Interview with Ghidrah
Originally recorded by the band themselves in a stanky damp old house in Hamilton, New Zealand back in 1996, Invincible Deluxe was the first release by Hamtown punk rockers, Ghidoragh (originally known as Ghidrah but changed after Toho Film’s legion of lawyers dressed in Godzilla suits descended upon and attacked their home and recording space in 98’, burning it to the ground).
A catastrophic assault on the earballs, this Aotearoan punk classic is being re-released on 140 gram vinyl by Metric System Records, distributed by Razored Raw and re-mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air making it the best version of the recording yet, capturing Ghidrah’s ridiculous spack-out intensity in all its glory.
LP available for pre-order from Saturday, September 25 https://razoredraw.bandcamp.com/album/invincible-deluxe-25th-anniversary-remastered-lp Release date October 22
Please introduce each of yourselves and give us a bit of background about yourself up to the point that you become involved in hardcore/punk/extreme music.
CP: This is Christian Pearce, the heart but also brain of the band. Drums and shouting.
Background before ghido-ganglife: a total dweeb, only cared about drawing and hanging out with our dog. Lifelong four-eyes. Hates 3D. Long history of bowl cuts and dungarees. Had my eyes pulled out of my head when I was 3. Loved Bill Cosby. Slept in a garden shed for 6 years.
GB: I’m Greg Broadmore, CEO of Ghidoragh. I play the bass guitar and shout the most often - mainly at the other two for not hitting their quotas and KPI’s.
I was the most popular cool tough kid at my primary school in Whakatane, and was never bullied or treated like a total loser dork. My musical journey can be chronologically abbreviated down to nursery rhymes>Duran Duran>Napalm Death and now full circle back to Duran Duran.
BH: I’m Brian Holloway… I guess I’m the mild-mannered janitor of the band. I play the guitar and do an occasional bit of shouting and banging on things in the interludes between the songs.
I’m an aphantasiac so I don’t remember much before punk. I think mostly playing backyard cricket.
AE: Hey, I’m Amber Easby. I put out the band’s first record.
How did you discover hardcore/punk and what bands were around locally at the time? What international bands were you listening to? What were your initial thoughts on bands/venues/people involved in the hardcore/punk scene at the time?
CP: I remember first hearing Black Flag and the Minutemen on a skateboarding video in the late 80s. There was other good shit on that vid too but those two bands really jumped out as something special, a couple of us ordered tapes direct from SST and that was it. Hooked!
At that point I hadn’t imagined it would be possible to actually make music, the idea of being in a band never even entered my head. A few years later I went to a gig in a big shearing shed on a guy’s farm outside of Hamilton. The guy (Scott) was a skater too, there were little ramps and sheep shit all through the place. That place was just called the Barn and it hosted quite a few shows.
When the bands started playing it blew my mind. I knew those dudes! They were making this fuckin huge noise and people were going mental! It was amazing. I think xCONTROLx played, and a band from Auckland called Big Lizard maybe..?
Came out of there all beat up and sweaty and super inspired to make music. I think I was given a Fugazi tape that same evening, I’d never heard them before. A big night!
GB: In the late 80’s, I was probably a pretty typical kid, into skateboarding and Living Colour, but growing more and more disconnected from the mainstream world, and this music video show came on late on a Saturday night, called CV. They always had a couple really weird choices on there… and one week I heard Dinosaur Jnr and I was just totally confused but hooked by it… I wasn’t sure if I liked it or hated it.. but I knew I’d found the something different that I’d been searching for. Then they played some metal bands and a few punky, alternative kinda bands, enough to warm me up at least for the day they played Death - a live performance by the Florida death metal band. It totally blew the top of my head off. I was in awe. Like is this even music? One week I’m learning that Heaven is a Place on Earth with Belinda Carlilse and the next I’m Screaming Bloody Gore. From then on I was just full on into metal and punk and anything that
pushed my musical boundaries - Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Misfits, Napalm Death, Godflesh, Swans. My old school mate Bryan Jacobson (of Spiteful Unrinator) was ahead of the curve and introduced me to heaps of stuff - gave me mix-tapes with all sorts of punk, metal and alternative music and it was like discovering a new universe that you never knew existed. I just inhaled it all. And it was like a musical arms race - like a quest to find the fastest, dirtiest, rawest, heaviest bands. When I discovered Napalm Death it was like a revelation.
Me and some mates started a grindcore band in my hometown of Whakatane a few weeks later - and we WERE the scene. There were no venues for scummy punk kids in Whakatane so we played for ourselves and mates in bedrooms and living rooms. It wasn’t until I moved to Hamilton and Auckland that I discovered a scene.
BH: Going to high school in Morrinsville I didn't know anyone who was into punk, I probably didn't know what punk was other than maybe the Sex Pistols. There were a few kids who were into metal though so I managed to borrow an Iron Maiden tape from someone and then moved onto Metallica and Megadeth. At the same time I was really into bands like The Cure & The Cult which came from my friend Sean’s brother’s record collection. After that it was a bit of a combination of Radio with Pictures, Rip It Up & requesting bands I'd read about on Radio Massey when I was at my grandparents in Palmerston North. I also borrowed my Nana's library card and found stuff like Bad Brains, Black Flag, Bauhaus, Ramones & Sonic Youth records at the Hamilton library and made tapes of those to take home.
Around the time Ghidrah formed I was listening to all sorts of stuff... on the punk side of things, bands like Fugazi, NoMeansNo, Swing Kids & Hoover were huge bands for me but I was also listening to a lot of more experimental stuff- Don Caballero, Iceburn, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Steve Reich etc and our friend Simon was getting a lot of stuff Middle Eastern & African stuff from Bill Lazwell's Axiom label too.
In those days all the music venues in Hamilton were pubs and the drinking age was 20 so there weren't too many options for punk and hardcore bands. To get around that people started hiring halls, putting up posters and handing out flyers and hoping people would turn up. The first thing in that scene that really stood out for me was watching Balance (with Cyrus singing) for the first time. I was totally blown away.
Can you give a bit of background as to how Ghidrah formed? What bands had you been playing in prior to this?
CP: I’d been in a couple of bands, I think. Nothing that really lasted more than a gig or two. There was a noisecore band called Scud, that one was with Brian, a bogan hardcore band called Restraint that eventually played at the Barn I mentioned earlier, and few other shitty jam band things.
BH: Similar to Christian, I was in a series of bands/projects with the same rotating cast of characters - Christian, Kurt, Rhys, Simon & Dan, Grant & Stefan from Dribbly Cat Attraction. Generally they either didn't last very long or would evolve into something else pretty quickly... SCUD that CP mentioned put out a split lathe cut vinyl with a band called Armice Pumbpit. I think we played one show at Ward Lane and got banned from ever playing there again! We had a project called Grain that would jam on one riff for hours at a time once a year or so. We had an Amiga 500 for a drummer in a bunch of different bands too.
GB: I’d lived in Hamilton for a while, had an industrial noise band called Lungfeast, and eventually moved up to Auckland around 91 or 92 to do that a bit more seriously, but it didn’t
pan out, so I kinda mucked around with a few things… a joke grindcore band called Coprophagia with contemporary but evergreen song titles like ‘Michael Jackson Fucks Kids. After that I formed an industrial band called Nihil, and that eventually drew me back to Hamilton where I met Christian and Brian and we connected over our shared love of Black Flag and Minor Threat and our passion for raw, dirty high-energy punk. Ghidrah or Armor of God (named after a Jackie Chan movie) as we were originally known was a bit of a reaction to the fairly straight-laced hardcore music that we saw around us. Not sure about the others, but I felt that the punk scene had lost some of that rawness and was becoming more and more this kinda plodding hardcore/metal crossover. We wanted Ghidrah to be going 100 mph from beginning to end - even if we couldn’t control the vehicle.
I get the feeling from various names you have mentioned and from people you had been in bands with previously, that you were all coming into the “hardcore” scene from a much different angle than a lot of the other bands/people who you were working with. Do you think that is true? If so, how do you think that impacted on the way you were perceived or the way you worked?
CP: I think it’s true that we were quite different but I don’t think it was really intentional. I don’t think any of us knew about the scene or the names for the different types of music. I still don’t know what hardcore means. Breakdowns?
We had this crazy spastic energy right from the start, we were at our best when we were playing just beyond our abilities and as we improved we’d need to play faster and faster to maintain that on-the-edge-of-fuckin-falling-apart thing that was exciting and funny to us.
We really liked all those bands we played with and were inspired by them for sure, but I don’t know if we were influenced by them. I definitely stole a chord from Sommerset though! I remember hearing it and being “the hell is that” and watching for it at a show, it’s on a couple of Invincible songs I wrote.
GB: I always felt like we were outsiders, even in the outsider hardcore punk scene - but that’s probably mainly me cos I am a fucking idiot misanthrope who struggles to connect with humans.
But like I said, to me at least, our music was a bit of a reaction to how samey and safe the hardcore music of the time was becoming. So yeah, I think we stood out as the odd band, but people were super supportive and nice to us - the Hamilton punk hardcore scene was and still is full of great people - we went back and played Hamtown Smakdown a few years back and it was a treat.
How did the offer to release Invincible Deluxe come about? My understanding is that Amber was from Auckland, whereas Ghidrah was from Hamilton. Amber, is there any reason why you didn’t initially choose to work with a band more locally to yourself for your first release?
BH: It was pretty much out of the blue for us as far as I remember. We'd recorded a demo tape pretty early on that we were selling at shows but I think we'd only played three or four shows when Amber (who we barely knew at that point) asked us if we wanted to make an album/cd.
AE: I just really liked the band. Locally, nobody else was making music like it and it felt exciting to me. I was into a lot of international music that came from bedroom record labels so it just seemed like a way that I could contribute. So after the band agreed, I got a quote from the one place you could press CDs at the time and borrowed money to cover the costs.
Can you please describe the recording process for Invincible Deluxe? Were you recording prior to Amber offering to release something? Amber, did you hear any recording prior to the offer or even the completed album?
a. If you want to give a bit of a “rig rundown” of what equipment you were using, that would be awesome.
CP: I was playing a Remo bebop kit that I bought with my student loan and spent the next 20 years paying off. I just wanted to be Elvin Jones. It had an 18” bass drum, which was pretty unusual for a punkrock band back then. I use a 16” one now!
I had a big old reel-to-reel tape recorder that I used to make tape loops on, it would give you shocks if you touched any of the metal parts when it was running. We used that as a kind of pre-amp, just fuckin drive the mic volume into it like crazy to get it to break up a bit. It had a tube amplifier in it and would add a kinda nice warm distortion if you really pushed it. From there it’d go into Brian’s Fostex DMT-8 hard drive recorder. We’d record drums and bass together live, then overdub the guitars and vocals. We recorded it in my bedroom in our flat on Abbotsford St in Hamilton. Man, our neighbours must have HATED us.
I remember trying all kinds of things with those recordings. I used an in-ear headphone as a mic and put it in the bottom of a vase to record some vocals on. I think we used a contact mic on a cello for some of the noisy stuff. A couple of the songs we packed as many people as we could into my bedroom and recorded it live like a mini gig. To be fair, our usual audiences weren’t much bigger.
Oh - before that we had recorded a little EP after hours at the Waikato Polytech, this was when we were called Armour of God. It’s a great Jackie Chan film but not such a great band name cos everyone thinks you’re Christian rock.
GB: Recording that album was super fun! It was recorded in various rooms in our flat - nothing was standardised at all - one day it’d be the whole band in CP’s bedroom, the next it'd be vocals in someone else's bedroom, then all of us doing gang vox in the kitchen. And it was ridiculously random, ad hoc and experimental. CP and Brian are great at coming up with crazy ideas to get interesting sounds so there was always a new recording idea for each song - all with gear that was begged, borrowed, broken or stolen. Always bass and drums together at the least, to get the foundation of the rhythm down and sometimes the whole band live. I didn’t even own any bass equipment and had no money (we were all unemployed), so I used CP’s fretless bass guitar (using fretless was not an artistic or sonic choice - that was just the only bass on hand so I had to figure it out) and I think CP had a bass amp that I borrowed… The only bit of gear I owned myself was a Rat pedal which I still use to this day - it’s on the End Boss pedal board actually. Recording that album was the most fun - pure chaos. 3 drunk dummies having a great old time.
BH: The other secret to the sound on that album was a crazy looking stereo mic called a SASS-P that we managed to borrow from Shearers Musics store for weeks at a time. It was awesome of them to lend a $1500 mic to a bunch of punkers. As far as guitar stuff, I was playing an Epiphone Les Paul that I bought from a second-hand store we knew as “the shop where everything is stolen” that used to be under the old Wimpy Bar on Victoria St. Ampwise I was using a Mesa Boogie DC5 that I’d imported from the US. That Mesa probably ended up back in the shop where everything is stolen after it was nicked from a friend’s car a few years later.
AE: I think I heard that early demo and that was about it. I’m not even sure I heard the full album until we were about to master. We all lived a couple hours away from each other. It was pre-internet. We didn’t have cell phones.
You included two “cover” songs on the album, one credited to the “Structure saga”, and the other to Scrumptious. Can you talk a little about the decision to record these and include them on the album?
BH: Scrumptious was a band that Amber was in, so that song was a tribute to her really. It helped that it was a banger of a song too! The Secret Kids Underground is going to have to stay secret. Sorry about that.
GB: Fun fact: ‘Scrum-diddly-umptious’ was the song on the album with BH on lead vocals!
AE: Haha. I don’t think I knew about the ode to Scrumptious until it was too late. Very sweet tribute but I’m otherwise very happy for that band to be forgotten by history.
Obviously information on how to put out a CD was a lot harder to find at the time due to a lack of internet. Can you talk a little bit about putting the release together? Did anybody help you outside of Amber/the band? Are there any decisions you made that you may have done differently now?
CP: I couldn’t believe Amber wanted to put something out for us. Still one of the greatest most generous things anyone has ever done in the history of humanity. I’m including Jesus in that too, that stingy hungus! I’m hoping the others will remember how it happened better than I do. Thanks ever so much Amber! Seriously!
GB: I had released a Nihil album called Nil on CD before we started Ghidrah, and had done that all myself, so I guess I knew what to do. But the lesson for me from releasing that album was ‘never do that again’.
It was so hard. I did all the packaging art, layout, had everything manufactured myself, with custom hand-pressed stamps on the cover, I mean shit, I literally designed the metal die-cut template for the cardboard sleeve, cos the printers I went to hadn’t done CD packaging before, and I glued them all together in my bedroom… and then after all that I had to go out and sell and distribute them… and I had no idea how to do any of that. And while I liked making it all, even the physical production of the albums, I hated going to record stores and asking them if they’d buy copies of my record. I did not know anything. I never even considered going to a label, or that some people might have connections to record stores around the country. Any time I would go to a town to play a show I’d take a handful of CDs and try and sell em’… and of course they’d never heard of it so I got a fairly unanimous chorus of ‘no thanks’. It suuuuucked. I hated that part. I still have a massive pile of Nihil CD’s in my basement. Ha!
So when Amber swooped into our lives, like a caped punk rock hero, with her generosity and enthusiasm, and told us she wanted to release our album? It was such a huge relief. We will be forever grateful. Years later, we were super lucky to meet Matt who invited us up to play at Destroy Napier - our first NZ show in 15 years or so! Later Matt moved to Wellington and started Razored Raw who released Invincible Deluxe on cassette tape (in glorious mono!). And he’s the one who connected us with you Dean, to become the latest Patron Saint of Ghidoragh! So massive thanks to you both!
BH: A few weeks ago I found a letter that Amber had written to us in the middle of that process. She seemed to be totally on top of everything and was already planning the All We Have is Difference compilation. There were other people that helped out like Stu & Ike who took the photos, Bob Frisbee who did the mastering and Tom who did the cover layout but Amber organised all of that and we just did the recording side of things.
As far as what I would have done differently, I wish we’d been able to back up all the multitrack recordings. The 8 track could only record 12 minutes at a time so we were having to mix down and delete stuff regularly. I still owed a lot of money on the 8 track so buying hard drives to back things up was a bit out of the question. There were a few songs I wish we’d worked on a bit more. Maybe we could have checked some of the spelling on the CD cover a little better too!
AE: Oh my god, love that I wrote you a letter with an update. So organised. In reality, I had no idea what I was doing. Local promoter John Baker definitely helped me out - he told me where to get the CD pressed, and helped me negotiate an ok price. I think Greg’s experience with the Nihil album is true to mine with the Ghidrah CD. Everything took so long - months to get the CDs and figure out the die-cut template for the cardboard sleeve. Friends and flatmates would help glue the sleeves together and I stamped every cover with the custom stamp in bronze ink. Probably 100s of hours of work.
This album seems to get a lot of props from people from a lot of different backgrounds since it came out (at least, from people I know). Can you remember what the reception was like at the time? Did people recognise your genius immediately? What was it like trying to sell/distribute a release back then? Was there ever any overseas interest?
CP: I don’t remember there being much of a reception at all! I have no idea how you’d find out about stuff pre-internet anymore. We couldn’t get rid of them!
It is crazy though, the amount of people I meet who had it and loved it. It still happens, 25 years later! I met 2 people a couple of weeks ago who came right up and started asking about it. And you Dean! The best one yet!
Matt from Razored Raw has been awesome too. We met him when we played at Punkfest in Napier a few years ago. He ended up putting out a cassette of Invincible, which was really cool of him. He’s a super productive dude, always a big supporter and part of the scene and in heaps of bands and making stuff - the man is a machine! I’m playing drums in a band with him now, he works me like a dawg. Very inspiring bloke.
I remember first delivering those CDs to Cookie at Tracs record store in Hamilton and he was all like "what sort of music is it?". I told him it was kinda punk rock and he said that there was a record exec in the store and called her over and asked if he could play it through the shop speakers for her. I laughed and said sure! About 10 seconds into Red 8 she just smiled and walked away. And that was our brush with music industry success. I think they expected Green Day.
GB: It’s such a privilege and a treat to hear people got so much from it all these years later, but yeah, at the time, it really did feel like we were just making maniac noises, and truly did not expect anyone else to like it. I recognised my genius of course, that’s why I’m CEO afterall and why I gave myself a massive raise and bonus last quarter.
BH: I don’t remember the reception being that great generally but then my memory is pretty hazy. After shows we’d often meet one or two people that really dug what we were doing and that was really cool. Even years after we broke up I’d occasionally meet people who were really into us. I remember an Aussie band playing in Hamilton asking about us about a decade after Invincible came out. I had no idea how they could have come across us in the first place.
AE: Yeah, I think the first 150 CDs sold really quickly and then after that it became much harder. Places like Crawlspace Records, Real Groovy and Slow Boat would take 5 CDs at a time and take months to sell. I think some international zines reviewed the record which resulted in a handful of mail orders, mainly from Australia. I remember thinking at the time people just didn’t *get it*.
I found a sleeve of CDs, still in their packaging, when I moved house once and I gave the rest of them to the band. Not sure what they did with them.
I definitely didn’t make back the costs of making the album, but absolutely no regrets.
Do you have any juicy gossip about any of the international bands you played with? Or the local bands even?
CP: We did a live to air with Mr Wayne Anderson on bFM that was pretty fuckin magic hahaha. He didn’t know any of the songs, didn’t WANT to know any of the songs. We just launched right into it. It was great.
Playing with Fugazi… forget about it! To me that was like opening for the Beatles. I remember we were all too shy or didn’t want to look like suckups so we didn’t talk to them, but after the show Ian came up and said “great show” to our idiot friend who just bummed a ride to Auckland with us. He was all like “thanks!”
GB: That Fugazi show! Oh man - that was an honour. I am pretty sure I broke a bass string in the first minute of our show, and I didn’t have a backup guitar… not even a set of extra strings to re-string the bass! I was fuuuucked - up under the lights on the Power Station stage thinking, well what now?...pure shame-ola. But I spotted Stefan from Balance/Sommerset out in the crowd and incredibly graciously, he offered his bass. I mean, what a nice dude - I coulda bust his strings with my spack-out nervous energy and ruined his show too! He saved our facon bacon. Actually, that may have been the Melvins show? Not sure. Memory hazy. I do remember a really nice “Great show, guys” from Ian as he wandered past, but I was too ‘in my own head’ to offer much more than a meek ‘thanks’. I think I was still feeling like a tool for breaking my strings…
So, is it Ghidrah or Ghidoragh? Why the change?
CP: Ghidrah, Ghidorah, then Ghidoragh. Each album gets a letter added. Who knows what the next one might be!
GB: You can delete this answer, cos I like CP’s enigmatic answer best! But truth is we had a long hiatus, and when we came back of course there had been other bands called Ghidrah and Ghidorah etc.. so we updated it! I think we changed from Ghidrah to Ghidorah pretty early, cos that’s the more phonetically accurate name of our 3 headed namesake!
BH: The Ghidrettes.
Can you each pick a highlight of your time working together? If someone beats you to your pick, then you need to come up with a new one.
CP: I’m still not sure if this is a highlight that proved my undying love for the band, or if it’s a lowlight that just proved what a lousy immature scumbag twat of a human I was/am…. but we played a show just a few hours after my daughter was born. I was all “you mind if I…” to the missus and she was all like “fucks sake, get outta here”. That show may have been the one
where a bunch of skinheads turned up and ripped down the Japanese flags that were hanging in the venue, there was a karate class taught there too. (BH: I think it was the Citizen Fish show we played that night out in Nawton) So yeah, mixed emotions…
There was a couple of shows where we made our friends who had never played brass instruments before form a horn section as backing and it was fuckin hilarious. Like this free-jazz nitro dragster pile-up disaster. The absolute best.
Oh we played with the fucking Melvins too and afterwards we signed posters with them! Haha some poor sap had battled his way backstage to get the Melvins to sign his big beautiful full colour posters and they were like “well these guys have gotta sign them too”.
GB: So many good memories. I think of this band as a brotherhood - we’re on a hiatus again, cos life just got busy for me, but I’m in this band forever - will be to the day I die.
It’s a truly special thing and it’s ingrained as part of my identity. The highlight is getting to meet Brian and Christian, and for the universe to line up so we could make our racket together.
BH: So many for me too… If you told me that we’d get to play with Fugazi and the Melvins I don’t think I would have believed you.
There was a year or so after I’d moved to Wellington - maybe around 2009 or so where we started playing together again in Greg & Kate’s kitchen most Sundays (sorry Kate!). We seemed to come up with a new song or two almost every week. I don’t think we really had any intentions to do anything with it to begin with but we sort of evolved back into being a band again. That was pretty cool.
Oh yeah and flying to Florida to play for 40 seconds for a man in a space suit, that was pretty awesome too!
Can you tell us why you chose to end the band the first time around?
GB: We had to put the band on a break when I moved to Wellington. I got kicked off the dole and decided to change everything up - sold pretty much any and all music gear to pay rent.
CP moved down not long after, and then a few years after that BH joined us. So with all of us together in the same place, we decided to start jamming again, and Threat Level Ultra came out of that.
What have you been doing in the 25 years since the release of Invincible Deluxe?
CP: Still got that daughter! She is also 25 now, every time I look at her dear face I just think “awww. Invincible Deluxe”. We’ve done two more albums since Invincible.
I’ve been working for the last 20 years doing design and illustration. I’m currently in a couple of bands and still play drums nearly every day. All I want to do is make music really. Oh and get wasted!
GB: Weta Workshop has been a huge part of my life for the majority of the last 25 years or so! I was super lucky and Richard Taylor took a chance on me, and gave me a job drawing robots and monsters. CP joined me at Weta a few months after I started so we still annoy each other to this day.
I’ve done a bunch of fun things, like writing and illustrating books, comics, exhibitions, and I even wrote and directed my own videogame on a platform called Magic Leap One.
And that loops nicely back to Ghidoragh - my friend Rony Abovitz who started Magic Leap and is a proper future-thinking visionary (and a genuine sweetheart GC with a love for punk) asked us 3 to come play live at his Ted Talk in Sarasota, Florida some years back. He originally wanted Foo Fighters but upgraded to Ghidoragh! That was an incredible thing. I’ve joined CP in the daddy game at last and have lil’ 4 year old boy that is the centre of my life now.
Still making music with End Boss and would love to do more Ghidoragh when the planets align.
BH: It’s a bit hard to sum up 25 years in a sentence or two! I've had a few jobs - projectionist, multimedia tutor, video editor, graphic designer and for the last dozen years or so I've been working at TVNZ in Wellington. Outside of that I guess just living life and doing my best impression of an adult.
Any last thoughts/comments you want to make regarding the album looking back at it 25 years later?
CP: When we first finished it I thought it was awesome but then I didn’t really like it for a looooong time. I hadn’t heard it for about 10 years and suddenly I thought it was great again! There’s definitely bits that make me cringe and mistakes that hurt to listen to, and about half of it doesn’t doesn’t sound as good as the rest of it - but it’s perfect really. We were/are cringey weirdo fuckups and it’s a very accurate representation, in that regard. The remastering for the vinyl has helped a lot with the sound of the tracks I didn’t like as much, it sounds better than it ever has. Sucks to have peaked so young, but lots of people go through their whole lives without ever recording Invincible Deluxe so I can’t really complain. But I do.
GB: Just a huge thanks to Amber, for believing in us, and now to you too, Dean - the re-mastered record sounds better than ever (thanks Will at Dead Air!) and it’s just an honour and privilege to have people like you take a risk on us. I always thought of our band as a nitro-fueled dragster, blazing down a pot-holed road, but the wheels are wobbling, fire and smoke is pouring out of the wrong holes, the whole thing is hanging together with string and duct tape… and you guys were like, ‘Looks fine - I’ll have a ride’. So all thanks to youse both and anyone else who supported us, bought the records and came to the shows!
BH: It’s so crazy that this thing we created in our bedrooms 25 years ago is still hanging around!
Time is a strange thing, in some ways it really doesn’t seem that long ago but just the fact that we were paying $40 a week in rent and updating Amber on our progress by mail really knocks that thought on its head! I guess looking back the thing that stands out to me is just how lucky we were. To have the friends we did, a house we could practice and record in and people putting on shows and inviting us to play was pretty amazing. And then to meet someone who wanted to put out an album… we were living a charmed life.
Any shout outs, last words, or advice for up and coming youth doing bands in NZ?
CP: Corny as it sounds - just do it if you love it. If you can find a few people that you can connect with and enjoy making whatever sort of music with, well that’s a rare and precious thing. Be your own shit, find what’s unique about yourselves and push it, don’t worry about how you fit into any scene. Punk and hardcore can get pretty nostalgic and stuck in the past... we all
love that stuff but if we didn’t keep changing and challenging ourselves I don’t think we’d still be playing together.
But if you want to be successful and make money and have your stuff played on a tv commercial for a bank… fuck knows! Ask Six60.
GB: Advice? Don’t kids get into punk rock to ignore advice? Shout out to my mum!
BH: I think being in a band and making music with other people is about as close to magic as you can get. Do it!