WHAT COMES TO MIND … DAVE DOBBYN AND WHEN THE SHITS ARE THE FANS
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence, whose not-so-secret goal was to dig into my brain or soul or what might pass for both.
Each time, he pulls out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenges me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical, but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, the quietly excellent and demurely flamboyant Dave Dobbyn, here on a rooftop throwing shapes that say look at me but also please don’t stare as I’m from New Zealand and we don’t go in for that sort of thing, has me asking is it ever ok to squeeze into that photo?
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USUALLY WHEN THEY GROW UP, definitely when they were kids, sometimes as they age, music writers and critics, just like musicians, are fans. Fans of artists who first turned them on to music, turned them on to writing or, well, turned them on to be being turned on. Fans of genres and sounds or looks and attitude; fans of the physicality or intellect, and when those two combine, or when everything disappears and you can’t tell what’s at play. Fans of the very idea of music.
In musicians you can see it sometimes in those (usually banal) artist on artist interviews that magazines and managers like to run, more often when you have someone talking about who influenced them or excited them as a baby musician: the edge of Madonna or Zappa, the humour of Missy Elliott and guile of Carly Simon, the brilliance of Prince or Joni Mitchell. But you can also see it in the way deference or respect is paid.
On my second or third time to New Zealand to speak with Neil Finn, having been taken out to the recording studio/house overlooking the black sand beach at Karakere, among the locals passing through for work or a visit was Dave Dobbyn. He of the sunny disposition and sunny curls of hair, a contemporary of Neil’s whose career had taken off just as the younger Finn was joining the older Finn, Tim, in Split Enz, and whose musical path would intersect with Neil on their 1994 album together, Twist.
I knew of him, of course, though slightly: pretty much for Slice Of Heaven and for having seen the name of his band, DD Smash, on posters around Sydney for years, but had never been in the same room. Until now, as Neil introduced me to the man who these days is Sir David Dobbyn (not the last knight to feature today I should note) with a sense of respect that was palpable. Without laying it on thick – they were New Zealanders of course, chronically resistant to such behaviour – he mentioned a song of Dobbyn’s, threw in how good it was, and beamed at him with a mix of affection and awe that I recognised as something like what crossed many a face in Neil’s company.
Later I was asked if I had had a photo taken of that moment. Or of any of the interviews I’d done with either Finn. No, of course not. It hadn’t even crossed my mind, I said, to my perplexed colleague. Why would I do that? Well, what kind of fan are you?, I could see him ponder. He didn’t pull out his roll of shots with people he’d interviewed, but the implication was there that the photo was proof, not just that you were there but that you were there as both journalist and fan, an equal status in his eyes.
But is that right? You could be both, but could you be both at the same time? I don’t think so.
There was one day when a bunch of us on a trip to the UK for interviews were being shuttled through a set of rooms in the sort of posh hotel our grubby types were only ever allowed in while accompanied by a responsible bill-payer. (The Dorchester, in this case. And yes, I did nick a pen: silver, solid, hotel name-stamped, and almost never used since but occasionally brought out to slyly admire.) The star accepting our presence on this occasion was Rod Stewart: amiable though not overly talkative, tanned and appropriately shock-haired. And among my party were journalists fresh and some who had been in the business for a couple of decades or more, having tallied scores of interviews like this.
At the end of the interviews almost all had their photo taken with Stewart, smiling and pally, arms around each other. For the socials (though this was a bit before socials really mattered and mobiles were mostly cameras) or the fridge door, or the memoir. I declined, as I have almost always done. Not because there was anything wrong with Stewart – hey, it’s not like Sarah Ferguson bizarrely posing for a post-interview photo with neo-fascist insurrectionist Steve Bannon, then adding the caption “what’s wrong with this photo? Nothing.” – but because I felt we were there as professionals, not fans, and this was not how professionals behaved in any other environment.
(Your honour, can the defence team get a selfie after the verdict? Hey nurse, get your phone out and frame my face wouldya, the suture on this footballer’s knee rod stewais a work of art!)
The PR was perplexed, my colleagues thought I was a bit weird, Rod Stewart I’m sure didn’t even register who was or wasn’t standing beside him and would have forgotten us all within the hour, and almost everyone who’s heard that story from me has probably thought, wanker, just take a photo and get off your high horse.
Now, to be fair, it’s not only some journalistic purity thing. Some people are just comfortable with others, stars or otherwise, and can feel at ease being chummy either in casual chat or doing a bit of fandom. Some, like me, are just awkward and find standing next to someone – anyone – for a photo, or gripping and grinning, more than a bit tortuous. (Ask my wife and daughter about the shortest measured moment in the world: the time between me smiling in a photo and me saying “are we done?” as that smile collapses and I am already moving out of frame.)
So even if I’d wanted to be in a photo with Sir Roderick David Stewart, Knight Bachelor, I’d have been as ungainly as a skittish deer in the headlights. But I can’t shake my view that shifting from (roughly) equal in an interview setting to just another fan wanting the selfie and blowing smoke up the superstar arse before being dismissed from his/her presence, is belittling. A belittling made infinitely worse for being self-inflicted.
Not that, in case it isn’t already clear, there’s anything wrong with being a fan. Nor am I somehow above that. As Neil Finn knows. And indulged.
When Neil put on a week of shows in Auckland’s venerable St James theatre in 2001, under the Crowded House-referencing banner of 7 Worlds Collide, it was a series of manifold delights for music fans – including, most obviously Mr Finn himself. Everyone was there for the Finn catalogue, of course, but many of us were also there for some fan-boying, for in his band for the shows were Phil Selway and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Lisa Germano and Sebastian Steinberg, brother Tim and son Liam Finn, Eddie Vedder and Johnny Marr.
The freeloading media were upstairs, old farts and new farts mixed in and living off our own enthusiasms. On my right was a 20something who while bouncing with joy at the prospect of seeing Vedder was perplexed why the two ancients beside him (me and, on my left, another Australian of my vintage) were sighing over the chance, finally, to see Marr and hear him play a lovely There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with Neil. Who?, he asked? The Smiths? Who had never toured Australia or New Zealand? And they had broken up when he was still in Year 2 or something? Sure granddad, whatever rocks your chair.
The morning after that first show I had an interview with Neil at the venue, and among the chatter both idle and pointed I thanked him for giving us the chance to see Marr, explaining how pivotal The Smiths had been to a young me and how I’d resigned myself to never seeing or interviewing the man. As I was leaving, held up at the door to Neil’s section of the dressing room, Marr and his wife Angie entered the main room and started heading towards us. Naturally I began my escape before he reached us – lest I intrude on something; lest I embarrass myself; lest I exist – but Neil stopped me and said, “Johnny, do you know Bernard?” (knowing full well he didn’t), introduced us, then stepped back a pace to let us chat.
I don’t know what I said to Marr, probably something about how good the show had been, what a pleasure to see him play, mumble mumble something else, while thinking “keep it together man, stop babbling, get out before he notices”. Then I slid away, nodding to the Radiohead blokes I’d met a day earlier, walking with the casual indifference of a veteran at this stuff past the fans standing outside the stage door, and keeping my shit together as I walked up the lane to the main road with measured gait and easy indifference that was definitely not an affectation. No sirree, Bob. Not me.
Turning the corner, I looked back, confirming I was no longer in sight of anyone at the St James, and proceeded to run at full tilt all the way back to my hotel, impatiently riding the lift and, once in my room, dialling up home in Sydney.
“I just talked to Johnny Marr,” I yelped at my wife, my voice going higher still. “Johnny Marr just talked to me.”
Such insouciance, I think the French call it. Like a grown-up journalist. Cool. Professional.
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