2003 Media Interviews

Stuff NZ

Original content copyright 2003 to Stuff NZ

The beautiful success of Bic

CHIPPED CRYSTAL: Bic Runga really wanted to be
Karen Carpenter "but I like food more than that".

Original article is at:    Stuff.co.nz

Date:                          15 January, 2003

By:                             Sarah Stuart

She boasts the two best-selling New Zealand albums in history and is about to leave our shores for a new career in Europe. Sarah Stuart charts the remarkable talent of Bic Runga.

The chipped-crystal tones of New Zealand's favourite voice have escalated to a breathless squeal. Bic Runga is so euphoric she's bouncing between octaves.

"Everything is soooo good, my life is getting better and better and it's just hard to control myself, it's so exciting," she trills.

Though her management company has been crowing all week, the normally subdued Runga didn't know she had just become the creator of the nation's two best-selling albums of all time. While '97's Drive has held the top spot - over more established artists such as Dave Dobbyn - for a couple of years now, her second chart-topping effort Beautiful Collision has already sold almost 80,000 copies to become the second biggest local album made.

Holed up at her Christchurch parents' Hoon Hay home writing songs, the singer who once said "success is a long-term career" can barely believe her good fortune.

"That's news to me but, wow, it's cool," she gushes uncharacteristically. As Sony manager Michael Glading says, the reticent Runga is rarely so excitable. "But every now and then she comes right out of her shell and whoa."

The album success is not all Runga has been celebrating.

Yesterday the 27-year-old flew to Sydney for a series of Australian gigs, five of which were sold out before she landed. She's been on a rapid French language immersion which has been surprisingly easy to navigate ("it's like music. It's copying sounds so my pronunciation is very good") and next month she leaves New Zealand to live in Paris, the start of a push into European charts.

She's set up her own record label Noo Shu, is producing for her first young artist, Australian Tim Guy, and is happily in love with photographer Daryl Ward.

Runga's also become the only Australasian songwriter to be signed by the late Beatles manager George Martin's film score agency and she's preparing to perform with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. Life is too, too sweet for the sweetest vocals in the land.

"I feel really free and strong and with-it for the first time," she says. "I don't know if that means my music is going to get better but my attitude toward it is going to change. I won't be so apologetic about it anymore."

Popstars are rarely as effusive but Briolette Kah Bic Runga has never aspired to being cool. While her older "suburban superstar" sister Boh donned Goth gear and listened to The Smiths before becoming lead singer of her own hip band stellar*, Bic wanted to be Karen Carpenter, singing and playing drums. "I still do really," she laughs. "But I like food more than that."

Runga's Chinese mother Sophia was a lounge singer in Malaysia when she met Joseph Runga, a Ngati Kahungunu Maori on leave from Vietnam. The couple moved to New Zealand, Sophia learning a new culture and language which her youngest daughter is only now beginning to appreciate.

"That takes great courage, I really admire people who can do that," she says. Courage is a Runga trait: though she has at times hated appearing on stage and her shyness is sometimes mistaken for rudeness, it is the music that pushes her. Those unique folk pop songs with their domestic imagery and lush soundscapes which seem to encapsulate a distinctly New Zealand sound due, perhaps, to that Maori-Asian mix.

"In some ways," says Runga, "it's a unique set of ingredients."

Growing up in the '70s and '80s, the family of three singing sisters (including middle sibling Pearl) were the only brown faces in their Christchurch street. "We were pretty fresh when we were little," says Runga. "There was some sort of outcast flavour to us."

Her gamine good looks and vulnerable on-stage presence have always belied Runga's strength. She was determined to make music a career, entering school rock contests and winning a deal with Pagan Records while still a teenager. Her quiet demeanour meant that at first she was taken in directions she didn't like, her songs reworked by industry suits. Too bashful to disagree, she has said she dislikes listening to that first successful album.

"A lot of people thought I had no ideas because I never spoke up - and fair enough," she said soon after the release of Drive. "It was my own fault but I won't let it happen again."

She didn't. Beautiful Collision took an agonising five years to make with a sometimes paranoid Runga flitting between studios, countries and engineers. There were well-publicised writing blocks, attempts at moving into the world of electronic music which she loves but which didn't work with her songs, and a dinner at friend Neil Finn's house when he encouraged her to keep on with her original beautiful dream.

"It was a series of failed recording sessions and having to water down what my own vision was that made me (determined)," she says. "When music is the most important thing in someone's life you just can't compromise."

She's enjoyed a great mentorship with both Finn brothers and Dave Dobbyn who performs on Beautiful Collision. The small New Zealand music industry cradles talent like Runga's and her quiet confidence fitted well with the elder statesmen of pop.

"More than anything from those guys I learned the meaning of being gracious about things," she says. "They are big stars but they're not big stars, there's something so familiar and down to earth about them. They pull your head in."

The reviews for Beautiful Collision have been almost universally good, though one American wag did suggest it was better than counting sheep for falling asleep to. It is always the music that comes first for Runga, her eloquent lyrics slotting in afterwards like a crossword, trying not to detract from the emotion of the music. "People who set out to be moving or emotional seldom succeed," she has said. "Moving people is something you do inadvertently and it's never born out of trying because people can see through that."

Dobbyn, too, gave good album advice, telling the Neil Young fan that as soon as she tried to make a hit record, not a good record, she'd get "all messed up".

That sense of integrity is one reason for the emergence of Noo Shu productions. Runga has fought against being eaten by the music industry despite her stints of touring and living in the US.

Melbourne musician Tim Guy, 30, approached her at a soundcheck with a demo of his own carefully crafted songs and became her first label signing, spending a month at her Titirangi home in Auckland working on an album of guitar and piano songs.

"I don't think we're going to sell huge quantities or anything," she says of Guy's work. "This is my way to reclaim or have a part in the music business rather than being a victim to it."

Her company will do things differently. "I want everything to be imbued with good taste and with so much of what big label pushers do . . . a taste bypass is inevitable."

So now the girl who was working in an Auckland shoe shop when she had her first top 10 hit is preparing to play at London's hip bar Union Chapel then dashing off to live in Paris. The long-term career she planned has become the kind of success trajectory an LA manager would be proud of and the next album, says Michael Glading, will not take five years to make.

"Oh I'll be back for sure," says Runga. "I couldn't possibly leave for good. I'm just like any Kiwi. I'm a hobo, I like to move around and I get itchy feet. You might try to make a life somewhere else but you always have to come back."

Original content copyright 2003 to Stuff.co.nz