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17 Nelson’s music man
TESS JAINE
Music plays a loud part of Grant Smithies’ life so it’s no surprise to see him with a smile on his face in his own record store at The Free House Pub in Nelson.
Nelson’s music man
Grant Smithies is described as the country’s finest music writer. His ear for a tune and eye for a yarn have led him around the world, to the halls of Hollywood celebrity and to fireside chats with some of the world’s biggest names in music. Yet his roots remain firmly at home with family in Washington Valley and nattering to locals at his record store in central Nelson, where Tracy Neal caught up with him.
In the vinyl-lined hut, old records in mint condition compete for space with new releases, including Lorde’s latest, Solar Power. It features an odd sticker over her nearnaked butt as she scissors over the album cover.
“The record company did that,” Smithies volunteers, lest we think he has a prudish streak. Smithies, as he’s known, has forged a big career out of music, shaped by little else than his dad’s ancient radiogram and his mum’s cassettes which whirred and stuttered around an old tape deck in the kitchen. “I grew up in a skint part of Whanganui, in a house with a yard full of dead cars next door. My old man had a radiogram - one of those ancient valve ones, and a bunch of 78s. “The first record we had was a Beatles compilation called The Essential Beatles. It had a scratch on the song Penny Lane, so it went: “Penny Lane is in my….Penny Lane is in my…over and over, so every time I hear it on the radio I expect the song to do that.”
Smithies can hear a fine tune before it’s been created but he doesn’t read music. He admits his musical abilities are limited to the tin whistle – a simple six-holed instrument one might expect to hear rising above the din of the school orchestra. “I got a guitar at some stage, learned to play three chords, then it got dusty in the corner before I gave it away, but I can play a surprising number of semi-adept things on the tin whistle.” Before his ascension to musical raconteur, Smithies spent a
few years in the UK where he worked as a gardener in Ireland, as a naked life model at Edinburgh Art College, and then as a house painter on the East Cape on returning to his homeland. His work as a features writer and columnist for Sunday publications, and as a reviewer for Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme was shaped by his early days as an apprentice studio operator. “I qualified as a radio technician, then travelled around the country working for different radio stations, by which stage I was writing ads and helping to edit documentaries for radio.” Smithies says he was first introduced to Nelson while passing through en route to the West Coast. “I spent a few days here and liked it, so came back, in about the late ‘80s, after I’d returned from overseas.”
He worked in local radio before he and his wife, artist Josephine Cachemaille helped to establish Takaka Hill dance party festival, The Gathering, from the ashes of the smaller Entrain. By then, he had begun writing music reviews and got noticed by national mastheads. “I never went through journalism school but discovered an aptitude for it. I bluffed my way, thrashed ideas about and found a thing that worked.” Smithies is immune to being star-struck. It has nurtured an honesty in his writing, which has occasionally got him into trouble, like the time his critique of a Billy Joel album release triggered a threat from the artist. “When I interviewed him he came across as this kind of…odd, arrogant, belligerent character to talk to, so when I wrote the story I was reasonably disparaging of him, implying that maybe his best days were behind him. “He read my story and wrote a letter to the Sunday Star Times, saying: ‘Grant Smithies! If he comes to my Wellington show, he’d better wear a hockey mask in case I deck him’!” One of his favourite interviews was with American musician and poet, Lou Reed. “He’s a key musical figure of the era, along with Iggy Pop, who I’ve also interviewed, and who by the way, told me he was wearing a pair of clear plastic pants and that he delighted in wearing them with no underwear.
“I said, ‘Dude, you must look like a pressed pack of sausages’, and he said, ‘yeah man, that’s what’s so good about it’.” The “notoriously crabby” artist Neil Young was surprisingly generous. “He was on a bus, conducting the interview via Skype, and it kept dropping out, and he kept phoning back! “He didn’t want to talk about his music – he wanted to talk about electric cars.”
Phil Collins was “tedious as”, while he once talked with Paul McCartney about how best to remove tree foliage stuck to his car.
“He was hilarious. He was walking to pick up his car in London and one of his workers had had it valeted. He was planning on driving to whatever stately home he’s got, but walked around the corner and saw the state it was in.
“He went, ‘oh f…, it’s all covered in leaves and sticks!’. I suggested he take it through the car wash. “He said, ‘nah, I’ll just drive really fast down to Dorset and it will all fly off’.” Smithies has been flown to the UK to write about Glastonbury, and to Los Angeles to interview celebrities featuring in television shows screening in New Zealand, despite his fear of flying. He has fine-tuned the art of asking slightly curveball questions, which usually chisels out the most interesting tales. “The trick is always getting something interesting out of them, because often they’ve talked to 40 people before me.” Smithies opened his record store, Family Jewels Records about four years ago in the small hut beside The Free House in Collingwood Street. Its genesis was the record fairs he held in the yurt that was once a feature of the venue, and the 20 crates of spare records under his house. Smithies says record stores are a beacon of alternative culture in any town, and it works well being alongside a local business he rates highly.
“A lot of my week is solitary, which I like, and then I come down here a couple of days a week and it’s really sociable, with all these eccentric music fans washing in and out.” The discussions have confirmed his view there’s no such thing as “the good ol’ days” when it comes to music. “It’s interesting how often I’ll get guys coming in who want to have that conversation about how there’s been ‘no decent music made since Bob Dylan in 1965 and that everything since is rubbish’.
“I think what happens with a lot of people is that the music which resonates at times of high emotional turbulence in their life, is what they think is best, but there’s as much good music being made now than at any time in human history. It’s just whether you get to hear it.” He says the dominant musical forces which once funneled listeners to the same artist no longer exist. The myriad of platforms has made it hard to cut through the noise. Smithies has just entered his sixth decade. It’s dawning on him that’s he’s now at the age he once considered unfathomably old. “I’m in the middle of a slow retirement and looking forward to getting the pension.” One senses though, there are a few more good spins on the turntable yet.
