Deborah Wai Kapohe: Pride of the South
Author: Reuben Keeling
So, how does an avant-garde folk-rock group from Invercargill, fronted by an opera singer, become involved in the Iraq conflict? Deborah Wai Kapohe has been asking herself that question quite a lot lately, after her song Australian Soldier was picked up as a protest call across the ditch, and her group was featured on the front page of www.worldpeace.org.
"We never thought it to be an anti-war song or anything," Deborah says over the phone from Invercargill. "We were in Australia on holiday, and I heard the interviews on Triple J and on TV about troops going to Iraq and just wrote a song about it."
"It has really been taken on by the peace rallies, it's playing on radio and TV over there, and we're on the front page of worldpeace.org, along with the Beastie Boys! So we were quite thrilled, and we thought 'that's not bad for a band from Invercargill'."
The song will feature on the album 'Elusive', which is due for release in May and will be Deborah's third album as a singer/songwriter. Most though will recognise Deborah more for her talents as an opera singer, with celebrated performances in Australia, London and China as well as here in New Zealand. And while she will keep up the more traditional side of things with shows in Asia later this year, for now she wants to focus her attention on more contemporary music.
"The discipline and strictness of classical music is great but I really wanted to write my own music again, and play popular music, as well as classical," she says. "I've always loved popular music of all forms, like rock and all that sort of stuff. The popular music scene is so different – it's another world. It's the land of no-return phone calls!"
Deborah's musical talents also extend to the guitar, piano, trumpet and tenor horn, but her most distinctive instrument – her voice – was discovered in quite an unusual manner.
"I had a really, really lazy guitar teacher," Deborah laughs. "You've never met anything like him, he was dreadful. He would sit down, read the paper, eat hamburgers and he just could not be bothered teaching me, so he'd go, 'Oh, sing that song could you?' He'd try to get me to sing rather than have to get up and teach me anything. And I hated singing, I really hated singing in public, but that experience kind of broke the ice."
In 1997, after a variety of successful tours overseas, Deborah decided to return to New Zealand to set up an independent label, through which she could release her own music. And after taking some good advice from her mum, Deborah returned to Invercargill, where she had grown up.
"I think it was totally unexpected that we ended up here," says Deborah. "My mum actually called us when we were in Melbourne and said, 'Look, the house prices are so low, you could buy a house and just leave your stuff in it – it's cheaper than hiring a storage case in Auckland!'. So we went off to China to do an opera, and came back with the deposit for a house in my shoe!"
From there Deborah and partner Michael Beazley moved into a three storey art deco building in the centre of town, where they began their label, Ring Trout CDs.
"The building is huge – we can house musicians, and we have heaps of practice space and no neighbours, so we can play all day and all night!"
Deborah has been joined at Ring Trout HQ by guitarist Sam Benge, saxophonist Ryan Prebble and Argentinian percussionist Mariano Mazzeo, and together they are working hard on the new album, which they are recording and mixing themselves.
"We hadn't planned it that way," she laughs. "We were expecting our technician to bring all his Digi001 and 002 gear, but at the last minute he decided to go skiing in Switzerland!"
Deborah has already released two albums of mostly solo work – 'The Family Edition' in 1998 and "I Unwrap You' in 2002 – through Ring Trout, and has also landed a five album deal with Wellington's classical label Trust Records. After releasing 'Elusive' in May, she plans to head back into the studio.
"Near the end of the year we want to re-record a lot of the songs from my first three albums, and do very different versions of them. We'd love to get someone in to remix them for us – that would be fantastic – but I guess we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it."
'Elusive' will be available in selected CD stores and through www.ringtroutcds.com sometime in May.
www.deborahwaikapohe.com
