Get Yer Kit Off: Marcel Rodeka: Dunedin Music Authority Roi Colbert Catches Up With a Legendary Goose

When Marcel Rodeka was 11 years old, he volunteered to hit a big bass drum with a mallet 12 times in a school play. He was spotlighted upstairs in the theatre, and he says he felt huge and important. The boy never looked back.

Rodeka, nine years on the stool for the legendary Mother Goose, is back in Dunedin now, and has opened his own drum studio. The lesson of the mallet and the big bass drum has not been forgotten.

"At the studio, students are taught from the outset that the drums are made to be hit with a positive confident stroke, and not to be tickled. The more confident the playing, the better they sound and the better they like it. Light and shade and playing dynamics come later."

Rodeka went from the mallet to sitting on his bed with old suitcases and rolled-up Road Safety magazines for drumsticks, playing along to Pete Sinclair’s radio Hit Parade on Thursday nights, the only light in the room coming from his Pye radio. Then his parents bought him a set of Beverly drums, sparkling red metal flake in colour.

"One roll from the snare to the tom and I was hooked."

He spent hours taping Avengers’, Larrys Rebels’ and Hi Revving Tongues’ songs - and Beatles’ and Stones’ - on a four-track Fountain recorder to learn the drum parts. The first international band he saw was The Sweet at the Dunedin Town Hall in the early 1970s.

"They were in full glam-rock gear and they were awesome and loud. The drummer spun his sticks at the end of a fast roll, the first time I had seen someone do that. It was amazing."

By now, Rodeka was working the local traps with bands like E-Shed, Bullfrog and Argus. Mother Goose formed in 1975 with global dreams - totally at odds with the historical norm of Dunedin bands to that time - and a stage act - outrageous costumes and tight choreography - the opposite of the Dunedin Sound bands who would come along five years later. It was the music of that time, with Split Enz and Genesis the obvious antecedents, but as with those two bands, the songwriting behind the tutus and sailor suits was strong. Keyboardist Steve Young won the APRA Silver Scroll in 1981 with I Can’t Sing Very Well.

The band moved to Australia in 1976 and released 'Stuffed’ on the Mushroom label a year later. The single from that album, Baked Beans, was a massive hit after a memorable rock video shot in a supermarket. Rock videos were still in their infancy then, and nobody ignored Mother Goose and their Baked Beans.

The dream took them to America in 1978 and they were based in Los Angeles for nine months, working there and in New York. There was plenty of interest - they whiffed the big time one memorable day in New York when sitting in the office of Sid Bernstein, the man who brought The Beatles to Shea Stadium. Sid rang John Lennon right in front of them - but the international deal never came.

The band made two more albums in Australia - ironically they were always much bigger there than in New Zealand - and toured relentlessly, still in zany costume, before calling it a day in December 1984 after a five-month tour of Canada.

Rodeka’s fast and furious drum solos and exciting stage tricks had always been a highlight of the Goose show, and he was quickly picked up by another Mushroom band, Perfect Strangers. Again showmanship was the key, their singer Andy Clayton Smith, a former top gymnast, hanging from the rafters and back-flipping across the stage. But when Smith died from cancer, the band broke up, and Rodeka returned to Dunedin.

After 15 years sharing stage and studio with artists like Queen, Ritchie Blackmore, Chris Rea, Joan Armatrading, Blood Sweat & Tears, Sir Bob Geldof, Midnight Oil, Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham, Rodeka settled back in Dunedin and co-founded a covers band The Rockdaddys, who quickly developed a big following and were the most popular band in town by the mid-1990s.