Greg Fleming - Going Back to find the Way Foward
Author: Richard Thorne
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During much the 1990s Greg Fleming was a prominent and idiosyncratic figure on the Auckland new music scene, both as a solo performer and with his band The Trains. Credited as a pioneer of alt-country rock here, the title song from his 1993 debut album ‘Ghosts Are White’ was Jonathon King’s first ever music video. The album deservedly earned critical acclaim – though it was on stage that Fleming’s star shone brightest. History will have it that the light faded abruptly just a few years later with his considerable potential unrealised. But history can be re-written, and the release of a two-CD set of Fleming’s extensive song catalogue on a new independent label heralds the return of this stylish singer/songwriter who is also an accomplished poet and writer.
Richard Thorne talked with him about the album he started in 1995, which is finally available to be heard 15 years later.
Richard Thorne talked with him about the album he started in 1995, which is finally available to be heard 15 years later.
It’s an odd, but convenient coincidence that Greg Fleming’s label, when he was first recording back in the 1990s, was called Lost Records. It provides a handy epithet covering both the album he recorded in various bursts between 1995 and 2003 – the aptly tilted ‘Taken’ – as well as the singer/songwriter’s own musical output, indeed parts of his life in the years subsequent.
Lost Records was an imprint label of the once vibrant Auckland indie label Deepgrooves, and when both businesses folded into bankruptcy in 1996 Fleming faced the loss of his already-named, but unfinished second album’s recording master tapes. He had to pay to extract them from one of the studios owed money on the recordings but then, since Deepgrooves also held his publishing rights, could literally do nothing with them for a decade, neither release ‘Taken’ nor re-record the songs for another album.
While he doesn’t link the two, it was not much later that Fleming’s drug dabblings became “a pretty bad habit”, and for several years he largely dropped out of circulation and of music making.
“I guess part of that was being discouraged with what had happened, but there was lots of other personal stuff going on throughout ‘Taken’. I was there, but I was starting on that path. You can hear that in Hamish, that sort of covers what was going on. There was all that self-obsessed drama going on… it’s ridiculous really, but that was what I had to go through. It’s not like [I was] Anthony Keidis, or someone with lots of money to fall back on, it’s pretty grim.”
Of his escape from addiction Fleming says you just reach the stage where that’s enough.
“In the end I just got sick of being sick and tired all the time. But you can come back from that sort of stuff, I’d hate for those few years of my life to define the future. It [music] helped me in the end to come out of that, in 2003 I was writing songs again and wrote lots. I’ve now got the privilege of having over 100 songs to choose from for my next album.”
Enter Andrew B. White, well known as a graphic designer to the music industry, a fellow musician, former band mate and long time friend, who also happened to have his own fledgling label, LucaDiscs, needing a suitable artist to kick things off with.
As the impressively extensive and fascinating for-those-who-were-there album liner notes reveal, thoughts about releasing any new material led quickly to consideration of releasing that ‘lost’ album, as well as a re-release of his first album (1993’s acclaimed, but long forgotten ‘Ghosts Are White’).
“…it started to make sense, the way forward could begin by going back,” as Fleming is quoted – and almost remarkably it does.
Very few relatively unknown local artists could safely release material they wrote and first recorded well over a decade ago. It is a tribute to Fleming’s timeless musical style (he is rightly described as a local pioneer of alt-country rock but slips easily into a variety of genres), and his considerable songwriting skills that his material readily stands the test of time, sounding in many cases like it could as well have been recorded just this year.
Lost Records was an imprint label of the once vibrant Auckland indie label Deepgrooves, and when both businesses folded into bankruptcy in 1996 Fleming faced the loss of his already-named, but unfinished second album’s recording master tapes. He had to pay to extract them from one of the studios owed money on the recordings but then, since Deepgrooves also held his publishing rights, could literally do nothing with them for a decade, neither release ‘Taken’ nor re-record the songs for another album.
While he doesn’t link the two, it was not much later that Fleming’s drug dabblings became “a pretty bad habit”, and for several years he largely dropped out of circulation and of music making.
“I guess part of that was being discouraged with what had happened, but there was lots of other personal stuff going on throughout ‘Taken’. I was there, but I was starting on that path. You can hear that in Hamish, that sort of covers what was going on. There was all that self-obsessed drama going on… it’s ridiculous really, but that was what I had to go through. It’s not like [I was] Anthony Keidis, or someone with lots of money to fall back on, it’s pretty grim.”
Of his escape from addiction Fleming says you just reach the stage where that’s enough.
“In the end I just got sick of being sick and tired all the time. But you can come back from that sort of stuff, I’d hate for those few years of my life to define the future. It [music] helped me in the end to come out of that, in 2003 I was writing songs again and wrote lots. I’ve now got the privilege of having over 100 songs to choose from for my next album.”
Enter Andrew B. White, well known as a graphic designer to the music industry, a fellow musician, former band mate and long time friend, who also happened to have his own fledgling label, LucaDiscs, needing a suitable artist to kick things off with.
As the impressively extensive and fascinating for-those-who-were-there album liner notes reveal, thoughts about releasing any new material led quickly to consideration of releasing that ‘lost’ album, as well as a re-release of his first album (1993’s acclaimed, but long forgotten ‘Ghosts Are White’).
“…it started to make sense, the way forward could begin by going back,” as Fleming is quoted – and almost remarkably it does.
Very few relatively unknown local artists could safely release material they wrote and first recorded well over a decade ago. It is a tribute to Fleming’s timeless musical style (he is rightly described as a local pioneer of alt-country rock but slips easily into a variety of genres), and his considerable songwriting skills that his material readily stands the test of time, sounding in many cases like it could as well have been recorded just this year.
