Full of Sympathy (song) with David Downes

Created in 1987, this song (one of 5 created for my Honors portfolio) was the first ever collaboration between myself and David Downes

By the end of 1986 I had completed a Bachelor of Music with a double major in piano performance and composition at Victoria University of Wellington.

My piano teacher had been Judith Clark, and my composition teachers had been Ross Harris, Jack Body, and David Farquhar. Other teachers during my undergraduate years were Margaret Nielsen, Peter Walls, Elizabeth Kerr, Greer Garden, Gavin Saunders, and Alan Thomas.

Although the weakest player in my piano cohort (there were three of us), through a a bizarre sequence of events I, astonishingly to all, ended up top of my year in piano performance (with a B-minus !). It was decided that it would be a great idea for me to continue into postgraduate study....as a composer. It was clear to all I didn't have the necessary relationship to practicing the piano to ever be more than barely mediocre on the instrument.

In my Honors composition year (1987) I asked to for one of the papers to allow for the writing of pop songs (an area in which I had a vast, almost total, lack of experience). I suspect Ross went to bat for me and I was allowed to do it. I was then faced with the problem of having no idea what to actually do, or how to write a song.

I set about refining a poem I had written during my Napier summer job, when I'd been consigned to breaking up a commercial concrete driveway with a sledgehammer at the Wattie's canning factory. It was a long driveway, I was a team of one, and it was a hot summer. Most of the lines begin with "I get so mad...."

I put this to music in a very basic way and asked a fellow student, Hamish Graham, to 'sing' it (I hadn't come up with a melody, and I was - and am - 'singphobic', so couldn't suggest anything to Hamish). Names for this phobia are evolving: Decantophobia, Adophobia, Psallophobia or even karaokephobia!

We got together in the main classroom at music school and started to jam. Me at the piano, Hamish singing, and others playing some kind of beat. A younger student, relatively unbeknownst to me, was quietly there observing. This was David Downes; an immensely - I would easily say profoundly -talented composer, musician, and visual artist. David spoke to me afterwards and said he could feel potential in what we'd been doing there. I was glad to hear it, I was floundering, and out of my depth. He suggested we go to the Electronic Music Studio at 44 Kelburn Parade to try some ideas out.

The studio was legendary in New Zealand. It no longer exists, but I think it might have been the first of its kind in New Zealand (possibly the Southern hemisphere). It was established by Douglas Lilburn when he made his radical shift from orchestral and chamber composition to the newly emerging medium of electronic music. Douglas was one of the early pioneers of this new creative terrain in New Zealand music.

David's first suggestion was to sample slamming doors and turn them into the song's drum track. So we spent an hour or two setting up microphones and started repeatedly and violently slamming the EMS doors, looking for 'just the right sound'.

That day and night David and I created the whole song. We entered a kind of shared flow (the first time I'd ever experienced it). It's been there every one of the times we've worked together (and there have been many). Most of the ideas were David's (at least all the good ones). He suggested I recite the lyrics, and that we drop my voice a few semitones. This seemed to suit the song. And David played the 'guitar' solo on the recently-acquired Emulator II (an absolute leap in music technology at the time). Over the next few years we stretched the Emulator to its limits, so much so that eventually it developed a single (but deeply worrying) glitch; when saving our work, the tiny screen display showed "This Will Take a Whilo....". Made us very nervous.

We eventually went on to make a video of the song which was (amazingly) aired on the main Music Video Program on national television in New Zealand. Link below.

Working with David always felt like privileged time. He brought so much ingenuity, musicality, originality, focus, and humour to our collaborations. In the following years we also created (either just the two of us, or with others):

Silent Partner

Law of Gravity

We Lie Here

This Rhythm

Insight

And two dance shows (with Delia Shanly), created by Michael Parmenter: Go and Venture

Quite some years later we co-created a soundtrack to The High Ride - a high-intensity motion ride at Te Papa's "OurSpace" installation.

Our last major collaboration was in 2010, Faustroll with Joe Bleakely.

Here we are at the entrance to the back of the Electronic Music Studio on Kelburn Parade, Wellington in 1987.

And here's me in the studio kitchen cooking one of my legendary (often near-lethal) fry-ups.....

In this video you will see:

David Downes

Delia Shanly

Dan Poynton

Jeremy Dempsey

Tinaka Sutton

Michael Avery

Me

Jeroen Speak

Hamish Graham

Patrick Englert

Claudine (surname?)

And two others who’s names I’ve sadly forgotten.

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