The name is Don

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Don McGlashan is having quite a week. He's been juggling rehearsals for his Auckland Festival show, promotion for the gig, family commitments and a spot of guest euphonium playing on the forthcoming Finn brothers' album.

While McGlashan's next project is recording his debut solo album, tomorrow night's AK03 show is effectively his solo coming-out in his hometown.

Though he won't be alone on stage. Helping to colour in the new songs and reworked old ones will be Sean James Donnelly - who records his own electronic art-pop albums under the name SJD - on bass, backing vocals and computer duties.

And there will be accordion accompaniment from the wonderfully named Tatiana Lanchtchikova, late of Siberia ...

Some quick questions.

So it doesn't sound particularly solo?

Well, it's my songs and Sean's providing loops and vocal harmonies and writing bass parts, but, I don't know, what does solo mean?

Going out under your own name.

Yeah, but Dave Dobbyn does that and he's usually got a band. Sting might have 15 people on stage.

But you've seemed shy about going out under your name. Have you just put it off?

I have put it off, and I've put it off for a long time. I'm not sure why that is. It could be an aversion to the publicity aspect of it. Because I don't have any aversion to getting a whole bunch of people and saying, "We're going to do my songs".

Admittedly I was bit of late starter doing that, because I didn't until I was in my early 30s with the Muttonbirds.

Even though the point of that band was it was going to be mainly my songs, it soon became more collaborative because it was a band.

If they're created under your own name, are the new songs more personal?

I don't think they've changed. I think I'm writing as I have always written, and people who listen hard might find threads in all these new songs that go back to Front Lawn songs, to Muttonbirds and Blams songs.

Threads such as?

There's landscape songs. There's songs which are like short stories where I'll assume a character for the song. There's fewer straight pop songs. And something about the fact that there's a not a band there, that kind of gives me permission to let atmospheres develop slowly.

Also, because I haven't been thinking in terms of radio or pleasing anybody at a record company, these are really pleasing me, these songs.

So in the swing between art and pop, you've swung back towards art?

Back towards art? Yeah, it depends on whether art is a dirty word. I feel good being able to write music that's more like the music that I love to listen to, and I'm loving listening to old story songs like old Robert Johnson stuff and Gillian Welch's stuff. I'm going back to listen to Nick Drake a lot where you can paint pictures in a more leisurely way with a song. I've always written songs like that - A Thing Well Made, White Valiant.

There are songs that really relate quite strongly to those songs in this new bracket of stuff. But what usually happens with me is, I write a bunch of those songs and then at the last minute, before the album gets made, two or three pop songs rush through the gate.

Apparently White Valiant has inspired [tonight's] episode of Mercy Peak.

The Mercy Peak people approached me and said, "We always called this episode the White Valiant episode, and can we use the song?" and I was really wary of it because I wasn't sure whether the song would suffer from being associated with the drama.

But they sent me a script and a rough cut, and they use it pretty subtly, so it's more of an overriding atmosphere in the show. They've done it really well and treated it really tastefully.

Is is strange encountering large posters of yourself and your name on the streets of Auckland?

Yes, really strange. I can do without that. I think it's also to do with having a festival. You lose a bit of control. I was keen to play a smaller venue and do a week, but they wanted it to be a showcase kind of thing. So they need to fill it, so I've had to do a lot of promo, which hasn't been too bad.

It's been good going on TV and playing those new songs. It sort of feels like I'm back on the scene even though I seem to have managed to get Pam Corkery fired.

I secretly think it was because I miscalculated the length of the song. I told them I was going to play a four- and-a-half minute song and it went for five-and-a-half minutes. I expected a normal TV tantrum when I came off stage having gone over, but they just shrugged their shoulders, so maybe they already knew ...

Herald Feature: Auckland Festival AK03

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