2004 Media Articles

Sunday Start Times

The Next Bic Thing

Original content copyright 2004 to Sunday Start Times

Original article is at:    Sunday Start Times

Date:                         4 April, 2004

By:                            Jo McCarroll

The next Bic thing

It was not the homecoming a homesick Bic Runga expected.

After several lonely months in Paris, a wildly successful series of performances in the UK and enough "The New . . . (Norah Jones, David Gray, Travis, et al)" headlines to launch several British careers, Runga flew back into New Zealand last week to see her own wistful face staring out from the front page of a daily newspaper.

"Runga: NZ a racist place" the story read with quotes the nation's favourite songwriter unwittingly gave to an Irish newspaper in an interview several weeks ago. It was "heartbreaking" she says, as the story was "a beat-up" and her quotes reprinted out of context.

"I never labelled New Zealand as a racist place, I just said at times it can be. I love this place, this is my country," Runga told Sunday the next day. "Did I grow up with racism? Of course I did. I'm Maori Chinese. It wouldn't have mattered where I was from, it's just the way things are the world over. But New Zealanders are good people."

The story went on to report Runga telling the Belfast Telegraph she had left New Zealand "because she was sick of seeing herself in the newspapers". Welcome back Bic.

So it's no wonder the patriotic Kiwi ("no country is without racism. I grew up with it, that was my experience. It has not made me bitter or ashamed") who has desperately missed her homeland and her family is heading off to church - 11 churches, actually, in an acoustic national tour sparked by a gig at the Union Chapel in Islington, north London.

That concert, as with almost all Runga's recent performances, received rhapsodic reviews. A recent article in The Times described a crowd sitting in hushed reverence at the singer's feet, staring up at her "in wide-eyed amazement as though privileged to get so close". The mainly Kiwi audience listened in mute adoration as Runga performed, the reviewer said, breaking into "cheers and rapturous applause" whenever she paused.

Runga does indeed occupy a special place in the New Zealand consciousness, responsible for at least a couple of the tracks on the compilation tape of national identity. Her first album Drive, released when she was just 21, is the biggest selling local pop album in New Zealand of all time; her second album Beautiful Collision stands at number two.

Unsurprisingly, her record company is now positioning her for global success and the British press has been falling at her well-grounded feet.

It's a remarkable achievement for anyone, but particularly 28-year-old Runga, who is, she promises, going to get significantly better. After all, to paraphrase the Carpenters, she's only just begun (Bic's a big Karen fan).

Runga is learning self-confidence, you see; living in Paris, where she moved eight months ago, leaving behind her parents in Christchurch, her two sisters Boh (who married Bic's long-time manager Campbell Smith a year ago) and Pearl, as well as her boyfriend of more than three years, cinematographer Darryl Ward. She misses everyone, of course, and spends a lot of time on the phone. Ward has visited a couple of times. Distance is just something you learn to work around, she says, and it does make them value the time they have together.

"Besides in the time I've been here (in Paris) a lot of our friends who do get to live together have broken up," she says. "Nothing makes you exempt from that."

In Paris she spends most of her time on her own and the loneliness is the one downside she'll admit to in this on-the-cusp rock-star life. Her French is "good enough" to get by although she expends a lot of energy, she says, "just trying to communicate". And she's away from the city a lot, on the road touring and promoting her second album. Collision has just been released in Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe and the first single "Get Some Sleep" is creeping up the charts. Her label is "very excited" about how things are going.

She's the next Bic thing all right, though "The New Dido" comparisons do become tiresome. (Runga once dismissed Dido as "music to microwave lasagna to".)

"But I'm just trying to be myself," Runga protests. "I don't want to copy anyone."

Hence Paris. Living in New Zealand may have helped make Runga who she is but it also, in some ways, stopped her being herself. At home she was hampered by that ever-present Kiwi self-consciousness. In Paris, people "really look you in the eye". She finds it refreshing.

"You just can't be yourself at home," she says. "A lot of my friends say this too. Here I can go to a club and just dance myself stupid. Here I can do stupid things that I would just feel self-conscious doing in New Zealand. And they are really open to other cultures in Paris. Living here, I feel more Maori and more Chinese than I did in Christchurch. Living in Paris, I feel I am suddenly more myself."

Of course a touch of cultural disorientation is nothing new for Runga. Her father, a Maori soldier, met her mother, a Malaysian cabaret singer, while on R&R from a tour of duty in Vietnam. Apparently it was love at first sight. Her mother threw in her career, where she earned "about as much as a lawyer", for marital and maternal bliss and a job in a chicken factory in Christchurch. (Trying to live in France, Runga says, has made her aware for the first time of quite how brave her mother must have been.)

Love is blind, naturally, but Runga and her sisters Boh and Pearl weren't. Christchurch was no cultural melting pot and while growing up they were "acutely aware" they weren't white. That's probably why her family was very insular; "so much so that our cultural definitions were blurred". The racism she experienced was of the "walking down the street minding my own business" kind, she says. It was part of her upbringing, part of her make-up now.

"I used to think it was my fault, but as an adult I'm proud to say of course it wasn't . . . but it has really made me strive to be an individual."

Runga didn't have any formal musical training except perhaps via osmosis. There was a lot of music at home: the aforementioned Carpenters, Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, Beatles songs sung in Chinese. At four and tucked up in bed, Runga heard "Diamonds Are Forever" playing on her mother's record player in the next room. "And I got really scared and chilled by it," she says. "I remember I didn't really know why music would make you feel like that. Why would it when it was just waves coming through the air?"

Runga only started in bands to emulate big sister Boh, then a Dr Marten wearing Goth, now the glamorous lead singer of her own band, Stellar*.

Bic joined high school bands and began writing her own songs so when her application for art school was rejected she looked up the address of music mammoth Sony in the phone book and sent in some demo tracks. Those tracks eventually formed the backbone of Drive.

The music industry is not, as a rule, a particularly nurturing environment, and starting out so young Runga naturally came under pressure from music industry execs keen to package her as another ethnic-cute, sugar-pop princess. Some of the tracks on her first album were reworked and she has said she dislikes listening to Drive now.

"When you are really young you say 'yes' a lot."

But to her credit Runga resisted the pressure to rush out another album capitalising on Drive's success. Collision took five painful years, and required mentoring by her many believers, including the brothers Finn, Dave Dobbyn and sister Boh.

Runga is annoyed some painted her as a sad and pitiful figure during the long wait for the second album, making out she was somehow adrift when she was working hard on her craft, because "I just care about what I do".

Really she's happy, she says, and getting happier. She has the confidence in her own songs, her own look ("I describe it as 'homeless chic' ") and herself on stage. She's still not a natural performer, but she's getting better with practise.

"Some people are extroverted and they like being looked at," she says. "People are either extroverted or they're not. And I would say that I wasn't."

But most of all Runga now has confidence in her own abilities. That's why she's doing her best to make it big on the world stage. Not because of a desire for fame or for money. When Drive first started making her money, she says, suddenly she didn't have to choose between getting the bus home or walking home and having a scoop of chips. Apart from that she didn't really notice any difference.

"I think I have something to offer," Runga says. "I think there's something that I do that is going to be important to some people. Not everyone. A lot of people might think it's just pap. But then there's the odd person who feels the same way I do."

Original content copyright 2004 to  Sunday Start Times