Ronnie Sundin: a mysterious footnote in NZ music

Ronnie Sundin in 1960. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library

Ronnie Sundin was a Kiwi pop idol. His debut single, Sea Of Love, was a massive hit. He sang to 20,000 people at Western Springs. There was a sell-out national tour in 1960, during which ecstatic fans ripped his clothes. One even wrenched a shoe off his foot and ran into the night.

At the end of that year Sundin turned 17. Then he disappeared.

For six decades he lurked in my mind. In the summer of 1959-60, when I was 13, I'd watched him sing at a packed-out Waihi Beach soundshell. I'd seen live shows before, but this was different. Teenage girls crowded the rim of the low-set stage and called out "We love you Ronnie!"

How did a household name, as he was for a heady 12 months, become the most mysterious footnote in New Zealand pop music? Last year I made contact with him by phone and text. But to my genuine regret, between Covid-19 and his heart problems, we never managed to meet face-to-face, and he passed away on May 19 this year.

In the months since he died, I've spoken with his family members, old bandmates and a neighbour who became a rugby league legend. A melancholy tale of the sad pitfalls when a school kid becomes an overnight sensation emerged.

Ronnie was a fifth former at Avondale College, just 15, when on September 9, 1959, he recorded the single that would, in his older brother Nils' words, "basically ruin his life".

Until then music had been a joy - and there was a lot of it in the neighbourhood. The Sundins lived at 114 O'Donnell Avenue, Mt Roskill. Across the road at 113 was Wilfred Jeffs, better known by his stage name, Bill Sevesi, the king of the then-thriving Auckland dancehall circuit.

The Sundin boys' mother, Clara Elizabeth Cocker, was the daughter of a wealthy British trader, Robert, and Mele Tu'ifonualava from Pangai, once the seat of the Tongan monarchy.

In Nuku'alofa Clara met and married Ron Sundin, an Australian managing the local branch of the powerful Sydney trading company, Burns Philp. They had three sons, Bill, Nils, and baby Ronnie, born on December 18, 1943. The boys were still toddlers when the family moved to Auckland for father Ron to take a job with Fisher & Paykel.

As a teenager, Nils put together a skiffle group, the Glow Worms, which was evolving into a pop band. "We were practising in Mum's lounge one day. Bill Sevesi used to listen to us, and we played at the Orange Hall in his breaks. We won Have A Shot twice on ZB. Bill asked Dad if he could borrow Ronnie for a Town Hall concert because the English singer he'd had, Vince Callaher, had gone back to Britain.

"Dad said he could have Ronnie as long as he sang Waltzing Matilda. Dad was a true-blue Aussie. He reckoned he could see Australia if he went to the right beach in Auckland."

The concert was a huge success, and the next step would change everything for the sweet-voiced school kid.

Auckland record producer Ron Dalton had just come back from a trip to Britain with a copy of Sea Of Love, a song written and recorded by a rhythm and blues singer from Lake Charles, Louisiana, Phil Phillips. The original hadn't been released here.

Backed by Sevesi's band, using the name Will Jess and His Jesters, Dalton recorded Sea Of Love with Ronnie, backed by an up-tempo version of Waltzing Matilda. Sundin's single, released on the local Viking label, was the biggest-selling New Zealand record of 1960.

Almost overnight Ronnie's good looks, winning smile, and slightly shy stage presence whipped up the sort of audience reaction that, in hindsight, was a hint of the mania that would be in full bloom four years later when The Beatles toured New Zealand.

On a national theatre tour, Sundin had been at a signing session at the DIC store in Lambton Quay in Wellington.

The Evening Post newspaper reported that "Inside the DIC there was a large audience, listening and getting autographs in an orderly way. Ronnie and his manager left the shop after a pleasant evening, mercifully free of incidents.

"However, there was no peace for the popular entertainer, as the teen idol soon discovered. On leaving the shop they were confronted by the largest crowd of teenagers they had yet struck. They managed to get to, and scramble into, their car but were unable to start off through the crowd.

"Finally, in desperation, Ronnie climbed onto the top of the car with his guitar and started to sing. He hoped they would disperse after a song and leave him to go in peace, but no such luck. For 20 minutes he had to sing to, and with, a mob of wild teenagers, bringing the traffic on Lambton Quay to a standstill.

"It finally ended when traffic policemen, accompanied by four constables, pushed their way through the crowd to the besieged vehicle with the rock star on the roof playing his guitar, and asked if he had a permit to perform in a public thoroughfare."

From the outside it looked like every teenage boy's dream.

At school, says Nils, "the girls reckoned he looked like the film star Robert Mitchum". There was more than singing to admire. Talented cricketers, Ronnie and Nils would go to Sunday morning coaching sessions with former New Zealand captain Merv Wallace. Ronnie was a demon fast bowler. His mates basked in all the reflected glory. On wet mornings they enjoyed the fact he would sometimes shout them a taxi ride to school, paying with the cash doled out by promoters and record companies.

Down the street at No 121 lived the Lowe family. To Graham, only 5, but the oldest of four boys, the Sundin house was a second home, and Ronnie was like a hugely admired big brother.

Lowe is now Sir Graham, after a stellar career as a rugby league coach. To this day his face lights up when he remembers the Sundins.

"They were really kind to me, especially Ronnie. He taught me chords on a ukelele. Queen Salote of Tonga was related to their mum and used to visit them. One day she called me over to her and showed me how to do a five-finger strum."

Lowe says, "Everybody loved Ronnie and so did I. At one stage he drove around in a brand new Hillman Minx. Written all down the side was 'Here Comes Ronnie'. We felt so proud because he used to take us for a drive around the block."

How Ronnie came to hate fame

What few outside his family knew was that Sundin himself felt trapped and grew to hate being a pop star.

"Ronnie didn't like touring," says brother Nils. "He didn't like the girls swarming all over him. He really only wanted to do dance halls. And he didn't like doing cover versions. But all his records were cover versions."

The first part of Ronnie's musical career to vanish was recording. In 1960 there were six singles, and a 12-track album, Ronnie, second-hand copies of which currently sell at Real Groovy Records for $79.95.

Ronnie by Ronnie Sundin with Will Jess and His Jesters 1960 Album released by Viking Records picture supplied

He'd never record professionally again. Why did he stop?

Of all the people I've spoken to about Sundin, nobody knows the answer better than Alex Patchett.

Patchett was the lead guitarist in the Sevesi band in 1960. On the cover of the Ronnie album, he's the chiselled, good-looking man with the beaming smile on the right.

Patchett has lived in London since 1967, first leading a trio that played in Soho strip clubs, then working as a solo cabaret performer. Gracious and erudite, the former Auckland schoolteacher told me how he saw, at close range, Ronnie's career disintegrating.

"It was so sad. He was very shy, very likeable, and very eager to learn. He was very raw, and he went from school straight into a totally different world.

"We spent hours and hours rehearsing in Bill Sevesi's garage, where Bill had a home studio. We spent a huge amount of time working through things with Ronnie, preparing him for professional recording. He was very young but he had a really pleasant voice, which was the type of voice that was in vogue at the time, ideal for ballads. He had youthful good looks, too.

"But he took to drink, which made him unreliable. He also had lots of hangers-on, who encouraged him. He was an extremely generous person and I think he was taken advantage of by lots of people.

"He was drinking a lot and the hangers-on influenced his thinking. He just drifted away really. It was very sad. Sometimes he would come in and he'd be blind drunk."

Viking Records lost interest in Sundin but Patchett kept in occasional touch. By 1961, working under the stage name Al Paget, the guitarist was leading a sextet that played for dancers at the Oriental Ballroom in the city, and the Bayswater Marina on the North Shore.

"My brother Irving played rhythm guitar in the band. He was in the navy and very often we had to find a replacement for him when he was overseas. During that time Ronnie would fill in for him, but only sporadically.

"When he played with me Ronnie would sometimes arrive and he'd still be hungover from the night before. Later I'd hear from friends how they'd have seen Ronnie drunk in a nightclub. Once the alcohol takes over, and you're surrounded by friends who are encouraging you, it's tragic."

After the sporadic live work with the Al Paget Sextet there were a couple more forays into performing for Sundin but they were almost like dark comedies.

One was a last shot at solo stardom. When a new club called The Shiralee was due to open in Customs St in 1961, there were plans for a Ronnie Sundin group to be the house band.

Then fresh out of Auckland Grammar, Glyn Tucker was the rhythm guitarist in a highly talented quintet, which included musicians who had played with Johnny Devlin, the first Kiwi rock 'n' roll star.

Tucker, who would go on to run Mandrill Studios, used by Kiwi icons such as Dave Dobbyn and The Dance Exponents, recalls the weird out-of-town trial run. "We went to Taumarunui and did a gig. It was the middle of winter and it was freezing cold. We had hardly anybody in an almost empty hall in the middle of winter. Our van broke down and we came back with our tail between our legs.

"At a rehearsal the following week we decided we'd continue on without Ronnie. The older guys didn't think he was adding much to it." Without Sundin, the group renamed themselves The Embers, and in that guise played the Shiralee before Ray Columbus and Max Merritt stormed north from Christchurch and took over.

Ronnie's last band was with his brother Nils, who told me, "We were going to run a dance in Hamilton. We went down on a Saturday and the hall was jam-packed. But Ronnie didn't show up, he was watching rugby. That was it."

A life damaged by alcohol

Sundin's life after music would be blighted by alcohol. Graham Lowe mournfully recalls running into the adult Ronnie in the 1980s and inviting him to join the Kiwis rugby side he was coaching on a trip to Whangārei to a trial game.

"He had a flask with him, and very naively I thought it might be orange juice or something. He asked me if I wanted a drink. As I put it to my mouth I nearly passed out from the fumes. It was straight dark rum. He knocked that off, found some more up there, and coming back he was just a different person."

What never vanished, when he wasn't drinking, was an easy, genuine charm. When his wife Suzanne first met Ronnie she was boarding with her grandmother while going to Epsom Girls' Grammar. Now living on the Gold Coast, she remembers how "all the girls were talking about him. I didn't know that much about him, but when I met him he was really polite and nice."

Suzanne's mother was slightly horrified at her daughter seeing "an entertainer" but marriage and a livewire baby boy Mark, who had "all of Ronnie's good attributes and none of the bad ones", followed.

Both Suzanne and Mark are totally honest about Ronnie's failings but they still have a deep affection for him. "Ronnie had a shocking alcohol problem," says Suzanne, "and although we were always really good friends, you can't live with a child with someone like that."

Mark, like his father a gifted sportsman, has played cricket in Lancashire as a professional, kayaked across Bass Strait, trekked in the Himalayas, and now runs a successful kayaking retail business in Sydney.

When he and his mother moved to Australia in 1978, Mark says contact with his father "was limited to the odd seven-second-delay toll call and trips home in the school holidays. We drifted apart in the 1990s as I made my way in the world, and didn't talk for quite a while. Then his brother Bill passed away in 1999 and I came back for the funeral, and we reconnected.

"Without a lot of words, we agreed that would be the last time we'd only catch up at a funeral, and we kept in regular touch.

"I could see then that he wasn't in great shape. He hadn't looked after himself. He was living in Rānuiin a pretty crook sort of house with a bunch of old single fellas, and was going down a dark sort of hole.

"The cliche of the rock star who burns out and ends up in a bad place was exactly what was happening.

"In 2005 that lack of attention to his own health led to a pretty dire health scare. He was quite young to be in care, and pretty quickly became the golden boy at the Edmonton Meadows rest home in Henderson.

"For the first time in probably many years he had three square meals a day, and love and care all around him."

Suzanne always visited when she was in New Zealand. "We'd talk for three or four days. He was just the best company."

If Ronnie was an erratic father, Mark says he "was a very good grandad. Like clockwork, a present would turn up a few days before every birthday. There was almost always a soft animal toy that sang, everything from a really ugly pig dog that sang Who Let The Dogs Out? to a Rastafarian lion that sang Don't Worry, Be Happy. The kids loved them and their childhood was soundtracked by a succession of really awful-sounding animals."

Suzanne says that one topic Ronnie barely touched on in their time together was the teen pop star phase. But Mark recalls one incident that probably sums up how his father looked back on that period, and the impact it had on his life.

"He once saw a photo of my daughter Kiri in a little junior dance costume. His face went ashen. He said, 'You're not going to let her be famous, are you? Whatever you do, the kids can't be famous.'"

A last laugh

My search for Ronnie Sundin was aided enormously by a Rotorua music enthusiast, Ray Tombs, who plays Sundin's music on his station, Radio Cindy, and visited him at Edmonton Meadows. Singer Midge Marsden, another schoolboy Sundin fan, enthusiastically shared with me his extraordinary range of musical contacts.

It was October last year when I first spoke to Ronnie. He was enthusiastic about a lengthy interview, and we kept in touch. But somehow we always missed sitting down with each other.

His second to last text to me came from Auckland Hospital, where he said specialists were about to try a new treatment that would "either put me in the ground, or see me ready to play for the All Blacks". I promised I'd give Ian Foster advance warning. My last text from a man whose story I believe I now understand, and wish I'd met, was a laughing emoji.