Hay the ultimate defender of kiwi music

Karyn Hay is hunkered down under a spa pool cover in West Auckland, the angry rain pelting like shrapnel on the fibreglass. It's supposed to be peaceful here inside her makeshift writer's shack in the sodden bush behind her Titirangi home. Essential oil is burning on a little tea trolley, a string of bright beads drape down one wall. This is where Hay comes to write critically acclaimed novels and to find peace. But today it is more like a bunker. Hay is under siege.

She twists and tugs at her dyed blonde hair, and constantly tweaks her old wristwatch, as if wishing it were digital with an alarm that might go off, giving her a legitimate reason to leave.

But no, husband Andrew Fagan, former Mockers front man, has got the kids from school and there is no other reason to escape, so she is trapped, in her sanctuary, with evil personified. The Media.

We've been on her since her Radio With Pictures days in the 80s, and she really did not want to do this interview. But the problem is, she needs us. Kiwi FM, the 100 per cent music radio station she manages, has been resuscitated and is back on air, though almost no one knows, as it was launched with no announcement or fanfare a week ago.

Hay has a year to make something of the station or it ceases to be. So she must do battle with her old foe. There is misinformation to correct and a conspiracy, she says (of the Herald's, among others) to see Kiwi killed off.

Besides that, Hay, 80s rock queen, goddess of the airwaves, has found herself in a luckless battle over Kiwi with musician Neil Finn and other stalwarts of the industry she has been such a crucial part of.

It all started with such a lovely idea. A 100 per cent Kiwi music station born from CanWest's failed commercial alternative station "Channel Z". But Kiwi emerged just before a ratings survey, Hay says, and never had a chance to shine. "The media jumped on it and said 'Great, you're a failure, bye bye', and that, to me, is like a red rag to a bull."

A survival plan was hatched. CanWest would support the station for a year if the Government let it use three FM frequencies reserved for public service radio. Eventually, Kiwi would become self-sufficient and not for profit. The deal was announced on May 1, and almost instantly, Hay's good news story turned bad. Supporters of a youth radio network accused CanWest of a conspiracy to rob them of a chance of ever going to air on the reserved frequencies.

It didn't help that CanWest boss Brent Impey had fought to keep youth radio off air, because of obvious threats to his own youth-focused stations. Finn, a proponent of youth radio, came out firing. Kiwi had failed in its old format and was destined to fail in its new. Student radio was horrified. It would ghetto-ise Kiwi music, they said.

Did all that hurt Hay? Yes. "People were all like 'Shock! Horror! There must be some skullduggery going on here because it's CanWest. Where's the conspiracy?' Which I found really offensive because people who know me know I would not be involved in anything like that. It attacked my integrity." So she hit back. "I don't see why we should all get our skipping ropes out just because Neil Finn says jump," she wrote in an open letter published all over the internet.

As for student radio, that lot make her fume. "They are hypocrites. They promote themselves as protectors of independent radio, and their spin on being anti-commercial is very clever. Let's ask everybody what their motivation is. Your motivation is you don't want competition and we're going to take listeners off you. We have from the beginning. Let's get honest here."

To be fair, Hay is warmer than her reluctance to be interviewed makes her sound. She meets me with a smile and a spare umbrella and tramps ahead, leading the way through the puddles to her spa-pool-cover hideaway. She is battle-weary, but real and immediately likeable, even offering to drive me to the airport later when the taxi threatens not to come.

Fagan found the spa cover for her in Ponsonby, left over from a house demolition. It's temporary. She wants a wooden shed with windows you can see out of, she explains, as she makes us tea, chucking the teabags out the door and pouring milk from a Tupperware cup.

She hasn't changed a bit since her Radio With Pictures days, except for the hair, which has a lot less of the 80s boof. She's still slim, with that slightly self-conscious gummy smile, pretty face and intense brown eyes. Then, of course, there is that voice.

Not that her accent was ever that bad. She has always sounded, well, fairly normal. Maybe that's what made us cringe. Ooo, yuck, a Kiwi accent. It was just so embarrassing. I mean, who the hell did she think she was?

Or so the media said, because the public, bless them, weren't thinking anything of the sort, Hay reckons.

So with the good wishes of the state broadcaster's elocution teacher, who told her that her "lazy tongue" would be the making of her, the first woman to speak real Kiwi on television was propelled into stardom. By 21 she was extremely famous.

But within a few years she was bored. Bored with the fact she had mastered the Radio With Pictures format and bored with her fame. "People were so starstruck at that time. It used to really bother me that I couldn't have real conversation with a lot of people. I couldn't get past that with them, so you were endlessly trying to make people feel good about themselves. Endlessly trying to get them past it, you know? Here, let me help you over the hurdle of celebrity-dom, [she laughs] or whatever it is. I don't need that to make me feel validated. What I need, I've discovered over the years, to make me feel valid is to express myself artistically in writing."

So she and Fagan escaped to England, where they lived in a long, skinny boat on the Grand Union Canal on and off for years, got married in a registry office, had two little boys and finally, when the eldest was two, Hay began to write.

By the time her award-winning novel Emerald Budgies was finished in 2001, Hay was revelling in anonymity and had changed her name by deed poll to Lee Maxwell, her two middle names. It's her legal name today, but the plan to lose herself in obscurity backfired when publishers insisted she publish here under Karyn Hay to cash in on the fame she was trying to avoid.

Emerald Budgies came so naturally and angrily, it was like vomiting, Hay says. She only recently finished the second novel, tentatively called Winged Helmet White Horse.

"It's about love and yearning and not getting what you want and envy, written from a man's perspective, which has beeen really interesting, thinking like a man, immersing yourself in thinking like a man. It's quite simple, I have to say."

Sex? I ask. "No, not necessarily. They think in a very black and white way. They just want to solve problems, and I think they look at women and just sort of see this mouth opening and closing. Then occasionally they'll tune in. And I'm on an endless quest for being listened to."

The novel was finished here, under the spa cover, and worked on in a historic Auckland writer's attic she won the use of in 2004 as one of two Buddle Findlay Sargeson fellows.

Kiwi FM funds the writing, not the other way around. And not for the first time she mentions the "tyranny of distance" Tim Finn sung of which New Zealand artists suffer in seclusion. It's one of the reasons she will leave New Zealand again, once the mission to reunite her children with extended family is complete.

Fame here is not accompanied by the fortune it is elsewhere, which irks her and brings her back to the subject of the musicians Kiwi FM will support.

Unlike Neil Finn, most are not wealthy and thus have little power or mana, she says. "People respect wealth. They respect everyone from the Spice Girls through to Mick Jagger, whoever has made money and become millionaires. It doesn't matter what they do after that. It's a whole different mindset. If our musicians had that wealth, the Finn bros wouldn't be alone in their icon status."

Nevertheless, out of respect for Finn's 10-year fight for youth radio, she met with him last year and told him of the plans for Kiwi to seek the public FM frequencies. "He basically said 'Well, if it's got anything to do with Brent Impey and CanWest, I don't want to know about it'."

So what does Hay want for Kiwi? "For it to have some integrity and be successful in a way that makes the musicians feel they are being represented. Writing a song, putting it out there, and the thrill of hearing it on the radio must never be underestimated. For me there are not enough outlets here for that. So many musicians here are so talented, on an international level, and if we lived anywhere else in the world, I would know 30 or 40 millionaires, because that's the level of talent in this country. And I just endlessly feel for how that classic line of Tim Finn's, the tyranny of distance line, sums it up so beautifully."

It's a tyranny she lives with daily. But as Finn said, "It didn't stop the Cavalier, so why should it stop me? I'll conquer and set free."