Successful songwriting career<\/p>\n
\u201cLike a very square peg in a very round hole\u201d is how McGlashan describes his otherwise incredibly successful songwriting career.<\/p>\n
McGlashan wrote or co-wrote many of New Zealand\u2019s most iconic songs, including Dominion Road, Anchor Me, There is No Depression in New Zealand and Bathe in the River.<\/p>\n
Stan Walker performs at the Aotearoa Music Awards in Auckland. Photo \/ Juliette Veber<\/p>\n
He was inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2023, and a documentary about his life and his music called Anchor Me is due for cinema release in January 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tell the truth, I didn\u2019t think it was going to be made,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, Shirley Horrocks got in touch with me. I like her work a lot\u2026 it was a good excuse for a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I\u2019ve had so many experiences over the past few years where people have wanted to make a documentary, but it hasn\u2019t been funded, so I kind of didn\u2019t really expect it to happen. But Shirley is incredibly passionate and committed, and she made it happen. So I was kind of in shock, I must admit.\u201d<\/p>\n
McGlashan\u2019s legacy stretches back to the scratchy post-punk of Blam Blam Blam in the early 80s, the percussive eccentricity of From Scratch, the musical comedy of The Front Lawn and the gorgeous \u201990s pop melodies and reflective genius of the Mutton Birds.<\/p>\n
McGlashan and the Blams<\/p>\n
McGlashan\u2019s first big song was There is No Depression in New Zealand, released by Blam Blam Blam in 1981. The words were by Richard Von Sturmer, \u201cessentially a poet who sort of burst onto the scene wanting to do all these other things\u201d.<\/p>\n
While it was written before the infamous Springbok tour, he said the tune somehow \u201cbecame a kind of unofficial song about the tour\u201d, which McGlashan took part in \u2013 as a protester.<\/p>\n
Don McGlashan performing in the RNZ studios for NZ Live, May 2025. Photo \/ RNZ, Cole Eastham-Farrelly<\/p>\n
\u201cI was incredibly ineffectual because I\u2019m little. I can remember being in a crowd of protesters and there was a standoff, and the Red Squad [police] were all the old, huge, beefy men, you know, with batons. And for some reason, I ran out from the crowd and booted one of them in the bum. I still don\u2019t know why I did that.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then\u2026 we both looked at each other. He looked at me as if like, a mosquito just sort of touched him, you know? And I looked at him sort of going \u2018not sure what to do now\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I ran back into the crowd and\u2026 later on they were going around doing individual arrests, and they just pointed at me and pulled me out, and I was handcuffed and led under the stands of the test, so we could actually hear the test going on.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then we were taken\u2026 for processing, and I ended up spending the whole evening there with my English lecturer. He was in the cell with me, a really cool guy. He\u2019s not with us anymore, guy called Sebastian Black, and we talked about [Samuel] Beckett. And\u2026 it\u2019s arrogant to say this, but I think it\u2019s probably the first time that anybody talked about Beckett in that particular cell.\u201d<\/p>\n
McGlashan said that was possible because he wasn\u2019t like the other \u201cpunky type people in those days\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t go home and, you know, take drugs and lie on the floor with the room spinning, listening to The Clash. I went home and listened to [Anton] Bruckner and [Gustav] Mahler because I was a French horn player.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, but the Blams happened and we started touring the country, it was kind of too big a thing to ignore. It was like everything else in my life had to sort of go away, because here we were in a clapped-out van, playing to different sets of people every night, you know, just playing our hearts out, and the audience were going crazy.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it was kind of like, this is where I belong. This is my home.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Front Lawn<\/p>\n
McGlashan\u2019s pre-Mutton Birds band, The Front Lawn, were known for their humour as much as their sound. But that wasn\u2019t always the plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we started, we took ourselves terribly seriously. We didn\u2019t think we were going to be a comedy act. We thought we were working with what it means to be from this weird country at the bottom of the world\u2026 And so we had all these sort of highfalutin\u2019 ideas, and then when we got in front of people, they laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we thought, well, we could run with this. And that\u2019s why we turned into a comedy group.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sense of the unusual carried through to the Mutton Birds, one of New Zealand\u2019s most beloved 90s groups, who had a number one hit about a talking heater.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re bringing these weird songs into this environment where everything was really aimed at three-minute pop songs and Blur and Oasis\u2026 It was nothing like what we were about, but we got an audience, you know? And I wasn\u2019t capable of writing anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Being in a successful group like The Mutton Birds meant having to put up with \u201cludicrous, bizarre stuff that happened all the time\u201d, McGlashan says.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery day, there\u2019d be stupid things \u2013 like at one stage, we got a call, the manager called us and said, \u2018Michael Stipe from REM has personally asked you to come in and open for them in Prague. But you\u2019ve got to get in the van now, right now\u2019 \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then we got in the van, and we got to the Channel Tunnel or something, and then we found out that it had all evaporated, you know? And then later on, we found out that Michael Stipe didn\u2019t know us from a bar of soap. He hadn\u2019t asked us in person.\u201d<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Successful songwriting career \u201cLike a very square peg in a very round hole\u201d is how McGlashan describes his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[95,10779,20217,3276,27834,156,692,113009,111,139,69,90,1642,6753,6380,810,4276,113010],"class_list":["post-176298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-and","tag-awards","tag-bishop","tag-chris","tag-don","tag-entertainment","tag-he","tag-mcglashan","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-online","tag-shut","tag-spat","tag-up","tag-why","tag-yelled"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}