DEJA-VOODOO
15th July | THE FERGUSON
If you were to believe everything you read on wikipedia, then Deja Voodoo might seem like a scuzz-rock version of Flight Of The Conchords. Maybe that’s not surprising, as the band includes the celebrated NZ maverick TV and filmmakers, Chris Stapp and Matt Heath; but it’s also true that at least one member of the band would "rather stuff their arse with broken glass” than be seen in a Stapp/Heath production.
Sure, Stapp and Heath included Voodoo music on the soundtrack of their acclaimed feature film The Devil Dared Me To, but that was more to do with a refreshing lack of modesty than the existence of thematic tie-in between the projects. So while conventional wisdom holds that the group was conceived especially to provide short “musical” interludes for Back Of The Y Masterpiece Television, there is actually a long and separate history behind one of New Zealand’s most popular rock’n’roll acts that has absolutely nothing to do with cameras.
It’s a classic story of adversity and triumph that might surprise music snobs, Coldplay fans, and even those who celebrate the irresponsibility and violence of Stapp and Heath’s other work.
It starts in the eary 90s, the teenaged Chris Stapp was inspired by his devotion to the wilfully-destructive experimentalism of Sonic Youth to start his own band. Naturally, a Sonic Youth fan saw the necessity of having a female in the group, and he put out the word.. Matt Heath responded to the call, reasoning that in the Deep South, beggars can't be choosers and Stapp might be forced to over look his sex. He got the gig, mainly because Stapp considered :Heath's well-conditioned flowing locks and fresh-faced naivety to be girly.
The initial trouble was that Heath didn’t entirely share Stapp’s tastes, preferring the LA graunch of Guns n Roses to the NY artsiness of Sonic Youth (the fact that the pair came from Otago towns with more livestock than people and lightyears away from US popular culture, had no bearing at all on their ambitions). Luckily, this was the era when a common-ground emerged from the American Pacific North West: bands such as Mudhoney, Tad, and Poison Idea were creating the hard rock/punk hybrid which would become 'grunge'. The boozy, down-to-earth blue collar concerns and the sonic battering of the blues tradition struck a resonant chord with both Stapp and Heath, who recognised a spiritual brotherhood with these groups from way across the Ocean. To them, what was happening in Seattle and Portland seemed to be an accurate echo of the Otago spirit, a celebration of provincialism, a youth call-to-arms that was applicable to anyone, no matter what backwater shithole they had the misfortune of living in.
As has been noted before, to the fledgling Deja Voodoo, the “Dunedin Sound” seemed to be something that only people who didn’t come from New Zealand’s South liked. Most Southerners they knew were disgusted with the University-centric jangle plundered from the third Velvet Underground LP. Stapp and Heath couldn’t stand the ‘educated’ band's polite jangle and yawn that was becoming internationally-recognised. They couldn’t see their environment as the birthplace of such appalling boringness; and the only solution was to drown out those plinky-plunkers with an amplified howl of basic, exciting, primal rock’n’roll, played to the best of their limited abilities through a drunken fog.
The band played a circuit familiar to all small-town rockers: keg parties, high school parties, any kind of parties; and as the 90s wore on, decided to take their beer-soaked adrenaline-firing shows further. They moved to Auckland, an “awful and dangerous place where Southerners were routinely sneered at for their lack of sophistication”. They opened the Big Day Out, and after settling on “Deja Voodoo” as their final name, recorded what was intended to be their debut release with Matthew Heine of legendary noiseniks S.P.U.D. at the controls. The trouble was that the result, Grunge Rock Pioneers, was rejected by every record company in New Zealand as “base” and “tasteless”; which was completely ironic considering who WAS being signed at the time.
At this juncture, Deja Voodoo detoured into playing a more measured kind of Oz Rock: they even managed to get the drummer of The Angels (a band who influenced both GnR and many Seattle-ites) to play on their debut LP, Brown Sabbath. Bizarrely, this is what connected them to the New Zealand public at large, who in a gross generalisation are not especially open to anything Oz-tralian at all. But the hit record Brown Sabbath and it’s critically-hailed follow-up Back In Brown did exactly what the band had always intended: resonate with an audience around New Zealand. An audience of people totally removed from any hipster posturing, musical pretence and music industry bullshit. Deja Voodoo established themselves as the biggest live act to emerge from Southland for a long while and without so much as a whisper of any Dunedin-velvetunder-Sound.
And with a strong and stable line-up, where Stapp (bass/vocals) and Heath (rhythm guitar) are augmented by a couple of kick arse musicains, Gerry 'The General' Stewart (lead guitar) and Dutch Graham (drums), Deja Voodoo are refocussing their sights on the kind of music they were playing before their breakthrough.
The Shape Of Grunge To Come can be considered as Deja Voodoo's alternative debut; a re-ignition of the hard rock/punk attitude and everyman accessibility that their peers from Seattle back in the day sweated out. A return to the band's proud and ancient roots. Sure, the lyrics are still “a bit shit”, but they are an honest expression of the everyday life that Deja Voodoo and their audience experience. And before some prick decides “joke band”, just remember that if history had allowed only bands who WEREN’T considered a joke by the cognoscienti to be heard, we’d only have cocktail jazz.
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