The work of New Zealand musician, author, playwright and poet Bill Direen isn’t easy to nail down, even when you focus only on his music. He holds a place in the international art-punk pantheon, in part for work he began in the early 1980s as leader of a project that was at that time called Builders. Direen is a prolific collaborator prone to pseudonymous spontaneity — his work with an expanding and rotating cast of musicians has been released under names including Die Bilder, Bilderine and Bilders. Builders’ jangling, snarling 1983 album Beatin Hearts was the first studio LP released by New Zealand post-punk label Flying Nun Records, making it a landmark of a great creative period in rock history.
Simon Ogston’s 2017 documentary Bill Direen: A Memory of Others helps put the kaleidoscopic array of Direen’s music in context. The film’s career-spanning soundtrack, released in October by Louisville’s Sophomore Lounge label, puts 26 choice tracks on your turntable. A short U.S. tour brings him to Nashville’s Proper Saké on Friday, courtesy of arts nonprofit FMRL. The Scene caught up with Direen on an email thread that ran from Nashville to Boston, Paris, London and Glasgow before all was said and done.
How old were you when you first started touring? What were the performance spaces like in those early days?
In my late teens, I played solo with acoustic guitar on the South Island of New Zealand, but my first band toured to the North Island to play our first show — five hours’ drive and three hours on a ferry distant. We were all about 20 by then.
We played in social clubs rented for the night; in many Catholic church halls; in one defunct Freemasons’ hall, once home to a Foresters’ Guild, that kind of place. The buildings were wooden with a stage at the end, and they echoed a lot, especially when they were only half-full. We attracted a few fans and played at the new punk and New Wave venues. The best was a first-floor warehouse space on the South Side [of Christchurch]. It was always thronging with punks and shell-shocked survivors of the ’70s. Some were politically aggressive, some were just aggressive. The challenge then was not echoes but volume and “crossfire” — a different confusion of sounds. After that we opened for bands like Chris Knox’s Toy Love, at club venues. The last time we opened for him, one of the P.A. towers toppled due to stamping and stomping.
The biggest challenge was hearing yourself, and managing to sound as you would wish, especially when the system was optimised for a popular touring act. Playing became frantic and speak-singing became screaming, but each performance was unique in spite of the casualties. Strings, voices, skins and bones busted. Then the bands busted up. The theatre shows I moved into next were the opposite! The small theatres had inferior sound systems or none at all, and the economic pressure of doing alternative theatre or cabaret tended to drain the good energy. You were too knackered to be optimal.
What lesson from those days do you still apply to your art?
Try to estimate correctly the situation where you can do the simple things well.
Where does your art take you these days?
Writing and poetry takes me to Eastern Europe this year. An early novella about a Balkans refugee who works as a male prostitute in Berlin [Wormwood] has been picked up by a Serbian publisher for translation, and they invited me to do a reading tour with the translator. I play regularly in New Zealand and Australia, and enjoy [crisscrossing] Europe, sometimes with a band.
What are the common threads — or where do commonalities diverge — in the spaces where we make art in 2019?
I tell micro-stories. This tour is called the Memory of Others tour, not only because that is the title of the documentary looking at people I have worked with, but also because the songs are often telling of others — other friends, other characters in stories I have read, others we might have been or wish to be. It can be easier to know your own journey, or story, through others. Today I mainly play locations dedicated to fostering local talent and creativity, who bring in outsiders like me. We share the same impulsion on the ground.
How does the momentum of travel affect your creative process?
I stopped taking acid after a little experimentation when I felt that going on a trip again was returning me to reality, not escaping from it. Performing is like that, but in a good way. Touring divests you of the concerns of daily life like mortgages or rents, emotional travail and long-dragging histories. Sometimes you forget to eat, and can have transcendental epiphanies on the road like when you are blown away by some urban landscape or upon seeing the Valley of Pisgah below you after hours of winding driving. But when you do the job on stage, the action is a more intense parallel of everyday reality. It is not a separate, conjured event. That’s art for me.
Where do you want to go in 2020?
Nowhere else, but no place is ever the same as it was before.
