Moana McArtney, daughter of the late Dave McArtney - founding member of Hello Sailor - unveils her debut album, A Fleeting Moment of Clarity, in her new guise as Prynne. Photo / Samantha Totty
She’s the daughter of Hello Sailor founding member Dave McArtney and model/athlete Donna Mills, and granddaughter of Les Mills (yes, that one), but now Moana McArtney is finding her own spotlight with the release of her new single.
Moana McArtney was holed up in a humble flat in Mt Albert after the death of her father, beloved Hello Sailor frontman Dave McArtney, when she first felt the impulse to pick up his guitar. Moana had taken it as a keepsake, this symbolic instrument that had been the vessel for Dave McArtney’s astonishing prowess for rock’n’roll, tunes that had left a mark on the New Zealand landscape. Up to that point, Moana had never played music before.
“This feeling came over me, this kind of urge to start playing it,” Moana says. “It was this buzzy moment. I just started playing it and my fingers were just pressing on the strings and I thought what was coming out sounded quite lovely. I didn’t know what I was playing. Ten minutes, and the song just came out.”
The song, taken from poetry she had written in her diary, was titled Steel Your Soul. Though it doesn’t feature on A Fleeting Moment of Clarity, Moana McArtney’s debut album under her nom-de-plume PRYNNE, it was nevertheless a catalyst for a flurry of musicality that, up until then, had been lying dormant. The memory of her father, who died in 2013, sparked it within her: “It felt like this beautiful moment where I was connecting to my dad.”
Despite Dave McArtney’s massive popularity, for Moana, the machinations of the rock’n’roll world were very much in the background of a childhood spent by the beach and amongst nature. “I knew my dad was a rock’n’roller but he was always just my dad,” she explains. “He was so present with us. I came home every night and without fail he was cooking in the kitchen with the music blaring, drinking a beer.” She credits Dave’s strong moral compass for keeping his family life sequestered away from the excesses of the music world. “When I was younger I went to his gigs and grew up around the other musicians but I think within himself he had a very true and clear boundary. He had his head screwed on tightly, his morals intact. I felt quite protected.”
That said, there was some bleedthrough, and Moana’s childhood was inevitably dotted with the presence of New Zealand’s music industry royalty - not least bandmates Graham Brazier and Harry Lyon, as well as notable music producer Alan Jansson, whose credits include OMC’s How Bizarre, and who served as producer of A Fleeting Moment of Clarity. “I did a lot of work with her father and Graham Brazier. I loved working with Dave. She contacted me and I said I’d love to,” says Jansson. “I was quite touched, a lot of her songs were quite beautiful.”
Guitarist Johnny Fleury, one of Dave’s post-Hello Sailor band The Pink Flamingos and one of his dearest friends, appears on the album, most notably in the guitar-heavy barn-stomper On the Run - which brushes up against Dave’s work with the Pink Flamingos. It was a full-circle moment for McArtney and Fleury, who regard each other as family. “I loved playing with Dave, we were like brothers really,” Fleury says. “When he passed I said to Mo and her mother that I’d look after them as much as I can.”
Moana explains that this was a direct request from Dave before his passing. “Johnny only told me that recently. He is such a loved part of our family, and an incredible guitarist. It felt right to have him come and play.”
Dave McArtney, with his feathery shock of hair and lanky, leather-clad persona cut a fairly different frame to his willowy, graceful daughter, and the differences extend to the music as well. Nestled comfortably somewhere between dream-pop and folk, Clarity is a debut that finds Moana flitting deftly between sounds and genres, all united by her versatile, elastic voicework - feather-light in one moment, defiant and urgent in another.
One might think from the exuberant first single Kid You’re Free, with its splashy stabs of 80s keyboard and a rumbling bassline, that we’re in for an album of sad-girl dancefloor-fillers akin to Lorde’s Melodrama. But as PRYNNE, Moana is interested in navigating a range of emotional avenues and sounds to represent them, including the hole in her life left by her father’s passing.
“I really didn’t premeditate it too much in terms of actively knowing I was flitting between genres. I was trying to be in tune with the flow of my own creativity and staying true to that process. It was kind of an accident that they just flow together so easily. I really tried to honour the songs and the music and what it needed to be, rather than try and shape the song into something I thought was expected of me,” she explains.
As the album progresses, two different pictures of Moana McArtney emerge - the exuberant free spirit and the reflective homebody. “The [different genres in the album] are different sides of my personality too - the wild, free extroverted side and the side that’s extremely shy and introverted.”
The name PRYNNE is derived from an extremely rare, delicate flower found only in Japan. Intrigued by how little information she could find on it online, Moana decided to adopt it as her stage name. Combined with the album title, A Fleeting Moment of Clarity, a sense of McArtney’s thematic interests starts to emerge - the search for meaning, transcendence, and purpose amidst the grief and mystery of life.
“I was going through quite a tumultuous personal period of self-discovery [at the time of naming the album],” McArtney explains. “I felt at that time like I was quite lost even though I was following my passion. I didn’t really know myself and I had a yearning for meaning and to discover more depth about life, to know myself more. That phrase just popped into my head as so many of my songs tend to in a moment. It just seemed so fitting, and it sounds so elusive. Yearning for more, yearning to find myself.” McArtney stresses the dark side to this idea, as well: “It’s fleeting - a double-edged sword.”
McArtney’s life, like the album, has seesawed between an idyllic childhood and a difficult process of maturation in her adult life. Not only the daughter of one of New Zealand’s most beloved musicians, McArtney’s family is studded with notable names - her grandfather, Les Mills (yes, that Les Mills), was not only the founder of the wildly successful gym of the same name, but was the Mayor of Tāmaki Makaurau in the 1990s (and an Olympic athlete to boot). Her mother, model and athlete Donna Mills, competed in the Commonwealth Games in the high jump.
Did she ever feel the pressure to follow in the footsteps of the sportier side of her talented family?
“My grandad was very keen for me to get into athletics, but I quickly realised who I was, which was an artist. But I still run every day!” she says.
The notion that the recording of the album was a family affair was an apt one, during a lengthy, Covid-delayed recording process that alternated between feverish intensity and solitary periods of dormancy. “It was intensely creative and it was very much following a creative flow and allowing things to happen, allowing inspiration to come,” Moana explains.
Fascinatingly, though, the musical paths of Moana and Dave McArtney rarely crossed. Though Moana has long been a poet, jotting down lyrics in notepads and diaries, the inheriting of her father’s guitar served as a literal passing of the torch, diverting Moana’s life-path to another discipline, and a music school a world away in London. It would prove to be the most creatively foundational experience of her life.
“I ran away to Europe with my best friend about six months or a year after dad died. I remember I was so lost at that time, I was very damaged,” Moana reflects. “I had no plan. I was starting to write songs and I’d brought his guitar with me overseas. And I decided I was going to audition for music school. I brought a few of my little songs and my guitar I could hardly play and sat in a room with a lady and played them for her. And I got in, which was crazy. And I just started doing that. I was really scared, terrified. I’d never done music before.”
Mostly green and surrounded by musical wunderkinds, Moana leaned on her most well-established gift.
“I could write a good lyric, that was my only strength. I really winged it. I woke up every morning and didn’t want to go, I was so scared. We’d have to write three songs a week and we’d come back and perform to the class the next week.”
Finally, Moana started to find her groove.
“I taught myself how to play the piano and produce music and started PRYNNE. So I felt like I was doing something I was meant to be doing. It felt good to have that after so much grief - things clicked into place.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a litany of unknowns and what-ifs that accompany the release of her debut, and sadness, too.
“I do have a little bit of sadness, I often feel sad thinking about how I’m entering this world and [my dad] can’t be there to guide me,” she explains. “I mean I have a really good support network, but it does feel like if he was here it would be a little less lonely going into the shark tank.”
Did Dave impart any wisdom upon Moana that influenced the work? Naturally.
“I do remember him saying over the years a few kind of poignant things to me about people, and being able to read people in situations and assess whether they had good intentions or not. Use your gut instinct and not get swept up in the flurry of things,” she says.
Moana felt most guided by the indomitability of Dave’s spirit. “Who he was, the way he was around me when I was young, he was leading by example.”
Whether it’s simply his presence in her life or something else entirely unexplainable, Moana has felt guided by her father in moments that, upon reflection, were major crossroads in her life. This culminated in album standout I Want to Be Like You, a deeply moving direct address to Dave, the recording of which seemed to be done in the presence of Dave’s spirit. “[Me and Alan] sat in the studio together, it was midnight, we listened like ten times and cried. It felt like Dad was in the room.”
Jansson concurs. “I’m not one of these people who are in touch with spirits, unless their name is Jack Daniels,” he laughs. “I always loved working with Dave. Quite often it felt like Dave was there. When we were making key decisions it felt like we had someone else there helping us. I’ve never really felt that before.”
The music may have Dave’s fingerprints on it, but it marks the arrival of Moana as well, forging her own path through the music industry. It’s hard to imagine Dave would’ve wanted it any other way.
“I definitely feel a sense that I should be good at what I do because of what my father has done,” Moana adds. “I hope I can do his legacy justice - I worry about it of course. But I think I have to just try and be my own person as well. I want to give people a beautiful experience where they can take away something personal to them. I hope I can continue to do that for the rest of my life.”
Kid You’re Free, Moana McArtney’s first single as PRYNNE, is out now. The album A Moment of Clarity is due for release in April
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