It is a sunny spring morning. The surf rolls endlessly against the shore. Wayne Mason and his partner Jude are along at the cricket watching their 10-year-old son. We head back to their house. It is in disarray, every flat surface covered with something, books stacked on top of the only keyboard. Wayne puts on his new (2006) album, ‘Same Boy’.
We start talking about how each song happened and Wayne is away like a poet, all bright blue eyes, crooked smile and tousled blonde-going-sandy hair. This song is about that and this one starts at a different place. They are the same three or four major chords, with few minors. The lyrics journey from a geographic place inward to a personal space, questioning mental distances and the gravity of emotional attraction.
Louise plays – a story about love and how a couple can never own each other explains Wayne. “Milk? Sugar?” he asks, plugging in the jug.
Wayne wrote them all on guitar, a round-hole Giannini acoustic made in Brazil and bought for £50 in London in 1971 – Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin played one about that time. Wayne’s former band, Fourmyula was then in its final days despite a number one in New Zealand with Nature (Fourmyula had a song in the national singles chart every week during 1969).
Wayne left shortly after the band renamed itself Pipp, reappearing on keyboards in funky country band Rockinghorse, lead guitar with the punkish Two Armed Men, back to country on keyboards and accordion with The Warratahs, and recently solo as the Wayne Mason Band. Over four decades he was a mod in a frilly shirt, longhaired hippie, punk and suburban cowboy. There were big offers but Mason acted natural. He lived beside a Wairarapa river before moving his home to Paekakariki with a window framing Kapiti Island and the Tasman Sea.
After The Warratahs, his ‘Between Frames’ album in 1995 kept the legend alive. Six years later Mason is back in the spotlight with Nature identified as the nation’s best song of the past 75 years, ‘Same Boy’, released on Jayrem Records, and a national tour booked with Europe planned later next year.
‘Same Boy’, his second solo album, began to take form after ‘Between Frames’ was released. With the lyrics and chords written Wayne could hear the arrangements as they mostly turned out to be.
A year ago he started recording with Steve Garden, travelling on the overnight train to Auckland at weekends. Arriving at the Garden Shed Studio in Sandringham, Wayne would sit down, plug into a pre-amp direct to the desk, play the songs down on his acoustic – the same way he did to show Fourmyula how Nature went – strumming it through again and again ’til the others got the idea.
Garden swallowed everything into his Soundscape software and hard disk. Then the studio door opened for overdubs, the “light framework on top” as Wayne puts it.
Former Rockinghorse and Warratah (and producer of ‘Same Boy’) Clint Brown first played jazz bass under the acoustic guitars. Some guitar strums are sampled as percussive loops then cymbals and other drums were painted in by Garden, another ex-Rockinghorse.
An odd order, particularly compared with the live rhythm section used on ‘Between Frames?’ It was more flexible for arrangements that each song did not have a rhythm track says Mason, it showcased the songs. Backing vocals by Sharon O’Neill, Kim Willoughby, Callie Blood and Jackie Clarke, with solos from Mark Bell on electric guitar, Bob Shepherd keyboards, and Warratahs fiddler Nik Brown were final touches. Carl Evenson takes vocals on a remake of Turn Your Back On The Wind from the final days of Fourmyula. Now Wayne can see and recognise his voice as a waveform for cutting and pasting.
So does ‘Same Boy’ sound natural?
“It is organic and gentle… bent Irish?” he suggests. “Intimate and in front of you?”
Wayne likes his lines and laughs. The single All She Ever Wanted, about a bride in Nightcaps, Louise and Turn Your Back are maybe radio-friendly. His personal favourite is Leningrad, written in 1995, a Paekakariki perspective about going too far from home and how some things will always be remote and impossible, as though as far away as Leningrad.
Then there is This Fire about a friend who would walk past the house along the road beside the beach, her lonely darkness and how her spirit carries on after her suicide. More Paekakariki images follow with Mercy Of The Moon, and a lyric about the view of the South Island that turns into an recurring internal doubt of personal vulnerability. Two Southland settings in Cold Wind Bay and All She Ever Wanted add to local landmarks. In 1998 Mason toured Austria and Germany for a month to receptive audiences. First In Line was written in Austria and enters the isolated world of a medieval executioner shunned between civic occasions to living in a remote cabin. Back From Over There was completed in Germany sharing a crowded little room amid love affairs and their sometimes psychotic chaos.
And now there is a fresh version of Nature, with interest from EMI Australia. An experimental recording – using matchboxes and shoes as sound effects – at the studio one day in 1969, now regarded as the most popular New Zealand song since Blue Smoke. Ruru Karaitiana‘s lyric was about the smoke from a troopship in 1940 sailing to a war in Europe. Nature has put Wayne in the smoky spotlight as political touchstone.
‘Was he stoned?’ asks a weekend newspaper. ‘Off to Timor with the concert party?’ questions another. ‘Is the elder songwriter growing fat on art and royalties with compositions recorded by Midge Marsden, Tex Pistol, Jon Stevens, the Muttonbirds, Margaret Urlich and Renee Geyer?’
Wayne remains straight. Preferred drug? Wayne selects pheromones, coffee and a glass of red wine taken together. He admires the Christmas concerts in East Timor but is not volunteering. His last political song recorded with The Warratahs in 1991 was Who Do You Believe, about economic restructuring.
He laughs at the notion of being a rich songwriter. Royalties from the tiny NZ market have always been less than substantial. A milk advert using Nature has been a rare taste of big advertising budgets. Between bands he has worked odd jobs as a postie, a cleaned the British House of Commons at one time. But mostly he has been a professional musician making do with a crowded home, and yet to clean up.
