From his home on the Kāpiti Coast, Graeme Downes sounds much as he ever did: astute, casually intellectual, peppering his digressive conversation with droll social and political observations, and noting his current reading has been Shakespearean scholar George Wilson Knight’s 1948 essay Christ and Nietzsche.
“I’m also fond of Shostakovich’s letters to [critic] Isaac Glickman. They’re very polite in the first half of the book because it’s the Soviet Union era and you don’t trust anybody. Then they get more and more frank,” he laughs.
This is familiar Downes and it’s as if nothing has changed. But just about everything has.
“Yeah, the body’s a bit fucked around but the brain’s still pretty good,” he says, with masterful understatement.
As Dr Graeme Downes, a respected teacher and musicologist at the University of Otago, he ran a parallel life steering the much-admired rock band The Verlaines, named for the 19th-century French Symbolist poet.
He retired from public life almost four years ago after a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer. He and Jo – his wife of 42 years who managed The Verlaines’ career – moved to Ōtaki to be close to their two daughters and grandchildren, who live in Wellington.
“It’s been three years since the operation,” he says flatly, “although [the cancer] could always come back. I’m very much a reduced human being but I’ve had three years and am very grateful for that. But there’s no point in sugar-coating it.
“I can hardly pick up my Gibson [guitar] these days because it’s too heavy so I’m never going to be able to thrash around like I used to.”
And in The Verlaines, he certainly did that. In his memoir Positively George Street, musician Matthew Bannister – of The Verlaines’ contemporaries Sneaky Feelings – referred to Downes as “smouldering and Byronic” and “he whipped himself into an expressionistic frenzy on stage and dropped literary references by the bucketload”.
An early review described them as “a hybrid between Dylan and The Velvet Underground” – impeccable references.
Dunedin musician Julian Temple, a student in Downes’ groundbreaking rock music course at Otago, said he was “intimidated by him because he had such presence”, but as a songwriter “he made me think outside the box”.
Downes – whose PhD is for his internationally admired research on the symphonies of Gustav Mahler – says emphatically he doesn’t miss the academic world.
With ease and alacrity he seemed to juggle his parallel careers, as well as delivering erudite programmes on RNZ about popular culture and talks before orchestral concerts.
But everything took its toll on the man who, four decades ago in Burlesque, sang of a portentous pact made: “One day you’ll be dying of triple throat cancer/God, the vindictive old sod, will screw you for an answer/When you were young and a singer-romancer, music was forever/Here’s a copy of the contract you signed at the time/to say you knew what you bartered … ha ha”.
Reflecting on the life he had, this once promising cricketer reaches for an analogy. “How many more test runs is [retired Black Cap] Ross Taylor going to score? The answer is none. When it’s over, it’s over and you hang your boots up. You have to.
“I got to do it until I was nearly 60, had a 40-year rock’n’roll career and a 20-year tertiary career. That’s like two people’s lifetimes in one.
“I don’t think anyone could accuse me of not having left it all on the park, as they say. I gave everything to the students I had for 21 years, and that’s just at Otago. Before that, I was in Auckland [at Tai Poutini Polytech]. I reached the point where I didn’t have anything more to give.”
He reflects on recent high points: “Well, I got a gong [made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2021 for services to music] and that made my dad very proud, and I saw my last PhD student over the line to glowing reviews from his external examiners. That was probably the highlight of my academic career.”
Back on vinyl
Then there’s The Verlaines, in the rear-view mirror now but a band – one of the finest of Flying Nun’s 1980s roster – finding new listeners through a reissue programme helmed by their recent drummer Darren Stedman “because I’ve been a bit indisposed”.
With Downes’ oversight and through the American independent label Schoolkids Records, Verlaines’ albums appeared on vinyl in time for this year’s Record Store Day.
There has been Dunedin Spleen (previously unreleased songs from 2013-14), the reissue of their exceptional 1987 album, Bird Dog, remastered at Abbey Road Studios, and in 2022, a double live recording of the band in furious form at Auckland’s Windsor Castle Hotel in 1986.
Downes has special affection for the incendiary Live at the Windsor Castle – recorded over two nights – because the band were young, ambitious and with songs he describes in the liner notes as “angry, dark, negative, mocking – yet uplifting”.
“We’d tour with 40 or so songs under our fingers, so you’d play a Friday night and hope to lure them back on the Saturday because, ‘they didn’t play that one’.
“And you can tell the difference. On the Friday night, they’re off the leash with money in their pocket, pissed as rats and crazy. On Saturday, they pay their cover charge and nurse their jug the whole night, so it’s a bit more sober.
“That was a good time to catch that band; that was about as good as we ever got playing impossibly difficult songs. My respect for Jane [Dodd, bass] and Rob [Yeats, drummer] is off the scale, because we managed to pull that off and somehow made people go crazy for it.”
No mean feat because Downes’ songs were full of complex chord changes and time signatures, and lyrics that drew from often obscure literary and music references. Perhaps the lyrics deserve a collection of their own?
“Well, something posthumous. If someone wants to publish the collected lyrics and if there’s a poem lying round, then knock yourself out.”
International fame
The Verlaines worked in that sparsely inhabited territory between high art and populist rock, but the charismatic Downes – tall, dark and brooding – carried them to great heights at home and internationally.
“Looking back, it’s like looking at somebody else; I feel somehow severed, estranged from myself. Where did the energy come from to do what we did? Being young, you can do all sorts of things.
“Everyone has their go at greatness, and one could be to become a rock star. Then, in your late teens or early adulthood, the world crushes you and says, ‘You’re only allowed to be this’. So, you go, ‘Okay, that’ll do’.
“That’s the reality for most people. It’s a constant theme in the early Verlaines because it used to appal me that the little rebellion of being in a rock band is just totally crushed for most. So they run off to be … normal?
“Most people who pursue these things aren’t normal.”
He notes the tenacity of Martin Phillipps, Shayne Carter and David Kilgour – Flying Nun peers who emerged out of Dunedin’s creative crucible at the same time as The Verlaines – who also “just kept doing stuff”.
“There’s also something quite messianic in even doing it in the first place. You have to have a very strong belief you are, not blessed, but encumbered with an ability that you should do something with.
“It’s endemic in our generation to a certain degree. Some people dally with it when they’re young and make an EP or an album then think, ‘Shit, might as well get a real job, marry someone and have some kids.’ I managed to keep the ideal. For me it was just bloody mindedness.”
From the mid-80s, their heyday, The Verlaines recorded three albums for Flying Nun, but after Some Disenchanted Evening in 1989, signed to American label Slash. They lasted there for just two albums: Ready to Fly (1991) and Way Out Where (1993), which was reissued on vinyl in a new cover for Record Store Day.
Last chance
Although the enthusiastic amateurism of Flying Nun had been exasperating, the Slash experience was no less fraught, especially when they returned from touring Ready to Fly and he had to complete his thesis.
“Ready to Fly went okay and Slash said they’d give it another try, which is code for ‘this is your last chance’, and they wanted my demos on their desk by the end of the month.”
However, he’d emptied his songwriting cupboard so “got up at 6am every day and worked for maybe three, three and a half months to get the demos to them. Which is pretty darn good for a record like that – 12 songs of that diversity pulled out of my frame.”
But rock culture was shifting. “Nirvana had broken through and changed the whole landscape; the world moved on from what I’d had to offer.
“I knew full well this was the last chance for the big time; it was probably coming to an end, and that was fine.”
Way Out Where – recorded in Los Angeles with hotshot American producer Joe Chiccarelli – received indifferent reviews, although the climate has changed again and the album today sounds stronger and more approachable.
Lucky in My Dreams stands the equal of Neil Finn for Downes’ way with a melody, albeit with lyrics that address a common theme in his work: “Why do we get stuck on one train/when the next destination never bodes well? There’s so many choices out there …”
Intellectual breadth
His jibes at consumerism and “we all depend on the status quo” are still pertinent: “It’s the only way politicians and those running the system can legitimise themselves, making the people feel their lives are getting better, and that means perpetuation of the same.”
Then he laughs at his own seriousness: “There’s no constituency for me in politics! As a musician, it’s your job speaking the truth to those who don’t want to hear.”
In a digression about Aches in Whisper on Way Out Where we get a sense of Downes’ rare intellectual breadth within rock culture. The song was prompted by Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which a love-struck young man commits suicide.
“Love is always a double-edged sword; it is a great creator but can also be the great destroyer. These stories are ‘don’t open the door to your heart’ because there’s something wilfully destructive about these things.
“It’s the human condition; people make intense dramas out of their lives to make life interesting. Coronation Street depends on these things.
“That’s the way people comport themselves. Their way of making their lives seem meaningful actually ends up being pathetic.”
But Way Out Where was an endpoint after an ambitious and draining decade: “If Hollywood’s what the world expects/it matters not what I do next,” he sings in Incarceration.
“I knew this was the swansong of world domination,” he says with a laugh, “so a lot of the lyrics pertain to failure and attempting the impossible. There are a lot of lyrics drenched with a certain amount of finitude, not just in the band’s career but in life itself.”
However, he continued to record and acknowledges he was fortunate to have a studio available at university so could make albums with no commercial constraints or expectation: “Each one was, ‘Okay, good enough. But not good enough so try again.’”
And that’s what he did, until he couldn’t.
Choices, choices
He wrote more than 100 Verlaines songs and along the way orchestrated music by Flying Nun bands for the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra in the Tally Ho concert series. Downes reflects on the snobbery in popular music (“time defeats the poseurs pretty well”) and is a plain-speaking pragmatist about the conservative nature of classical concert programmes.
“Having worked with orchestras and being on the board of an orchestra, it’s a bloody expensive business to get that many people on stage, so you don’t do stuff that people are going to stay away from. You just can’t afford to.”
In passing, he deconstructs a lyric on Way Out Where referring to how his father and mother were nudged into marriage by “the community because they’d been going out for too long. He always wanted to be a ship’s carpenter and see the world. But he ended up having to get married instead.”
It probes one of Downes’ existential themes: every choice made shuts out others.
“From a philosophical point of view, you can’t help but regret all the other Graemes you could have become,” he says.
The song ends with, “As we exit this mental ward/you know whatever old man’s face you wear will cry, ‘Damn! I wish I could have been them all.’”
Downes did his damnedest to be as many Graemes as he could. Left it all on the park.
Finally, he reads me a poem he’s been working on, To the Dreamers of Immortality. It’s clear-eyed, no sugar coating.
It opens with him drinking red wine, being chided by his doctor and includes the lines, “I dream of girls/I never kissed/though none would have denied me./So why should not old men/be pissed/and what’s money for? Remind me!”
The brain’s still pretty good.
Way Out Where was released on vinyl for Record Store Day in April. Other reissued Verlaines albums are available digitally, on CD and in limited editions on vinyl.
