The Taite Music Prize has announced Look Blue Go Purple as the winner of the IMNZ Classic Record Award. Russell Brown tracked down the members of the all-women 1980s Dunedin band for a look back at the group’s heyday which produced enduring songs like Cactus Cat and had tours which did wonders for the country’s op shops.
In Look Blue Go Purple’s first press interview in 1984, the band’s drummer, Lesley Paris, advanced a theory about what made them sound different in a Dunedin music scene where you could barely throw a party without someone forming a band. “I just think that when we play together, we all listen really hard to each other – and when I play with other people, I sometimes get annoyed because some people don’t seem to listen.”
After a deep breath to acknowledge the passing of 40 years, the five members of Look Blue Go Purple – who have assembled on a Zoom call to talk about being named as this year’s Taite Music Prize Classic Record recipients – are more than happy to endorse the idea.
“That was so well put,” says bass and flute player Norma O’Malley. “I thought about this today and I think that the beauty of LBGP is that we played for each other.”
“We were collaborative and considerate,” agrees singer-guitarist Kath Webster. “Very considerate of each other.”
“Such a polite band!” O’Malley replies.
“The politest band in rock’n’roll,” Paris deadpans.
The Classic Record honour is well deserved and a little bit of a fudge: officially, it’s for Compilation, the 1991 CD release that collected all their studio recordings, rather than for any of the three EPs they released on Flying Nun Records when they were still together.
There has been another compilation since: 2017′s Still Bewitched, released jointly by Flying Nun and the Brooklyn New York label Captured Tracks. The American release underlined how well the band’s music has weathered and the global reach it eventually achieved. Its title references Bewitched, LBGP’s 1985 debut, which was recorded in 22 hours in an empty Auckland office on equipment their producer Terry Moore had borrowed from The Lab recording studio.
“I remember hearing us for the first time in the booth and just going to myself, ‘Oh my god, is that us?’” recalls Francisca Griffin. “‘Is that what we sound like? Holy shit.’ I was completely impressed. ‘We’re actually a band. We’re doing it. We did it. That sounds like a song.’ When you’re in the middle of it, it’s hard to feel the wholeness of it.”
Moreover, while it was clearly part of the creative ferment of the time, it didn’t sound like anyone else from the scene.
“That is a really good thing to say,” says O’Malley. “For a group of women who had vast record collections and all completely respected each other’s taste in music, I don’t think we sounded like anything else.”
Admiration for each other’s record collections was often how bands formed in early 80s Dunedin. For Look Blue Go Purple, it preceded actually owning musical instruments. Griffin and O’Malley had played together in another band, they recruited Paris, who brought along eventual keyboard and guitar player Denise Roughan, and O’Malley vouched for Webster. Webster was out of town at the time, but she did own an acoustic guitar. And then there was …
“The flute!” cackles O’Malley. “Oh god, I knew this would come up! It was the only other instrument we had at the time – and quite frankly, I thought ugh, no, I hate Jethro Tull.”
In truth, O’Malley’s flute on As Does the Sun is the icing on the Look Blue Go Purple cake and the debut EP performs the great trick of the best early Flying Nun recordings (The Chills’ Pink Frost is another) of seeming to embody an unrepeatable mystery. It’s perfectly imperfect.
Their second record, LBGPEP2, sounds quite different. Its best-known track, Cactus Cat, bursts brightly from the speakers. Roughan recalls it also earned them a fervent fan in poet Sam Hunt. (“[Songwriter] David Kilgour introduced us and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Denise wrote Cactus Cat,’ and he took my hand and didn’t let it go and just kept reciting poetry to me.”) Hunt had once expressed a desire to work with the band but the message never reached them.
There were a few missed messages in an era when Flying Nun was stretched trying to meet the needs of its sprawling roster of artists, especially those eyeing international careers. After a final EP, 1988′s This Is This, which includes the brilliantly catchy I Don’t Want You Anyway, the band dissolved.
“I think we didn’t realise what we were leaving behind, in a way,” Roughan says. “If I knew then how special it was, maybe I would have changed some decisions, to have kept it going for a bit longer and demanded that everyone do the same.”
But Griffin was having a baby (she’s now a naturopath and treasurer of the Flying Nun Foundation and still plays music); Paris soon became the manager of Flying Nun and now heads Otago Access Radio; Webster has been editor of AA Directions magazine for the past 23 years; Roughan later toured the world as a member of the 3Ds and worked at the National Library before returning to Dunedin to work at the city’s public library; O’Malley recently retired from the business she ran.
Not captured by the Taite honour is LBGP as a live band, although a handful of tracks included on Still Bewitched, especially their surging, droning version of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Cod’ine, offer a glimpse. They were good at touring, partied as hard as anyone else – and were sometimes prepared to put aside their collegial style.
“When we were on tour and coming into a town we knew had a good op shop, we’d be literally jumping out of the van before it stopped to get into the op shop first!” recalls Webster.
“Pushing people back into the vehicle as we leapt out,” Griffin adds.
They did share their finds. In particular, every member of the band at some point wore The Dress – the 60s number that Webster found one day at a church fair (“I liked it because it was cotton and it had pockets”), the one copied for the cover of Bewitched, the one that became a visual symbol of the band. The Dress has not been forgotten: it’s now held in the archives of the Hocken Library.
“And the hem is still held up with gaffer tape,” says Griffin.
The Taite Music Prize ceremony is in Auckland on April 23. For a full list of finalists go here.
