It seems like just yesterday and a long time ago that King Loser got back together. The band had existed for only a turbulent five years in the 1990s, signing to Flying Nun Records – where their affection for twangy surf rock and various forms of exotica made them outsiders – before shattering in 1997. But people still talked about them. And here they were in 2016, promising – or threatening – a good time all over again.
They asked their friend Andrew Moore, creator of the definitive New Zealand skate culture film No More Heroes, to come with them and document their reunion tour. He’d been wanting to make a music film, so he jumped at the chance.
“It was going to be a documentary and it was just going to be about the tour,” he recalls. “I went into it with the intention of making a classic fly-on-the-wall, DA Pennebaker-style film.”
What actually happened was something else altogether. The road to the film King Loser, which premieres at this year’s Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival, turned out to be seven years long. In that time, an exhausted Moore believed more than once that he’d lost his way. But he found friends, carried on and emerged with a story about love and loss, friendship, drugs and rock’n’roll.
Derek Gehring is shouting into his phone. In keeping with the content of King Loser, it was decided some time ago that its festival screenings would also be gigs featuring Cash Guitar, the fluid ensemble of former King Loser guitarist Chris Heazlewood. But Gehring has just discovered that Heazlewood had not, in fact, mentioned the Wellington show to the musicians he claimed to have lined up, who are now double-booked – along with the backline gear they were supposed to bring. Gehring is frantically pulling favours – and shouting at the errant guitarist. The film might have wrapped, but the spirit of King Loser is unending.
Gehring, long known as a cool-headed fixer for his friends in the music and arts communities, stepped in as producer a couple of years ago. Moore’s cut of his film had failed to land with either the film-festival bookers or the friends he’d showed it to, and he was ready to shelve the whole thing. Gehring encouraged him to keep going and suggested he hand what he had to their mutual friend, Cushla Dillon, an experienced film and TV editor who was already busy crafting two of last year’s best documentaries, No Māori Allowed and Brave New Zealand World.
“There was a shitload of footage,” Moore says. “It was all labelled weirdly, and I didn’t even explain how it was laid out on the hard drives. I honestly didn’t think anyone could just come in with no instructions.”
Six months later, Dillon got in touch to say she had something. In some ways, it was more like the film Moore had wanted to make than the procedural one he’d ended up with. Out went a cluster of interviews with music industry people.
“What did those interviews add?” says Moore. “Not a lot. So Cushla took most of them out and just let the band speak because they spoke so well about it. You know, it’s about them, so just let them tell the story.”
Dillon says, “I love documentary and I love bringing audiences into a place where they can’t be: backstage, in the car with a band, in the hotel room. That stuff was amazing. It was great to centre on that footage that Andy had shot.”
That footage also goes a long way to explaining why Moore got exhausted. The band’s first practice session is a war zone, and a scene in the minibus on the way to the airport for the first tour dates is rolling chaos. At the centre of both, burning brightly and giving off smoke, is Celia Mancini (née Patel), the band’s keyboardist.
Mancini, who at the time of filming, was carrying multiple injuries as the result of a motor-scooter crash, died suddenly a year later, in September 2017.
“It was like someone hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat,” says Moore. He stopped work on the film for a while and when he returned to it grappled with the fact that interviews shot before Mancini’s death weren’t appropriate any more. Mancini had been capable of being both the worst drunk and the most witty, engaging company, sometimes in the same evening. With her death, perhaps people didn’t want to say what they’d said before.
It became an opportunity to refocus on the deeper stories of relationships in the band and of Mancini herself. Her father, Dr Kanoo Patel, is kindly and philosophical about his wild, brilliant daughter. Heazlewood is wistful and sensitive talking about his you-and-me-against-the-world lover, friend and drug buddy.
“I could see that affection that [Heazlewood] had for Celia was the stuff that was going to kind of counterbalance the roughness, the craziness and the shouting,” says Dillon. “It was about balancing those two. Otherwise, it’s just Spinal Tap.”
It helped that there was a surprising amount of visual material of both Mancini and the band over the years, in part because, in the way that chaotic people sometimes do, she kept everything. The film includes clips from Slightly Delic, the mad, compelling show she made in the early days of Triangle TV (the first few episodes were shot by Gehring).
One of its strongest parts, where Heazlewood and Mancini are making music as new lovers, was shot by Moore in 1991 as a way of trying out a new camera. Somehow, the tape survived.
The latter scenes took place in a flat in the old Edwardian terraces on Auckland’s Karangahape Rd, a couple of hundred metres from Gehring’s apartment in Samoa House. It’s a stone’s throw to the Red House, the unruly mansion on West Terrace where Mancini and other members of the gang once lived, and the venues where the band played are scattered along the strip. This is, everyone agrees, a very K Road story full of K Road people.
Moore’s talent for being in the room and Dillon’s tightly structured editing – her weaving together of contemporaneous scenes in Mancini’s hotel room and at the venue where everyone is waiting for her is brilliant – have resulted in a film that doesn’t require anyone in the audience to have ever heard of King Loser. Though fans of the late lamented King’s Arms will enjoy the rock’n’roll redemption that takes place there.
Moore is keen to emphasise the support of his partner, Amber, also a documentarian, who kept him going, shot several of the initial interviews, bought him a computer to edit on “and put up with this for seven fucking years”.
A modest crowdfunding project helped pay for the sound mix, but otherwise it has been completed without a cent of external finance.
Dillon hopes audiences will come away thinking about “loyalty, friendship, deep bonds. I am struck by Celia and Chris’s friendship. They really cared about each other, they really looked out for each other. They were lovers, but their friendship was kind of deeper. And I think that’s not a part of the story that people know.”
Adds Moore, “For people to see this footage now, they’re going to get a real taste of what a f...ing great band sounds like. All they cared about was the music. They didn’t really care about your feelings or what you thought about it. They were just like, this is what we’re doing, this is great.”
King Loser is at the Whānau Mārama: NZ International Film Festival in Auckland (July 28, 30, 31), Wellington (August 5, 6), Christchurch (August 12, 17, 23), Dunedin (August 19).
