Splashing the Surface of the Puddle
Author: Mark Bell
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As Kiwi musical enigmas go, they don't come much more interesting - and certainly no more uncompromising - than The Puddle's George D. Henderson, a man whose sprawling and erratic musical outpourings span the late '70s to, literally, the present day. While such a long period of activity might suggest a weighty back-catalogue, in reality The Puddle's recorded output was confined to a handful of album releases over nearly three decades. That is until an unparalleled burst of creativity brought 2007's 'No Love - No Hate', the band's first release in 15 years, and now in 2009 'The Shakespeare Monkey'. Mark Bell spoke with George Henderson about the dimly lit periphery of commercial success and still doing it his way a quarter century on.
George D. Henderson has been recognisable as a genuine musical genius since at least the early '80s, The Puddle first grouping around him in 1984. Putting the sparsity of his recorded output into context, it's not that he has been lazy, working in an office, or wildly erratic, but there was a serious battle with drug addiction such as beset more than a few Dunedin musicians of Henderson's era. The almost mandatory Hepatitis C that followed pretty much wiped out a decade of his creative output.
"Apart from that decade I was prolific, in that I could write songs all the time. I've got hundreds of songs in my songbook," he says.
Amazingly Henderson has cured himself by finding a successful, self-researched combination of anti-oxidants and maintaining a generally careful diet. He says he feels better than he can ever recall being and is determined to maintain the cracking pace he's set for himself with another album - 'Playboys in the Bush' (started in 2005) apparently almost in the can.
I pick Henderson up outside Auckland's Downtown ferry building (he's not a driver and has trained in from his new location in Huia), recognising him by the Sir Walter Raleigh beard and well-loved corduroy jacket he tells me he'll be sporting. Back at NZM we get down to the business of shedding a little of that media spotlight on this literate, articulate, quasi-legendary, musically uncompromising Dunedin icon.
With the rewards for a long-term musician on the fringes of an already small and over-subscribed musical arena being of a more ephemeral than financial nature, I ask what he might perceive as his reward for such long-standing service to the celebrated Dunedin do-it-yourself ethic.
"I guess the first thing is a sense of power. I don't play sports and I didn't have a car or whatever, so that kind of mana that a bloke needs, I realised I could get it from music. When I saw a band playing, it was supernatural compared to the other options of a child in '70s Invercargill. I saw a band call Watchdog on stage, the first song they played was Get it On and I thought, 'This is what I want to do, I could do this'."
And do it he did. Throughout the '80s The Puddle functioned as something of a nursery for green talent, Snapper's Peter Gutteridge being one of many raw recruits to pass through the band. This helps to put into context the sound and structure of many of the early Puddle songs as Henderson explains.
"Many people actually learnt to play in Puddle who had never played before. Because they were with me all the time anyway, I'd say, 'You don't want to play bass do you? I'll teach you'. I'd teach them a few notes, and that's why those Puddle songs still to this day have very simple bass parts, because they had to be part of a Puddle song that anyone could play if they'd only been playing for a few months. So I tried to write interesting, good, complex songs around four-note basslines.
"The great thing about that is you can teach it to anybody, and also it gives the songs a kind of a hypnotic Krautrock feel, 'cause I listened to a lot of Krautrock when I was a kid. It's that influence, and also knowing that minimalism can work, you can turn it into something valuable, you know?"
Operating in the music industry in a small city like Dunedin for as long as Henderson did prior to moving north in 2005, you inevitably accumulate a weight of history behind you. In the case of The Puddle that history has not always been helpful in allowing them to mature into the band they would like to be.
"Apart from that decade I was prolific, in that I could write songs all the time. I've got hundreds of songs in my songbook," he says.
Amazingly Henderson has cured himself by finding a successful, self-researched combination of anti-oxidants and maintaining a generally careful diet. He says he feels better than he can ever recall being and is determined to maintain the cracking pace he's set for himself with another album - 'Playboys in the Bush' (started in 2005) apparently almost in the can.
I pick Henderson up outside Auckland's Downtown ferry building (he's not a driver and has trained in from his new location in Huia), recognising him by the Sir Walter Raleigh beard and well-loved corduroy jacket he tells me he'll be sporting. Back at NZM we get down to the business of shedding a little of that media spotlight on this literate, articulate, quasi-legendary, musically uncompromising Dunedin icon.
With the rewards for a long-term musician on the fringes of an already small and over-subscribed musical arena being of a more ephemeral than financial nature, I ask what he might perceive as his reward for such long-standing service to the celebrated Dunedin do-it-yourself ethic.
"I guess the first thing is a sense of power. I don't play sports and I didn't have a car or whatever, so that kind of mana that a bloke needs, I realised I could get it from music. When I saw a band playing, it was supernatural compared to the other options of a child in '70s Invercargill. I saw a band call Watchdog on stage, the first song they played was Get it On and I thought, 'This is what I want to do, I could do this'."
And do it he did. Throughout the '80s The Puddle functioned as something of a nursery for green talent, Snapper's Peter Gutteridge being one of many raw recruits to pass through the band. This helps to put into context the sound and structure of many of the early Puddle songs as Henderson explains.
"Many people actually learnt to play in Puddle who had never played before. Because they were with me all the time anyway, I'd say, 'You don't want to play bass do you? I'll teach you'. I'd teach them a few notes, and that's why those Puddle songs still to this day have very simple bass parts, because they had to be part of a Puddle song that anyone could play if they'd only been playing for a few months. So I tried to write interesting, good, complex songs around four-note basslines.
"The great thing about that is you can teach it to anybody, and also it gives the songs a kind of a hypnotic Krautrock feel, 'cause I listened to a lot of Krautrock when I was a kid. It's that influence, and also knowing that minimalism can work, you can turn it into something valuable, you know?"
Operating in the music industry in a small city like Dunedin for as long as Henderson did prior to moving north in 2005, you inevitably accumulate a weight of history behind you. In the case of The Puddle that history has not always been helpful in allowing them to mature into the band they would like to be.
