BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM thinks back to the nineties, where the likes of Garageland provided the soundtrack to his teen years. He talks to lead singer Jeremy Eade of the eve of the band’s reunion gig.


FOR ME, Garageland epitomised the 90s. I listened to them at a formative time of my life, and hearing them alongside the likes of the Pixies and Pavement, it confirmed to the teenage me that a) we have some shit hot music in New Zealand and b) New Zealand bands can write pop songs to match the best of them. And Garageland were good too – intelligent lyrics, catchy-as-crazy melodies and a band-wagon-worthy international reputation. They left New Zealand with the world at their feet, and indie success was beckoning, or so it was assumed. But things didn’t quite turn out that way. Seven years after a rather disastrous end to the Garageland story, they have decided to re-form to play a one-off (to date) gig in Auckland in November. And there’s more planned, another chapter to be potentially added to a band who probably justified the label “wasted talent” when they crashed to their abrupt end, but who displayed enough talent in their all-too brief career to warrant a glowing reputation.

I talk to Jeremy Eade, the singer from the group, and it seems like this reunion gig is as much about exorcising some demons from the past, as it is writing a new chapter in the band’s history. Eade admits by 2001 “I just lost touch with what I was doing. I got very disorientated after a while. As romantic as it sounds, going into hotel rooms, and flying everywhere and drinking to excess and all other excesses – it’s not very beneficial to developing maturity. That kind of lifestyle isn’t particular good for your development as a person. I felt I was turning into a person I didn’t like. I guess when you get that you have to stop. After seven years I’ve got to like myself again... not that I hated myself.”

It was seeing Black Francis on the recent Pixies documentary about that band’s reunion tour loudQUIETloud which proved to be an “epiphany” for Eade. “He’s feeling vulnerable. I’m feeling vulnerable, I guess it’s only fear, there’s nothing stopping me. Who makes the decisions about what’s wrong and what’s right? It’s just bloody music.” Certain life changes also assisted. “I got married and had a kid and I was growing as a person. It sounds very Tony Robbins.”

But all this seems very far away from when the band first came together to do their first recording in 1985. The recording “was with Russell Crowe, and he was running a club at the time. And it was fucking awful. It was kinda poppy, I was fifteen and listening to a lot of commercial radio – I hadn’t discovered My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr. The Jesus and Mary Chain etc. – and we were trying to sound like the Mockers. For a month everyone said we were going to be big. Then we went away.” A few years later, Eade and drummer Andrew Gladstone found themselves flatting together, unemployed and bored. “And music just started”.


There were the early frequent comparisons to the Clean, and this wasn’t helped by their signing to Flying Nun. In fact, they probably became seen as the archetypal 90s Flying Nun band (along with the Headless Chickens) a reputation that Eade isn’t particularly comfortable with. “We’ve been on about eleven labels, Flying Nun was just one of them. Now that we’ve had these Flying Nun retrospectives, it seems we’re a Flying Nun band. To me a Flying Nun band is from that original three year mafia. They knew each other from Dunedin. We’re from Pakuranga.” But there was the undeniable influence from the Flying Nun sound – the poppy melodies, the dark undercurrents, the DIY nature. “Probably the most inspiring thing was one, they were from the same country as me, and two, there was this punk rock ethic in the simplicity of this all. They fed into all the great bands – Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground influence, the psychedelic influence in the nun sound, and I was listening to all those bands.”

The band had massive local success with their first album Last Exit to Garageland, surprisingly as far as the music industry was concerned, hitting number three in the New Zealand album charts, and achieving some radioplay with singles like ‘Beelines to Heaven’ and ‘Fingerpops’ “We definitely had a strategy, me and Andy, I had been following music for a long time and he was working in record retail so we had an idea of how it worked. We definitely thought we could go in the Pixies and Pavement channel – and they were charting at number thirty. I was blown away by number three, I thought ‘shit’. That was quite a good feeling.” Eade admits that as a bit of music vulture he sucked up all the music he could including stuff from the charts, “so there was the dream of being number one. Later on you realise the charts are getting more and more safer and more pedestrian”. However he was particularly proud of “getting to the top of the b-FM top 10, I was over the moon.”

From there, the band jumped overseas, leaving with much fanfare from the local media, and skulking back. Eade admits there was “not a lot of visibility. We built a following up in London. All the rest were pretty much explorations. America’s a huge place, you’re at the mercy of the bands you can get the support of. We did really well in France of all the fucking reasons. We did this myspace page, Andrew wrote it up, and we get all these French guys saying we were at boarding school listening to you guys.

Garageland certainly had a pretty unique experience overseas. “To get that buzz, it builds really slowly, I can’t quantify it, it’s certainly something that wouldn’t worry an accountant. [However] almost effortlessly we’d make the big publications - NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone. We had a foot in the door, in retrospect, of all the things that you think happens in four years, it happened in four months.”

However, this led to some of the problems that Eade mentioned almost straightaway. This reached its nadir with the band’s third album in 2001, Scorpio Righting an album not as bad as the band themselves seem to suggest. “It took eight months to record. Previously eight weeks was a pretty standard time, a month to record and a month on the mix. This one seemed to roll on forever. Basically it was recording on that beach where they did The Piano. We were recording in some house that Crowded House used. I was just tired, there was a record being made and I wasn’t making it. There was this expectation too, including myself, that we could get a bit of money out it. We had no money. I felt like it was almost like an assignment to write some radio pop songs. It’s not all bad, but it’s not an admirable artistic endeavour.” Eade was upfront in saying “it was my fault, I take full responsibly. I have to be honest, I wasn’t around a lot.”


Eade holds some pretty strong views about the music industry, no doubt affected by the band’s experience, and his love of good music. “That’s what pop music is, it’s an articulation of emotions, a document of emotions. A great pop song has the same power as a Jane Austen novel.” And there was a period in the early 90s when it seemed, to Eade (and to plenty of other people) that popular music was getting a good stir when bands like Sonic Youth, REM and Nirvana crossed over from the underground to mainstream success. “There was a chance when things got really interesting. Sonic Youth were mainstream for a couple of days.” It was too ephemeral, and leads Eade to justifiably wonder “all the bands who influenced us, like The Pixies and Pavement, why aren’t they on classic rock [radio]? They’re fifteen year old albums, there have been a whole batch of music that has influenced that isn’t there.” And I must admit I was forced to wonder that myself - if anyone tries to argue with me that ‘Here Comes Your Man’ or ‘Here’ aren’t some of the greatest pop songs ever written, I’m sure I’d be able to recruit Eade to back me up.

Eade definitely wants things to change in the music industry, especially since Garageland appear to want to be back in. I ask him about the Radiohead model of giving their albums for download (not that Radiohead were the first to do this, but hey), and query whether this is going to shake things up. “I had that model years ago! I think what they’re doing is brilliant. There has to be other ways to be doing it. When we were starting, we were at the end of the industry model. It’s not a good model to make progressive music, all it’s trying to do is play it as safe as possible. No A&R person says you should sound like The Pixies and Pavement. They should.” One target of Garageland’s frustration in the past (if the Flying Nun website is to be believed) who seems to epitomise all this was Billy Joel. I wonder if the band really do hate him. “Yeah. Um... hate’s a... I don’t see any reason to... It’s funny I watch The Daily Show, and they’re constantly taking the piss out of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, I feel kinda validated. He encapsulated the way the industry thinks. The thing which annoyed me was in ‘It’s All Rock and Roll to Me’, even punk was another arm. No it wasn’t. This is rebellion. Yeah I hate him.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with the values that are around me at the moment. That kind of thing of wanting things to change, listening to people like Kurt Cobain, we’re well overdue for a little bit of shit kicking. Our society’s a bit too conservative. I love the idea of the late 60s too, to me we’re on the verge of another 60s, there’s a lot of kids getting pissed off. And it’s not just the kids, I’m going to be forty soon and there’s no way I’m going to accept some of the values – there needs to be a lot of things freed.” And for a band who’s named after a Clash song, there seems to be a strong similarity to the righteous anger of the likes of Joe Strummer. His death was certainly a shock to many a music fan, and seemed to hasten a whole bunch of iconic musicians’ deaths. “Miles too fucking early. The one that really got me was Joey Ramone when he died. I still can’t work out why the Ramones are dead. I have to admit, I’ve always liked the Clash, but it’s only recently that I realised how awesome a philosopher Joe Strummer was.” Eade in particular is fond of the excellent Clash documentary Westway to the World, admitting to seeing the film over twenty times. “Isn’t he fucking amazing in that? I couldn’t get over what he was saying. That opening saying, ‘creativity is intuition’. If you know you have something to get out you really have to get it out.”

And that’s what Garageland appear to be doing, after the seven-year hiatus and considerable soul-searching. Eade is certainly aiming for a fourth album. “I guess I’ve done some pretty in-depth thinking, I don’t have to follow these rules, I can do what I want. It feels like I’ve got a whole bunch of poetry I’ve been hiding from myself. Basically, my two kind of long term goals, if we’re all feeling good, is to do one-off gigs around the country periodically. I do think we’re missing an album. Especially since the third one was made under such weird circumstances. Obviously there are certain logistics to be worked out.” At this stage however, there is only the show at the King’s Arms that has been confirmed, a show that will probably come with a bit of audience expectation, nostalgia for the good times, and a wee bit of curiosity. “I don’t have any way of trying to quantify how successful we will be or were, apart from units, and we didn’t shift many units. We did meet people and there seemed to be an intensity that was quite rewarding. I don’t know maybe it’ll just be a handful [of people who come], it’ll be great to see people into it, but personally just the exercise of doing it is a real buzz for me.”

Garageland play at the Kings Arms, Auckland Saturday 10 November. Tickets on sale from Real Groovy.