07.10.2000 By RUSSELL BAILLIE
Right now Zed, a band which
seems to be going somewhere fast, are nowhere in particular and quite stationary.
Down a side road behind Muriwai Beach the quartet are enjoying a rare day
off midway through a sold-out New Zealand tour of theatres and clubs.
Well, it’s not quite a proper
day off. As the various equipment trucks and vans which surround their
deckchairs indicate, they’re making a video. Or they would be if only the
tide and light would cooperate with director Julian Boshier’s vision for
their next single, Come On Down.
So founding Christchurch
members Nathan King, Adrian Palmer, Ben Campbell and newish boy Andy Lynch
of Auckland (dreadlocked and resplendent in his bassist-producer father
Bruce’s Cat Stevens 70s touring jacket) sit and wait, read music magazines,
eat fish and chips for lunch and swap in-jokes.
Though if the Tasman Sea
is proving a slight snag to the Zed-plan, you get the feeling that’s only
because manager Ray "the Modfather" Columbus isn’t down at the water’s
edge doing his best King Canute.
Everything else has worked
like something resembling clockwork. From the time Columbus got the original
trio signed to a publishing deal in Australia when they were in their mid
teens, to the trickle of high-charting singles (Glorafilia, Oh Daisy) on
major label Universal, to the flash flood of debut album Silencer.
Released in late August,
it’s already sold a double-platinum-plus 34,000 copies after entering the
New Zealand charts at No 1. Seven weeks later, it’s still at No 4, while
single Renegade Fighter is at No 7.
Excuse us, young Mr Campbell,
why has all this happened?
"I think we are good songwriters.
That’s the main reason. You don’t get by without good songs, really. I
think we have got something special as a band. We get along really well.
We work really hard, put the yards in, treat it really seriously, and we
are all good musicians."
But there is another part
to the Zed story. It sounds like this: "ZED! ZED! ZED!" And like this:
"Waaaagggggh."
Now imagine that sound for
90 minutes or so, at a pitch verging on the canine-hearing range. As their
Auckland gig the following night at an inevitably long sold-out Mandalay
shows, Zed are very popular with women. Well, girls actually, who in the
bouncing throng down front seem to outnumber males by 10 to one.
Zed may well be good songwriters
and everything else that Campbell mentioned. They are also four nice-looking
young chaps who smile a lot when they play and whom you could probably
take home to Mother. There’s something fairly invigorating about this en
masse expression of adolescent oestrogen and it seems to power Zed’s surprisingly
muscular playing through a set which covers Silencer, a couple of oldies
and a new song or two.
The biggest "Waaaagggggh"
comes during the encore, when a member of support band the Heavy Jones
Trio, who have joined them on stage, asks: "Who wants to see Nathan take
his shirt off?" It all goes a bit Chippendale after that as the two bands
plough through a version of Blur’s Parklife minus their tops.
So, young Mr King, what
do you think they’re all screaming at?
"I honestly don’t know if
it’s an image thing with the young girls at the front. It’s the music that
they enjoy but with it comes an image — and if it’s that, I don’t understand
it because it’s something they will have with, say, a boy band like the
Backstreet Boys ... like a crush or something.
"I’m just trying to think
of female artists that would be the same for me, but I can’t." King does
admit the fervent attention is energising.
"When we go to other gigs
sometimes and we see New Zealand bands that are a bit more underground,
I don’t reckon they have as much fun on stage because the intensity is
not up. When we play gigs that are R18 and the intensity is not there,
it isn’t as enjoyable. It’s much more fun when there is more hype and excitement."
Lynch says he’s still adjusting
to Zedmania: "I find I am still trying to cope with it. I don’t know if
they are screaming at your playing or how you just moved. You are not quite
sure whether to acknowledge it or ignore it."
Campbell says it’s only
a matter of time before the gender bias in Zed’s audience balances out.
"The guys will come. At the moment we’ve just appealed to a certain market.
I think our music is going to cross over and it is starting to already.
And if I was in a position of an 18-year-old guy, where the hell would
I want to be on a Friday night than where all the girls are?"
Still, it must be odd having
at least part of your rock’n’roll dreams come true seemingly so quickly.
"It’s very unbelievable,"
says Palmer. "There’s not a day when I take it for granted, you know? I
was a student up until last year and I was thinking, ‘I want to be a musician,
I want to be a musician,’ and at the moment it’s not exactly lucrative
but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and it’s a dream come true." Lynch adds:
"Yeah, it’s one thing that has been striking me quite recently. When I
see double platinum and things like that, it’s like: ‘Come on, I am supposed
to be jumping up and down here.’ Go back two years and I’d probably be
in hospital getting my stomach pumped. "But now it is not like that. It’s
my dream, it has been my dream for a long, long time from back when I was
watching Slash on TV every day and learning every Guns’n’ Roses song ever,
taking my shirt off and playing in front of the mirror — I play a Les Paul
like he had, of course — it was: ‘One day it’s going to be me.’ It hasn’t
happened yet. But it’s looking that way."
* Zed play at Napier’s State
of It tonight, Palmerston North’s Regent tomorrow and at Auckland’s Mt
Smart Supertop with Blink 182 and Tadpole on Saturday, November 4.