Anika Moa takes time out to mentor up and comers

When Anika Moa last played in Gisborne two years ago it was, she says, at a "pretty hard-out" pub.

Drunken patrons called out requests from the crowd and a haze of marijuana smoke drifted overhead. But the Auckland-based singer/songwriter says she felt right at home.

"The pub owners got in heaps of crayfish and I thought 'now I know I'm in Gisborne'," she said. "They made us feel really welcome."

But next week's gig in the East Coast city couldn't be staged anywhere more different. Moa will play at an upmarket venue which for around a century served as a gentlemen's club.

That, too, is cool, says the notoriously down-to-earth 24-year-old. She just loves playing music.

That is a love she will share when she spends two days with young musicians at Gisborne Girls' High School next week.

Girls' High clearly puts a lot of energy into contemporary music. Staff sourced funding to bring Moa to work with students.

The students themselves have already put in the hard graft - Girls' High bands making up half the 16 entrants in this year's regional finals of CokeSmokefreeRockquest 2004.

"She will be working with our rockquest bands and we know she will be a real inspiration to young musicians and songwriters," said Jane Egan, joint head of the school's music department.

"Young band members here don't have access to a music scene as big as, for example, that in Auckland, so sometimes they can feel a bit isolated. Anika can bring them first-hand knowledge of the music industry plus hints on writing, performing and general stagecraft. It is a brilliant opportunity."

Moa's own views on the industry are well documented.

Herself a rockquest entrant as a Christchurch schoolgirl, her journey was documented in 3 Chords & The Truth: The Anika Moa Story, which screened on television two months ago.

In 3 Chords, documentary makers followed the then 21-year-old as - signed to a major international record label - she embarked on a publicity campaign in America for her debut album, Thinking Room, which went double platinum in New Zealand.

Homesick, wary of being made to look too commercial by slick music executives and finding it hard to write so far from home, Moa rejected the American dream.

But today, back in Auckland and preparing to start recording her second album, she says she does not reject the idea of returning to the US altogether.

Still, she remains committed to her refusal to be sexed up by the industry.

"I think the documentary was really useful in that it showed that the whole experience of being a musician can mean you are asked to resort to selling yourself, to being something that you are not," she said.

"I was never interested in being rich and famous... to me, money is not the equivalent of success. But I love travelling and I love playing music, so as long as they are not asking me to do things that don't fit with my songs, that is fine."

The songs for her new album are, she says, slow burners revealing what currently consumes her.

Some are love songs - the result of a recently broken heart. Others are more political, exploring the notion of Aotearoa's nationhood, in particular the recurrent themes of her own Maori heritage - the legacy of culture, land and tangata whenua.

"Some of my most recent material is about love, but it is also about things like Pakihaka and the Maori land wars.

"That is what I currently feel most strongly about, what makes me feel most sad or angry."

- NZPA