Play it at breakfast, lunch or tea, the song ‘Fish and Chips’ is almost as famous in Aotearoa as the dish itself. So why is the woman who wrote it virtually unknown?

When you see Claudia Mushin zooming through the streets of Wellington’s Miramar in her electric wheelchair, you might hear a familiar chorus sung in her wake: “fish and chips make me want to lick my lips.” The ditty has been repeated thousands of times across New Zealand schools since the 1990s, and it’s made Mushin famous enough in her Miramar neighbourhood that locals who spot her whizzing by can’t help but burst into song.

Hum the tune, and most New Zealanders 40 and under should be able to sing the lyrics back to you – it’s funny how a few rhymes you learn in primary school can stick with you for ever. ‘Fish and Chips’, originally born from the mumblings of Mushin’s son Steve, was a track on the third collection of Kiwi Kidsongs, a series of Ministry of Education albums that were sent out on cassette tape, then CD, to every New Zealand school across the motu from 1990 to 2010. 

Finding Claudia Mushin

Despite the success of ‘Fish and Chips’, Mushin is virtually unknown by New Zealanders outside of her Miramar neighbourhood. The same could be said about most of the composers of other Kiwi Kidsongs hits – like ‘Bad Hair Day’, which briefly propelled composer John Phillips into the spotlight after it went viral on TikTok last year.

Searching for information about the ‘Fish and Chips’ originator online can lead you away from Mushin’s trail. A 2023 clip from 7 Days introduces Janice Marriott as the producer of ‘Fish and Chips’, and the hosts seem to think she wrote the song. Marriott did work as a producer for the Kiwi Kidsongs albums, but only two years after the song was released.

Perhaps some believed Mushin to be too ill to talk about her own song, or even dead, or the 7 Days producer responsible for the segment just didn’t do their homework. Whatever it was, Mushin doesn’t have much to say about the palaver.

Instead, she laughs when told a generation of New Zealanders consider her ditty iconic. “I mean, it was just on the whim of Steve asking me if he could have fish and chips for tea, and it all went from there,” she says. “It obviously spoke to the children.”

The family had moved to Wellington from the UK three years earlier, and 12-year-old Steve quickly caught on to the New Zealand family tradition of fish and chip night, with Steve constantly asking his mother to recreate it at home. Instead, Mushin wrote a song about it – a classic mum move, Steve says, as she always had a pad of paper to scribble on nearby. ‘Fish and Chips’ is one of three songs she penned that ended up on Kiwi Kidsongs albums.

These days, the 78-year-old is too weak to lift a pen on her own, and is preparing to move her life into a care home. She’s been trying to get back on the mend following a recent fall, but it’s difficult as contracting polio as a child in the 1960s has left her with multiple disabilities. However, the younger nurses caring for Mushin do get a kick out of singing ‘Fish and Chips’ to its creator.

When the song first came out, Mushin had just started working at Miramar Central School, where she spent 19 years teaching and tutoring. By the end of her time there, she was 65 and using a walker, which her students nicknamed Wally. 

“[‘Fish and Chips’] passed through the classrooms, through the families, and at my last assembly, the kids all sang it to me,” Mushin says. She’s “amazed” the song managed to travel further than the classrooms in Miramar.

The song didn’t necessarily give Steve major clout on the playground – by the time of its release, he was 15, and having your mum make songs about your fish and chip cravings was definitely uncool. It was only a few years ago, watching a group of friends and strangers sing ‘Fish and Chips’ over a potluck, that he realised his mother had penned a beloved earworm.

Creating an iconic children’s anthem

Mushin can still remember writing ‘Fish and Chips’ at the kitchen table in 1990. She was a kindergarten teacher at the time, and had long loved poetry and rhymes as a little girl, but tunes learned from BBC’s Singing Together no longer felt timely. ‘Fish and Chips’, on the other hand, seemed something any New Zealander could get behind.

She hummed the tune to Wellington Teachers College music lecturer James Middleton, who helped put the song to music and suggested some new lyrics. It was later recorded in Tītahi Bay, by Radha Sahar and Tony Clark, in 1992. Sahar has tried to rake through her mind, but she can’t quite remember recording ‘Fish and Chips’ specifically – after all, it was just one of hundreds of her sessions with Kiwi Kidsongs.

Mushin recalls a prominent ‘Fish and Chips’ memory: the time the Ministry of Education tried to ban it. The song was included on a compilation album of the best of Kiwi Kidsongs in 2000, but the department tried to ban it as it believed the message of ‘Fish and Chips’ went against its own healthy eating guidelines.

“[A mother] was taking their child home from school, and the child started to sing it. She [the parent] thought, ‘that’s a terrible song’, expecting children to eat fish and chips for three meals a day,” Mushin says. “She was obviously over-PC, and she set about getting the Ministry of Education to ban it.”

Mushin’s loyal students fought back, and eventually Fair Go’s Kevin Milne showed up to deliver justice by interviewing Mushin and the kids and broadcasting their disappointment. In a letter to the programme, the Ministry of Education wrote: “Fish and chips is almost an iconic Kiwi takeaway and it would be a shame if we could not have a fun song about it. I think we made a mistake when we looked at withdrawing the song. We have now fixed the mistake by including the song.”

The albums were a project by Learning Media, a Ministry of Education enterprise launched in 1989 and shut down in 2013. This is where Janice Marriott was involved – she worked behind-the-scenes at the enterprise as a producer for 15 years, from the time of the fifth Kiwi Kidsongs album. Her job was to keep her ear to the ground to find the next children’s hit, and connect with musicians such as Phil Riley, who wrote ‘Sausages and Custard’ about Marriott’s dog, and John Phillips of ‘Bad Hair Day’.

She’s the person who picked the songs that appeared on the albums, though Marriott says the hardest part of her job was “making the ministry happy”. When Kiwi Kidsongs was discontinued, Marriott tried to convince the Ministry of Education to relaunch the project to no avail. It’s a shame, she says, that kids these days have fewer musical influences in the classroom.

A teacher’s legacy

Once in a blue moon, ‘Fish and Chips’ still gets played on the radio – in 2016, after it got a run on Australia’s ABC network, Mushin received a modest $200 in royalties. On TikTok, the song is getting a new lease of life as a nostalgia hit.

Steve says the success of ‘Fish and Chips’ managed to perfectly encapsulate his mother’s energy. Cheeky, playful and concerned only with life’s pleasures – that’s exactly who Mushin is, he says.

An artist and author himself, he says the work of teachers isn’t too dissimilar to that of creatives, in the sense that what they do can totally transform a person’s life. “Teachers live on nothing, and they very rarely receive recognition when they pour so much into their jobs,” he says. “You remember them for your whole life, and they often don’t realise they’ve had this impact on you.”

The woman living with five chronic illnesses, who used a walking frame while corralling her classes of five-year-olds and cemented herself into the minds of thousands of New Zealanders through her rhymes. “Claudia is a giant,” Steve says. “She is the strongest person I’ve ever met, while being the weakest person I’ve ever met.”