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Sport 32: Summer 2004
Mary and Sappho
Mary and Sappho
Mabeth's this small dark fireball, this cropped-haired sweetheart of wide-eyed voluble enthusiasm. She wants to know the names of everyone on the doco crew; she nods her head vigorously, repeating them, until she gets them right. She is the most recent addition to the core band, and is always the only woman musician. ‘Singers, they are not women,’ she says. ‘Singers are divas.’
Singers do not pack in, or out. Singers merely swan onto stage at the beginning of their first set, looking beautiful.
Mabeth is proud that she lugs and carries with the best of them. She remarks indignantly on the fact that when on tour Tara does the laundry for all the boys; it does not occur to Tara to do Mabeth's.
At an early rehearsal at Herd Street, you're sitting watching, listening, and you don't think anything is showing on your face; but Mabeth comes by on the way to the loo and slaps you on the knee—it's the first time you've spoken to each other—and says conspiratorially, ‘Real guys' stuff, huh?’
She and her partner Simone also perform, just the two of them, Mabeth on percussion and Simone on guitar. At Easter, in Taupo, by beautiful accident, they are set up on the corner of the stage right before a six-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, all blue cloak, white gown, downcast eyes, golden halo, hands piously folded. A gloriously unholy trinity.