Later in the decade, the trio began making Back of the Y Masterpiece Television, which first aired on Auckland public access channel Triangle TV. The segments, which featured haphazard stunts by fictional daredevil Randy Campbell (Stapp), later drew comparison to US show Jackass, though Back Of The Y preceded the US show.
Its audience grew through word-of-mouth and Tim Finn liked it so much that he got the pair to make a music video for his song ‘Underwater Mountain’ (they also made a clip for The Hasselhoff Experiment’s ‘Drag Race’). TVNZ picked up Back Of The Y for its second season, though baulked at some of the episodes and delayed airing them.
a video of ‘Ten Guitars’ showed Heath smashing 10 guitars over Stapp’s head
Back of the Y included Heath, Stapp, and Brough performing as an in-house group, Deja Voodoo, who appeared at the start and end of some episodes. They were caught off guard when the fictional group was offered a national University Orientation Tour. They didn’t actually have any songs, but it sounded too fun to turn down, so Heath and Stapp quickly wrote a set and enlisted second guitarist Gerald Stewart, who had been playing bass in The Brunettes. The most notorious moment came via a cover of ‘Ten Guitars’ which included Heath smashing 10 guitars over Stapp’s head. Footage from the tour was included in one-off TV show, Back Of The Y Goes To Hollywood.
Brough announced he was moving to the UK and was replaced by “Matt's girlfriend's little brother”, James Goodfellow. They were soon drawing decent crowds around Auckland, but the band had to be paused while Heath and Stapp left for London after Back Of The Y was sold to MTV UK (it also aired on Channel [V] in Australia).
Their London trip lasted six months and they returned home to a record deal with Liberation Music. Their first single ‘We Are Deja Voodoo’ plotted the way forward with a surprisingly catchy-but-stupid hook “we rock more than you do / who rocks more than you do? / deja voodoo do.”
Their next single gained them even more press attention, though not in a good way. On the return flight home from London, Heath and Stapp first read about the “P” epidemic occurring back in New Zealand.
They felt the hysteria had a parochial edge, as Heath later explained to The Spinoff. “It was just meth with a flash new name. And boy did it take off, driven by its snappy new media branding. Every drug dealer in the world should call Meth ‘P’. It’s so catchy. It makes it sound like fun. The name makes people laugh. So despite not really caring, we decided to save the day by bashing out a tune that down-played ‘P’.”
The backlash was immediate. Not only did the song seem to make light of meth use, but the line “I smoked P and I didn’t cut anybody’s hands off” referenced a real-life incident. Heath was invited to debate the song on RNZ with ex-MP Jim Anderton and it was discussed on weekly news show, Sunday.
‘Beers’ was inspired by a comment, “I would give you one of my beers, but I’ve only got six”
The members of Deja Voodoo were unperturbed. They had another slot at the Big Day Out and a new single, ‘Beers’, which was inspired by an encounter at an earlier festival. Stapp had met up with a musician he knew and asked for a beer from his rider, only to be told, “I would give you one of my beers, but I’ve only got six.” The song stole the line and also made fun of Stapp’s simplistic songwriting approach (“I always like songs that rhyme / that’s why I made this one rhyme”). The accompanying music video ended with Stapp leaping from a great height onto a stack of beer cans.
Their debut album Brown Sabbath (2004) was equally unserious, but dipped into the Top 30. They actually sounded better than your standard joke band – after all, they’d recorded at The Lab with experienced engineer Olly Harmer, so it had a big full sound. Bands including The Datsuns and The D4 had brought back the raw rock sound, so Deja Voodoo timed their arrival perfectly and toured the country with other bands of the moment – the Bleeders and 8 Foot Sativa.
Over this time, Deja Voodoo made a final change to their line-up with another Back Of The Y cast member, Piers Graham, taking over on drums. They promoted the album with a music video for ‘Today Tomorrow Timaru’ which was their own remarkably effective attempt at an Exponents-style song (named after the nearest city to Jordan Luck’s hometown of Geraldine, with Luck on backing vocals).
Heath and Stapp were busy with their other projects during 2005, though Deja Voodoo continued to play live and the pair rounded out the year with a Back Of The Y New Year’s Special which included performing the Billy Joel song ‘Goodnight Saigon’ with Tim Finn.
Deja Voodoo started 2006 with another appearance at the Big Day Out and then released their second album, Back In Brown. It managed to reach No.20 on the charts, though lead single ‘Can’t Do (What I Wanna Do)’ has not aged well, since the lyrics are about an underage girl.
Much of Heath and Stapp’s time was taken away from the band by their film Devil Dared Me To (2007), which focused on Back of the Y stuntman, Randy Campbell. The soundtrack relied heavily on Deja Voodoo tracks – for example, Randy’s girlfriend was named Tracy, which gave them the perfect chance to use the Deja Voodoo song of the same name. The actors in the film included musicians, such as Tyson Kennedy from Steriogram and Joe Lonie from Supergroove.
Deja Voodoo planned to release an album called “Grunge Rock Pioneers”
Deja Voodoo then took a change in direction. When first starting the band, they wrote songs in the style of the grunge bands they’d grown up with (Mudhoney, Nirvana, etc.) and had planned to release an album called “Grunge Rock Pioneers”. However, Liberation didn’t like this direction, so they took a more straightforward hard rock approach. With Liberation no longer in the picture, they successfully gained album funding from NZ On Air to record an album that took them back to this original sound.
The Shape Of Grunge To Come (2009) included standout tracks ‘Girls With Guitars’ which was an ode to girls in bands, and ‘Punisher’ about annoying male fans who clog the front row. Deja Voodoo made a final appearance at the Big Day Out the following year and then petered out. Stapp put his creative energies into his art and animation work, while Matt Heath became a breakfast host on Hauraki FM.
The music of Deja Voodoo continued to find new listeners. Most notably, the song ‘Beers’ went on to surpass a million streams across digital streaming platforms and was covered by popular punk act, DARTZ. Heath and Stapp might have started Deja Voodoo as a joke, but they also got the last laugh.
