Evening Post Interview
August 2000

Bic Runga's got a special mesage on her cellphone she's going to keep saving.

It’s a message from Tim Finn, inviting her over. "It said ‘come around to my house and I’ll teach you the chords to my songs, and I can teach you My Mistake’. It’s such a cool phone message, I want to keep it".

Runga is in gush mode and she’s only mildly apologetic about it.
She was over at Dave Dobbyn’s house the day before the Evening Post spoke to her, listening to his new album and having cups of tea.

So what, you might think, surely musicians like that get together all the time and jam. Not necessarily so. And anyway, this is a bit different from any old jam session. Finn, Dobbyn and Runga, aka Top Shelf Troubadors, are about to gon on a tour, performing from Invercargill to Whangarei, in cozzie clubs, theatres and town halls, some of which are already sold out.
They’ve had to schedule a second concert in Auckland, such is the demand.

Dobbyn’s album, Hopetown, will be out in the first week of the tour, Finn’s album, Say It Is So, was released several months ago, and Runga’s second album should be ready by Christmas.
Runga is so excited by the tour, she’s done something very few artists will do – dropped everything in the middle of recording her own second album to do the tour.

She was recording in Los Angeles when the promoter called, asking if she was interested in doing the tour. "It’s amazing, it’s kind of ridiculous for me to be doing it, I don’t know how suitable it is for me to be performing with these two guys, because they are really my heroes, it’s like a dream come true, it really is, I know it sounds kind of gushy but…"

"It’s kind of silly, I mean, they’ve had 20 year careers and I’m just at the beginning of mine, it’s going to be a real privilege".
She has toured with them before, of course, in different configurations. Runga opened for Dobbyn on her first tour: "I’d just signed with Sony and they told me to [do the tour]. I think it was part of my grooming to be terrified in front of Dave Dobbyn’s audiences."

"I don’t know how suitable 
it is for me to be performing 
with these two guys, 
because they are really 
my heroes, 
it’s like a dream come true, 
it really is".

That was the apprenticeship. Now, it’s equal billing, but still a big call to temporarily abandon recording. "At this time of year, in the middle of my album, I wouldn't dream of going on tour on my own, but this was an opportunity I couldn't pass up."

Finn, Dobbyn and Runga will be swapping roles, instruments and songs. Runga will perform My Mistake and both she and Finn will take turns at the drums while Dobbyn plays the keyboards.

"All of us are staying on the stage all the time, so it’s just a case of going to some hand percussion or another instrument."

There will also be a live album from the tour, to be released in September.

Runga sees it as a huge bonus if any new songs, naturally composed on the road, come out of the tour, and she might add them to her album if they do arise.

It will be vastly different to her debut, Drive. Some of the songs on Drive were written as early as the age of 17 and, in hindsight, Runga questions whether they were worth writing about.

"You haven’t really done a lot at 17. Now, seven years later, I’ve seen a bit of the world and I have a better perspective on what things are about. The songs are just a bit more mature". 

Musically, she’s trying to take off in a different direction.

“I’m still a kid, really. I go to clubs and listen to dance music like other kids, I mostly listen to electronic music, but as a songwriter, it’s really hard to make that transition between what you really like and what you actually do.

“If I can make that marriage between songwriting and electronic music, that would be fun, but it is quite hard to do.”

Once the tours over, the pressures on to get the album finished by the end of the year and then it’s back to the United States, where she’ll stay as long as it takes to get airplay on American radio.

“America’s a hard country to break, and it hasn’t really happened a lot for New Zealand musicians, but I think we have a better insight into America as a country and how the industry works now. It’s a possibility this time after the last attempt".

“We spent a lot of time building a fan base there doing  some important tours, got some good film synchs, I had a song feature in a No. 1 American movie. So if I can come up with the right record, now would be a good time, so I’m trying to ride that wave. Everything, though, is dependent on radio programmers: Just to be present there and play a lot there helps, and a money injection helps.”

In the meantime, Runga’s going to keep saving that message from Finn, just to remind herself how lucky she is.

“Every now and again I have to ask myself, how cool am I to be hanging out with these guys, you know? It’s really cool, it’s just too cool for words.”

Bic Runga, Tim Finn and Dave Dobbyn, Together In Concert, are at the Wellington Town Hall on  August 13, 2000.