 film Sione’s Wedding. The idea for a third film after 2012’s Sione’s 2: Unfinished Business had been kicking around for a while when South Pacific Pictures boss Andrew Szusterman suggested Kightley and co-writer James Griffin turn their prequel dreams into a TV show. Kightley agreed and with $4.3 million of NZ on Air funding secured, the pair began writing and producing the show, spending several months filming it earlier this year. 

An origin story focused on the 80s upbringing of Siones Wedding’s core characters, much of Duckrockers is drawn from the Samoan-born Kightley’s real-life upbringing in West Auckland. Getting the markers of that time period correct – from haircuts to names, clothes and slang – was incredibly important. “We wanted to be really specific with it,” says Kightley. It was a time when video games were played in fish and chip shops and talking to people on the phone was through a landline in the hallway. “The audience will have a visceral connection with that stuff if you really get it right.”  

The cast of Sione's Wedding.
Oscar Kightley and the cast of the original Sione’s Wedding film in 2006.

In real life, Kightley was too young to attend the infamous Aotea Square concert. But in the first episode of Duckrockers, the show’s core group of four teens – that’s Sefa, Stanley, Michael and Albert for those who don’t remember the films – sneak onto a nearby rooftop to enjoy the show, and taste their first beer. Kightley and Griffin keep the posters and location the same, but rewrite history slightly when the riots are sparked not by Dave Dobbyn saying “wanking” but by the four kids throwing a beer bottle from the top of a nearby information centre into the crowd.

It was a fun idea, but filming those scenes became some of the hardest of the entire shoot. “That was a big day,” admits Kightley. “It was our biggest extras day … we had 20 minutes to film this huge scene.” He and his crew pulled it off by building fake platforms and filming from low angles, then mixing in the still-shocking footage from the actual riot. The results, seen in the first episode of Duckrockers, which premieres Wednesday on TVNZ 2 and TVNZ+, are as close to reality as they could get. 

Duckrockers
Finding the right cast was crucial to making Duckrockers a success. (Photo: Supplied)

“We always thought it would be a challenge to recreate it,” Kightley says, but it was important to start his coming-of-age story here, because it was a moment of change in Aotearoa. “We went from a place where we trusted everyone to behave themselves and have a drink in public to being quite knowledgeable about how we would get up to mischief if the opportunity was there. It was quite a milestone day in our history and our evolution as a country … we knew that’s how we wanted to tackle this story.” 

Recreating a famous riot wasn’t the only problem the Duckrockers crew faced. Chemistry was key to the success of Sione’s Wedding, with the cast of Kightley, Robbie Magasiva, Shimpal Lelisi and Iaheto Ah Hi already friends and members of the comedy troupe Naked Samoans well before filming began. As a result, their gags and effortless camaraderie oozed off the screen.

Finding the right actors to recreate the film’s loveable gang could make or break the prequel. Kightley knew the cast needed to gel, but he rejected the usual TV approach of hiring actors in their 20s and found real-life teenagers for the roles. “There’s a real innocence you have when you’re genuinely a teenager,” he says.

The chosen four – brothers Levi and Augustino Ieremia-Seulu, plus Duane Evans Jr and Dallas Halavaka – are aged between 14-18 and all still at school. Apart from the brothers, they were also all strangers to each other, but weeks of rigorous rehearsals helped them bond quickly. “Because of the pressure, because of the expectation, they’re really tight.”

Duckrockers
The young cast of Duckrockers in a dance battle in Grey Lynn Park. (Photo: Supplied)

They also needed to be able to dance. Duckrockers is full of “bopping” sequences as the boys form a breakdancing crew and begin facing up against a more practised local team. While Kightley says he’s never been able to dance, breakdancing was a big thing during his childhood. Some of the cast were so good they had to try and unlearn some of their tricks to make them look more like beginners.

The other issue creating a TV show in 2022? Covid. On a sunny but chilly day in May, the cast and crew were outside filming a bopping battle in Grey Lynn park. Dozens of actors were gathered around a cardboard mat lying on a basketball court with ghetto blasters scattered around. Nearby, an 80s police car was ready to speed onto the court to break up a looming fight. “Can we get on with the flipping battle?” yelled the opposition as the Duckrockers made their familiar hand gestures and “quack quack” call signs.

Duckrockers
Oscar Kighley on the set of Duckrockers with his young cast. (Photo: Supplied)

Laughing behind the monitor was Kightley. Everyone was masked except the actors, and Covid breaks became a regular occurrence during the shoot. “We lost actors, camera crew. Somehow we managed to soldier on,” he says. “Our protocols hung tight.”

But he couldn’t hide his delight at seeing his childhood depicted on screen. “It was a specific kind of innocence,” he says. “New Zealand was a more innocent country back then. Look at the TV, stuff like Top Town, the whole family would sit down to watch that. I couldn’t imagine that now.”

He’s hoping many do indeed sit down to watch Wednesday night’s debut of Duckrockers. Like Sione’s Wedding and Bro’ Town, Kightley’s pleased he’s managed to get faces just like his on local screens again. “There’s never been a show like this … about brown kids. I can’t remember one,” he says. “We got to make one. This is a huge deal for our community.”

Duckrockers airs on TVNZ 2 and TVNZ+ from Wednesday.

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midnights album cover and a music emoji with a purple filter and fun purple shapes in the background
Artist Taylor Swift has advocated for changes to streaming royalties. Image: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureOctober 28, 2022

On the poetic merits of Taylor Swift

midnights album cover and a music emoji with a purple filter and fun purple shapes in the background
Artist Taylor Swift has advocated for changes to streaming royalties. Image: Tina Tiller

Shanti Mathias attends a seminar about Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights and finds that poetry and pop music aren’t so far apart after all.

The poet’s new collection was received well. It’s already a bestseller. Many critics love it. Other poets and academics do, too: at a seminar hosted by Te Herenga Waka’s English and Creative Communication department yesterday, poets Chris Tse and Ronia Ibrahim and UCLA professor Summer Kim Lee discussed how this new collection fits into the canon – the literary canon, and the mythology the poet herself is building. 

The poet was Taylor Swift; the collection was Midnights, her latest album. And the seminar was a reminder that it can be fruitful – and also just plain fun – to fit pop music into the language of academia. 

“There’s a blurring of eras: the past mixes with the present and the future,” said Tse, Aotearoa’s poet laureate and fashion icon. It was an earlier collection – that is, an album – that had caught his attention, years before: the intricacies of Taylor Swift’s Red singing into his storm of a breakup. Tse had bought the new album, liner notes and flickering flame cover, at a JB Hi-Fi, the retail worker there already tired from restocking shelves with all the different editions

Chris Tse: poet laureate and Swiftie (Image: Tina Tiller)

He read a poem from his second collection, He’s So MASC, titled “Notes for Taylor Swift, should she ever write a song about me”. “Make me a hit song for the ages,” goes the last line. “The last great crossover ballad.” Tse meditated on Midnights as a song cycle, linked by the theme of restless, sleepless nights. He read a new poem he’d written in response to Midnights, reflecting on the loneliness and possibility of darkness – like going to a cinema alone, and watching the credits roll, free from any pressure to tell someone else what he’d thought of it. 

Ronia Ibrahim, a poet, essayist, and designer who has co-created the Moon Musings zine and edited Salient’s features section, was interested in Swift’s ability to write about experiences she might not have had: loving Swift as storyteller, self-mythologising through her lyrics. Ibrahim’s poems responded to Swift with imagery of petals and diamonds. One piece, about a break-up, used a repetitive structure, echoing Swift’s album, where each song is a midnight. Another played with Swift’s vocalisations – those long aaaaas and iiiiiiis as stutters, the trap of peer pressure like a moth getting high on fluoro lighting. 

Zooming in from the other side of the ocean, UCLA professor Summer Kim Lee, who studies performance, aesthetics and gender, reflected on how the release of the album itself was a kind of performance, the surprise addition of the 3AM bonus tracks – at 3am, of course – asking fans keeping vigil to stay up a little longer, to spend the whole night with Swift. “I may not have sleepless nights for the same reasons as Taylor Swift,” she said “But a sleepless night for Taylor is a sleepless night for us all.” The slipperiness of time in the album was compelling, too: in what order do the midnights occur? How do the songs each fit into the narrative of Swift’s life? Does Swift, the poems’ speaker, learn any lessons from staying up so late?

Taylor Swift performs at Mt Smart Stadium on November 9, 2018 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo: Don Arnold/Getty Images)

Both Ibrahim and Lee reflected on how, for many years, listening to Taylor Swift had been an “experience of shame”. Ibrahim had fallen in love with the 2008 album Fearless in primary school, but stopped after listening to peers who told her that “boys don’t like girls who listen to Taylor Swift”, until she rediscovered Swift’s discography a few years ago. Lee reminisced about living in Brooklyn and taking the subway with Swift piped into her headphones, imagining the distaste that the hipsters around her might convey if they knew what was in her ears. “Being a Swiftie is an experience of shame,” she said, but added later an idea from queer studies – that shame is also “a productive collectivising effort.”

Often, the image of a poet is dreary, pages and pens and a performance of poverty, while the music industry is supposed to be glitz and glamour and filthy lucre. As industries, poetry and music function very separately: one industry is being transformed by superstars and fan communities on Instagram and TikTok, while the other – well, actually, the other is being transformed by Instagram and TikTok too

An audience member asked if Swift’s latest album could still be poetry without the music – another fruitful question. Ibrahim, who has been reading the lyrics to learn the words that evaporate into the music, thought that it did. To me, an audience member, this seemed a striking point: why are poetry and pop music separated? Contemporary live poetry is remarkably mainstream – whether that’s lucrative reality TV slam contests or the smash hit glitzy New Zealand Show Ponies performance (catch it next week at the Verb festival!), it can mean sold out venues and rabid fans. A few years ago, songwriter Bob Dylan accepted a Nobel Prize in literature. The mediums aren’t so very far apart. 

Tse recounted the theory that the colour of the elevator buttons in the Bejeweled music video were a reference to the Speak Now album cover, a sign that the next “Taylor’s Version” album will be a re-recording of the 2010 album, spreading his arms out like Pepe Silvia. An audience member asked the panelists about the Gaylor theory – that Swift is queer, and has been signalling this to fans through an arcane system of lyrics and semiotics for years. It was this aspect of the seminar that most interested me, the dormant parts of my brain that have a literature degree activating in the synthetic grey seminar room. 

When I studied literature, I was often annoyed – and also amazed – at the ability of academics to connect the personal lives of the writers they studied to the work they produced, to take any line and reference seriously, worthy of analysis. Sometimes, the connections felt tenuous; at other times, gossipy. Once, for an assignment, I had to read through some of Katherine Mansfield’s letters, and felt like I was snooping in the diary of a friend: reading the stories intended for publication was one thing, but forming theories about the internal life of this remarkable writer felt like another. (I did enjoy it, though I almost didn’t want to.) 

But of course creative work and personal lives are intertwined – something that Taylor Swift’s passionate fanbase knows well. Like literature academics, the thrill is in the chase: piecing together theories from clues and fragments, treating every image as a potential symbol. Some of the theories will never be confirmed, but the pleasure is in believing that art is more than itself, that everything means something. 

The seminar was fun. Pop music is great, and so is poetry – everything that is revealed, theorised and hidden as artforms build on each other. Perhaps Taylor Swift put it best: she’s only cryptic and Machiavellian because she cares.


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