Signs of crateness. Chris Knox, Hillsborough Tavern, Christchurch, 1979.
Photo: Christine Burrows. |
A Toy Love StoryIntro: This is a Toy Love story, not the Toy Love story, covering a couple of years of my life through 1979 and 1980, when I was involved in the fortunes of a great rock’n’roll band. There are no squalid tales of drugs and groupies or defenestrated TVs, the banalities of rock mythology… but fear not, there are plenty of other banalities. Nevertheless, it’s a tale that’s interesting for me to record and might be interesting for a few others to read. I’m a fan of informal personal chronicles that have the grain of everyday detail. When I come across a good piece it always seems worthwhile that something minor yet authentic has been captured, before it disappears into what jazz writer Benny Green called the limbo of forgotten things.
What was intended to be a fairly lean and subjective yarn, got a little out of hand as I started expanding on things at random, and injecting new information that emerged amidst the emailing and fact-checking. Eventually I decided to just roll with it, bringing in useful quotes and references while trying to avoid repeating too much of what’s already out there in various liner notes, interviews etc. I’ve also sketched in some of my own background where it relates to why I became involved with this band in particular, and to give a glimpse of the scene in Auckland as I knew it at the time. There’s no attempt at a sustained critique of the music, although some of that has slipped in the side door. As a result of all this, it's probably too long and jumps around a little. I moved to Melbourne in Easter 1981 and for the next 25 years almost nobody asked me anything about Toy Love, then things quite suddenly changed. A couple of passages in here differ in their details from what I’ve said or written in the past, when I would usually just respond to queries off the top of my head. In short, this piece benefits from a little more research and a lot more thought. There are small disparities with other accounts of this time, but that’s the nature of these things. If I’ve got something factual horribly wrong, don’t hesitate: terryhogan@ozemail.com.au |
Towards the end of writing this piece I was very saddened by the news that Jane Walker had died in Auckland, following an illness. I last saw Jane at the NZ Music Awards in 2012, the only time our paths had crossed since the band broke up 32 years earlier. It was great seeing her again and we chatted and joked as always, but all too briefly. When I heard she’d returned to Auckland from the UK a few months back I was determined to meet up again on my next visit. It wasn’t to be. Jane was a vital part of everything Toy Love represented. She was talented in music, graphics and more, was smart and forthright, and had a distinctive personal style and great sense of humour. She was a key figure in the scene I'm writing about here, both in her crucial contribution to Toy Love as a musician, and as a model for the young women who saw her up there amongst it all, confident and natural, so often smiling brightly through the bedlam. Jane was an original.
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"We Went Wild For It!"
It was a backyard birthday party in suburban Melbourne, early 2018. While standing around in a big old shed and working my way through the trestle table buffet, I was introduced to Christine as a fellow ex-pat New Zealander. We exchanged brief accounts of our lives in Australia and when I mentioned that I’d first lived in Sydney around 1980 while working with a rock’n’roll band, she asked who they were. "Toy Love", I said. Christine’s eyes lit up as she told me how she’d seen the band many times in Christchurch before they’d left for Australia, and that she and a friend had also moved to Sydney around the same time, and continued going to Toy Love gigs there. Meeting Christine was a quite unexpected link to the past. Our mutual friend whose birthday it was, knew nothing of those long ago events and had no reason to think that Christine and I might’ve had any connection. Yet it’s clear that we must have often stood in the same noisy, smoke-filled, sometimes crowded room in Sydney at precisely the same moment. Christine and her Christchurch friends had been ardent fans of Toy Love. In a later email she remembers that “the energy was incredible, and who knew what Chris would do during a performance? Smash a crate over his head, cut himself up, throw himself off the stage, just be generally maniacal. We went wild for it!”. Christine had also taken photos of the band in both Christchurch and Sydney, and had even kept some impressions in a journal… somewhere. A flood had destroyed a lot of her stuff some time ago, but she feels there might still be Toy Love items to be found in the remaining ancient cartons in which she, like so many of us, has carted her life around for years. I was delighted to meet Christine and our conversation gave me another nudge towards something I’d tried to get a start on once or twice before – writing an account of my own Toy Love years. This is it.
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Images: I've tried to credit images wherever possible. Please let me know if I've missed something.
Click on images to enlarge. 
Toy Love: left to right – Alec Bathgate, Jane Walker, Mike Dooley, Chris Knox, Paul Kean. Photo: Anthony Phelps.
Above: Poster for the Enemy at Zwines.
Below: The Enemy, Auckland University Cafe. Photo: Murray Cammick. Below right: The Enemy, Auckland (?) 1978.
Above left: State Theatre, Symonds St. 1960s.
Photo: Diana Wong. 
Above: Philip Peacocke's poster for The State Dance where I saw the Enemy.
Above: The Enemy (minus bassist Mick Dawson), with Phil Judd, right.
Photo: Murray Cammick. 
Above: 95 Williamson Ave.
Above: Band file for Rip-It-Up magazine.
I took the Polaroids in the band's practice room at Williamson Ave. Below: Two more shots from the same day. 
Above: Entrance to Zwines.
Photo: Paul Luker. Toy Love playing Zwines, March 1979. Photo: unknown. 
Above: The first State Dance poster I did for Simon Grigg. March 1979.
Above: Saturday afternoon at the Windsor. Seated left to right at the table – Jane's eyebrows, Carol, me, Alec, back of Doug who's obscuring Georgina, Chris K who's obscuring Chris M.
Photo: Murray Cammick. 
Above: Outside the Windsor.
Photo: Sarah Leigh Lewis. Inside the Windsor, Scavengers on stage. Photo: Murray Cammick. Below: One of my favourite line-ups at the Windsor Castle. Poster by Chris Knox. 
Above: Harlequin studios demo tape that started all this trouble.
Above: I gave this cream suit jacket to Chris one night in Auckland and this was the state of it a few gigs later. Much improved. The photo is from Sydney.
Above: Varsity Rec. Centre, 1979.
Photos: Anthony Phelps. 
Above: Xmas card from Greg Shaw, who was the first to release a Toy Love track overseas.
Below: Waves Vol. 2. Mid-1980. (Bomp!) 
Above: Hamilton gig poster using a practice room Polaroid.
Above: Toy Love at the State in 1979, and my poster for July 21st.
Bottom two photos: Anthony Phelps. 
Above: Joe Wylie's hand-painted button.
Above: Urgent telegram from Roy Colbert warning that the sins of the Enemy were falling on Toy Love. The Cook was threatening a ban. c. Oct. 1979.
Above: Colin Wilson's poster in two versions for separate tours.
Above: In the studio for 'Rebel/Squeeze'.
Doug, me, Jane and Carol .. clapping. 
Above: Front and back cover for first single 'Rebel/Squeeze'… just add a plastic bag.
(WEA/Elektra)
Above: WEA bandfile. Letraset overload.
Above: Toy Love poster by another Strips magazine contributor, Laurence Clark (aka Helen Cross).
Above: The b&w promo photo was taken during the 'Squeeze' video shoot.
Christobel Wylie's fabric work, used as a title. Those are her nails too. 
Above: Lurking in the background at Taste Records, keeping an eye on Simon and Iggy.
Above: Flyer for Zap-O clothing label, Darby Street. Designer unknown.
Above: Contact sheet for Philip Peacocke's photo shoot. Early 1980 (?).
Below: Out-take and two promo photos from this session. The Consul looking good. 
Above: My fastest turnaround for a poster, responding to a phone call from Bryan Staff. A quick collage of the band's faces and 50 photocopies later.
Above: Front cover and inner sleeve for Bryan Staff's compilation on Ripper Records, AK79.
Above: The Island of Real. Chris Knox climbing, Chris Moody holding the spot, and Peter Urlich of Th'Dudes holding his head.
Above: Outside the Gladstone, 1979, Oct.(?)
Below: Beneficiaries Hall Dunedin 1979, with The Clean and Heavenly Bodies. 
Below: three shots from the Deluxe signing. Mike's pockets overflowing with Monopoly money. Tim Murdoch (centre-left) and Michael Browning (centre, asleep?) in the top one. Chris having a cuppa and then a beer. Paul eating a plane in the bottom one. 
Below: Sweetwaters, Jan. 27th, 1980. Photo: Murray Cammick. 
Above: Most of the set lists were done by Alec or Jane, although everyone had go. This is one of Alec's typically meticulous efforts.
Below: Chris on his knees .. beggin' please! 
Above: Mike's cover for the second single, 'Don't Ask Me' c/w 'Sheep'. (Deluxe)
Above: The Gladstone, Christchurch.
Photo: Christine Burrows. 
Above: Farewell at the Windsor, the day before going to Sydney.
Photo: Sara Leigh Lewis. Below: Same day. Chris with the late Julian Hanson of the Spelling Mistakes. Photo: Anthony Phelps. 
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According to the promo sheet the film told of “an alienated middle class couple being stalked and eventually murdered by their youthful punk mirror images”. The occasion was the premiere of David Blyth’s film Angel Mine at the Wintergarden beneath the main auditorium of the Civic theatre in Auckland, October 19, 1978. A night concluded by not one but two versions of the Suburban Reptiles, who might loosely be called the art school wing of early Auckland punk, playing in the theatre’s foyer. The roar of their great single ‘Saturday Night Stay At Home’ reverberating through the minarets and elephants of the 1929 pseudo-Moorish interior. In amongst all these suitably offbeat goings-on somebody introduced me to the singer for the Enemy, a band that had recently come up from Dunedin. Chris Knox and I immediately started talking about comics. He recognised my name from Strips, Colin Wilson’s pioneering fanzine which had given local comic artists a place to publish since early ’77. I’d had some involvement in the mag, including a little graphic work intended to test boundaries in some vague way, and Colin had been kind enough to give me an editor’s credit. Chris soon let me know that he liked the magazine well enough but that he thought my own efforts were a bit pretentious. I wasn’t bothered by the critique, he might've had a point – it was the candour that struck me and I was fine with that too. I absorbed this early bit of cheek without comment, because as we chatted I sensed a rapport that further piqued my interest in what he and his band were up to.
In my day job in the promotions department at WEA Records I’d had some correspondence with the late Roy Colbert in Dunedin, typically on matters such as the chances of some obscure UK import making it into the WEA NZ catalogue. Roy had mentioned the Enemy at some stage and he’d been championing them in the south from the beginning. He'd suggested that I check them out when they hit Auckland, which had happened in mid-September. As guitarist Alec has recalled: "(Auckland) punks were suspicious, they didn't like these out-of-towners from down south. Chris had a mohawk and we had this aggressive name so no-one wanted to book us". So the gigs were sparse but word was getting round… the Enemy’s push north was causing a few ripples. After meeting Chris at the Civic I was keen to follow up on all this and went to the old State Theatre in Symonds Street on Oct. 28th to catch them live, along with the Scavengers who I’d already seen at the Windsor Castle in Parnell. As Philip Peacocke’s iconic poster featuring the Reptiles’ Zero and Jamie Jetson from the Idle Idols shows, the Suburban Reptiles were also on the bill. But the schism indicated by there being two versions of the line-up at the Civic had lead to a reptilian extinction, and the various members of this seminal NZ punk band went on to other things; most prominently the Swingers. An ageing picture palace whose days were numbered, the State Theatre had first opened in 1911 as The Lyric. It had been owned by the Auckland Chinese community since 1960, and Phil Warren had run it as the Oriental Ballroom for a few years. In the early 70s I’d gone along with my friend Arthur to see a mixed bag of rock’n’roll clips from the 50s and 60s, and a filmed Sydney concert by Johnny O’Keefe. A lot of old plaster must've shaken loose as it played out its final act as a band venue before the whole block was torn down in the 1980s. Typically of former theatres it felt a bit cavernous unless there was a reasonable crowd, but the State Dance gigs featured many of the better new bands around town, which made it a focal point in this developing scene. With easy street parking and not far to walk from other parts of the inner-city, punters would congregate on the Symonds Street footpath, smoking, meeting and greeting, and checking people out in the time-honoured way. I liked the place and enjoyed most of the bands, and through late 1978–79 I was glad to be asked by Simon Grigg to do the odd poster for these shindigs in exchange for a door pass. I think I missed the Scavs on the night they played the State with the Enemy, but I've retained a reasonable picture of Dunedin’s finest onstage. I recall a moderately sized crowd scattered around the old cinema’s cleared out ground floor as the band started up, and for some reason I wandered upstairs to watch from the middle of the circle. I had a clear view, the sound was good, and the Enemy were terrific. In a mid-90s interview Mike Dooley said, “At times I’ve thought the Enemy were a better band than Toy Love… like some machine/beast hybrid that couldn’t be stopped once it got going”. Seeing them this one and only time makes it difficult to be specific about my impressions, but I recall the rolling power that Mike implied and was largely responsible for. “Dooley hammers away at his tom-toms like a little street fighter cornered in a back alley”, Roy Colbert once observed. I also sensed they had good songs that would take on further life and shape when I had the chance to hear them again. And there was the interactive stage presence of Chris Knox, acerbic and funny. By the end of the set I'd gone back down to the front of the stage – and I left the State intrigued, to say the least. I was keen to see them again. Despite being a regular at some of the venues where the Enemy played their remaining gigs going into late-’78, I did not in fact see them again. They seemed to have disappeared. When I next ran into Chris early in the new year, he told me their bass player Mick Dawson had gone back to Dunedin and they’d been practicing for a while with Phil Judd, late of Split Enz. This set-up didn’t gel very well and guitarist Alec remembers feeling “woefully inadequate” dealing with Judd’s sophisticated progressions. Eventually Judd privately suggested to Chris that the two of them work together without the others… that wasn’t going to fly either. In due course the ex-Enemys formed a new group with a couple of Christchurch friends who’d also drifted north; Jane and Paul from the Basket Cases and other combos. This all sounded very interesting to me, and disappointed that I’d not been more diligent in confronting the Enemy at least once more, I took up Chris’s invitation to see the new band rehearse at their house in Ponsonby. By late January Toy Love had already played a handful of gigs, mostly at Zwines, whose seedy charms I’d heard about but not yet enjoyed. During that period a lot of my time and energy had been caught up in the turbulence of the notorious Kim Fowley’s visit to Auckland. A story well told on the audioculture.com website (I’ll put some links at the end, if I ever get there). Somewhere in the midst of it all I went to see Toy Love practice. When I arrived at Williamson Ave and wandered in the back door, I noticed a promotional poster for the Sire Records label that I’d done for WEA, pinned up in the hallway. It seemed a small, positive omen. I already liked Chris and wanted to meet the others, and more than anything wanted to hear some music. Someone directed me out the back to the practice room. I made my way there and introduced myself to the rest of the band – Alec, Mike, Jane and Paul. It was a tiny dusty space with a busted old wardrobe and a few bits and pieces lying around that suggested someone might've been sleeping there in the recent past. (Alec tells me that he’d done exactly that for a short time. Update: so did Chris Moody). The practice had already started so there was a bit of conversation and then “this is a new one we’re working on” and they launch into ‘Squeeze’. Okay. Some backstory. I discovered rock’n’roll in the late-50s, growing up along with the music into the 60s and beyond. My daily life was drenched in pop and rock by the early-70s in that I played records constantly, devoured US and UK music mags, and obsessively explored any sounds old or new that took my interest. To some extent during the early 70s, I still looked for the continuing spirit of the Beatles, Kinks, Byrds, Beach Boys and others that had lit up my youth. I wrote a few record reviews, scouring albums by bands now largely forgotten, looking for great harmonies, an exhilarating chorus, and/or some original or strange quality… something irresistible. I was also catching up on the harder, darker dynamics of the Stooges, MC5 and the Velvet Underground as their records became more available in NZ. I first heard the Velvet Underground on the last track of a ‘groovy alternative sounds’ type of compilation that I'd bought second-hand sometime in 1969. Initially it was simply the differentness of the VU track that registered with me, as I focussed on the more West Coast-influenced stuff. But after a few listens, that insistent, ragged throb that had at first seemed kind of underdone, cut right through, and ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ became the only thing on the album that I played. I listened to it over and over and thought it was timeless, still do. I bought the Velvet Underground & Nico LP as soon as I could. Although there had always been critical endorsement, in the early 70s you didn’t hear much talk about being influenced by the Velvets or Stooges. Despite the solo activities of ex-members like Lou Reed and John Cale, the Velvet Underground itself was like a splendid flare-up out on the fringe that had spluttered to an undignified end by 1973. And for the more pop-oriented groups drawing on the legacy of the 60s, even the best of them were likely to be cult acts, getting more attention from a handful of sympathetic critics than from the vast audience which had once craved similar sounds. My own listening ranged over all types of pop, rock, soul, blues and a little jazz. I mostly played albums but loved a lot of singles – 'Virginia Plain', 'Family Affair', 'All The Young Dudes' spring randomly to mind – and the prescient ‘Trash’ by the New York Dolls, although I played this as an LP track on repeat. Likewise the MC5's 'American Ruse', another LP track on high rotation. Into the mid-70s it was clear that something fresh was afoot and the Modern Lovers, the Stooges' Raw Power, and especially Brian Eno’s early solos were never far from my play stack. I was especially entranced by Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and thought it was the most truly original pop record of the decade. There's no album from this period that I like more. And to someone who had eagerly foisted both Abba’s ‘What About Livingstone?’ and Capt. Beefheart’s ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ on unsuspecting visitors at full volume, a band that played a medley of ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy’ & ‘Positively 4th Street’, as Toy Love did, made plenty of sense. For a year or so I also played inept drums with a group of friends in a little band that never made it out of the proverbial garage – in our case a rustic shack in the Titirangi bush. When Toy Love played ‘Squeeze’ in the practice room, I believe a little slower than it would become, I heard echoes of the Velvet Underground and a skewed pop sensibility in the ominous guitar and agitated chorus that immediately grabbed me. This was my kind of thing. I didn’t analyse it at the time, just took it in and said something complimentary. I might’ve mentioned the Velvets. A bit of nodding and chat, then another good song and another – there was a meeting of pop and the underground, to put it in simplistic terms, and a sense of there being a lot more where this was coming from. After an hour or so someone said that they were booked to record a handful of demos at Harlequin studios in a few days’ time. I asked how much it was going to cost, “$40”. I handed over $10 and said it was my contribution if they included ‘Squeeze’ among the tracks, then headed home. Someone said in an interview that I’d probably heard pop potential in Toy Love that wasn’t in the Enemy, but it wasn’t really like that. I liked the Enemy a lot and if they’d handed me an Enemy tape at the time I would’ve been just as pleased, but I only saw them once and never met them as a group. So despite being aware of the continuity between the bands, when I met and heard Toy Love I was starting from scratch rather than making any comparisons. I was firstly and immediately a fan and wasn’t thinking like a record company guy, a trait which had made my mostly enjoyable stint with WEA feel a little insecure at times. I certainly wasn’t an A&R man out there looking for talent; in my experience NZ record companies didn’t work like that. The company boss took the initiative in looking for acts and called all the shots regarding the rare local signings. I’d got a job in the WEA warehouse about two years before all this happened, through an earlier meeting with the late Tim Murdoch while scrounging review records. I’d gone into the small office in the city that was WEA New Zealand’s humble beginnings as a distributor for the major US labels, and asked for a Gene Clark album, probably No Other. Tim said that I was lucky to have asked for the right record. I later realised that he was infatuated with the L.A. scene, and that my interest in the ex-Byrds singer/songwriter was a tiny trigger for the chain of events that followed. After a few weeks of similar contact and brief conversations with Tim, which continued when the WEA office moved down to Britomart Place, I asked about a job in the smart new premises they were planning in Federal Street. Tim said okay. So I left my position as foreman at a paper warehouse in Parnell, in no doubt that life was getting more interesting, and fast. I packaged orders in the WEA warehouse for a few months, eventually working my way into the promotions department by offering to paste up release sheets and put together ads. It didn’t look too difficult and I could sit down on the job. The lure of the music and a curiosity about the recording process lead to spending all-nighters in recording studios to see how it all came together. Regular ports of call around town included Murray Cammick’s Rip-It-Up magazine, Taste Records, Philip Peacocke’s (later Dave Perkins’s) silkscreen business at Snake Studios, and similar places whether I had WEA-related business there or not. But I had no real clout back at WEA. In fact my tastes were regarded with some suspicion around the office, although back in the warehouse where I liked to spend plenty of time there were some kindred spirits. I put my two-cents' worth into office discussions about which Doors re-releases should be imported or if, for example, the poster should be included in The Pop Group’s Y album. “But we’ll only move about half a dozen”, it would be argued … my position was that those half a dozen people expected to get the poster too. Maybe I won a couple and lost a lot more, but I wasn’t officially involved in catalogue decisions or A&R – being mostly just the house graphics guy who wrote some blurbs, had an opinion or two, and pulled orders in the warehouse when things got busy. Zwines was in a small dilapidated space at the rear of an historic stone building in Durham Lane, in the city. Started in February 1978, it was just around the corner and up the alley from what was then Babes Disco but had been many other things, including Bo-Peep where I’d often seen the celebrated Human Instinct play a decade before. Zwines’s reputation as the pre-eminent Auckland punk club is embedded in local lore and the tawdry stories are legion. Patrons of these two ideologically conflicting venues would exchange glares and loathing (and more) in the nearby streets. Musician Warwick Fowler (Aliens, Spelling Mistakes) recalls "lots of runaway girls, heroin addicts, a mixed bag [and] some genuine psychos" and being threatened with a shotgun in the alley outside. Toy Love played Zwines regularly during this period and I think it was a Saturday night when I first went along to see them. I don’t have many specific memories of the set they played, the songs were still unfamiliar to me, although clearly there were songs aplenty. But the live Toy Love were instantly captivating. That night reinforced the feeling I already had that this was my kind of band and that maybe some sort of ride had begun. At one point Alec busted a string and a bunch of fans jumped on stage to sing Flick the Little Fire Engine during the lull. Despite the problematic aspects of the place with the encroachment of hard drugs and other toxic elements, the Zwines crowd had a mostly good-humoured tribal nature that was, for all the dress-up and attitude, bluntly honest. One night I was standing against a wall on the left side when a girl came up to me and said, “Are you a cop?”. No, just a fan. “Whaddaya do?”. I work for a record company. “Oh”. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her go back to her group and say something. They looked over at me for a moment, and that was that. I was a few years older than the average crowd at most gigs I went to and still had the moustache I’d grown in 1968 (not much has changed in either regard). It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been asked if I was a cop and it wouldn’t be the last, but I didn’t get hassled again at Zwines – although I might've come closer than I realised. Mike now tells me that a group of skinheads asked him who I was and said they'd like to beat me up. How real the threat was is hard to say, but Mike put them straight and defused the situation. In mid-'79 Zwines was gutted by a fire that had been started, as the courts later determined, with criminal intent. I started going to Toy Love gigs regularly, including the Friday night State Dance that Simon Grigg had asked me to do the first of several posters for, and at the Windsor Castle in Parnell on Saturday afternoons. On most Saturdays during this time I worked with Simon at Professor Longhair’s (which became Taste in mid-'78), a little record shop up the hill from the Windsor that was one of the very few in Auckland trading until Saturday lunchtime. Good days, listening to everything new and interesting that came in, chatting to customers and acquiring a taste for Australian beers from the pub next door. According to Doug Hood, Taste in Parnell had been the Enemy’s first stop when they’d hit Auckland in September, drawn by its reputation for having the best stock of punk and new wave in the city. When we shut the door on Saturdays there was a short walk down to the Windsor where further good times were more or less assured. Almost every band now considered part of what might be called the AK79 scene, played the Windsor. Proud Scum, the Terrorways, Johnny and the Hookers, the Primmers, the Scavengers, Spelling Mistakes, the Features, the lot. And all for $1 at the door, courtesy of promoter Larry Young, and where Simon’s sister Fiona insisted at the door that Iggy Pop cough up this outrageous sum like any other punter when he dropped by. I recall walking in one Saturday and jostling my way towards the bar as the first band played to a room already packed beyond the by-laws. Someone I didn’t know at all turned and shouted right into my face, “This is our music, mate. This is our Beatles!”. I sensed that he wasn’t including me in this blessed company, but that was okay because this was a time and place where people got excited enough to shout things like that at complete strangers. I just nodded and smiled, there was too much noise for anything else. In my experience the Windsor is the room where Toy Love played more great gigs than any other. On stage the band was always ferocious and funny, and the crowd, apart from a handful of manic dancers up-front, watched transfixed. Most Toy Love sets at the time spiralled to a close with the unhinged finale of ‘Frogs’, as Chris roamed the tabletops looking for mischief, goading the punters and generally tempting fate. And when it all suddenly stopped or sort of petered out, triumphant or pathetic with Chris under a table somewhere, there was usually a moment of what-the-hell? and near silence – followed by a smattering of applause and nervous laughter as normality returned. In pot-stirring mode during a Rip-It-Up interview at the time, Chris told Louise Chunn that Aucklanders don’t dance, they pose fast, and anyway “We’d rather stun them”. I’d noticed the scars on Chris’s arm from self-inflicted wounds going back to the days of the Enemy (particularly during their number 'Iggy Told Me'), and which continued sporadically into the early Toy Love period. The shock value was undeniable, being a turn-off for some and fascinating for others, including a customer at an early Gluepot gig who had grabbed Chris’s arm to take a lick. I saw Chris cut himself once or twice and there was blood at other gigs. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it other than the realisation, if I didn’t already know it, that I was involved with something uncommon. I never mentioned it to Chris or anyone else in the band, but just accepted that it was part of the complex reality of the situation. In an interview for Radio NZ in 2006, Chris said that he had never felt any pain until the next day and that he always healed quickly, while admitting that, “Looking back, it does seem a little odd”. Odd, inadvisable, unflinchingly real, it was all of that, and whatever the underlying motivation, it eventually faded or was quelled. Sometimes people remarked, as if a little surprised by the fact, that Toy Love could really play. There was general astonishment at the power of Mike’s drumming, which was as idiosyncratic as anything else about the band. Alec’s guitar, searingly direct when needed, had plenty of inventive moments – his own ears and taste making the dreaded ‘sophisticated progressions’ irrelevant. Jane’s keyboards brought variety and colour, and her percussive style on the clavinet (she was also a drummer) gave the rhythm a characteristic crunch. The visceral tone and melodic drive of Paul’s bass both propelled and underpinned the music superbly, as it still does with the Bats. Although Chris wrote nearly all the words, everyone contributed to the arrangements and got equal credit, with the intensity coming from all these elements being bound together in a singularly compelling way. In full flight they were something to hear and I went to hear them as often as I could. After a brief stint as the Clean’s vocalist, Doug Hood had come north with the Enemy as road manager and sound man, and was a core of practical sense and loyalty in this group. In all that was to follow my admiration for Doug only grew, and even after the hook-up with an Australian label and booking agency, I always regarded Doug as the true manager at street level, where it mattered. The two roadies, Chris Moody who'd also been with the Enemy, and Ian Dalziel who would join a little later, were excellent folk and committed to the band. Shortly before going to Sydney, Chris Knox mentioned to me in conversation how good it was to have these friends as the crew. As for the name Toy Love – it appears to have been the only one they came up with that they all disliked and yet couldn’t let go of, and that seemed a solid basis on which to move forward. I don’t recall having any reservations about the name and took its ambiguity as being open to whatever meaning you brought to it. Nearly 40 years later I read somewhere that it was intended as a sort of antithesis to “real hate”, which would be news to me and probably to the others. Anyway, no matter how a band name might resonate before the fact, it’s all redefined by the music if it’s strong enough. To a multitude of people in NZ and beyond, Toy Love now means only one thing. By the middle of February the band had recorded and mixed four tracks at the Harlequin studios in Mt. Eden. ‘Pull Down the Shades’, ‘Toy Love Song’, ‘Squeeze’ and ‘Frogs’. I dropped in at Williamson Ave and picked up a copy from Chris, who had drawn little ball-point portraits of the band on the cassette slick. I listened to the tracks for a day or two and decided to take matters further… why not? It was blindingly obvious to me that these songs needed to be released as “proper records” because they were much better than the vast majority of proper records I heard around me, foreign or local. There had been occasional murmurings around the WEA office about needing some kind of success with a local act. A few months earlier at a staff conference in a city convention room, some big cheese from The Coast had pressed the point by playing a soaring, sentimental ballad that the Rome office had turned platinum. He’d noted a couple of smirks in the room and testily suggested that WEA NZ had no cause to be patronising and might want to pull their fingers out. Despite this, Tim had appeared on NZ television recently explaining the financial drawbacks to recording local acts, more or less saying they were a money pit that local companies couldn’t afford. And yet L.A. scenester/producer Kim Fowley’s visit had spurred WEA into supporting the Street Talk album, so maybe it was worth a shot. All the same, I expected nothing when I took the cassette to work and was already thinking about what other possibilities there might be. At the end of a working day I went into Tim Murdoch’s office and gave him the cassette – “I’ve seen these guys and really like them. I think the demos are pretty good too.” You couldn’t have accused me of overselling it, but I knew this stuff wasn’t really up Tim’s alley, to say the least, and it was best to let him make up his own mind. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Enemy had already sent a tape to WEA late the previous year, which had been returned to them by Tim with a letter more or less rubbishing every aspect of the music – guitar, drums, vocals, the works. They’d been similarly rebuffed by Polygram and EMI. The foyers of NZ record companies were not a welcoming terrain for bands like this. The next morning (it may have been a Monday after he’d kept it for the weekend) Tim walked up to me in the office, dug the cassette out of his pocket and handed it over. He said that he’d played it in the car and that he didn’t really get it, but if I truly thought it was good then I should give Glyn Tucker a call at Mandrill studios in Parnell – that I should book some time and see if there was a single in there! I was astonished and elated but quickly normalised the situation for myself by getting on with it, and made the call to Mandrill within minutes, before Tim could change his mind. Although it would be another four months before any actual recording took place. I liked working for the record company and most of the people at WEA were music fans one way or another, which made for a good environment. But in an instant it had gone from being enjoyable to being exciting; from working for a big conglomerate to also working for a small group of people who (there’s no better way to put it) I believed in. In the best way, things had just got personal. Over at the band’s house after work I let the others know that Warner/Elektra/Atlantic were interested in making a Toy Love record, and they were as flabbergasted as I was. Despite the differences of personality and taste in many things, which probably meant that we could never have been truly close buddies, I always admired Tim’s tendency to say ‘okay’ rather than ‘no’ at surprising times. Offering me a job in the first place, allowing me to move into promo because I said I could do it, and then giving me the go-ahead with Toy Love on what must have seemed flimsy evidence from his point of view – I remain grateful for it all. There were others at WEA excited by this Toy Love activity as well, but as things got rolling I became aware that one or two in the office saw this punk band business as "Terry’s folly" when, in an almost soap opera moment, I overheard the phrase in a nearby conversation. A little reminder not to take the situation for granted. .............................. I'll jump back to April 1973, to pick up another thread that eventually leads to Toy Love. Sometime around then I'd written to Who Put The Bomp! magazine in the US asking about subscription rates and back issues. I knew the editor Greg Shaw’s by-line from his Juke Box Jury column in the fabled Creem magazine out of Detroit, and maybe I’d seen a subscription ad for his mag somewhere. I didn’t go along with everything he wrote, but his fervour and much of the music he favoured certainly resonated with me. Greg replied, saying they had no back copies left but four issues a year by airmail would be $7, and I’d get a free Legendary Masters double album by either Fats Domino, Rick Nelson or Eddie Cochran for signing on. I took the offer and the Fats Domino, although it wouldn’t have been an easy choice. So began my fitful but valuable correspondence with Greg through the 1970s. He’d been a pioneering publisher and writer in the San Francisco rock’n’roll magazine world of the 60s, before moving to L.A. where he'd worked at United Artists records. It was Greg himself who had put together those Legendary Masters doubles which had set a high bar for any quality compilations that followed. He left UA to concentrate on his own Who Put The Bomp! magazine which he’d started in 1970. Bomp! reflected Greg’s disillusionment with the way rock and pop were going, and boosted new music that in his own words represented “everything those horrible post-hippie early-70s hated”. It covered then unfashionable genres such as girl groups, garage bands, doo-wop, surf music and the like, with passion and insight, being an early platform for writers like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. Greg went on to work with the Flamin’ Groovies, Devo and the Dead Boys, and run Bomp! Records and its associated labels, becoming an important force in promoting music that was influential on punk and new wave. He continued to pour his energies into this rock’n’roll obsession until he died aged 55, in 2004. I mention all this for two reasons. Firstly, the correspondence I had with Greg through the 1970s, and especially his generosity in our record swapping, was a real pleasure and a big part of my musical exploration. I loved the other magazines he put me on to, and my feeling of anticipation when opening one of his packages was like the best Xmas every time. While recently flicking through a 1974 issue of Bomp!, I noticed a letter to the editor from Roy Colbert in Dunedin who, like myself, was clearly just another poor boy lookin’ to connect (to paraphrase the bard of Hibbing). Connect with the rest of the world, that is, because living in the comparative remoteness of New Zealand pre-internet, such link-ups were priceless. I’d send Greg second-hand LPs by Larry’s Rebels and Kal-Q-Lated Risk, ask for 13th Floor Elevators and Big Star in return, and we both thought we were getting a fantastic deal! Looking through the faded photocopy auction lists that he mailed to me, and his letter insisting that I pick out a few more things in exchange for those great Underdogs albums I’d sent… even now it makes my mouth water. Greg never lost his interest in NZ music and in one 1999 US interview he said, “Do you know how small the population of New Zealand is? Every third person must be in a band with a worldwide cult following”. The second reason is that Greg was the first person to commit to releasing a specific Toy Love track on record. In May 1979 I sent Greg a copy of the Harlequin demos knowing he’d be fascinated, and he quickly replied: “First I must convey to you how exciting I found it. I wish we were not separated by such a great distance, because this sounds like a band I’d like very much to work with … this kind of talent excites me very much”. He offered to include a track on a forthcoming Bomp! label compilation of new bands called Waves Vol. 2, and enclosed a copy of Waves Vol. 1. His order of preference was ‘Frogs’, ‘Squeeze’, ‘Pull Down the Shades’ – a single track for a one-off deal. Chris was chuffed when I told him that it was the demented ‘Frogs’ which was top of the list, and the deal was made. So Toy Love would soon make it to vinyl, and on a respected US indie label to boot. But that wave took a long time to break. I’ve got a note from Bomp! records dated Burbank, May 14, 1980, a full year later, saying “Enclosed are five copies of Waves Vol. 2. Hope you and the group enjoy them”. The delay was no surprise – enterprises that run mostly on passion are often financially wobbly and time-frames are by necessity elastic. I respected Greg a lot and his genuine enthusiasm on hearing these Toy Love tracks cold, was timely. In a review of the compilation, the L.A. Trade paper Music Connection singled out ‘Frogs’ as being “a total cacophony of noisy music that somehow works, and works well”. Succinct, but about right. .............................. During early 1979 I visited the Williamson Ave house every now and then and went to one or two more practices, but didn’t make a habit of it. At first I sensed that Mike was a bit wary of me, but we bonded a little over being fans of Badfinger. I lent him a copy of their Wish You Were Here album (well predating the Floyd title), suggesting that it might be as good as their acknowledged classic Straight Up. After a few days he returned the record saying that he liked it, but it was no Straight Up. No problem, although I still rate it. (Ironically, Toy Love’s cover of Badfinger’s ‘No Matter What’ wasn’t among their best, in my opinion.) Mike was probably the most ideological member of the band, certainly at least as much as Chris in having no time for the inauthentic, as he saw it. It’s clear that for Mike, Sheerlux fell short in this regard, as their faces are scrawled out in a group photo of AK bands he used on his poster for the album. It seemed fitting that when the famous Gluepot in Ponsonby finally deigned to allow bands like Toy Love and others to grace their stage, it was Mike who bumped against the social order when his steel-capped boots violated the dress code that had been imposed, to safeguard the venue from skinheads. It wasn’t the only time Mike’s boots aroused suspicion, although the situation was usually sorted out promptly. He also remembers climbing over some seats near the door at Mainstreet to get around the swarming crowd, when the manager furiously dragged him outside and threatened him with a beating until, as Mike says, Doug intervened “as he did on many such occasions”. I recall feeling quickly at ease with Jane and Paul, and it’s not the only time that what might be a certain Christchurch bohemianism has felt somehow familiar to me. They had a flat on the other side of Ponsonby nearer Jervois Road and I was glad to be invited over for a lunch or a cuppa. Eventually Alec, who had impressed me as mostly being very quiet, but firm-minded when he did speak, also moved over to the Herne Bay area with his partner Georgina “to escape the Dooley/Knox shenanigans”, which seems very reasonable. With Chris, I was immediately struck by his prodigious creativity and startling memory, and as I’d intuited from the first, we’ve remained in tune on many things with the occasional sharp difference on some matter of taste. That’s never changed, and a good thing too. Although he’ll often state his opinion in the bluntest terms, especially when there’s a chance to make a point publicly, on a personal level I always found Chris’s spontaneous warmth and enthusiasm to be more characteristic and at least as heartfelt. Sometimes band members, girlfriends and roadies would come around to our Carlton Gore Rd house to watch Ready To Roll on the colour telly; or if the circumstances allowed, Radio With Pictures later in the evening with everyone draped around the overflowing front room. I was born in Grey Lynn and grew up in Douglas Street, Ponsonby in the late-50s. During this mid-70s period I had many friends and acquaintances in the area including a drummer I flatted with briefly. Heroin has, from some perspectives, been called the defining drug of 1970s Auckland – and I soon realised what the occasional tap-tap on the front door outside my room at 2 o’clock in the morning was all about; there was business to be done. I wasn’t interested in heroin defining anything about my own life including getting a good night’s sleep, so I was glad to quickly move on to Vermont Street at Colin Wilson’s invitation, shortly before meeting the band. One day at the drummer's house, a visiting Graeme Brazier stuck his head around my door – “I went through a period when I thought heroin was romantic and neat”, he once ruefully told an interviewer – he pointed to the Maytals I had playing on the stereo and exclaimed “Kinky reggae!”. When Brazier’s band Hello Sailor got going around 1975 they were the only outfit in town with Velvet Underground in their repertoire, among other good things, and a heated set one afternoon at the Kiwi Tavern still sticks in my mind. So it was great to meet him that one time for a brief conversation about the music, and I regret that we never really chatted again before he died, much loved and respected, in September 2015. It was entirely natural for Toy Love to land in this old inner suburb, along with many other bands and denizens of the city’s music and arts scene. With its large weatherboard houses at moderate rents, creative and often dissenting bustle, and mixed ethnicity, Ponsonby was an affordable and interesting place to live. My girlfriend Sharon and her twins also lived there, in Cowan Street near Three Lamps. Much has changed since then, but I retain a strong bond with the neighbourhood and even now I stay with friends in the area more often than not when visiting Auckland. For me, Ponsonby remains home ground. I first met Colin Wilson while dropping off reviews at the City News offices above some shops on Ponsonby Road. I’d volunteered to write record reviews for the inner-suburban paper for free, because it allowed me to do the rounds of record companies picking possible gems out of their new releases. It worked very nicely for a while. The record companies were happy because I got something published every week, and I was often interested in artists that didn’t get a lot of exposure. I was happy because free records were a good thing any way you looked at it. And I got to hear a lot of new music and write about it although, I'll admit, in a style that was much too influenced by the Meltzers and Christgaus of this world. Colin was doing some page layout when the editor introduced us. We talked about music and other things for a few minutes, long enough to recognise an affinity and a mutual love of comics, and it seemed only a matter of days before I was sharing an old two-storeyed house in Vermont Street with Colin and Ngila Dickson. A house wallpapered with hundreds of pages from old fashion mags and featuring a huge panel from a Dan Dare comic strip, complete with giant ants, painted across the kitchen wall. This’ll do me just fine, I thought. It was there that Strips comic magazine was started, which was entirely Colin’s baby, although I was able to bring in a Ponsonby friend Barry Linton, and Joe Wylie (soon to move up from Wellington) who I’d been put in contact with by Arthur Baysting. Colin’s brilliant, classically realist artwork has lead to a stellar international career in comics, and in 1979 at the beginnings of that trajectory it was a no-brainer to ask him to do a poster for Toy Love’s Aug/Sept tour. He'd quickly become a fan of the band and, incorporating elements of the French radical graphics he was interested in at the time, the resulting red and yellow poster is a beauty. It was re-jigged in a green and yellow version for a later tour and the main image used again for the 2005 Cuts compilation and the double LP in 2012. (As I was writing this piece I got the sad news that my old friend Barry Linton, mentioned above, had died. I was very fond of Barry, loved his work and greatly respected his influential role in New Zealand comics. He was the most avid fan of reggae that I knew in the mid-70s, and I first heard some lasting favourites in the convivial haze of his tiny living room, above an old corner shop in St. Marys Road. In later years, visiting him at his current home studio which was almost always in Ponsonby or thereabouts, was a highlight of my trips back to Auckland. I’ll miss our confabs about fado, flying saucers, ancient civilisations and past girlfriends.) When Tim Murdoch mentioned around May sometime that the US producer Jay Lewis (Albert Hammond, Danny O’Keefe) was holding a weekend workshop in Wellington, I expressed an interest in the idea and Tim took the hint. With instructions to do a little promo work at record stores while I was there, I headed down to the capital. Jay Lewis was a personable guy and the workshop which covered aspects of recording and A&R involved only a small group of us, which kept things fairly informal. At one point he said that when you’re trying to get a producer or record executive interested in some demos, hand the tape over confidently. Don’t apologise for the cheap production or flawed execution – if the magic is there a good professional will hear it. It’s the one piece of direct advice from the weekend I still remember because at the end of proceedings I approached Lewis and gave him a copy of the Toy Love demos, simply to get his response. Unfortunately I didn’t catch myself before mentioning the modest nature of the recording studio, compared to the one we were standing in. We looked at each other, smiling – I said “Oops!”. He got back to me later with some encouraging words about the songs, but felt that he and Toy Love were probably not a good match, which I’d never envisioned anyway. (Of course, some of those early demos are as good in their own way as the later tracks from state-of-the-art studios. I like the Harlequin demo of ‘Pull Down The Shades’ as much as any other). By July, Lewis was producing Citizen Band's second album Just Drove Thru Town for CBS at Mandrill studios back in Auckland, and having a passing acquaintance with a couple of the band members, I dropped in to say hello. Lewis remembered the Toy Love tape and asked if there'd been any progress. I was able to say that they were booked into that very studio to record their first single. In a recent interview the head of CBS at that time, John McCready, said that Toy Love "were the only band I wanted" and that he "has not seen another band with that potential since". Considering that Jay Lewis also produced Sharon O'Neill for CBS, perhaps in some parallel universe Lewis did end up working with Toy Love. Between Sunday 8th and Monday 23rd of July, Toy Love put in the hours between gigs to record and mix ‘Rebel’ c/w ‘Squeeze’, and five other tracks as demos towards future recording, with Glyn Tucker producing. ‘Rebel’ inevitably recalls the Kinks with its loping tempo (with origins in Smokey Robinson's 'You Really Got A Hold On Me' by way of the Beatles) and sharp social observation; and the lyrics of both these key Toy Love songs express an almost Holden Caulfield-like anxiety about phoniness and conformity. An anxiety mitigated, perhaps, by acceptance: “he’s a rebel, he’s so fine, he’s like me” (channeling both the Crystals and the Chiffons); and “’Cos I’m a fraud and I accept that’s what I am, because it’s a part of me and me is all that I have got.” Glyn Tucker has said that the sessions were “relatively hard work because their equipment was shit … everything rattled, buzzed and squawked”. Nevertheless, Glyn was great to work with. He went to rehearsals to hear the songs and made real contributions in the studio, as Chris noted in some diary pages from the time, reproduced in the booklet for Real Groovy’s 2012 double LP compilation. As Chris says, there was some discussion about which track to make the A-side, and over those few days opinions swung back and forth between ‘Rebel’ and ‘Squeeze’. In the end, the idea of one song or the other backed with two of the demos was dropped. The single would have both tracks with the emphasis on ‘Rebel’ for radio play. I spent as much time as I could at the sessions, watching and listening, and got roped into some hand-clapping on the chorus of ‘Squeeze’. I guess my minuscule contribution survives somewhere in the mix, unlike the Beach Boys style woo-oos that I’d improvised during the playback at a later session (probably the Hauraki jingle). Someone encouraged me to try doing it in the booth. I couldn’t hit the note and after several attempts I took the pained smiles I could see through the studio glass as a cue to give up. I got to work putting together promo sheets for the single’s upcoming release, in amongst all the other day-to-day bits and pieces my job required. It was nice to work on something I was personally involved with and could bring a different flavour to, as a change from writing blurbs for big overseas names and cribbing info from international release sheets. I convinced Tim that a picture sleeve would be the way to go, and volunteered to do the cover artwork. The fact that there would be no extra graphics or photography fees, made the simple picture-in-a-plastic-sleeve packaging more feasible. About ten days after recording had finished the advanced pressings arrived, not yet with the picture sleeve. The band were playing a weekend in Hamilton so I jumped in my car after work and drove down there, meeting them in the foyer of the motel where they were staying. It was a treat to hand over the single and see the reaction. WEA had decided to release it on Elektra and I’d told the band that I would try to get it done using the classic old red Elektra label with the big E, that we all associated with those Doors albums. Unsurprisingly this wasn’t possible and it came out on the caterpillar version that Elektra was then using for singles, to complement the butterfly label on their albums. I thought they might be disappointed but Paul said they were surprised that I’d even tried. I stayed in town for the gig that night at The Corner, then went back to Auckland as the band headed south to Palmerston North and New Plymouth, and on to Wellington where they recorded a clip of ‘Rebel’ for TVNZ’s Ready To Roll. Much to the chagrin of the Ready To Roll team, the band refused to wear the home-made Beatles wigs that had been organised… good decision. ‘Rebel’/‘Squeeze’ was released on Friday August 17th. Taste in Parnell sold 57 copies in an hour and a half and the various stores around Auckland which had taken much smaller numbers, soon sold out. On the same day that the single was released Toy Love played their 100th gig, at the Ngamotu Tavern in New Plymouth. Through the mid-70s the New Musical Express was the best music paper coming out of the UK, and every week I’d wander down from the office to the newsagents in Wyndham Street to get my copy. Until the NME’s resurgence after nearly hitting the wall in 1972 I’d paid it little attention, much preferring the various US mags I was desperately trying to source through the mail. Of the UK titles, I liked Sounds better and read it regularly, but writers like Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent initially, and later the team including Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, set a fire in the NME belly. If you gave a damn about pop and rock in the 70s you had to read it, and fortunately it was a lot of fun to do so. I think I posted a copy of the Toy Love single to the review sections of both the NME and Sounds, and was elated when the NME’s Danny Baker gave it what can only be called a glowing (if a little patronising) review. I hadn’t been optimistic about the UK mags responding, or if they did, how the record would sound to someone who knew nothing about the band or their context. These guys could be a bit sniffy if they were in the mood but I’d reasoned that any sort of review was probably worth it just for the mention. Baker was obviously intrigued by what he heard, especially Chris’s smart lyrics, and wrote that Toy Love must have “bleedin’ good eyesight cos they appear to have sections of this fair land [the UK] sussed”; when in truth they only needed eyesight good enough to look around them. He thought the name Toy Love was "lousy", but the record was "exquisite", and noted the apparent incongruity of a release through a major label being packaged like an independent. That aspect had never occurred to me. When you’re doing some things for the first time, you just do what feels right. The Auckland reviews were just as positive: "of classic status" (Adam Gifford in Craccum), "local masterpiece" (George Kay in Rip-It-Up), and Colin Hogg of the Auckland Star said he'd already "listened to it 15 times". Not everyone was so upbeat. An acquaintance who had been around the Auckland scene for a while and had given me some advice, listened to the recording of ‘Squeeze’ and said, “What happened? They lost it.” Talking to Christine when we first met in Melbourne nearly 40 years later, she told me that she and her best friend hadn’t liked the single much, it seemed a pale version of the on-stage Toy Love they’d gone crazy over. Soon after first seeing the band play, I’d encouraged Barry Jenkin to check them out. Barry had a late-night spot on Radio Hauraki in which he had the rare luxury of playing whatever he liked. His own discernment had already made the show a good listen for a year or two, and I’d occasionally sat in with him for sessions playing favourite tracks along certain themes (recent UK, US West Coast etc); including a marathon Beach Boys binge early in his tenure. Eventually, Barry had an epiphany on seeing a Stranglers clip (“It was their attitude!”) while doing his Radio With Pictures show for TVNZ as Dr Rock. That moment along with persuasive encounters with various people, had inspired a change of tack. His Hauraki shift was soon wall-to-wall with the new music coming out of the UK and US, and when I took a freshly pressed copy of local compilation AK79 up to him one night, he played a couple of tracks on-air immediately. His show had quickly become habitual for the eager few who were tuned into this stuff… while his ratings plummeted. It was great radio but in a small market it couldn’t last, and eventually Dr Rock had the inevitable terminal disagreement with management. Barry continued his similarly uncompromising approach on TV and other radio gigs. A few days after urging him to check out Toy Love I met up with him. His reaction was that they were great but “You’ll never get that down on vinyl”. I knew what he meant, but said I was absolutely sure we’d get something down that would be terrific in its own way. I think he felt his doubts were justified when the single came out, it probably wasn’t as rowdy as he’d expected, but he liked it anyway and gladly played both the record and the subsequent video as soon as they were available. In fact, there was never going to be any way to capture the full live experience of Toy Love on vinyl. Despite this, I believe the studio recordings as songs and performances stand as an achievement in themselves, as the recently remastered versions only confirm. More on that later. Just as an aside. When Barry and Hauraki parted company I got a call from someone at the Auckland Star saying they were getting various opinions from around town about the schism. I said what a pity it was and how important Barry’s show had been over the years, and because no-one else was doing anything similar I hoped he would get another gig, and soon. I was surprised when the article appeared the next day and mine were the only remarks quoted. Back in the office I was quietly told that my “public statement” had ruffled a feather down at Hauraki, which also surprised me. About three days later I heard a Hauraki station promo on the car radio which featured an apparently gormless character called Terry Hopeless. Coincidence or whatever, I had to laugh. We all wanted to do a video for ‘Squeeze’, to have something to put on the telly of course, but also just for the fun of it. There was no proper budget allocated so a deal was made with contacts at the Vidcom studio in Mt Eden to record something on a Saturday in late July. The fee was two dozen Heineken and a bag of NZ green, bought with promotions department petty cash and delivered on the morning of the shoot. In these rushed and cut-price circumstances the set-up was basic and the input from the band was limited. The uncharacteristic old suits worn by Chris, Alec and Mike were the result of a tip I’d received from someone at Vidcom about the minimal set they were planning, possibly inspired by Elvis Costello’s ‘Pump It Up’ video. He'd suggested the band might wear something dark. I’m sure I only half-heartedly passed the idea on but it was good that they went along with it, as the dark suits worked out fine against the stark white backdrop. On the day Mike was loaded up with painkillers for a severe neck infection, and he couldn’t recall much about it when I asked him recently. In the video’s skin-peeling scene, the naked back belongs to Alec’s partner Georgina, and the impressive nails are those of Christobel Wylie, whose Toy Love fabric work we used for the clip’s title frame. The ‘Squeeze’ video was first shown on Radio With Pictures with Barry Jenkin on August 14th. Looking back, I regret that WEA didn’t work with some other bands from the AK79-related scene, but at the time it still seemed remarkable that the company had taken on Toy Love at all, and there were certainly no assurances as to where things were going in the future. Despite being regarded as a success in many ways, the first single had only made it to #29 on the NZ charts and WEA in Australia were showing no interest in the band, at all. Nothing felt secure. One day a member of a local group came into the office and spoke briefly to Tim Murdoch. Tim came over and asked me to have a chat with this person and explain why WEA wouldn’t be getting involved with any other local acts for a while. I don’t remember the name of the musician who I'd never met, although I think I had seen the band. Tim sometimes directed these sorts of enquiries to me and I did my best to handle them diplomatically, without suggesting that I got it right every time. I explained the situation as well as I could and that the record company wasn’t about to increase its spending on local bands any time soon. I felt uncomfortable being the guy in the foyer with the unwelcoming news. The next night at the Squeeze club Terrorways singer John No-one introduced a song as being “… for Terry Hogan, who thinks that Toy Love are the only good band in Auckland”. It wasn’t true, but I understood where the comment was coming from, and hung out in the band room afterwards to show there were no hard feelings… on my side at least. Squeeze was a basement club in Fanshawe street for about a year, and it’s not often mentioned in accounts of the period, although audioculture.com has a nice piece by Garth Cartwright. However, its presence lingers in artefacts like the well-known Swingers promo photo taken against the club’s op-art mural. Maybe Philip Peacocke's shot for the State Dance poster with the Enemy was also taken there. Photographer Philip Peacocke, along with Paul Hartigan, had opened a screen-printing business called Snake Studios in 1974. It was situated in the long since demolished block on Darby Street, a hive of creative activity throughout this period. Murray Cammick had moved Rip-It-Up magazine from its tiny Airedale Street office at Snaps photography gallery to a space above the original Taste record shop in Lorne Street, and then in late-1979 to the capacious Darby Street top floor. Over time the building’s tenants included the Denis Cohn Gallery, animation artist Joe Wylie, future Academy Award winner Ngila Dickson's Zap-O fashion label with Robyn Rastrick, and other groups and individuals juggling their own unstable mixes of art and commerce. Darby Street was a favourite stopping point for me at the time, and even after I’d moved to Melbourne in 1981 I returned to Auckland occasionally to work on Ngila’s Cha Cha magazine, also on the top floor. Snake was eventually taken over by the late Dave Perkins, who’d already had a major impact on the city with Taste Records in Lorne St, and then High St (“extraordinarily hip”, as Simon Grigg once observed), another regular hang-out. Philip Peacocke did a photo shoot with Toy Love either in late 1979 or (more likely) early 1980. Some of these shots have popped up in booklets and liner notes and I’ve seen one or two of them wrongly captioned as being taken in Australia. They were definitely taken in Auckland because they’re all on the same contact sheet that I’ve recently found, with several frames featuring my two-tone Mark I Consul. I have an inkling the photos were taken out the back of Karangahape Road somewhere, possibly on Newton Road. A few images were printed up for promotional purposes and some are still widely used. And there are enlarged prints of some lesser known shots that are now minus a face or two, sacrificed to the urgent need of a back cover for the album, one frenetic weekend in the future, in another country. Colin called out as I headed for the front door one evening, “You’ll kill yourself at this rate!”. Not likely, I might’ve missed something. As the remainder of 1979 hurtled along I got to as many Toy Love performances as possible, and made the rounds to catch other bands that I liked. I’m quoted somewhere as having seen 80% of Toy Love’s gigs, which isn’t remotely possible considering the amount of touring they did, but I got to plenty of them. They were playing most of the venues in Auckland that supported the new bands, including the Windsor, the Globe, Island of Real, the Gluepot, Squeeze and Liberty Stage, and charging up and down the country in an excellent looking black Ford Transit van. Everywhere inciting mayhem and laughter, and having the plug pulled on them by dismayed proprietors – while inspiring people to form bands, start magazines, do something. My friend Christine and her crowd in Christchurch being perfect examples. “There was nothing at all happening in Christchurch”, she says, “and Toy Love just seemed amazing to us, with Chris and all that energy and anger and fun. I got an Ibanez guitar like Alec’s and played it in the same low-slung way. We started a band – we were pretty messy but we loved it”. By the time Toy Love played the Zap-O clothing Christmas party back in Auckland with the Primmers on December 18th, the gig count had hit 180 in eleven months. In December, Bryan Staff was set to release the now iconic AK79 compilation as the debut for his independent Ripper Records label, featuring six key bands from the Auckland scene. Toy Love had two tracks, demo versions of ‘Squeeze’ and ‘Toy Love Song’. Bryan rang me up about doing a cover and inner sleeve and came into WEA with a pile of photos and a handwritten blurb. I recall that it was all in a shoebox that he plonked on my desk, saying that he needed to see something in a couple of days, if possible. Luckily WEA had an account at a bromide studio in Parnell, which had been very useful for the posters and other non-WEA graphics I’d been doing. Whatever else I was supposed to be working on took a back seat as I immersed myself in the AK79 job. With a flurry of bromides, all-night sessions with the scalpel and spray glue and a bit more work on the blurb, it came together quickly. The front cover, though, was a problem and I worried about it while putting together the collage of band photos for the inner sleeve, almost hoping that something would just present itself. I didn’t want to feature one act alone, but also didn’t want the diffused effect of a collage of band photos, preferring to look for a single strong graphic. Very late in the process I had a greatly enlarged line-shot done of a detail of Dean Martello's guitar, from an on-stage Terrorways photo by Anthony Phelps. It’s the only idea I tried seriously and, luckily, as soon as I saw the bromide enlargement I knew it would work. The job was mostly finished when Bryan came into WEA again and dropped off the photo for the back cover. It didn’t really fit with what I’d already done, but it was too late to make major changes. Unfortunately the attempt to reverse the track listing in white out of the dark background never looked right, and became almost impossible to read as the ink faded over time. As with so many fast and cheap black-and-white jobs like this, you didn’t expect to see a printer’s proof and have a chance to fix anything; and I was only just starting to grasp how the whole printing process worked. Usually I just handed over the artwork and hoped for the best. The rest of the cover and inserts turned out reasonably well, I decided, while thinking that it would’ve been nice to have had another shot at it all. I don’t think I got much feedback at the time about the cover, in fact I don’t recall any sort of feedback. It did the job, and the popularity of the bands in such a vibrant scene had the album selling out its 250 initial pressing within days, then a second pressing soon after… and things moved on. About 25 years later I started to get enquiries about AK79. Who owns the image?… Is there original art somewhere?… We want to do a t-shirt, so who do we pay?… etc. Nobody really knew the answers. The cover design had been recycled for cassettes and other re-issues over the years, and I’d noticed that it was being changed and distorted in ways that bothered me a little. Deciding that I had no basis for complaint if I didn’t take control of the image myself, I scanned my best LP copy, tidied it up and offered a hi-res jpeg to anybody who needed it for a legit purpose. That offer stands. It’s funny that of all the work I did in the 70s, this rushed and flawed cover for AK79 has become the graphic I’m most associated with in NZ and has taken on a life of its own. Considering the spirit in which these things were done at the time, with never a thought that they would still have a life decades down the track, I’m happy with that. It was in early December that Tim had a word to me about an Australian guy who was interested in Toy Love. Michael Browning had been running venues in Melbourne since he was 18 in the late-60s, had managed Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs for several years, and eventually opened a Melbourne club called the Hard Rock Cafe based on what he’d seen during a stay in London. It was at the Hard Rock Cafe that he booked a bunch of local yahoos calling themselves AC/DC, and the rest is you know what. After five years of management and an acrimonious break with the band, Michael returned to Sydney and started Deluxe Records. His first signing was the Farris Brothers, who smartly changed their name to INXS. He also picked up another Sydney band called the Numbers, and from Perth, the Dugites and Eurogliders. Tim said that Michael was interested in Toy Love with a view to giving them experience in Australia before taking them further. Of course he wanted to see them play live as soon as possible and would be in Auckland later that month… is this something the band would be interested in? I’m a little fuzzy on some things, but this is how I remember it happening. I spoke to the band about this idea and what Tim had told me of Michael’s experience and trustworthiness. Everyone was at least curious and thought it was worth looking into. Michael arrived on Friday 14th of December, and on my way to the airport to collect him I realised I had no idea what he looked like, and would have to wing it. When I spotted a tall guy with white jeans, cuban heels and the look of someone expecting to be met, I knew I had my man. On the drive into town he told me that he liked the single a lot and was excited about what he’d heard on the grapevine. He said he’d always liked NZ bands and the chance to work with such a good one was something he didn’t want to let slip. Later that evening at Mainstreet I thought the band played an average sort of set and was unsure about Michael’s response. Every Toy Love set was fine by me, but I think I was objective enough to know when one gig didn’t quite hit the heights of others. I never tried to talk anyone into liking the band, being sure that an encounter with them playing live was the best way to convince them one way or the other. A lot of people loved them from the first moment, while others weren’t sure but were curious to see them again. But if you disliked them right off the bat, there was nothing I could say, the evidence was all there. There were no such problems for Michael. Before heading back to his hotel he said that they were great and he was keen to talk with the band and get started on whatever might be decided. A meeting between the band and Michael at the hotel had been arranged for the next day. In a recent interview he said, “I thought they were really interesting and Chris Knox was one of the most engaging, talented and artistic rock musos that I had ever met” (I’m not sure that Chris would appreciate being called a muso. He always enjoyed that “people got offended that you could be a musician without being a musician”). Alec remembers immediately noticing Michael’s armadillo skin boots, and also says that he’d liked the Aussie from the start. At the time I thought Michael had heard about Toy Love somehow and had initiated the connection with Tim. Only later was it clear to me that Tim had made the first contact, in an effort to get the records released in the face of WEA Australia’s indifference. It didn’t matter. I sensed that Michael’s enthusiasm was genuine, his track record of success was there, and this looked like a risk worth taking as a first step internationally. A chance to move beyond carving a rut into motorways up and down NZ. In the end though, only the band could decide. Michael flew back to Sydney soon after the meeting, in which he’d presented his standard contract for us to mull over and make suggestions. He planned to return to Auckland in the new year if everyone involved was in agreement to settle the matter. I would describe the overall mood as cautiously optimistic, not everyone was convinced and Doug in particular was dubious about the move to Sydney. Toy Love worked on a policy of all-in or nothing, and after some discussion the vote was to go. Things were different then, and the later worldwide proliferation of independent labels with the associated network of touring and support outside of the established system, was still embryonic. For a NZ band at that time, there were no obviously better alternatives to the sort of path that was being offered to Toy Love, to get where they wanted to go and with the kind of support that gave a feasible chance of success – however that might be measured. I have a letter from Deluxe dated Dec. 19th that confirms changes to some contract clauses and finishes with Michael saying that he would call me about his arrival date. After a bit of to-and-fro, the contract was knocked into shape by early January and a signing was set up for Tim’s office on January 18th. And so, almost one year to the day after their first gig at Zwines, Toy Love signed to Deluxe Records (Australia). On the day of the signing Mike brought with him a fistful of Monopoly money that can be seen overflowing from his breast pocket in the group photo. Although it made me laugh and still does (I’m not sure Tim was amused) I suspect this gesture reflected a lingering scepticism under the surface. Nevertheless, the immediate future was taking on some sort of shape and that in itself felt like a plus. It was decided that the planned recording of a second single would go ahead in Auckland before the band headed off to Sydney in a couple of months’ time. In an interview with 5AA in Adelaide in 2015 to promote his book Dog Eat Dog, Michael mentioned that when he’d signed AC/DC he’d “pretty much made a pledge that I’d have them out of the country within a year, with an international contract”. A similar commitment was made in the discussions with Toy Love, with the UK being the specific destination, and I remember that contacts at the Marquee club were mentioned. Crucially, creative freedom was assured. The prospect of hitting London with an album and a few months’ worth of new songs in the bag not only fuelled the band’s eagerness to go ahead with this, it was the whole point. In the days leading up to the signing with Deluxe, I’d been weighing up my own options, if and when the band did leave the country. My personal life gave me every reason to stay in Auckland, and I liked my job, although there was some restlessness in that regard; but Toy Love wasn’t simply a source of enjoyment whose absence would annoy me. The band was an important part of my life and I knew that for me the Toy Love-shaped hole left by their going to Australia would not be filled. Although I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work, I couldn’t see myself staying back in Auckland when the time came. The day Michael was about to fly back to Sydney, he asked me into Tim’s office to discuss an idea they had. They offered to send me over with the band as “a kind of personal manager”, working alongside Doug. WEA would keep me sort of on staff for a while until they saw how things developed, but I’d have to organise a few things for myself in Sydney. Meanwhile the band would be supported to an extent while the income from gigs etc swelled as anticipated. I’d be expected to liaise with Deluxe and WEA, work with promotions and other relevant people when necessary, and continue with various band matters just as I’d been doing. Michael said that he was keen for me to stay involved and hoped that I would come along. Perhaps he wanted a go-between, someone who would look after the band’s interests while also communicating his side of things. Whatever the concept was they both thought it felt right, and for me it was a problem solved. That evening as the band was preparing for a gig at the Island of Real, I wandered in and told them about the offer and that of course I would be taking it. Jane said that she and Paul had just got engaged, so it was smiles all round as she jumped down from setting up her keyboard and the two of us danced a little jig in front of the stage. The next Sunday we all drove down to the Sweetwaters Festival in Ngauruawahia. Toy Love had late afternoon slot in front of a big crowd (estimated at 30,000 over the three days). I recall a distinct grumpiness in our group and Mike was a little worse for wear. There were major sound issues during the set, but watermelons were smashed and an encore was demanded by the fans down front; so I guess it all went okay. I’ve never liked mega-festivals as a place to see and hear bands; give me a packed, small to medium-sized room where I can hear the buzz and rattle and see the faces of the band. Not much of the day has stayed with me but I do recall a testy discussion in the backstage tent with an Australian journalist about something or other; and a conversation with Todd Hunter which may have involved the recording of Toy Love’s second single the very next day, as John Dix reports in Stranded In Paradise. I don’t think I’d met Todd before then and in retrospect it seems unlikely that an arrangement was made on the spot for a job only hours later, and yet… sometimes things did come together that quickly. Dependent on others for a ride, I regret having to miss Elvis Costello’s Sunday night set, and for me the day was mostly a lot of mooching around and killing time before heading back to town. As I say, I don’t clearly recall how the initial connection was made that lead to Todd Hunter working on the second single and later the album, although Chris had a friend who once roadied for Dragon and maybe there’s a link there somewhere. Nobody quite remembers. Alec says that he’d not met Todd before and that it was Chris who had really pushed for his involvement. Of course Todd was and remains best known for his work with Dragon during their years of glory in the late-70s. He seemed genuinely smitten with Toy Love and later said that when he first saw them at the Gluepot they were “… fucking great. Great songs, huge energy”. The new tracks were recorded over two days from Monday 28th January. ‘Sheep’, which had been in the set for a long time was recorded first, and a little too hurriedly in Alec’s view, so that more time could be spent on a newish song called ‘Don’t Ask Me’ which was destined for the A-side. Trialled onstage at the Windsor a few days before as ‘Just Want To Hold You’, the lyrics were still taking shape as the band went into the studio. When Chris’s girlfriend Barbara Ward was asked if she had a better title, her response became just that, the title ('small world' footnote: Barbara's brother Derek Ward starred in Angel Mine). Chris has said that he wrote the final lyrics for ‘Don’t Ask Me’ on the day, and in truth I’ve always thought they could’ve done with a touch more work, but it’s such a beautiful record anyway – with the drama of a classic 60s pop song and laced with typical Toy Love obsession and ambivalence, it's one of Chris's best recorded vocals. Backed with the brain-damaged mosh-pit filler ‘Sheep’, it was a fine follow-up single. I recall that the final mix for ‘Don’t Ask Me’ was tricky to get right and later in the week, after the band had headed off to Wellington and Todd had also left town, Glyn gave me a call. He thought that maybe the mix could be improved, and would I like to sit in with him while he worked on it a little more. Just to see if we could come up with an alternative. This we did, and quickly sent a cassette south to catch up with the band. Chris eventually called me back with the verdict that the new mix was good, but they preferred the earlier one. I’ve still got the cassette, and he was probably right. While in Wellington for a string of gigs from February 6th the band filmed a short set at the Rock Theatre, which was eventually shown on Radio With Pictures, and shot a video of ‘Don’t Ask Me’ at the Avalon studio for NZTV’s Ready To Roll on Monday 11th. I have no memory of what it looked like and in the routine procedure of the time, it was soon wiped so the tape could be reused. The same fate had befallen an Avalon video of ‘Rebel’ shot largely in black and white with a red colour wash going through it at some point, which is about all I can recall of it. They headed south on the 12th for multiple dates in Christchurch and Dunedin, arriving back in Auckland by the 28th to play the Gluepot. Relentless stuff. In the meantime ‘Don’t Ask Me’ b/w ‘Sheep’, with a cover drawing by Mike which I'd tricked out with a fluoro pink frame, went to #10 in the NZ charts. The March 1980 Rip-It-Up Readers' Poll rated Toy Love as second best NZ group after Split Enz, 'Rebel' as the best NZ single, and the band members all made top three on their respective instruments. Best NZ album was AK79. We were leaving for Sydney on Sunday March 9th, and the band had a handful of gigs before then. I recall best the Wednesday night at the Varsity Rec. Centre. The crowd wasn’t very involved and I remember thinking the band sounded looser than usual, less powerful. I overheard a conversation between two nearby students; one was a fan of the band and was talking them up to the other, who was curious but unconvinced. Later I heard that Mike had punched Chris backstage in a disagreement about Mike’s scattering of the drum kit, which I'd noticed. All this stirred up a sense of unease I’d had since around the time of Sweetwaters. All being strong characters, band members sometimes crossed swords and it wasn’t the first or last time Mike and Chris, or some other match-up, would tangle; but there were no ongoing, seething personality conflicts or corrosive hard drug issues which would’ve made me wary from the start. There was some enthusiastic drinking, God knows, but considering the intensity of their performances and the punishing grind of touring, everyone got along pretty well. On the brink of taking a leap into the Oz unknown, it was unsettling to see some stress in the fabric of something whose onward-and-upwardness I’d largely taken as a given. A feeling that probably reflected some of my own apprehension. I had plenty to think about in the few days remaining before heading to another country, leaving relationships and friends for an escapade that had no predictable outcome. I’d made a similar departure once before in 1972 which involved parting from the same girl, although our friendship had survived that and other tests since then. The situation was both unnerving and exhilarating… and there was nothing else to do but get on with it. I sold my Consul to a local drummer, and took in some of the cheerful chaos of Toy Love’s farewell at the Windsor on the Saturday afternoon, where the door money ended up on the bar. The next day I joined the band (Knox with his head half-shaven), Doug Hood, roadies Ian Dalziel and Chris Moody, Barbara Ward, Georgina Trayhorne and Carol Tippet (partners of Chris K, Alec and Doug respectively) and hopped on a flight to Sydney. |
Above: Gone feral. Another shot from the Philip Peacocke session.
Above: Booking sheet for the Civic, Friday, April 18th. Additional Information includes "Keep volume as low as possible" and "No support band", although Alec records that Auckland band Proud Scum played too.
Below: The Civic Hotel, recently, and poster for what was a sort of residency. 
Above: Sydney, probably the Civic.
Photo: Christine Burrows. 
Above: Poster for Sydney University gig.
Above: Murray's letter! He said I could use it.
Above: The tin foil phase at its height.
Photo: Carol Tippet. 
Above: Doug and Chris relaxing at home in Sydney.
Photo: Carol Tippet. 
Above: Cover for the EP, combining the first two singles for Australian release.
(Deluxe) Photo: Philip Peacocke. 
Joe Wylie's note lamenting the lack of Toy Love, and below, Joe's lovely poster.
Above: French's Tavern, Oxford St. 1970s
Above: From left, Jane, Mike, Chris M, and Doug, mooching around at Windsor St.
Photo: Carol Tippet. 
Above: My backdrop made with gaffer tape and a marker. Not great, used once.
Above: Still from an interview filmed at Windsor St., July 1980. Shown in NZ the following month.
Above: Painted TV set, a spot, a black-light, and fluoro-daubed bits and pieces on the backdrop. No expense spared.
Photos: Michael Green. 
Left: Wednesday night at the Stage Door Tavern. Apparently supporting In XS.
Above: Chris all pick-eyed and bleeding subsequent to the mirror incident. Jane looking concerned. And later at the EMI studios with much nicer bandages.
Above: Playing pool at the EMI studios during recording for the album…
Ian Dalziel potting. 
Above: Chris's cover for the third single.
(Deluxe) Above: My jacket on Countdown.
Above: Jane's front cover and my back cover for the album. (Deluxe)
Above: I had a shot at the Toy Love album front cover. Deemed to be too reminiscent of the Residents. Probably fair.
Above: Last gig in Australia. The band flew back to NZ the next day.
Poster: Chris Knox. |
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Above: NMM's schedule for what was to be the final tour.
Above: Stills from Joe Wylie's video for 'Bride Of Frankenstein' .. yee-hah!
Above: Fomenting public indignation in a Dunedin cemetery.
Below: Christchurch poster for the final South Island gig. 
Above: Strange shadow effect gives me a Don King haircut, while John Dix looks eager for the next party. Christchurch.
Photo: Ian Dalziel. 
Above: All was not well.
Above: At the Gluepot for the last time.
Photo: Anthony Phelps. 
Above: Photo spread in Extra #1, October 1980. Backstage at the final gig, Mainstreet, September 20th.
(5) Chris Moody, (6) Doug Hood and Carol Tippet, (7) myself and Ian Dalziel. Photos: Murray Cammick. 
Above: Cover for Class Of 81 compilation on Simon Grigg's Propeller Records label.
Double vinyl releases, 2012.
Above: Demos, singles, B-sides etc. (Real Groovy Records and Flying Nun) Below: Live at the Gluepot. Front cover lettering by Jane Walker. (Real Groovy Records) 
Chris and Alec being Dwarfs, 1981.
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Back Home
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Drawn to the magnetic north like many other bands, The Enemy/Toy Love came roiling up from underneath, exuding a kind of NZ southern gothic of death rehearsals and mental frailty – leavened with a little graveyard jollity. In the dark strains that trace through Toy Love’s songs there are surprising twists and nuances, in contrast to the clichéd bluster of some bands who might see themselves as heavy and weird. There's also a lot of doubt and ambivalence, brooding over what’s real and what’s phoney and which am I? Maybe in a culture sometimes perceived of as callow and remote, anxieties about being second rate and second hand are close to the surface and inclined to seep through. In the mid-1970s, the several months' delay between the NZ music scene and its influences in the UK and US could feed into this uncertainty. Of course many of Chris's Toy Love songs simply reflected his delight in the lurid and grotesque, and in playing a role. Still, it’s not difficult to see an element of personal scrutiny in the concern with authenticity, especially early on. And to whatever degree that was true, I always thought that Chris’s exposed persona in this and other ways was a brave one. In fact, at times Toy Love seemed like a raw extension of life as much as a theatrical reflection of it, and about as un-phoney as you can get.
Whatever the underlying factors, Toy Love's highly charged, uninhibited delivery gave life to it all, galvanising audiences and demanding a reaction. The frequent unease was countered by a bracing energy and humour, an overall spirit that writer Graham Reid has called “cynical but oddly life-affirming”. As an incident in NZ society Toy Love can bear a little analysis, although it could undoubtably be more cogently expressed, so I’ll leave it there.
As an occurrence in my own life, I fully embraced what they were from the start – too much so to fret about what they may have become in any future scenario, which can only be speculation. Although like any fan I regretted that there would be no more Toy Love songs and performances when they disbanded, I see them as a band that came to a natural and understandable end, rather than one whose time was cut grievously short. During that brief and frantic span, Toy Love’s impact and influence were immense, they were a lot of laughs and a bit of a worry – and I wouldn’t have been dead for quids.
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In 2012 Toy Love received the Legacy Award at the 47th annual New Zealand Music Awards.
Whatever the underlying factors, Toy Love's highly charged, uninhibited delivery gave life to it all, galvanising audiences and demanding a reaction. The frequent unease was countered by a bracing energy and humour, an overall spirit that writer Graham Reid has called “cynical but oddly life-affirming”. As an incident in NZ society Toy Love can bear a little analysis, although it could undoubtably be more cogently expressed, so I’ll leave it there.
As an occurrence in my own life, I fully embraced what they were from the start – too much so to fret about what they may have become in any future scenario, which can only be speculation. Although like any fan I regretted that there would be no more Toy Love songs and performances when they disbanded, I see them as a band that came to a natural and understandable end, rather than one whose time was cut grievously short. During that brief and frantic span, Toy Love’s impact and influence were immense, they were a lot of laughs and a bit of a worry – and I wouldn’t have been dead for quids.
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In 2012 Toy Love received the Legacy Award at the 47th annual New Zealand Music Awards.
Above: Most of the citizens in this photo feature in the above story. We're standing outside Real Groovy Records in Auckland at the launch of the double vinyl Toy Love compilation, Nov. 2012. Left to right: myself, Adam Gifford, Doug Hood, John Dix, Arthur Baysting, Simon Grigg, unknown. Photo: Simon Kay. |
Many of the people, bands and venues I've mentioned have entries at the audioculture site. There are specific pages for Toy Love, Chris Knox, Jane Walker, Doug Hood, Roy Colbert, Simon Grigg, Zwines, Windsor Castle, the Bats, Arthur Baysting, Barry Linton, Joe Wylie etc. Just go there and search.
https://www.audioculture.co.nz Other good places: http://www.toylove.co.nz www.simongrigg.info/index.htm nzonscreen.com/title/toy-love/artist nzonscreen.com/chris+knox … and of course Youtube. Links to other relevant pages on this site: rock'n'roll graphics 1978–81 music posters and graphics growing up with rock'n'roll A London Winter Special thanks for their help: Alec, Mike, Paul, Ian, Christine, Simon, Murray, Joe, Colin … et al. |
I wrote this short blurb sometime around 2005 and it's been reproduced here and there in slightly differing versions.
Toy Love’s music always seemed to be in a constant state of being formed and reformed, songs would warp and twist with every playing. So, for all its undeniable power it could seem unstable, almost fragile, threatening to burst out of its own skin, shards and globs all over the place – every gig was like another attempt to make this strange creature hold together and live. At times it would take off at a few unpredictable points, while at others it would lift off immediately and roar through the air – an astonishingly compelling, unlikely flying thing with dark folds and flashes of light. The best stuff was transcendent, and the near failures were so often funny or had the buzzy pathos of a crash site, you couldn’t look away.
Those early performances at Auckland venues like Zwines, XS and especially the Windsor Castle, sealed Toy Love’s reputation and set a benchmark that would challenge the band throughout its brief lifetime. They were still new like a baby, but raw like a wound, bursting with invention and exuding a singularity that stood them apart from even the best bands around them. I don’t remember wondering what they might be doing in five years’ time… or where do they go from here? Anything beyond what they were, and which might also be good, would be a surprising bonus. In retrospect those instincts were right.
Toy Love became (sort of) more consistent over time, without ever becoming set as if in a mould – they were too restless and honest for that – and they played terrific gigs right to the end. But I recall most fondly when they were that flawed and beautiful thing of those first few months. In amongst the smashed watermelon and broken glass, drenched in sweat and flecked with blood, the laughs, confusion, exhilaration… there was a complexity in the experience that’s all about the priceless, messy human-ness that drives great rock’n’roll.
There was a long moment when to see Toy Love in full flight was to get one of the best bands in the world, right at their peak… right where I lived.
Toy Love’s music always seemed to be in a constant state of being formed and reformed, songs would warp and twist with every playing. So, for all its undeniable power it could seem unstable, almost fragile, threatening to burst out of its own skin, shards and globs all over the place – every gig was like another attempt to make this strange creature hold together and live. At times it would take off at a few unpredictable points, while at others it would lift off immediately and roar through the air – an astonishingly compelling, unlikely flying thing with dark folds and flashes of light. The best stuff was transcendent, and the near failures were so often funny or had the buzzy pathos of a crash site, you couldn’t look away.
Those early performances at Auckland venues like Zwines, XS and especially the Windsor Castle, sealed Toy Love’s reputation and set a benchmark that would challenge the band throughout its brief lifetime. They were still new like a baby, but raw like a wound, bursting with invention and exuding a singularity that stood them apart from even the best bands around them. I don’t remember wondering what they might be doing in five years’ time… or where do they go from here? Anything beyond what they were, and which might also be good, would be a surprising bonus. In retrospect those instincts were right.
Toy Love became (sort of) more consistent over time, without ever becoming set as if in a mould – they were too restless and honest for that – and they played terrific gigs right to the end. But I recall most fondly when they were that flawed and beautiful thing of those first few months. In amongst the smashed watermelon and broken glass, drenched in sweat and flecked with blood, the laughs, confusion, exhilaration… there was a complexity in the experience that’s all about the priceless, messy human-ness that drives great rock’n’roll.
There was a long moment when to see Toy Love in full flight was to get one of the best bands in the world, right at their peak… right where I lived.