Dave Dobbyn's new album had him searching for a fresh approach but a classic sound - and finding it in London. He talks about the recording of Anotherland with RUSSELL BAILLIE
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Dave Dobbyn is sitting in his Albert St office and studio just a few days after returning from Beijing where he was musical mascot to the New Zealand team.
He had serenaded the athletes at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games two years ago and they wanted him back.
But it wasn't all troubadouring the colours. He went to the Great Wall. He stood under the shadow of Mahe Drysdale ("We are a nation of big beanpoles or hobbits, nothing in between"). He got mistaken for our Governor-General ("which is not surprising - dead ringers, mate"). And he says had a profound moment when he saw Mao's portrait gazing across Tiananmen square.
But his Chinese excursion is only the second great adventure of Dobbyn's year. The first the recording of new album Anotherland. That took him to places he and his music haven't been before - or hadn't been in a long time.
Although recorded in London with some seemingly unlikely collaborators - English reggae/dub-guru producer Adrian Sherwood and American blues guitarist cohort Skip "Little Axe" McDonald, it's turned out to be a soul album which echoes some of Dobbyn's heroes like Van Morrison and Leon Russell. There is one reggae-ish track, Long Way Across Town, others come with gospel harmonies and big brass.
All of which might have risked echoing Dobbyn's own past, like the brassy pop of DD Smash's Outlook for Thursday, the playground reggae of Slice of Heaven, or his cover of Luther Vandross' Magic What She Do which says "the 80s" like no other song in his canon.
But Anotherland sounds more like Dobbyn finding another gear from his previous earthy album Available Light. That set, overshadowed somewhat by its anthem Welcome Home, had him working with many of the players from Wellington's roots scene.
This one, he says, had a similar starting point. He wanted to embrace the things he loved, like the soul records he heard on the radio as a kid. He wanted to do it with a band. He also wanted to shake things up in Dobworld.
"Some people here must just get so sick of me here, and I do too," he says before erupting into one of his frequent and loud explosions of laughter (if chuckling were an Olympic event, Dobbyn would be its Drysdale). "And that is why I go and record in London."
"As much as you are lauded for what you do and you get to hang out with great sportsmen ... you've still got this thing - the chains of the stereotype are everywhere."
"It just seemed like a natural extension. I kind of like a lot of the rootsy stuff that comes out of Wellington. I'm not head over heels about it but I think I can do a bit of that stuff. I would like to to mix it with a bit of gospel, a bit of soul ... but I didn't want to angst about any arrangements or anything and get all control-freaky because if you let people do what they are best at, you get better results than if people are just obeying orders. I've been riding a fine line between dictatorship and democracy for some time now and I am getting good at it."
Dobbyn and his manager, Lorraine Barry, got in touch with Sherwood to see whether they would like a recording project outside their own dub-blues zone.
He and McDonald came along to a Dobbyn London gig with a theatre full of Kiwis in full cry. They were in.
"These guys just wanted to do it straight away. They were so enthusiastic working with me, I couldn't avoid them. So it wasn't like I was flicking through [producer] dossiers or anything. I could have gone Rick Rubin and I will go Rick Rubin one day ... , f*** it, I'm that good," he laughs again.
But along with lots of working drawings for songs, many dating back years and scoured from the folders on his computer, Dobbyn also took a band - veteran drummer Ross Burge, Lucid 3 bassist Marcus Lawson and keyboardist Mark Vanilau. He arrived earlier than his backers to start assembling the songs, the arrangements and the lyrics for the three weeks of recording.
"It was full on right from the word go, band arrived week after me. It couldn't have been better - a band which had no idea what they are going to play. Once they heard the tunes, once every player knew where the grooves were coming from, they just sunk into it deeper than anyone else could because we had been working together a lot and you get that live telepathy thing happening."
The words for the songs came in bit of a rush after what Dobbyn says was a slightly worrying dry spell.
Funnily enough, that means a couple of additions to the hydro-powered bits of the Dobbyn songbook - Wild Kisses Like Rain and When the Water Runs Out, following Dobbyn water-metaphor songs like Maybe the Rain, Just Add Water and others.
"Yeah, water everywhere, you can't avoid it. But there is just as much fire in there - and light. Just like U2, Wilson Pickett, just like Al Green - I can name a million people who all sing about the same thing. I just find that a traditional thing. When the Water Runs Out was from the line 'what are you going to do when the water runs out?' That was the line that sparked that whole song. I came out with that guitar riff and it felt kind of Stones-ish but now it's turned into this sort of hymn."
And there are gospel leanings, musical and spiritual elsewhere for Dobbyn - the man whose Christian faith has become as much of a cornerstone of his songs as cigarettes and alcohol were in his young days with Th'Dudes.
"It's all part of the same thing - it's dancing, singing and playing the guitar, it's all part of being the ultimate human being that I can be. Which is what worship always is.
"It's not getting down on your knees and going 'Oh Lord, I am sorry'. That's not it. It's standing up and shouting about how good it is to be alive and how bad it is to be alive and live in the times we do."
But God is in the details of Anotherland, and Dobbyn says he's still discovering some of them himself.
"I am still listening to it and finding new things and I love it when records do that. There is much more room for the audience to jam along to it. There are no hooky, nailed-down parts in the very corner of the room - there are big, open spaces for you to wander around and just enjoy the lushness."
"I'd like to think I've offset the blue and bleak with some quite interesting pictures."
"I thought it would be an interesting experiment and we would get a few things right but it is a great collision. It's not often you get to do something that is bigger than what you do."
LOWDOWN
Who: Dave Dobbyn
What & when: New album Anotherland out on Monday.
Also: Dobbyn and six-piece band will be playing the album in a show at the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber on Monday September 8. The concert will feature a discussion session led by journalist Nick Bollinger. Tickets ($49.50) are available from www.the-edge.co.nz
