Insight (song) with David Downes

Song created with David Downes featuring Lance Philip (drumset)

Created in 1987, this song (one of 5 created for my Honors portfolio) was the first ever collaboration between myself and David Downes

By the end of 1986 I had completed a Bachelor of Music with a double major in piano performance and composition at Victoria University of Wellington.

My piano teacher had been Judith Clark, and my composition teachers had been Ross Harris, Jack Body, and David Farquhar. Other teachers during my undergraduate years were Margaret Nielsen, Peter Walls, Elizabeth Kerr, Greer Garden, Gavin Saunders, and Alan Thomas.

Although the weakest player in my piano cohort (there were three of us), through a a bizarre sequence of events I, astonishingly to all, ended up top of my year in piano performance (with a B-minus !). It was decided that it would be a great idea for me to continue into postgraduate study....as a composer. It was clear to all I didn't have the necessary relationship to practicing the piano to ever be more than barely mediocre on the instrument.

In my Honors composition year (1987) I asked to for one of the papers to allow for the writing of pop songs (an area in which I had a vast, almost total, lack of experience). I suspect Ross went to bat for me and I was allowed to do it. I was then faced with the problem of having no idea what to actually do, or how to write a song.

Chance brought me and David together when he heard me trying our Full of Sympathy in a classroom with fellow students (I was in the main classroom at music school;  me at the piano, Hamish Graham singing, and others playing some kind of beat. David was a younger student, relatively unbeknownst to me, quietly there, observing; he is an immensely - I would easily say profoundly -talented composer, musician, and visual artist. David spoke to me afterwards and said he could feel potential in what we'd been doing there. I was glad to hear it, I was floundering, and out of my depth. He suggested we go to the Electronic Music Studio at 44 Kelburn Parade to try some ideas out).

This song - Insight - was the 5th we created together. It has been battered a little by the passage of time, and while I don't cringe, I wince every now and then.

By this time we were using the brand new studio at the recently established New Zealand School of Music. We were able to bring in Lance Philip, a wunderkind drumset player of our generation, to bring live groove and a great outro drum solo (we had been working mostly with drum machines in our collaborations).

Working with David always felt like privileged time. He brought so much ingenuity, musicality, originality, focus, and humour to our collaborations. In the following years we also created (either just the two of us, or with others):

Silent Partner

Law of Gravity

We Lie Here

This Rhythm

Insight

And two dance shows (with Delia Shanly), created by Michael Parmenter: Go and Venture

Quite some years later we co-created a soundtrack to The High Ride - a high-intensity motion ride at Te Papa's "OurSpace" installation.

Our last major collaboration was in 2010, Faustroll with Joe Bleakely.

Here we are at the entrance to the back of the Electronic Music Studio on Kelburn Parade, Wellington in 1987.

And here's me in the studio kitchen cooking one of my legendary (often near-lethal) fry-ups.....