Punk

Obviously the biggest claim to the title Interesting and Significant Developments was made by punk rock. Interesting it was and should still be. Yet it ended up about as significant as a packet of Maggi soup. Punk should have been a provocation, a challenge. It should have funtioned on a conceptual and/or emotive level impossible to ignore. Working on the premise that they were different from everybody else and had something to teach us, the punk rockers should have made us think they could take over the festival. They didn't even try . . .

But perhaps I am being too hard. One punk did get beaten up by a pack of marauding vigilantes, another by the bouncers at a social: there were a few people running scared. And apart from that, NZ punk can be amusing. The following is taken from an interview with Buster Stiggs, drummer and songwriter for the Suburban Roptiles:

Why did you come to the Festival?

Well we thought basically, we wanted to use the festival as just a vehicle for the band you know, just to get exposure in Wellington via the festival. We thought we'd do other things as well as the festival. The first weekend we were down we did this thing at Ziggy's. Most of the audience left. It was just too new for them, too much of what they don't expect.

Does that worry you?

No. That's always the initial reaction. A week later the Scavengers were playing and there was all these Wellington punks turned up. About ten people. It's quite a big sort of thing—its changed ten people's whole life ... I was really appalled with the audiences at the varsity. Most of them were still back at Woodstock . . .

We were quite frustrated because we came down here—it was partly the manager's fault, he told the festival organisers, "We're not all that interested in the money, we just want the exposure," you know. It's sort of the wrong sort of tack really, you know. He should have presented us more professionally. But he failed to do that so when we got down here they just thought we were a pack of students—which half of us are.

Half of you or all of you?

Ah ... all but one

Why punk rock?

Because its the only thing that has, un—I've been writing for about 2 years—its the only thing I can devote my whole sort of thing to. I was writing songs with Neil Finn, who's now in Split Enz; you sort of touch a lot of things, but I wasn't totally absorbed in it. You have to be totally absorbed in the whole movement. You're on the line all the time.

What is punk to you?

Its quite hard to be objective about it. Punk's probably anything that you don't expect.

Punk music is like rowing upstream, going against the grain. Its a really big challenge because you're going against everything that's gone before.

70s Dada?

Yeah, there's an assimilation of Dada.

We had the play Travesties here a few months ago ago, which has Tristan Tzara in it, and the play basically rips shit out of Dada. It was done at Downstage, and they did a late-night Dada programme. Everyone was going round talking Dada for a while. You know, this thing is 50 years, 60 years old. It was pathetic it really was. But they loved it, you know, There was this big Dada craze. Then punk rock comes along, which is a contemporary version—

Yeah, I've never read much about Dada.

Its the same idea, its totally against the gram.

Yeah, against the established order.

I think a lot of people have been saying that the punk phenomenon in England is a social phenomenon, an economic phenomenon—

It is for us. It is for us too, really. Like just being a varsity student is really fucking hard work. . .

It struck me at the beginning of the week that you guys had it intellectually worked out.

Yeah. The punks in England, you know, why bother to compare them? They're not dumb. I've heard interviews with Johnny Rotten, who's a really sensible sort of guy . . . People just expect, that's another thing about punk, you sort of go against people's expectations. They expect you to have a lower class accent, and spew and vomit and everything.

What was the essence of that newspaper article on spewing and vomiting?

We didn't say that.

page 16

You didn't? Where did it come from?

They just dreamt it up.

Yeah, I couldn't picture it.

I spat at a bouncer at a university dance.

The papers printed you as saying university students are really secure—

Secure in their thinking. We've found that, we've found students are really conservative. Conservative like 10 years ago. They go to varsity and grow their hair and that. It still happens, it really does.

And Arts Festival brings them out of the wood work.

Yeah. Its crazy.

Is the going against the grain deliberately to try and invoke some sort of change?

Yeah. We're trying to be realists basically. We're not providing answers. We're just pointing out the way things are, basically. . . The lyrics and that, they're really sort of relevant. The way we feel, and that. We're not talking about when I boogie with my baby and all that. We're more sort of political, we want to have a lot of relevance to what's going on right now. It's really hard care sort of stuff.