George Henderson has enjoyed a long career as songwriter/singer/guitarist and occasional keyboardist in numerous underground acts, including The Spies and The And Band, before forming The Puddle in the 1980s and The New Existentialists in 2012, as well as writing and performing with Mink in the 1990s. The New Existentialists’ third album Bad Astrology was released by Zelle and Holiday Records in 2025, and The Puddle’s 2009 album The Shakespeare Monkey was recently reissued on vinyl by Fishrider Records. Henderson writes a regular Substack column on music, Songs From Insane Times. Photo by Susan Ballard
--
Perusing other entries in the Songwriter’s Choice series I was happy to see that many of our greatest, including, but hardly limited to, Bic Runga, Toy Love, Shayne Carter, Beat Rhythm Fashion, The Clean, Snapper and The Crocodiles, have already received their dues, and in words far finer than my own. Happy, too, because that frees me to write (for the most part) about some either lesser-known or more recent examples which appeal to me because of the interaction between what each song’s about, and the symbolism of the style in which it’s expressed. That is, the song’s personality, which isn’t truly fixed until it’s mixed (and can be substantially altered in the remix; an excellent recent example being the Sly Chaos remix of Jaz Paterson’s ‘Jealous‘). So this is also a vote of confidence in some fine producers and engineers, who, as time goes on, are more likely to be the people writing the songs. – George Henderson
--
i shouldve stayed home – frog power
frog power is Cosmo Potts, formerly of Auckland power-pop band Rackets and Dunedin anarcho-rock combo Coyote, making a sort of op-shop hyperpop in his basement. Don’t let that rickety sound fool you, Cosmo knows a lot about crafting rock songs. ‘shouldve stayed home’ is a DIY comic masterpiece of outsider self-mythologising; there’s a tradition of this sort of thing in Kiwi underground pop that runs through AXEMEN and Darcy Clay. Over an exaggeratedly driving beat that rocks like one of those bobble-headed car toys on a bumpy road, a voice half-muzzled by cheap autotune distortion whines about what it’s like to go outside when that’s not a good idea and, the world being what it is, there’s nothing out there but existential shock and further trauma. Should’ve stayed home. Everything sounds wonky because everything is wonky. The spoken word bit when Cosmo gets randomly stepped out is one of the funniest moments in the history of song, and I’m not going to spoil it for you here. Notice the decisive, excessive way the song’s simple pop cadences are thrown around a set of hairpin bends, so that by the time each verse begins, on the same chord that ended the last one, it feels like a reset.
You’re a Stranger (to me now) – i.e. crazy
This is from i.e. crazy’s first album Non Compos Mentis, written in the persona of Maggie McGee, so let’s tell it from McGee’s side. A lurching guitar sends us off on a death march, with a scratchy, uncomfortable industrial feel. She’s on the morning bus to work, thinking about her ex-lover, and the familiar faces she sees, alien as they are – the “fat man on the bus pulling his trolly full of stuff behind him”, the “kid with the undercut who never smiles but always waits until I board the bus as though I’m old” all feel closer to her than her ex. The melody picks its way around her sense of coldness and abandonment until the chorus, with a low note, hits its repetitive judgement of doom – “you’re a stranger to me now”. But all of a sudden the mood and the mode brighten, her voice softens and multiplies in swirling harmonies, as Maggie remembers the trajectory of their love in blissful, fraught passages – “But darling when we met you were a different kind of strange”. The ecstasy drops, we’re back in the dirge, she’s at work now in the bookshop, feeling closer to its demanding customers, then the song soars again as she recalls how the no-holds-barred intensity of the relationship eventually destroyed it. In other words, this song has all the scope and sweep of an aria from one of the great operas.
Skincare – P.H.F.
P.H.F.’s Purest Hell is that rare thing, an Aotearoa hyperpop album, full of stop-start drumming, autotune-distorted vocals, subsonic bass riffs, and colourful synth arpeggios in the maximal Japanese style. But at its core is some good old-fashioned Kiwi songwriting, with the kind of values that Goodshirt’s material had, harmonic ideas that have never come from anywhere but this country. ‘Skincare’ is the album’s centerpiece and in it, as in other songs, the theme is Joe Locke’s grief at the loss of bandmate Reuben Winter. This song works unplugged, but the hyperpop version is adrenalising, and pulls you in to its emotional whirlpool. The lines spiral down in a series of drum & bass judders with a sinking feel and just come to rest – “hopefully I’ll lose my grip, maybe it will be today” – before the chorus tries to rise up again – “Just imagine what you’d do, but I can’t do it with you”. Loss so profound deserves a memorial this beautiful.
Circumspect Penelope – Look Blue Go Purple
The most spellbinding song of the four on the Dunedin band’s first EP Bewitched, ‘Circumspect Penelope’ uses scenes from The Odyssey to speak the mind of a stay-at-home girlfriend, the ultimate argument for the value of a classical education.
She’s been waiting twenty years
and you just walk in
telling stories of the sea.
She should hate you, your Penelope
It’s propelled by rapid surf-style strumming of the two guitars and bass and Lesley Paris’s driving drums, movement overlaid with relatively languorous and quietly-mixed voices. The verses are separated by Norma’s circular organ phrase, pan-pipe like simplicity which somehow manages to evoke the Greek island setting, and each two-bar harmonised vocal line from Kath Webster is met with an instrumental response, led by shifts in the drum beat on the third and seventh bar of each verse; the rhythm throughout the song has a shifting, restless quality, like the sea, or like resourceful Odysseus.
Friday – Home Brew
‘Friday’, the fifth track on Home Brew’s seven-track 2008 mixtape Last Week, takes us along on a trip into the heart of Auckland on a Friday night over its six-minute, 10-second length. Resourceful Tom Scott warms up by pulling together the makings of a good night – some bud on tick, some cheap liquor from Pak’n’Save – before heading downtown with his crew. His rap celebrates more than a good time, it recreates his community, in a poor person’s cinematic odyssey through the allures and hazards of a city at play, among the unaffordable temptations he can mostly do without, because he’s not in the market for a girlfriend or a wife right now, he’s chasing the best sounds, and getting high, and higher. The moneyed or glamorous men and women of Auckland’s nightlife are several different species in the stoned vision of Scott and his crew, and there’s only a little scorn in his dismissal of them, because they’re part of his enchanted scene. The heart of the rap is Scott’s musical treasure hunt, and the acts on in town that Friday night, who include Julien Dyne and DJ Truent, the producer of the next track, ‘Saturday’. ‘Friday’, and the songs about the other days of Home Brew’s week, are of course Haz Beats productions, and ‘Friday’ approaches the Platonic ideal of a long-form hip hop composition. A pitched-up, sped-up soul wailing sample floats along the top, the bass plays catch-up with the beat, guest vocalist Aria catches the overtones in her closing verse, and you may not have much money left, if you ever had any before, but you know you’re still with friends.
364.1 – Death and the Maiden
As concepts go, what if Lana del Rey fronted Joy Division (to put it reductively) is a fruitful one, with answers worth including here from artists as diverse as Yumi Zouma, Reb Fountain, and the Purple Pilgrims. ‘364.1’ from Uneven Ground by Dunedin trio Death and the Maiden catches you reading extracts from someone else’s bad luck story, a place where the names of the song, band, and album align for the “headline girl, statistic girl”. The two chords repeated through the verse rise up (there’s still hope, maybe, or there was, once, promise) but the three chords repeated in the chorus carry us down (much as the riff from ‘Pink Frost’ does). While partially buried guitars shimmer like autumn light in a forest, and unsettling pop beats squelch underfoot, a softly eroticised singing voice makes you complicit in anything you find here. This is exactly what art should do. Lucinda King’s lyric leaves a little ambiguity but it’s not looking good, and “you won’t sleep easy now.” If her girl is a composite of lost girls in true crime stories, the song itself is a response to reading them. It was another Dunedin songwriter, Phaedra Love of Pearly*, who told me that 364.1 represents criminology in the Dewey decimal system.
Neighbours – The Bats
Robert Scott is a master of understated, everyman pop, and this stubbornly enigmatic song, from the early Bats EP … And Here Is Music For The Fireside, epitomises that. The singer’s girlfriend is coming back home, and like a good Kiwi bloke he’s hiding his feelings well, by complaining about his gossipy neighbours, and personal history is glimpsed at a remove, refracted in that mirror. As the chorus soars, “What will the neighbours say? You were their best friend,” love is symbolised by familiarity. Bob’s anticipation is eager yet melancholy, separation’s far from forgotten, and some of the acceptance of the slow life that defines country music is in this song. The melody lines skip upwards, the outdoors arrangement is clean and light and jauntily folk-pop, but the chorus “it’s always been that way” is plaintive and wry, the lack of privacy in our rural suburbias won’t go away. Welcome home.
Little Sisters of Satan – The Stepford 5
Dunedin bands read the New Musical Express and 2000 AD, while Christchurch bands read Creem and Robert Crumb comix, and leaned in to the American concept of rock as low art. Music like this was the payoff. The Stepford 5 were the Billesdon twins, Sharon and Joanne, with Reta LeQuesne, Camille Hood, and Celia Pavlova, the last three of whom sang. This lethally swinging, stomping hard rock number is the gang’s calling card, with lyrics by Duane Zarakov (the only outside contribution to these songs). The grinding garage rock chord change that starts with a killer drop is punctuated, call-and-response style, by a fuzz guitar hook that carries the “little sisters of Satan” line. The various vocalists on Cave of Love’s four tracks sing like they want to devour you, slowly in the case of the title track; on ‘Little Sisters of Satan’ it’s Celia who warns us that the whole gang is roaming “from the jungle to the city”, with a “coming on down” Helter Skelter reference thrown in for extra menace. A heavy, sustained guitar solo lounges on the chords like Brando in The Wild One, and by the end everyone has given it 500%.
Bright Shining Star – Humphreys and Keen
This pair, from the arty indie rock combo Able Tasmans, got together again to make something unique in The Overflow, an album of pastoral rock that evokes New Zealand and its landscapes in all their windswept, rainswept, sun-scorched grandeur. From its first track, ‘Bright Shining Star’, The Overflow repeatedly makes the case that a pop song can be the equivalent of something by McCahon or Janet Frame or Bruce Mason (there’s a track called ‘The End Of The Golden Weather’). Peter Keen’s vulnerable, resilient voice, in Graeme Humphrey’s chamber pop settings (assured keyboard writing lushly enhanced by Victoria Kelly’s string arrangements) has a man alone quality that’s genuinely moving, and, again, not something you expect in pop music. No doubt it helped that Keen recorded these tracks before a six-month oceanographic expedition that exiled him from his homeland and his loved ones on the world’s deepest and stormiest seas. ‘Bright Shining Star’ is defined by Humphries’ glittering piano figures, its starry sky navigated by Keen with forlorn joy.
Have You Checked The Children? – Life In The Fridge Exists
This is the great New Zealand generation gap song, our equivalent of Grace Slick’s ‘White Rabbit’. When I first met Sam Swan in Wellington she was a teenage runaway with a grudge against her mother, looking for a place to crash among the punks. When, a few years later, she recorded this song with Life In The Fridge Exists, it seems nothing was resolved, but she’d found a way to turn her rage and guilt into words, and what words. Picturing Mum at home quieting her anxieties with Valium, Sam updates a line from Dylan to taunt her – “your sons and your daughters are beyond your control – despite how you warned them, they’re working in saunas” (“and they were” – Gary Steel, in his AudioCulture memoir of the scene). Sam’s brother Nick and Nino Birch from Beat Rhythm Fashion play on this perfectly mixed track; their choked, thuggish stutter of a riff racks up the tension, a calm male voice doubles up Sam’s faintly in the second verse, and Sam’s friend Sue Forbes backs her like Juliette Hulme backing Pauline Parker on the chorus, the tagline of the 1979 babysitter horror flick When a Stranger Calls. Sam was formidable about her punk principles but a sweetheart to her friends, and her death in 1993 was a huge loss.