Spending time in his Voom

After an eight-year gap, Voom (from left: Nick Buckton, Murray Fisher, Mike Beehre and Buzz Moller) return with Hello, Are You There?.

Buzz Moller forgot about our interview. I turned up at Atomic Cafe in Kingsland on time, but Moller, who lives just round the corner, apparently, was a no-show.

It's hard to be annoyed with the songwriter and frontman for Voom. He's apologetic, polite and slightly goofy in a good way. And, after all, he's the guy who wrote that soothing anthem, Relax, from Voom's 1998 debut, Now I Am Me.

I decided to take his advice and "just relax".

"Bloody hell, I forgot," he says, on the phone later. "I was meant to meet you at 3pm, wasn't I?"

It was actually 3.30pm but, what with picking up two pre-schoolers from kindy, and being a dad of four kids in total, he forgot.

"I had it all set in my brain, too. I'm really sorry."

With this sort of temperament, it's no surprise Moller has taken so long to release a follow-up album.

But on Monday the band release, Hello, Are You There?, which includes tracks like the mighty, King Kong, and the appropriately named, Happy Just Bumming Round.

He says there are many reasons for the eight-year gap.

The first was band breakups: original drummer, Mac Macaskill, left the band for "non-musical reasons", which Moller doesn't want to go into, and bass player Danny Manetto left to go overseas at the end of last year.

"And, what else? Oh, I guess it took us 10 years to do the first album," he says, laughing.

Voom are an enigma. Great songs such as Relax, and the 2002 APRA Silver Scroll nominated, King Kong, make a splash and the expectation of more songs and an album is there.

But it never happens. It's not that Moller doesn't write songs - he has written hundreds, he says. It's just that he's pretty happy writing for himself in his own "isolated head space".

"This time last year I had people say to me, 'Your album's never going to come out'. One close friend of mine said he'd eat his hat if he ever saw another Voom album," he laughs. "I'm going to watch him personally, eh.

"But it's amazing how much work is involved in actually getting it out."

The current lineup of bass player Nick Buckton, along with drummer Mike Beehre and guitarist Murray Fisher, both from the disbanded goodshirt, played a big part in kicking the album release along. "Those goodshirt guys are really switched on to getting things done," deadpans Moller. "Yes, they're great, and they're really quite in tune with each other."

He has also taken on a more structured approach to songwriting this time - well, as structured as Moller gets.

"Originally I used to be obsessed with improvising. If the song didn't fall out in an improvised way, then it wasn't worth anything," he says.

"They were songs that I'd be singing into my computer for an hour and then I'd go to bed and go back to it the next day and find a little of it that I liked, chop the beginning and end off it, and that's the song."

However, after listening to the Beatles' If I Fell, he's been sitting down and writing songs more lately.

That Beatles track has nine different chords and "I was like crikey, most songs just have four or five chords maximum".

"And I was just impressed by the Beatles' ability to write great songs. So I thought, I'm going to write a song with more than nine chords in it." He came up with No Real Reality, which is on the new album, and has 11 chords.

Moller says he's not a full-time musician. He plays music a lot but "the rest of the time I scrabble around trying to find money to feed my family".

But his sporadic songwriting also comes from his upbringing in a middle-class family from Upper Hutt. Because of those family values, he never thought about being in a band for a living until later in life.

"I thought I had to grow up to be a stockbroker, or a doctor, or something. In the meantime I was writing songs every second day and doing it as habit and it was never for public consumption.

"But since we put out that first record, and got a great reaction, it's sort of nice to be putting it out there again," he says, casually.

"Even if I had no means of getting my music out to the public, I'd be writing songs everyday, anyway."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Voom LINE-UP: Buzz Moller (vocals/guitar); Nick Buckton (bass/vocals); Murray Fisher (guitar); Mike Beehre (drums).
NEW ALBUM: Hello, Are You There? out Monday.
ALSO: Now I Am Me (1998)
PLAYING: Tonight, The Classic, 8pm, with The Reduction Agents and The Sneaks.