World of WearableArt show's Paul McLaney on the music that changed his life

Paul McLaney returns as musical director of the World of WearableArts show. Photo / Nick Paulsen

Soundtrack to My Life: Composer, singer and guitarist Paul McLaney, who returns this year as musical director of the World of WearableArt show, goes on the record.

HEAVY HORSES — Jethro Tull

I was born in the UK and moved around a lot as a kid because of my father's work. By the time I was 13 I'd been to 13 different schools, so I was quite isolated as a teenager. In 1982 he got a job at the Marsden Point oil expansion project and we moved to New Zealand. One night when I was about 16, he gave me this record and put the headphones on me. It became my lifeline. I could put on that record, close my eyes and it was my safe harbour.

Another life-changing moment was listening to Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb on my Walkman. When the guitar solo came on, it stopped me in my tracks. I remember standing in the middle of the quad at Whangārei Boys' High at the end of lunch, with kids running around me in all directions and tears streaming down my face.

CHINA — Tori Amos

When I was 17, my school friends and I commandeered a van and drove down to Auckland to see The Cure on their 1992 Wish Tour. We slept in the Georgie Pie car park and the following day we thought we'd go to Real Groovy Records. We had this mad idea we might see The Cure, because we'd heard international artists would go there to buy records. We hung around for two hours and they didn't turn up, but we bought two Tori Amos cassingles: China and Crucify.

China really resonated with me. I played it on repeat for the whole three hours back to Whangārei. I don't think I'd heard anything that ambitious or been exposed to a female songwriter of her power. This prodigious musical talent, her facility with the piano, her vocal arrangements and, on top of that, the orchestral arrangements are so adventurous and of such a high calibre. And some of the subject matter Tori sings about is quite harrowing in places.

You don't really hear that sort of music being made anymore, although there's a guy out of the UK called Sault who's maybe back at the forefront of a more complete and adventurous musical era. Nothing to do with radio or what you would call the mainstream, and everything to do with a very hungry audience looking for something more than, you know, Ed Sheeran and that kind of inoffensive, polite music.

After the cancellation of last year's show, the World of WearableArt extravaganza returns to Wellington in September. Photo / Supplied

RIVER MAN — Nick Drake

This song was played to me at 4am, at the end of a magical night, when I was at Otago University — studying law and psychology then. It was very hypnotic to hear something so otherworldly, conjured from the imagination of one human being. The string arrangement is based on a piece by Debussy and is meant to sound like a river.

Nick Drake was a misunderstood genius who sold just a few thousand copies in his lifetime. When he wrote River Man, from his debut 1969 album Five Leaves Left, he was at Cambridge University. I felt a lot of empathy for the emotional space it occupied at the beginning of a young life — being in the current of events, rather than in the river itself. [Drake suffered from depression and died of a medication overdose at the age of 26.]

NIGHT CROW — Estere

For me, Estere is an embodiment of art and expression. Who she is and the music she makes is so completely entwined [the Wellington-based singer-songwriter describes her hybrid genre as electric blue witch-hop]. Her name means "morning star" and she carries that luminous identity into all of her music. To me, someone like Estere is at the vanguard of musical creativity in this country and she's not as widely known as she should be.

MUSIC IS MATH — Boards of Canada

They're actually two brothers from Scotland, and really I mean the whole Geogaddi album [2002]. I heard that record the day it came out. I was in the midst of composing Permanence, my first Gramsci album, and it felt like listening to a kindred spirit. I love music whose creation I don't completely understand; to just hear the sound and surrender to it. This beautiful, lush electronica came beaming in from another dimension.

SEVENTEEN SECONDS — The Cure

I released a new Gramsci album, The Hinterland, a couple of months ago. Seventeen Seconds is my favourite Cure album and it was quite inspirational. It's interesting how you go back to these formative pieces of music. It has a retro futurism about it and a particularly unified aesthetic. Sometimes I really like it when a band drills down into a very limited palette. There's something very cold and clinical about Seventeen Seconds, but with a more profound, deeper layer. Like skeletons with emotions.

— as told to Joanna Wane

"Underling" by Gillian Saunders, New Zealand, 2018. Photo / Stephen A'Court

Cancelled last year due to Covid-19, the World of WearableArt Awards Show is back at Wellington's TSB Arena from September 29 to October 16. See worldofwearableart.com