A definitive and sometimes desperate top 10 listicle of New Zealand authors who have in some which way crossed over into popular music
1. Tayi Tibble. The world woke up on Friday morning to the freshly dropped music video Solar Power, the first new song from Lorde in three years - and there, at 2:24secs, was Wellington poet Tayi Tibble starring as some kind of flower-power South Seas hippie chick. Lorde is a fan of her poetry; who isn't? That same evening, Tayi launched her new poetry collection Rangikura, at TimeOut in Auckland, and re-enacted the flower scene to vast applause and adoring acclaim. Rangikura (Victoria University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
2. Maurice Shadbolt. The great Titirangi author (1932-2004) was primarily a novelist but his works also include Voices Of Gallipoli, an oral history of Anzac soldiers; it inspired one of the songs on Let England Shake, a 2010 album by the great PJ Harvey. Her album was a musical memorial to the battles at the Somme and Gallipoli. Harvey drew on an account given to Shadbolt by New Zealand infantryman Vic Nicholson.
3. Allen Curnow. This is where the list begins to fray and resemble something desperate but anyway the great poet Allen Curnow went on the drink in New York with Dylan Thomas around the time that Thomas recorded his spoken-word masterpiece Dylan Thomas on February 22, 1952, at the Steinway Hall. The music was all in Thomas's extraordinary voice. The liner notes describe the recording session: "Dylan, arriving late, looked celestially cam, hailed everyone benignly, and propelled himself vigorously to the concert hall stage...After one final play-back, the whole easy, laughing group adjourned across the street to The Anchor something in the way of celebration." Curnow might have been there, unless it was his shout.
4. Denis Glover. This is where the list departs from the world stage and restricts itself to interesting and artful things that happened entirely within New Zealand shores such as genius singer-songwriter Bill Direen setting Glover's classic poem "The Magpies" to music, recording a sinister version on his 1983 Flying Nun album Beatin' Hearts.
5. Sam Hunt. Everyone goes on about Sam Hunt's collab with David Kilgour on the albums Falling Debris and The 9th, and quite rightly so, but for my money the best thing Sam ever laid down in a recording studio was the 1972 LP Beware The Man, in which he recited and sometimes almost sort of sang his poems to a groovy psychedelic jazz-blues groove played by Wellington band Mammal. It's fantastic.
6. Margaret Mahy. The strangest co-writing credits in the history of New Zealand music feature on that 1971 transcendent pop masterpiece "Dance All Around the World", by freak-out hippie band Blerta; the song was co-composed by stone-cold and stoned genius Corben Simpson, Goodbye Pork Pie director Geoff Murphy, and the wondrous, amazing, stone-cold and fond of a drink genius, children's author Margaret Mahy.
7 and 8. Damien Wilkins and Breton Dukes. The last time I heard from Dukes was an emailing instructing me to go f**k myself, but not too long before that, when relations were really quite cordial, I published an online launch during lockdown for Breton's book of short stories, featuring an incredible song written and performed for the occasion by novelist Damien Wilkins. It's actually really good.
9. Steve Braunias. I think I have a co-writing credit on a song by Jon McLeary on his 1986 album Idiot Sun and I'm pretty sure Shayne Carter credits me with the title for his song "Come Here" on his 2004 album You've Got to Hear the Music. He asked me one day, "What's the sexiest thing you've ever said to someone?"
10. Janet Frame. Thanks to Twitter savant Philip Matthews for sharing the information that the title of Janet Frame's 1963 novel Scented Gardens for the Blind was later used as the title of a 1975 prog-rock masterpiece album by Dragon. It is not known whether the great writer ever heard it.
11. Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Robin Hyde, James K Baxter, Rex Fairburn and Ruth Gilbert all had their poems adapted and set to music by Ross Mullins on his 2011 album Tidemarks, recorded with singer Caitlin Smith. Mullins also recorded the track "Stranger at the Ranchslider", about Baxter's last hours. Bill Manhire took to Twitter this week and commented: "I once played that track to a bunch of Baxter scholars at an academic conference." It is not known whether they danced.
