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ON PATROL AGAIN

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

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I just have so many good memories attached to that album, It feels like it condensed those times down to a little moment of joy. The creation of it was such a great experience.

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 yardglass 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 crammed 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 Bain and Braxton spent their days scrambling around overheated ceiling cavities together, 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 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

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2022-08-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/283081302983537

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