Shocking Pinks: Perpetual Night

This year New Zealand’s Nick Harte released a triple-album as Shocking Pinks. Now he’s playing Australia for the first time in six years. In an incredibly candid interview, Harte talks to ANNIE TOLLER about making the album, his past drug use and the lasting personal impact of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

Nick Harte’s music as Shocking Pinks has always sounded desolate. Even the breakout 2007 release Shocking Pinks, buoyed as it was by Harte’s frantic disco drumming and bright pop structures, feels defeated, its tone ranging from nostalgia to outright nihilism. Nothing Harte has done, however, is as bleak as this year’s sprawling triple-album, Guilt Mirrors.

Like the earlier self-titled album, Guilt Mirrors is a compilation, drawn from material recorded haphazardly over a number of years. A large chunk of it was composed in the wake of the 2011 earthquake that ravaged Harte’s hometown of Christchurch. Over this period his house was ruined, friends were lost and a relationship disintegrated. Though there are markers here of the familiar Shocking Pinks preoccupations – No Wave, shoegaze and twee pop – the album lurches from avant-garde horror (‘Hardfuck’) to industrial hisses and blasts (‘SoapsuddS’), and there are signs that Harte’s dark frame of mind has turned violent (“Those chorus girls/we’d slit their throats/I’d never ever, ever seen/a scene of such impure delight/and terror in their eyes”). This is music as individual catharsis, produced in isolation to excise some private nightmare.

Nick Harte spoke to me earlier this year from his home in Wellington. His last, traumatic months in Christchurch were long behind him, and their continual exhumation for promotional purposes seemed to be causing him some frustration. I got through after a few attempts, having become quite familiar with his voicemail message: a guy and a girl with distinct Kiwi accents, smokily reciting a Serge Gainsbourg classic like film-noir antiheroes: “Je t’aime…” “Moi, non plus.”

How are you?
Good, good. Puffed: I was just out, going for a walk.

I like your voicemail message.
Oh yeah, that’s quite old.

Is that taken from the Serge Gainsbourg song?
It’s actually a band that I used to be in with a friend, Heather [Mansfield]. She is – or was – in a group called The Brunettes.

Oh yeah, I remember the Brunettes.
I used to play drums for that group. We recorded that message in Auckland years ago. It is because of the Serge Gainsbourg/Brigitte Bardot song.

Right, I thought I might have detected a Kiwi accent in there. So you’ve been busy with promotional stuff lately?
Yeah, it’s what’s been mainly eating up my time.

I can imagine. And you’re drumming in another band tomorrow, you said?
Yeah, the bass player from Shocking Pinks, Ash [Smith], has a group called Secret Knives. He’s recording his second album, and he just wanted me to do some disco-y drumming.

Percussion is normally really up front and centre in all your Shocking Pinks work. Do you consider yourself a drummer before anything else?
I guess I do, yeah. It’s quite hard, being a drummer, not focusing on the drums when I listen to music. That’s the first thing I think of. With other bands I’ve been in, it’s mainly been as a drummer. But I mean, I play sax and stuff in free-jazz groups and things like that.

The press material for Guilt Mirrors focuses on the fact that a lot of it was recorded right around the time of the earthquake.
Yeah.

“I was pretty unhealthy. I stayed indoors a lot. I blacked out windows.”

I was just wondering if you could tell me a bit about what it was like to be in Christchurch at that time?
Ah, it was pretty stressful. It’s kind of hard trying to remember that phase of my life; it was so long ago. It was pretty bleak. I mean, I was pretty unhealthy. I stayed indoors a lot. I blacked out the windows, too, to record much of the material that’s on the second part of Guilt Mirrors – tracks like ‘Glass Slippers’, ‘LV VS SX’, ‘(Take Me) Lower’, ‘Beyond Dreams’.

So the ambient, noisier pieces?
Yeah. I don’t really – I find it weird categorising my music, because back when I recorded it I wasn’t even thinking that it would be released. I wasn’t thinking about an audience at all. I guess I thought it wasn’t going to come out because it was quite – you know, it was a lot freer than the other Shocking Pinks music I’d done.

Some of those more impressionistic tracks are my favourites off the album, actually – like ‘Glass Slippers’ and ‘Hospital Garden’, ‘Beyond Dreams’, stuff like that. I think they’re really evocative. And the harmonies can be really pleasant, you know.
Yeah, I mean, when I was recording them I kind of thought of them as pop songs. And I know if people have listened to other Shocking Pinks music, they would probably find Guilt Mirrors a bit abrasive on first listen. But if you listen carefully, like at the end of ‘(Take Me) Lower’, underneath all of the layered guitar textures there’s an acoustic guitar part, and it’s actually quite poppy right at the end. It’s very song-based.

It might be hard on first listen to take them as songs, but they are all songs in my own eyes – or ears. I was going to say this before – I don’t really like to use the word ‘noise’ in regard to this album. I mean, I know it might sound kind of noisy to some people, but to me it’s more textured, layered.

Did the damage from the earthquake affect your recording process much? Was your house damaged?
Yeah, it was. There was lots of damage in the streets – splits and stuff in the roads. There was even a time when I went to the shops and there was an earthquake and the ground split next to me while I was walking along. By that time I had gotten so used to aftershocks and things like that that I was quite blasé about it. But yeah, my home studio was pretty much destroyed by the earthquake – the first earthquake.

You were actually evacuated from your place, yeah?
Yeah, I was. Yep. By some Australian police who were pretty aggressive, actually.

“They called themselves ‘Aussie cops’. They were yelling at me and swearing.”

Really? I’m sorry to hear that.
They called themselves ‘Aussie cops’, you know, when I was in their car. They were all wearing their raid gear, and they had nightsticks. They were yelling at me and swearing when they came into the house.

How bizarre.
Yeah. The New Zealand police were quite nice compared to those guys. I mean, it was just four or five guys who were like that.

Well, let me apologise on behalf of Australia for that.
[Laughs] Yeah, I’m not saying all Australians are like that. I mean, I’ve toured Australia, it’s great. I’ve been there a lot of times.

What was the thinking behind blacking out your windows?
The thinking? I wasn’t really thinking about that. It was stupid. I probably did it because at night I found it easier to concentrate on writing, recording and mixing music, and when the sun was coming up, at five in the morning or whatever, I found it distracting when light came into the house. So I just ended up getting some black cardboard strips and putting them over the windows. That was what I meant by blacking out the windows.

Sort of like simulating that productive feel you get in the middle of the night.
Yeah. It was basically to create perpetual night – you know, so I could just keep working and didn’t have to think about the time, or clocks, or anything like that.

Were there any particular albums that you were listening to in that period?
Not really. To be honest it was mainly the music that was in my head, what I was working on at the time – my own music. I was just so obsessed with it that I would stay up for days on end – for, like, five days sometimes – and just be so obsessed with mixing a bass part or something that I’d just work on that. I don’t think I’d be listening to any music at all. I maybe watched some films and stuff like that – that’s perhaps why the album is kind of filmic, like in its length and everything. I had friends who came over and played some music, but that was probably the only time that I listened to other stuff.

Are there any films in particular that you were thinking of, perhaps in relation to different tracks on Guilt Mirrors?
There are certain tracks where there are lyrical ideas taken from screenplays that I like. There’s a John Cassavetes film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and there’s a line that Ben Gazzara says in it, “There are no rivers here,” and there’s a song on the record called ‘therearenorivershere’. If I went through the tracklisting – I can’t think of the whole thing now – there would probably be references in every song, really, in some way. Some of them would be pretty subtle. Andrei Tarkovsky films like Mirror and The Sacrifice, even just their filmic quality – they’re quite dreamy and hypnotic films – informed some of the songs.

I read that you studied classical composition at university.
Yeah, I did. And like – not sound design, but electronic music, digital composition. I also studied jazz drumming at Christchurch Polytechnic jazz school.

Does that come through, do you think, in what you’re doing?
Definitely. Especially the composition. I like to approach pop song writing in really different ways. After you’ve studied classical composition, it’s hard not to approach song writing with a bit of that in your perspective as well. Again, going back to the record, especially on the second part – the music I was recording around 2011 – I was thinking a lot more about sound rather than just thinking about an audience. ... There’s a track on the record that actually wasn’t recorded during the earthquakes. It’s a track called ‘Hardfuck’, which is quite heavy; I think it’s maybe one of the heaviest tracks on the record. That was actually recorded ages ago, when I was studying composition. It’s quite an early track of mine.

What kind of composers were you interested in around that time?
I’m still interested in them; I still listen to them quite often. People like Alfred Schnittke, Ligeti, Penderecki, some John Cage.

“I’m standing right next to my pile of unreleased Shocking Pinks CDs. There’s probably 100.”

Since it’s been six years since the self-titled album was released, I was wondering if most of the recordings come from the 2011 period or if you were recording that whole time?
No, not the whole time. I’ve been moving quite a lot. I’ve lived in Auckland and Nelson and Wellington – lots of different places. It’s kind of all over the place. I mean, there are some tracks that are really, really early – like, from the period when I actually formed Shocking Pinks, like my first album, [2004’s] Dance the Dance Electric. There is a track [on Guilt Mirrors] called ‘Dance the Dance Electric’ that’s an outtake from the first record. I just thought I’d include that and some other tracks like it to give the album a bit of diversity.

Is there anything that’s been recorded since you’ve been in Wellington on there?
No. I mean, I’ve been writing music since I’ve been here, and I’ve recorded some as well, but I didn’t include any of that stuff. I guess I do think of it as my – not my ‘earthquake record’, but the bulk of it is from that period in 2011.

I’m working on some tracks at the moment, and they’re a lot more song-based. I’m working on a ballad that’s almost like a brother, or a sibling, to the song ‘St Louis’ that’s on the record. It’s in the same tuning as that. I’m just writing the music for it; Gemma Syme is going to sing on it again.

‘St Louis’ is a very sombre track. Was it written from your own perspective?
No. Actually, that’s the only Shocking Pinks song ever that I didn’t write the lyrics for. It was written for a friend of mine, Michael Louis, who passed away – that’s why it’s got that title. I wrote the music, but I was too close to it to write the lyrics. I gave the instrumental part to Gemma, and she wrote and recorded her vocals.

I saw that you had almost 400 tracks for Guilt Mirrors at one point. How did you manage to select the 36 that got released?
Actually, I’m just standing right next to my pile of unreleased Shocking Pinks CDs and there’s probably nearly, I don’t know, 100 or something. There’s quite a few. It was quite daunting going through that process. It got a lot easier when I started working with the label I’m on, Stars and Letters. [The label’s] Mark Roberts got involved and we started working out the track listing for Guilt Mirrors and whittling it down to a more manageable length.

So he had a strong editorial role?
Yeah, he helped a huge amount with that stuff.

Was there an organising principle for each of the three discs – like, chronological, thematic, aesthetic or anything like that?
Not chronological or anything. I guess I looked at them separately. The first one is almost like a separate album. The second one is from the earthquake period, so I guess that one’s a bit heavier and harder to digest for some people. The last one is – I wouldn’t say demos exactly; it’s more like a collection of my more song-based material.

That would have a bunch of quite early stuff on it, then, as well?
Yeah, it does. It’s all over the place, really, the third one, as far as where the tracks are from time-wise, and where I recorded them. To me listening to it, it kind of feels a bit like a compilation now, but I still think it flows pretty well.

Do you have a favourite of the three discs?
Probably the second one, for me. It’s the most personal.

“It’s just nice to be able to release tracks that are longer than, say, four minutes.”

Yeah. Insofar as it is so abrasive, it’s probably the strongest statement.
It’s just nice to actually be able to release music like that, tracks that are longer than, say, four minutes or whatever radio stations are used to playing, time-wise. It’s quite refreshing.

On that – you said you weren’t thinking about an audience when you recorded a lot of the stuff in Christchurch, but I was wondering if, when you were preparing to release the album, you had an idea of how you thought people would listen to it?
No, not really. When I was recording it I was just obsessing about how I could make this track better. Like, ‘LV VS SX’, the guitar part and the glockenspiel part on that – the bell sounds – I remember spending weeks on that, really trying to please myself, not really thinking about an audience. I know that kind of sounds a bit selfish, but it’s kind of good in a way not having to question yourself all the time about how it’s gonna go down, how it’s going to be received and all that.

I was wondering how you chose the tracks for release on the shorter, 12” version of the album?
We just went through the collection and thought about which tracks are the ones that you need to hear from the record – obviously not the longer tracks from the second part. I guess I was just thinking of tracks that I couldn’t – not not live without, but that would have been hard to – just the tracks that sum up the record in 45 minutes.

Does it bother you on any level that people might just listen to the 12”?
Yeah, I’d probably prefer people, if they are going to listen to it, to listen to the trilogy because, as I said before, the second part is my favourite. I would like to hear how people react to hearing some songs from that because it’s quite different to things I’ve released in the past. But, yeah, some people might just listen to the vinyl and that’s fine. You know, different strokes for different folks.

There’s a bunch of dance-oriented stuff on the album … Do you listen to a lot of dance music?
I listen to a lot of different music, really, style-wise. I don’t like to discriminate between genres. But lately I’ve been listening to Burial’s new EP, Rival Dealer; I think that’s really good. I haven’t been listening to a huge amount.

I heard that you like to DJ.
Yeah, I do.

What are your DJ nights like?
I did one at [Wellington bar] Mighty Mighty a while ago, and that was kind of all over the place. I played some stuff from acts that were on DFA when I was with those guys, some Kanye West, Liquid Liquid, Scott Walker, stuff from Martin Scorsese soundtracks. I think I ended the night with a This Mortal Coil song. It’s pretty all over the place. There was even some free jazz and some Fleetwood Mac.

I was wondering how you came to move from DFA to Stars and Letters.
I’ve known Mark Roberts for quite a while. We lived really, really close when I was in Christchurch during the earthquake period. I hadn’t met him prior to that. I even played drums on an early EP for one of his bands, The Enright House. I remember being a bit frustrated at having to wait quite a while for DFA to put another record out after the self-titled record. I was just looking for other labels that might be interested. It was a real relief when someone suggested Mark.

Are you still in touch with DFA?
We haven’t actually been in touch for a while now, but there’s no negative feeling between us. I mean, if I was touring and I saw James [Murphy], there wouldn’t be an argument or anything; it would be great to see him again.

I remember being quite surprised that your album was on DFA in the first place, given its style. Why do you think they picked up your music?
Jonathan [Galkin], who worked for the label, was constantly looking for other groups to sign. I think they just – he and James – just liked what they heard, and they got in touch with me. Actually, I think the main reason was that there was a Pitchfork review which was pretty good. I think it was a review of the first record. Whichever record it was, there was a comparison – they namedropped DFA and said it was – not even better, but something along those lines. I think that made them get in touch with me, because they probably didn’t like someone using that kind of phrase.

Yeah, right – so they had to, like, soak you up and bring you under the umbrella, as it were.
Yeah, exactly.

So – stop me if you don’t want to talk about any of this stuff, but I read in the press release that you were struggling with some other issues since the self-titled album, like agoraphobia and substance abuse?
Yeah.

When was that happening? Do you want to elaborate on any of that at all?
Yeah, at that time I would have been using some form of drug. It’s hard to remember exactly what, but probably some kind of benzodiazepine, like Valium, in quite a large amount. I don’t use Valium anymore. But yeah, I was probably recreationally taking a lot of that. I could have been shooting something occasionally. My insomnia was bad back then as well.

“I didn’t record music straight after I’d taken drugs or shot up or anything like that.”

Right. So was that part of the reason for using benzos and that sort of thing?
That wasn’t really a reason. I don’t know, I mean, a lot of friends of mine –actually, some of whom have – well, they passed away during that period – they were using and, you know, when I was around them I would use a lot more frequently. I found it hard – not to say no, but if they came over and they were using, I found it hard not to want to do it as well. Quite often people would come over and actually use the kitchen to do it.

Is it something that you find useful when you’re writing music?
Useful? I don’t anymore, that’s for sure. I’m really glad that I don’t use that stuff any more. But, thinking back, I just know that I was very foggy and out of it, really, when I was creating music.

Yeah, the album certainly has that sort of feel.
Yeah, it’s quite hazy, really.

Was that substance use a kind of escapism in the aftermath of the earthquake?
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. It was a form of escapism, really. I don’t – I know, looking back, that I didn’t record music straight after I’d taken drugs or shot up or anything like that. And it was mainly morphine that I was using. I made rules for myself, where if I was doing that, I would actually say to myself, ‘Make sure you don’t record any music in the next seven hours’.

I think I broke that rule once with a song. It’s not on Guilt Mirrors. It has that kind of feel. I think it was more Valium abuse. There’s a song off [2005’s] Mathematical Warfare called ‘Girls’ where I know for a fact that I broke that rule and recorded when I was high. That’s a foggy track for me.

Is that a rule you’ve got because you don’t like the music you make when you’re high?
I guess I feel that I won’t have any form of control over what I’m doing. I know that I get a lot looser and feel a lot more relaxed. I just don’t want to subject my music – or my listeners [Laughs] – to what I do when I’m in that mode. Or when I was in that mode.

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‘Guilt Mirrors’ is out now through Stars and Letters. Read Anthony Carew’s On Rotation review. Tour dates below.

Sat, Nov 1 – John Curtin Hotel, Melbourne, VIC [w/Forces, White Hex + Teenage Mothers]
Mon, Nov 3 – The Liberty Social, Melbourne, VIC [DJ set, w/Miles Brown, Asps, Club ESC, Hans Detour + Awesome Wales]
Thurs, Nov 6 – GoodGod Small Club, Sydney, NSW [w/The Ocean Party, Teenage Mothers, Black Springs + Hollow Everdaze]
Sat, Nov 8 – Freda's, Sydney, NSW [w/Spirit Valley + World Champion]