Topp Shots

Ken vs Ken. Photo / Supplied by Rialto

A new doco feature Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls is marking the pair's "centennial year" - they both turned 50 last May. The revealing film traces the pair's rise from Waikato farmgirls to activist buskers to beloved all-round entertainers. And it affectingly documents Jools' breast cancer ordeal.

It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry and it will quite possible make you yodel. So as a primer, TimeOut asked the Topps to drag out the family photo album ...

Click on the gallery on the right for pictures

Two little girls

Lynda: The babies. That's Jools and me in our favourite dresses and they're the only dresses we've worn in our lives. The only reason we liked them was because they had little dogs on them. We loved animals when we were little.

Jools: Our auntie had done our hair in curlers too.

The Topp clan (with Mum and Dad and brother Bruce)

Jools: We would have been five or six maybe.

Lynda: Notice one of us has got our hair loose, and the other one hasn't. Mum had put clips in our hair and just before the lady took the photo I pulled my clip out like a rebel.

Jools: And I tell you what's so beautiful about that photo is the hydrangea. It's so Kiwi. Up in the islands you'd have a lovely hibiscus, but no, mum decided to put a whopping great hydrangea in her hair.

Lynda: And dad was beautiful. What a beautiful cocky. Not bad for an old bloody dairy farmer.

In the Saddle

Lynda: This is at a gymkhana as part of the Pony Club and I was riding the big horse called Tosca and the other horse was called Kerry. My horse was a beautiful big horse ...

Jools: ... and my horse was a complete freak. She bucked me off a million times and wouldn't jump or do anything.

Lynda: Our formative years were at the Pony Club, up to about 15, when we were show jumping and doing cross country.

Jools: We stopped competing when we left home.

Lynda: Yeah, and when dad started playing polo becuase he stole all our horses to ride.

School days

Lynda: When we first went to Huntly College we were country kids and the country kids had to basically take the commercial course, which was shorthand typing, acccountancy, baby care, and cooking. I didn't want to get school cert in any of those subjects [so she left school]. But I went back to college and changed all my subjects to ones I wanted to get school cert in. When I went back I was part of the relay team that ran from Wellington to Huntly. And we raised enough money to actually buy a school camp ground in Raglan. It's a beautiful thing.

Life's a beach

Lynda: That's over at Tairua on the Coromandel in our wild teen years. Huntly South Rugby League Club used to go to Tairua every summer and we all used to go and it was like a gang of friends. We had a fabulous time.

Jools: We used to consume large amounts of Waikato beer.

Lynda: That's a picture of the girls sunning themselves on the car. It would've been one of the boys cars. One of the early boy racers of New Zealand.

The army life

Lynda: We'd never been away from home really so the army was a nice little stepping stone into the world. We went to Burnham Military camp, and it was the last time women only were trained, then it became integrated.

Jools: It was all women so it was like a pyjama party with guns. We never really thought we would fight for our country. In the end we did fight for our country but for different causes - stopping nuclear ships coming into the harbour and equal rights for homosexuals.

Hippy chicks

Jools: What a beautiful picture and such a radical change. We'd almost gone feral. It's just a different uniform really. We are invincible. Lets change the world.

Lynda: We've got our long hair, Jools is wearing her overalls, and this shot was actually taken either in Auckland or Christchurch, and we are definitely in the, 'We are in control of our lives stage'. We are hippy-loving radicals.

Gone busking

Jools: That's in Christchurch.

Lynda: We were fresh and we were on the street. That photo says so much, we were just bursting out of ourselves and if I tried jumping that high now I couldn't. When we get out there on the street we are not afraid of the public and we're out having a good time and people just came along with us.

On the road

Jools: The Gypsy Caravan Tour in 1989. Beautiful idea. Lynda had seen the old caravan parked behind the Kelmarna Gardens in Grey Lynn and the old guy was advertising it for sale. It was a horse drawn wagon, but what Lynda did was buy an old tractor from Raglan and we hooked up the caravan and away we went. We've always thought of our job as a lifestyle, not a career, and off we went at 15 miles per hour and it was the best tour we've ever done.

Lynda: 91 days on the road.

Jools: We saw a lot of road kill, we set our rocking chairs on the deck of that caravan, played like gypsys, and just had a beautiful time.

Ken vs Ken

Jools: Pre-show entertainment before Auckland versus Waikato in Hamilton I believe.

Lynda: My Ken, Ken Moller, is in the Waikato Jersey and Jools [Ken Smythe] is in the Auckland jersey. What we did was run from one end of the paddock to the other and then I scored a try and the crowd went wild, and then Jools got the ball and ran the other way and I tackled her before the try line. The crowd went wild.

Jools: And that's the same ground that 20,000 people wanted to kill us during the Springboks Tour. It's amazing they let us run down that field because we had already been on their sacred field in a fashion they probably didn't want us to be years before.

Into the 50s

Jools: That photo is probably the most different we've looked. My hair is not dyed, it's just got chemo treatment through it. We'd gone through two years of chemo and come out the other side. We were excited and I felt really excited because I was alive and Lynda had been my caregiver. We're celebrating 100 years of the Topp Twins because we turned 50 last year. It's our centenary. We're back again in October for a national tour, and it'll be the zimmerframe tour next year.

LOWDOWN
Who: The Topp Twins - Jools and Lynda Topp

What: Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, a new documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Leanne Pooley

Opens: In cinemas on Thursday.

On tour: Hokitika Regent Theatre, Oct 14; Greymouth Regent Theatre, Oct 15; Christchurch James Hay Oct 16,17; Oamaru Opera House, Oct 21; Invercargill Civic Theatre, Oct 22; Dunedin Regent Theatre, Oct 24; Timaru Theatre Royal, Oct 25; Blenheim Marlborough Centre Oct 27-,28: Wellington Opera House, Oct 23; Palmerston North Regent Theatre, Oct 31; Napier Municipal Theatre, Nov 1; New Plymouth TSB Showplace, Nov 4,5; Auckland Bruce Mason
Centre, Nov 7