Interviews - BIRD's

Sunday Mail
5 March, 2006

Sally Browne
 

Kiwi's a bird of paradise
Original content copyright 2006 to The Sunday Mail

Girl power: Bic Runga is New Zealand's best-selling artist, bigger than Crowded House

Original content can be found at The Sunday Mail

Kiwi's a bird of paradise

SHE'S the best selling New Zealand artist – and, yes, that includes Crowded House – and her songs have even appeared on karaoke games. But ask 30-year-old Bic Runga about her success and she'll shrug it off modestly.

Best-selling singer/songwriter Bic Runga's new album tells of fallen beauty and love and is inspired by the strange feathered species of her country. She spoke to "Wacky, hey?" she says of the "best-selling" title. "I don't really think much about it."

She and Crowded House front-man Neil Finn are great mates – she has supported the band several times and he has returned the favour by performing on her new album Birds.

Runga has fond memories of touring America with the House boys, playing the so-called iPod Olympics on the bus.

"It's kind of like who can drop the best song," she explains. "DJ culture is at saturation point. But at its finest – if you play the right song at the right time – it's quite a skill.

"He put me on to a lot of music that I hadn't heard, and vice versa."

Runga's other great idols are her Chinese mum, who was a lounge singer with "a massive bouffant of hair" in the 1960s, and her eldest sister Boh, who "was cool and made mix tapes and had really massive hair" in the 1980s.

"I really just wanted to be like my big sister," says Runga, who reckons she's just cut off all her hair.

"I just wanted to play the drums in her band. So my mum bought me a drum kit when I was a kid and I followed my sister around and wore the same clothes as her – like a pain."

With her middle sister also in the band and Bic, the youngest Runga, on drums, they must have looked like a female version of the Hansons.

Runga still remembers the first song she wrote.

"I remember one rainy day my sister saying, 'OK, we're all going to go off to different parts of the house and write our own song. I was like, 'What do I write about? I'm six!'

"I remember writing a song called Snow Flake, which I had inadvertently ripped off Born Free," she laughs.

"I remember playing my song to my sisters and them going, 'That's Born Free'! It happens to the best song writers. You can accidentally rewrite Imagine. It's easy to do."

But things clearly improved – the follow-up song they wrote was called I Can See Your Arse Shining in the Moonlight.

"My other sister had just got an atlas so we trying to get all these country names in a song."

Fast-forward a couple of decades and Runga is now enjoying the success of her third album Birds, which made its debut at No 1 on the New Zealand charts and lands in Aussie shops tomorrow.

The album was recorded in the haunting setting of Auckland's Monte Cecilia House, a crumbling old building which Runga says suited the music.

"It's a moody record. It has one strong mood throughout. It's not really a pop record. It's like the house. It's kind of about fallen beauty, love and despair. I love the word 'miserablist'," she laughs.

She named the record Birds because of their prevalence in the unique New Zealand landscape.

"Birds kind of run the show in this country. We have a lot of birds here that are really strange.

"They're just so enigmatic."