I first saw Graham Brazier in 1981. I'd come back from living overseas and had never heard of Hello Sailor but there they were one night, these peacocks walking into Victoria University to play a gig and, by God, when I say walked, I mean swaggered. I had no idea who these tall, slim, striking men with kohl around their eyes were but they looked dangerous. I didn't go and watch them, but from then on I became aware of Brazier as a figure to keep an eye on, perhaps more for his adventures than his music.
Jump forward a decade or so, and I interviewed Hello Sailor when they reunited. The interview, in 1996 for a Sunday paper, took place in the Gluepot, in broad daylight and some of the feathers had fallen off the peacocks. The pub looked filthy, age hadn't been kind to any of us, and Brazier was disengaged, so Harry Lyon and Dave McArtney did most of the talking. It was on the eve of a tour and McArtney made a quip about the singer being more interested in breaking into a chemist's shop than breaking into the charts. I put it in the story.
The shit hit the fan. Brazier's fiercely protective mother, Christine, rang me in a fury the following week. Her son, she raged, had been reading the paper in the back of the car somewhere near Whanganui and as soon as he read the McArtney quip, he ordered the car to stop and he ran off. It was all my fault. I had killed off Hello Sailor. I felt terrible. Luckily, he turned up a day or so later and resumed the tour. My relationship with Brazier took a happier turn in 2008 when I had the bright idea that he, a famously wide, deep and intelligent reader, could be a great poetry reviewer for this paper. When I rang him, I was fearful he might remember me from that hurtful story and tell me to go away. But he was wonderful: excited, thrilled, and ready to take on the challenge.
Writing about poetry isn't an easy job, and Brazier couldn't handle using a computer. He rang me frequently complaining about the bloody computer. First he delivered typed reviews on bits of paper, then he got a friend to send the copy via email, which was a small miracle. But he was a very good writer. Take this, from a review of Small Humours of Daylight by Tom Weston: "Each time I search for a favourite poem in this book, it is eclipsed by another, so I choose stanzas, small twigs of verbal beauty."
