When Th’ Dudes broke up, Dave Dobbyn and Ian Morris spent many hours experimenting in Stebbing’s studio after midnight, exploring recording techniques. From these sessions, two singles appeared: ‘Lipstick Power’ b/w ‘Behind the Painted Smile’, in January 1981, credited to Dave Dobbyn, and in July 1981, ‘Bull By the Horns’, credited to Dave Dobbyn and DD Smash.
In the same month, DD Smash – rounded out with former-members of Lip Service and Hello Sailor – began playing around Auckland.
DD Smash, late 1982 (L-R): Dave Dobbyn, Lisle Kinney, Peter Warren, Rob Guy
In 1992, for the syndicated radio programme Walking in Light, Auckland announcer Bryan Staff asked Dave Dobbyn and Peter Warren how they got together. Dobbyn was speaking from Sydney; Warren while taking a bath in London.
Dobbyn: One day I ran into Peter Warren from Lip Service who used to play in tandem with Th’ Dudes a lot, and I would pop around and see Rob Guy [also from Lip Service] who was a friend of my flatmate. We found that Lisle Kinney was rotting away playing in a kind of club-band thing out at Papatoetoe which we thought was a waste, so out of sympathy for him and as I had written all these songs, we got together and rehearsed.
Warren: I dreamed up the name DD Smash. One day we were all round at Rob’s flat in Grey Lynn trying to think up a name. So we all put names into a hat but when we pulled them out we didn’t like any of them so I said “Right, we’re DD Smash. DD is Dave Dobbyn and Smash is me, Pete Warren.’
Auckland fans knew who you all were but what about when you went on tour? Did you have a manager by then?
Dobbyn: We went on tour with the Pink Flamingos and we were right on the point of getting a good following and that was when Roger [King] came into the picture. He had seen us around Auckland and was getting a bit sick of Record Warehouse.
Roger King had been the purchasing officer at Record Warehouse; while there bought the entire first pressing of AK79 one Christmas.
Dobbyn: Well, when he came on the tour I was travelling with him, listening to all the music he had and stopping off for Bloody Marys here and there. He was aghast at how badly band members were treated when they arrived to play in pubs. You would be fed a staff meal in the staff kitchen and were not to be seen anywhere near the restaurant, sort of thing, but Roger was aghast at how everyone just accepted it. So the whole game lifted once he got stuck into it.
I remember you had fun on tours. Do you remember when someone at a radio station mistook Roger for Dave Dobbyn and introduced him to the announcer as such?
Dobbyn: Ha ha, yes that was hilarious. It was in Invercargill. When we arrived I ducked into the loo and this guy came up to Roger and said how he was a fan and for Roger to follow him into the studio. They went in and started rabbiting on to the DJ, when I arrived and thought “what’s going on?” So I played the game for a while until the guy got completely confused and utterly embarrassed. Ha ha ha, point made!
Dave Dobbyn and Peter Warren, 1983 - Simon Grigg Collection
Roger got you the deal with Mushroom Records and then came the first album, named after a slang expression of the time.
Dobbyn: Because we had done so much touring we had a solid following, so Cool Bananas entered the charts at No.1. But then it was the same old story, you go to do an interview at a radio station and they would say “Aw we can’t play the single ’cos it doesn’t fit the format.” I remember going through a whole series of interviews and no one played the single, even though it was No.1!
Well a couple of months later you all decided to try Australia – how did that work out for you Peter?
Warren: We went as a four-piece: me, Rob Guy, Lisle and Dave. Plus Roger King our manager. We arrived in Melbourne when we thought winter should be over but it was very cold. We were staying in the Diplomat Flats in St Kilda and living on $4 a day. The first six months were pretty grim but we were making some waves. But I don’t think things were moving fast enough for Dave. Everything had gone very quickly in New Zealand, it was a very landslide success and appeal, and I think Dave brought about some rash decisions because we all know that in this industry you have to build up contacts and stay together as a band and if you are a good band you will cross over and get a hit. But you must stay together otherwise you just make a break from that early formulation and just go out on your own. And that was when Dave went against my advice and decided to incorporate horns, make it a bigger band and take it off into a really different tangent.
The first recording with horns in the lineup was ‘Outlook for Thursday’, which went to No.3 in the New Zealand charts. Dave, tell us how that came about.
Dobbyn: I think I started writing it at my mother-in-law’s house. She has this magic piano and every time I touch it I write a new song on it. But I had a couple of new old guitars so I tuned them down to Nashville tuning and came across these different ways of doing things. And I had always wanted to write a song about the weather ’cos that’s all everyone talks about – or that’s how it seems to me. This was back in the day when I wanted to write a song that you could almost slot into a showbiz musical or something, and that was one of them. Generally I’m pretty proud of that song, it did really well.
Warren: ‘Outlook’ had a definite hook line based around the horns and was just released at the right time I suppose and it worked. I always knew it was a good song but I was more bent on keeping things happening with a four-piece band, so I wasn’t really enamoured with doing that sort of soul sound as I thought we should keep developing the rock thing which was perfect for the Australian market.
Peter Warren and Dave Dobbyn, 1985
Well New Zealand thought so certainly. DD Smash creamed the New Zealand Music Awards in 1982 and ’83. Then came the Aotea Square concert at the end of 1984, which took Dave a long time to get over without blame. So DD Smash sort of retired and was replaced in 1986 by the low-exposure name The Stone People. What was that all about?
Warren: I was still a member of the Stone People but that came after DD Smash. We were coming back from Australia in ’85 and we decided to take the band from a six-piece back to a four-piece again. No more horns. Dave wanted to try out a new guitarist in Gary Verberne so we decided the best way to work him in was to do a tiny little tour of the West Coast under an assumed name. At the time Keri Hulme’s book The Bone People had just come out and Roger King thought it would be a hell of a funny piss-take to call the band “The Stone People”. I argued against doing it because it had been the name DD Smash that drew people. And of course the tour totally bombed because no one knew who the hell Dave Dobbyn and The Stone People were. We went to Greymouth and Hokitika town halls and Westport but sometime we were playing to just 20 people.
So you returned to Australia to record a new album but then Dave fired the band and that’s when Peter left as well wasn’t it Dave?
Dobbyn: Peter and I fell out during the recording of Loyal both on a musical and a personal basis and they happened to collide at the time.
Warren: The writing was on the wall for my departure from DD Smash because I could see that Roger and Dave no longer considered Dave and I to be partners even though I had just put six or seven years into the band, and had worked on the songs’ arrangements and looking after rehearsals and a lot of things people didn’t really know about. But I could see Roger was gearing Dave up for a solo career. And it all came to a point when we were recording the Loyal album … basically that’s where the knot got untied.
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Recorded by Bryan Staff in 1992 for Walking in Light
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