Last of the entertainers

By TIM WATKIN

Once a performer always a performer. As the photographer arrives for the photo shoot, the trio I'm having coffee with leap into action. Ray Columbus stands in front of the mirror, straightening his collar, combing his hair and explaining how he always checks his fly just before going on stage. Suzanne Lynch whips out the makeup bag and checks her lippy. Don Linden brushes his sweatshirt flat and takes centre stage, acting out a story about a colleague from the old days and how he prepared himself in the wings.

Apart from the black-T-shirted, goateed staff detachedly wiping tables and banging out coffee grounds, we're the only ones left in the cafe so, unfortunately, he's playing to a small crowd.

Once the shutter starts clicking, however, all the world's a stage. They banter with each other, drawing out the winning smiles a photographer needs.

It all comes so naturally; it's how they've earned themselves a living for years - no, decades. A camera demands a smile, a microphone a song or a gag, an audience an act. These are showbiz people. Not mere singers or comedians, but entertainers. A breed of people that seems to be disappearing.

Columbus, Lynch and Linden took the stage on Wednesday night as part of the Phil Warren memorial concert, commemorating Auckland's most famous impresario, music promoter and nightclub owner. The lineup of performers joining them to celebrate Warren's enormous contribution to the local entertainment scene read like a New Zealand who's who of 1960s and 70s pop and television: Ray Woolf, Shane, Jon Gadsby, Chic Littlewood and Larry Morris among them.

While many are still performing, they are names that speak of an era before music videos, comedyfests and niche markets, an era of live gigs several times a night and tours round the provinces, an era of variety shows and any number of acts on the bill.

"We learned to entertain," says Lynch. "When people come to see you, they don't want to sit there for an hour and a half."

"They want to get to know you," Columbus chips in.

"They want a bit of chat," Lynch continues. "They want to laugh, they want to be entertained. That's vanished."

Warren's death has underlined the fact that they don't make 'em like that any more. The show goes on, but these days it's a different kind of show.

T HESE three - articulate, warm and talking over each other eagerly - have all known what it is to be a star in New Zealand. Columbus had more than 40 hits with his band the Invaders, singing solo, and his own TV show, That's Country. Lynch, who was one half of the Chicks with her sister Judy, had a slew of hits in the duo and on her own, followed by a successful career as a backing singer to the likes of Cat Stevens and Neil Sedaka. Linden was a comedian, light entertainer and compere who knew how to work an audience. He doesn't perform many of his old comedy and lip-synching routines any more. But he can't resist the old gags.

"I've moved into a slightly different world," he says innocently.

So what do you do with yourself now, I ask, walking into the trap.

"Please, not in public."

Everyone howls with laughter ... Hmmm. I guess you had to be there. The thing is, in his day everyone was.

"The wonderful thing about variety then, that you don't have now, is that you always had a live audience to work with," Linden says. "I'm not decrying the [modern] mediums of TV and video, but we had to be prepared for anything. Now they work to a camera and directions and everything is predetermined."

Linden made a living out of live shows. He worked not only the clubs, but weddings, 21sts, RSAs. "On a Saturday night I could count on doing four to five functions a night. I'd take the money and move on."

People can't afford to hire entertainers any more, Linden says, and the venues have vanished. Gone too are the small-town tours. Tim Finn's adventure into the provinces last year, and his tour with Dave Dobbyn and Bic Runga the year before that, conjured up memories of the old shows that used to travel from town to town. But they're few and far between.

Now, the artists and record companies run the shows. Then, each town had its own impresarios, like Warren, who pulled acts together. Columbus remembers as a teenager being brought up to Wellington for what he thought was his big break and having to bed down in the promoter's garage. In Whangarei, a pair of brothers arranged gigs on the weekend. During the week they were the local funeral directors.

Those tours went everywhere. Linden shudders as he recalls ... Riverton.

"Riverton was a dreadful show town. We did Riverton in the middle of winter in a dreadful, cold hall. It was one of those places where you opened the door from the outside and it went straight on to the stage."

Lynch remembers Riverton too, and one performance at the showgrounds in Hamilton. "They had a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. Judy and I started dancing and the stage started going from side to side. On the last note, the whole thing collapsed, the band fell off the stage and we fell over the back. The headline in the paper the next day was, 'Chicks bring the house down'."

It wasn't always glamorous, but they were honing their skills and working in collaboration with other entertainers of all kinds. There was always a range of acts on the bill, even when the overseas stars came to town. When the Rolling Stones toured in 1965 they headlined a bill including Roy Orbison, the New Beat, Ray Columbus and the Invaders and a local band in each town.

"We would do 62 concerts in a month, two shows a night and three on Saturday," Columbus recalls.

Must have been a hell of a rock'n'roll tour after hours, huh?

"After hours? There was nothing open," Columbus replies. "The Stones said when they came to New Zealand it was closed. That tour was so tame it was remarkable."

Touring exposed them to audiences all over the country, but television raised their celebrity to a whole new level. It was a time when television, barely born, followed the theatre tradition and simply stood cameras in front of live performers. Music and variety shows were popular and television was always scouting for talent.

"In those days television programmes really helped our careers. We were on virtually every week and television was right into promoting local talent," Lynch says.

And there was only one channel, Columbus adds. "We were in everyone's home. We were very fortunate to be growing up in that era because it made us household names."

It changed when TVNZ became an SOE and specific budgets for specific programmes were introduced. Variety became too expensive, talent auditions stopped. Then along came music videos and live shows faded to memory.

"Today it's niche marketing and 30 or 40 channels," Columbus says.

Through the 60s and 70s, these performers were creating something entirely new: a New Zealand pop scene. Young people today might wince at some of their old songs, but these performers were local pop's first wave. They led the way for the second wave of local successes - Split Enz, Dave Dobbyn and his bands, Hello Sailor, the Exponents and so on - and the current third wave - such as Pacifier, Fur Patrol, stellar and Zed.

Columbus admits they didn't comprehend the significance of what they were doing. Consider his own rise: he had been singing and dancing since he was 6 and got his first television series, called Club Columbus, when he was just 19.

"I'd been told for 10 years or more, you're going to go and sing that song or tap-dance in that competition, so when I was told to go on TV I just thought, okay, and just did it. You don't realise you're breaking new ground."

Pop was being mainstreamed. But the teenagers involved were hardly Britneys or Christinas who had career paths laid out before they could even spell multimedia superstar.

"It was all good, innocent fun," says Lynch, who was just 14 when the Chicks hit the charts.

So is it still innocent fun? Columbus and Lynch reply with one voice: "No."

I T'S such a different world now," Lynch sighs. She and Columbus should know. He manages chart-topping boy band Zed and she's the mother of the band's lead guitarist, Andy Lynch.

"I'm seeing it all again," she notes with a motherly note of concern in her voice, "and believe me, it ain't innocent fun anymore."

The trio agree the music business is rougher and tougher than ever.

Columbus: "There's a big difference in the business today. It's very much ephemeral. You may get one shot, then it's gone. But the opportunities are much greater, too."

Linden points out, "You couldn't learn now by making mistakes, because if you make a mistake you die."

"That's exactly right," Columbus nods vigorously. "It's very hard work and it's a very tough business, a dirty business. Show business is now owned by the multinational record companies and some of them are owned by bigger companies, like waste-management companies, and really the young kids today are commodities. At the bottom-line, in some bean counter's room they're just soya beans. That's because New Zealand's now in the global business."

This country now has access and connections to the rest of the world that - if still rather limited - are far beyond what existed in the 60s and 70s. Crowded House may still be the only local band to have made it to true international recognition, but the likes of Pacifier, Anika Moa, Bic Runga and Zed are nibbling at the edges. Early pop artists were developed for a local audience, long term.

"They were expected to stay here and stay in the business," Columbus says.

The Invaders were one of the rare exceptions and had a half-chance to crack America. But as a classic example of how much things have changed, Columbus says they weren't allowed work permits to enter the US and perform.

"They said, 'We don't need any pop singers'. I remember going into the embassy here and showing them our gold discs and saying, 'We are unique and we want to take our music to America', and we weren't allowed in."

Columbus may have been pushing his luck a little to say they were unique. In those days it was all about copying what they heard overseas. He was told loud and clear not to write his own songs. The radio stations would scoff and insist on a cover. He wasn't able to put out an album of original tracks until 1965, just before the Invaders split up. It was called Original Numbers and, incredibly, Columbus says it was the first album of completely new, original local songs.

Commonly, in the 60s and 70s, local artists were slipped overseas covers by the record companies, sometimes releasing them before the original artist.

"We [The Chicks] had a hit with River Deep, Mountain High before Tina Turner got it on the shelves," she laughs. "When I was very young, 14 or 15 and just starting out, we were trying to be like someone else," she adds, waving her hand towards some far-off land.

Now, as immersed in global culture as we are, the trio agree performers today are more determinedly and distinctively New Zealand.

"Originality. Thank God for that," Columbus says. "That's the greatest thing that's happened to the music business in my life. Today, Kiwis want to play their own music."

"And when you have your own music, you develop your own sound," Lynch concludes.

It's getting dark outside and the black-T-shirt boys have run out of tables to wipe. Except ours. It's time to go. One last question: do you guys mind trotting out the old songs again and again?

No, they grin, wide as Cook Strait. They're humbled, honoured that people still want to hear them. Columbus says four generations of New Zealanders enjoy his shows and - here's pop immortality for you - She's a Mod has been in the school curriculum since 1990. "Little kids skip-rope to it every year for their hearts."

They don't mind being the old fellas?

Columbus laughs, "No, no. I get called the Modfather."

Lynch just tosses her hair and arches her eyebrows. "And I'm only 29."