Starring pop star Benee in her screen-acting debut, Head South is a time capsule of Christchurch’s punk and post-punk era by a film-maker who was there at the time.
Jonathan Ogilvie has been waiting to tell the story in Head South, his coming-of-age film about life and music in the Christchurch city of 1979, since, he says, “about 1979″.
Christchurch is, of course, the birthplace of New Zealand’s best-known record label, Flying Nun, and more recently its bohemian musical past has been the stuff of obsession for overseas music nerds. So ears pricked up all over when news of the project emerged.
But although Head South does take its place in a broader reassessment of the city’s pre-Rogernomics cultural identity – alongside Bruce Russell’s revisionist Flying Nun compilation Time to Go and the Christchurch Art Gallery’s 2021 The Art of Flying Nun exhibition – it isn’t really a musical or social history. It’s more intimate, more fond, than that. It’s also unabashedly specific, in a way that audiences who weren’t there (or weren’t alive at the time) won’t recognise.
“It’s so specific,” Ogilvie agrees. “But they talk about the idea of the hyper-local, where it seems counterintuitive, but the more specific you get in film, the more universal it becomes. And evidence for that is how incredibly well Head South went down at the Rotterdam Film Festival: standing ovation plus seven more sell-out sessions in a 1600-seater. The Dutch are not going to know too much about Christchurch, New Zealand, and those particular details.”
In a particularly notable example, Fraser (Jackson Bliss), the imperiously cool but quietly kind record shop proprietor who steers Ogilvie’s protagonist Angus (Aussie actor Ed Oxenbould), is unmistakeably a real person: Tony Peake, who held court on the mezzanine of the University Bookshop in those years, patiently pointing dorky schoolkids to the next cool record.
“The interesting thing about that, though, is that I didn’t cast Jackson as a lookalike,” says Ogilvie. “He did a rehearsal and I could feel he was right for it. But it actually didn’t occur to me that he was like Tony, and he had no idea until he was shown photographs of Tony when we were shooting and went, ‘Oh my god, he does look like me.’ But that was one of these happy accidents.”
Angus crops his hair after being awakened by Fraser’s tutelage, in a way that speaks to the very real importance of record shops and the people who ran them at the time. Ogilvie compares it to the role of drive-in movies and burger bars in American nostalgia films.
“You’d just flick through records and be there for literally hours. These guys or girls – truth is, it was mainly young men – they had status, didn’t they? They had mana. So some of them were quite scary to approach. I think what makes that universal, even if you didn’t experience it, is that everybody as a teenager has the experience of going into a retail store and someone behind the counter being intimidating to them, and getting over that.”
Roger Shepherd came up with his plan (to the extent there actually was a plan) to launch Flying Nun Records while he managed the Record Factory on one side of Cathedral Square, while Roy Montgomery (who has a cameo in the film) ran the EMI Shop on the other. Montgomery’s outfit, The Pin Group, had the first release on Flying Nun. His later band, The Shallows, also recorded a sole single, Suzanne Says, which memorialised the late Suzanne Irvine, a glamorous, doomed, Warholian face in the crowd of the time. Ogilvie confirms that she is reflected in Roxie Mohebbi’s bleach-blonde character Holly.
Likewise, the grungy warehouse where Angus sees his first punk rock show after sneaking out of the house, is based on Club da Rox in Mollett St and what Andrew Schmidt has memorably described on AudioCulture as “its patchwork crowd of young punks, counter-culture survivors and Garden City oddballs”. Ogilvie confesses that, unlike Angus, but like this writer, he was just a year too young to go to Mollett St on a school night.
“It’s a bit like The Beatles and the Cavern. If the number of people that claimed they did get there actually went, there’d have been 5000 people at Mollett St.”
Ogilvie confirms that the jolting conclusion to the film, which early reviewers felt was out of place (“it’s actually seeded throughout the film”) is his personal story. He says in his regular job, teaching screenwriting at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney, he advises students to “write what you know, but expand on it – advice I’ve assiduously ignored myself until now”.
Ogilvie’s last film, Lone Wolf, was a near-future adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story. Before he crossed the Tasman, his directing history included videos for The Bats, Straitjacket Fits (She Speeds) and the Headless Chickens.
“Up to now, I’ve been telling stories that actually don’t have much to do with me, but I think there’s a reason for that: it needed the time. Because the interesting factor for me, of course, is the central relationship between the father and son. If I had written it earlier, it would be all from the point of view of the son. But when I did write it, I was actually older than the father in the film.
“And so I start to see it from his point of view, which becomes much more interesting, because it’s not just the bad dad that we’re playing with here. We’re playing with someone who has empathy. He loves his son and his son loves him.”
Angus’s father, a mopey, dissolute civil engineer with a drinking problem, is darkly but delicately played by Marton Csokas in one of several excellent performances Ogilvie has drawn out of his cast. Another comes from Stella Bennett, who is better known as the pop star Benee, but seems very much at home as a screen actor. Her character, Kirsten, is symbolically important as a girl who can play.
“There was that inclusion with post-punk, which I love. Poly Styrene, Deborah Harry, the Slits – women were actually allowed to move through. It wasn’t macho hard rock, or prog rock, which were male domains.
“When post-punk comes along, it’s people who are genuinely picking up an instrument for the first time – without having guitar lessons based on blues. So they’re going, ‘What would happen if I played this string and then this string, or played an open string?’ That, to me, was the great liberating thing. And Public Image Ltd was the gateway sound.”
The first, self-titled, Public Image record forms a story point in Head South. Angus becomes a bass player in the sense that he works out what sound the strings make when he hits them. Ogilvie, too, is a bass player, and his own back-in-the-day band, YFC (featuring two bass players and no guitarist) looped back together to record the title track that Benee sings on.
Soundtrack of the old days
Shayne Carter’s soundtrack for the film also began with a callback to the old times – Ogilvie’s first conversations with Carter revolved around the flanger pedal: “the great guitar weapon in those days. That was the starting point, what he went with, and he ended up buying more and more pedals and getting this incredible sound. It becomes almost like a synthesiser.”
There’s a good deal of detail in Head South that reveals itself in a subsequent viewing. Ogilvie smiles wryly.
“It’s something that I’ve heard a lot about my films. My sister’s seen this one about eight times and says she gets something more out of it each time. It’s a nice compliment, because it means there’s stuff there. But at the same time, most people don’t have the experience of being able to watch a film more than once.”
Perhaps a silent ripple of recognition will go through the crowd at Head South’s film festival screenings: at the sight of Angus’s Air New Zealand shoulder bag, the Kaaru glasses on the dining table, or the invocation of Captain Lawrence Oates walking out into the snow, a story that seems oddly embedded in the psyche of a generation.
It’s remarkable that Ogilvie got there in portraying Christchurch, which, after the earthquakes, is probably the worst place in which to try to recreate the 1970s. If the camera had been turned a little way this or that, he agrees, there would have been a missing building and a broken spell. Thank goodness for New Regent St, basically. But Christchurch it unmistakeably is.
“Without appearing too parochial, a lot of great New Zealand art and music has come out of Christchurch. It seems to be overdetermined. I particularly love the idea that Len Lye grew up in Christchurch. He’s my film hero, the greatest New Zealand film-maker, who, of course, invented scratch film and direct film-making.”
Audiences won’t have to wait long for a homage to Lye. It’s there in the first frame of the movie, in the text scratched directly on to the film avowing that this all really happened. As a line from Children’s Hour’s Caroline’s Dream, it’s effectively a double Easter egg. Or perhaps a treble, given that the closing credits include a memorial dedication to Ogilvie’s old friend, Children’s Hour guitarist Grant Fell.
“This is fact,” it reads. “This is not a lie.”
Head South premieres at the New Zealand International Film Festival in Wellington on Thursday, August 8. Other screenings include The Civic in Auckland on Sunday, August 11, and the opening night of the Christchurch leg of the festival on August 15.
