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JULIA’S ON PATROL

For a time, it was hard to escape the melody of Fur Patrol’s smash hit, Lydia. But as singer-songwriter Julia Deans finally prepares to take the album Pet back on the road 21 years on, she tells Grant Smithies it’s time to dig up that time capsule – for b

PHOTO: LAWRENCE SMITH / STUFF

WE are getting old, my friends. Everywhere I look, I see evidence of the years spinning past. In the mirror, a weathered landscape of wrinkles and creases, as if someone has screwed up a photo of me at 30 then flattened it out again. Physically, to quote Leonard Cohen, ‘‘I ache in the places where I used to play’’.

Trees I planted when we moved to this house a few decades ago now hang heavy with apples, persimmons, plums and figs, hosting entire cities of birds. And records that seemed to come out just yesterday are suddenly ancient.

Consider this: a baby born the same day Fur Patrol’s debut album Pet was released would now be turning 21. Given the binge-drinking rituals of our culture, you might find them surrounded by chanting mates, chugging a yard-glass in a suburban backyard before chundering under the hydrangeas.

‘‘Yes, it really is amazing, isn’t it?’’ says Fur Patrol singer Julia Deans, who made Pet alongside bandmates Andrew Bain, Simon Braxton and Steven Wells in September 2000. ‘‘Twenty-one years! Sometimes it feels like only a quarter of that time since Pet came out. Other times, it feels like 40 years ago.’’

Deans mainly performs solo these days. Besides her own tours, she has applied her supple, glorious voice to the songs of Jacques Brel, Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday in arts festival shows, toured Jon Toogood’s The Adults project, and released her second solo album, We Light Fire, in 2018.

But now Fur Patrol – minus Wells, currently a fashion photographer in

Paris – is reforming for a Pet tour, partly to celebrate the record’s anniversary and partly just to get up on stage together again and make an unholy ruckus.

‘‘I just have so many good memories attached to that album,’’ Deans tells me from her Auckland home. ‘‘It feels like it condensed those times down to a little moment of joy. The creation of it was such a great experience. I remember an intense feeling of camaraderie, or even conspiracy, in the days before that word was so firmly attached to Covid deniers.’’

Fur Patrol had been playing live a lot before the studio sessions, and Deans had been writing furiously, mining her personal life for raw material, the lyrics flowing freely.

‘‘It was sort of stream-ofconsciousness writing and I’d look at the lyrics later and go, ‘oh, OK, that’s what I was processing’. A lot of songs were about friendships and romantic relationships, written in my early 20s, a time when you’re learning so much about yourself and about how the world works. When it came to recording those songs, it was really exciting, and you hear that on the record. We were working so hard, exploring the songs and sounds, and we’d been touring so much beforehand that our playing was sharp, too.’’

That hard-out touring also meant that the album found a ready audience.

‘‘We really put in the legwork as a live act, and that sparked interest in Pet. It was like, ‘I love this band live, and now I can take a little bit of that home with me’. It was also a time where there was a real push for New Zealand music in general, so we got played a lot on the radio.’’

She pauses, laughs, carries on. ‘‘And, you know… maybe it did so well because I’m just an amazing songwriter who really tapped into the zeitgeist.’’

The zeitgeist, circa 2000, also included a lot of patronising attention from male music critics who painted Deans as a painfully hot rock chick. There was sometimes little mention of her prowess as a songwriter, guitarist or live performer.

‘‘Urgh, yeah, that’s true,’’ she says with a groan. ‘‘I guess it was just an easy angle, given that there weren’t many women in this country making rock music at that time. Meanwhile, women reacted in a more positive way. Like, ‘oh, look, one of us! She’s doing it, so maybe we can too’. I’ve had so many younger artists come up to me and say I was a great motivator, showing them you could be loud and weird and a woman and play guitar in a band.’’

Fur Patrol took off for Australia around the time the record was released, chasing larger audiences, more venues, loud fun. Pet did so well in New Zealand that they came home regularly to tour, but Australia was a mixed bag.

I met them over there in 2006, in a bar called The Rose in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. The place was rammed with New Zealanders giving it a crack; alongside Fur Patrol were past and present members of such illustrious New Zealand bands as Cassette, Headless Chickens, D-Super, The Inkling and Head Like A Hole.

Fur Patrol guitarist Steve Wells had just bailed to Paris, and the others had decided to carry on as a trio. But paid gigs were thin on the ground, so Andrew Bain and Simon Braxton spent their days scrambling around overheated ceiling cavities, dodging poisonous spiders and rats and the occasional nesting snake, installing insulation. ‘‘Oh, God,’’ wails Deans. ‘‘I remember that. They hated it. It was such a hell job. My brother did it with them for a while, too. But we needed the cash. I don’t know how we managed to survive over there for so long on so little money.’’

In the end, Fur Patrol pulled the plug around 2008. Braxton stayed in Melbourne, but Bain and Deans headed back to New Zealand. Pet remains the

‘I’ve had so many younger artists come up to me and say I was a great motivator, showing them you could be loud and weird and a woman and play guitar in a band.’ JULIA DEANS, RIGHT

critical and commercial high point in a recorded legacy that includes two other albums, 2003’s Collider and 2008’s Local Kid, and two EPs. There were a bunch of memorable singles along the way, most notably Pet’s third single Lydia, which topped the New Zealand Singles Chart on Christmas Eve, 2000, displacing Beyonce and Destiny’s Child.

Oh, how we loved that song, with its meaty bassline, its slow build, the humming organ line, that elegant swoop up to heartbreak in the wounded line: ‘‘My baby… Don’t you want me any more?’’

Lydia is about a woman who bowls into a bar and witnesses her ex in a new relationship. It’s about ‘‘the dawning realisation that someone you thought you loved, and thought loved you, has moved on.’’

The song just sort of fell out, Deans once said. It was written in the length of time it might take to play it through three times. Lydia was Fur Patrol’s biggest hit and became New Zealand radio’s most played song for all of the year 2000.

‘‘We got a bit sick of it back then,’’ admits Deans. ‘‘We went through a phase of deliberately leaving Lydia out of our live set, which was easier to do in Australia, though we’d get severely scowled at if we left it out in New Zealand.’’

A predictable scene played out at Fur Patrol shows in the early 2000s: a clump of punters would loiter at the back until Lydia got played then bolt for the stage.

‘‘They would wait out our entire set then push their way to the front and start singing every word at the top of their lungs and dancing flat-out, like this golden four and a half minutes of bliss. And then, soon as that song finished, they would leave!’’

No doubt this weird scene will be repeated on this latest tour, with nostalgia-addled fans bellowing songs from two decades ago. ‘‘Yeah, definitely. I’ve been playing a few Fur Patrol songs at my solo shows recently, and I still look out and see people singing them right back at me. Some are even air-drumming the drum fills. But it’s very flattering, to have songs that have come out of my brain make a connection with so many other people’s brains. I love the fact that these songs are so meaningful to them emotionally.’’

Fur Patrol last played some reunion shows in 2016, with touring English shoegaze band, Swervedriver. This new tour has been rescheduled three times because of Covid; Deans can barely believe it’s finally happening. ‘‘Simon’s coming through Covid right now, actually, and Andrew’s already had it. I’m taking great precautions to avoid it. Like a lot of other touring musicians and sound people and stage crews, we’ve all been really hurt financially by the lockdowns.’’

What has she been doing during the down times?

‘‘I’ve been here at home, just rolling in all the money I made off my last solo album! I’ve been lighting the fire with hundies, ’cos that’s what us musos do to get rid of excess cash. As soon as I get off the phone with you, I’m gonna line up all my credit cards on the floor and see how far they’ll reach.’’

Deans has been pretty broke, in other words. But she and her recording engineer partner have built a studio in their house. ‘‘I’m working towards a new album, and I’m very excited about it. Some very strong themes have been developing, but I’m not going to go into that just yet. Let’s just say that it’s… um… really good! I guarantee it!’’

In the meantime, the endlessly rescheduled Pet tour is back on track and coming soon to a town near you.

‘‘I am looking forward to playing some loud electric guitar again. Doing solo festival gigs, it’s very rare that I would break a sweat, but with Fur Patrol, there was something very wrong if we weren’t sweating hard within the very first song. We were either in the rehearsal room, or in the snow. Back then, we used to drive around in a stinky Hiace van with the back seat taken out and an old couch in there instead. It was not exactly roadsafe. Thinking about it now makes me shudder. But we managed to fit ourselves and all our gear in there and get between shows.’’

The Pet album is a time capsule of sorts, capturing a young band on a hot streak upwards. Delivering it live will send Deans hurtling back to those exhilarating and turbulent times, 21 long years ago. ‘‘Those songs feel like a contained package for a set of wild emotions I was feeling at the time. I sing them now and think, ‘Oh. That’s right. That’s who I was!’’’

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2022-08-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

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