CHAPTER 4

DUNEDIN SOUNDS

Richard loved the Dunedin music scene – in all its forms.

I couldn’t grasp information if I couldn’t see it. It was extremely difficult and frustrating at high school — that’s why I liked to work on the model railway because I could teach myself in my own time. At high school, you had to have everything done in a certain time frame — there were deadlines for work, exams that you had to study towards — that’s why I had two years of sixth form, it took me that long to get all the information.

Richard went to Logan Park High School for two reasons — one, his father George had hated his experience at Otago Boys’ High School, and two, George and Ingrid felt that the relatively new, co-ed school would be better for Richard’s socialisation and personal development than an all-boys’ school that had a strong emphasis on sport.

Like so many steps in Richard’s life, the transition from intermediate school to high school took him out of his comfort zone. He went from the relative security of small schools, primary and intermediate, close to home and with familiar teachers and friends who knew him and who he in turn could read well. Suddenly, he found himself at a bigger school and without some of his trusted allies, such as Rob Smillie and Mike Hormann, who had gone to Otago Boys’ High School.

With a bunch of new teachers and new classmates, and at the awkward adolescent age, high school became a difficult and isolating experience for Richard. He struggled to keep up with the pace of teaching, with having a different teacher for each subject, each with a unique style and an individual accent he had to master. Lack of familiarity with Richard’s needs meant many talked to a blackboard instead of facing him, leaving him to ask classmates for help or copying notes by looking over someone’s shoulder. He soon learned to sit beside students who had fast and neat writing.

In the summer between his third- and fourth-form years, tragedy struck the school. According to Ingrid, Richard ‘adored’ Logan Park’s headmaster Arch Wilson. Returning at the start of his fourth-form year to the news Wilson had died over the summer holidays devastated Richard. Wilson had been climbing on Mt Aspiring and had gone missing.

Arch Wilson was the first principal of Logan Park High School. When I first met him, I felt in awe — he inspired confidence and warmth and gave me a great welcome to the school. Mr Wilson was a visionary leader, the right person at the right time for a new high school. He treated us students with respect and made you feel that you were part of a great school team. His loss in the Mt Aspiring climbing incident in 1980 was a hard one to accept and even harder to come to terms with as his body was never found.

Educational difficulties aside, Richard’s school years bore a striking resemblance to those of most other Kiwi teenage boys — trying to summon the courage to ask a girl out on a date, discovering beer, buying a first car and listening to music. But when you’re deaf, well, none of that comes easy.

For a start, he couldn’t hear music the way others did. He couldn’t ring up girls and ask them out on a date. Learning to drive, in a manual car as the rules required, presented all sorts of problems — from not hearing the engine’s noise to missing things such as fire engine sirens. Beer, however, presented fewer problems.

‘Richard was fun,’ said long-time friend David Stedman, who enjoys the sense of adventure Richard brings to everything in his life.

‘If you were around Richard chances are you would be taken somewhere, you’d learn something or he’d show you something. He drew people to him. He was always exploring, always up to something. He’d lead you up some crazy, scrubby hill — pulling you into places you never thought you’d go, and once you got there you’d be grateful because there would be an amazing vista.

‘Other times it felt as if it was hard to break through to him — sometimes it felt like he chose to be like that. But he had an amazing way of being self-effacing — he injected humour into everything. He amazed me.’

Richard and David became good friends when Richard repeated his sixth-form year at Logan Park. ‘We grew up in a similar area of Dunedin and I knew Richard because he was a memorable guy — his deafness and that shock of blond hair made you aware of him.’

The pair bonded over music and trains — specifically model railways. Stedman admitted they were nerdy kids who loved the authenticity of the model railways, and Stedman loved the track Richard had built in the family basement.

Stedman, along with his brothers Stephen and Darren, became an integral part of the Dunedin music scene, which also drew in Richard.

I prefer music that has a certain dynamic range, that’s interesting, theatrical, operatic … it started with Split Enz, Genesis, Pink Floyd, The Beatles and later the Dunedin bands, like The Chills and The Verlaines. I used to go to the Dunedin pubs — the Oriental, the Captain Cook, the Empire. I could feel the music.

‘Pink Frost’ from The Chills, with its unusual start, was a great song. The Verlaines, their song ‘Baud to Tears’ — ‘They go down, they drown’ — I loved that. Graeme Downes’s music was like an opera. They’d start quietly and music would build. And Straitjacket Fits — they were awesome and powerful. Shayne Carter was a great singer to follow as he had a powerful voice and used it to great effect. Some other singers didn’t use their vocals so well — they would mumble and I didn’t like that.

Richard’s photos of The Verlaines in the early 1980s. Richard loves the ‘Dunedin Sound’ so much he named a beer after The Verlaines album Bird Dog, top right, and The Chills, bottom right, have played at two brewery openings.

Of all the things about Richard Emerson, the thing most people struggle to fathom is his love of music.

‘Music? As a deaf boy, how does that work? I know he feels the rhythm, feels the music — but it wasn’t the same to him as the rest of us,’ Stedman said.

Martin Phillipps, frontman for The Chills, went to school with Richard at Logan Park. ‘I still don’t fully understand his love of music. I want to know: what is he actually hearing? He talks about feeling the bass in his chest — which is something we all feel — but he can distinguish his favourite songs, so it’s more complex than that.’

OF ALL THE THINGS ABOUT RICHARD EMERSON, THE THING MOST PEOPLE STRUGGLE TO FATHOM IS HIS LOVE OF MUSIC.

It started in the mid-seventies when Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ — with its trademark opening bassline — captured Richard’s attention. He sought out similar big, anthemic bands, skipping over anything light and sugary; music that barely touched the sides didn’t interest him, he wanted the full spectrum of sound.

With his good friend Rob Smillie as a guide, he would listen to albums as Rob ran his finger along the lyrics to help Richard better understand the songs. Rob would point out when the instruments changed, when the vocals kicked in.

Noting his appreciation of music, Ingrid enrolled Richard in piano lessons. He spent a year learning piano, but couldn’t officially progress any further because the grade one exam featured an ear test, which he had no chance of passing. Yet he loved the lessons for helping ‘make use of what I’ve got — it helped me differentiate sounds. I stopped when I was around fourteen, but it was probably one of the best things I have ever done — it helped me appreciate music a lot more.’

Richard reinforced Ingrid’s belief in the lessons when he came home from school one day as his mother was listening to the Concert programme on Radio New Zealand. ‘He said: “Music, Mum, and fast.” It showed he could pick up the tempo.’

In order to gain maximum enjoyment from his music, Richard needed to listen with the volume turned up to the maximum, creating its own set of problems for the rest of the Emerson household. According to his sister Helen, ‘The whole house would vibrate and you were forced to listen to whatever Richard was listening to.’

George disapproved of rock music, seeing it as a shallow pleasure, but nevertheless agreed to fork out for a record player. Richard duly signed the family up to the World Record Club, a mail-order subscription-based business from which LPs could be ordered at low prices.

The one problem Richard has with music is the need to listen to it with no other sounds in the background.

I have to be totally focused and still to absorb it all. If there are other noises the sounds tend to move around — my brain cannot separate the music from the other background sounds. If I’m in the car, I can’t play music because the background noise from the road blends in with the music and muffles it. I don’t know how normal hearing people can listen to music in the car with all the road noise.

I like the purity of listening to music with nothing else around. Technology has also helped as I can use Bluetooth to turn my hearing aids into earplugs to play music, but I have to turn the volume up and other people complain they get distracted by what I’m listening to.

The burgeoning local music scene, which became known as the Dunedin Sound, gave Richard a chance to combine his love of music with his passion for photography. Despite being underage, this saw him take his camera to bars such as the Oriental, the Empire and the Captain Cook to photograph the bands of the time.

Stedman, whose later career as a bookbinder would help inspire the beer of that name, played in a band called In A Circle in the early 1980s. Richard would hang out at the band practice room, taking photographs and enjoying the urgent, raw nature of the music they played.

At one stage, In A Circle recorded two tracks to be included on a proposed second volume of the famed Dunedin Double EP, which launched The Verlaines, The Chills, The Stones and Sneaky Feelings. Richard took the photographs of the band to run on the album cover, but for various reasons the EP never got produced and Richard’s career as an entertainment photographer ended before it began.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say Dunedin music — particularly at Logan Park High School — had an indirect influence on Richard’s brewing career.

As a modern school, close to the university campus and connected tangentially to the student scene, Logan Park became a hotbed of musical and artistic talent. Many well-known musicians came through the school — including Phillipps and his sister Rachel, both of whom were in The Chills; Graeme Downes, Darren Stedman and Jane Dodd who all played in The Verlaines; The Rip’s Alastair Galbraith and Robbie Muir; and Andrew Brough from Straitjacket Fits, The Orange and Bike. Such was Richard’s love of Dunedin, he later released a series of beers honouring some of his favourite tracks — ‘Tally Ho’ by The Clean, ‘North by North’ by The Bats and ‘Bird Dog’ by The Verlaines.

Immersed in this post-punk counter-culture, Richard and his friends, such as David Stedman and Phil Hurring, another Dunedin musician, took an anti-establishment view on many things — including beer.

George’s sabbatical to Scotland in 1983 was life-changing for 18-year-old Richard, as that’s where he discovered good beer.

They spurned Speight’s as the local drop — and any beer from Lion, the country’s biggest brewery, was considered the thing budding rebels were most loath to drink. Photos from In A Circle band practices show cans of Leopard Strong Ale, evidence the youngsters preferred to experiment; to feel as if they weren’t sheep.

As a symbol of how badly they viewed Lion, Richard gets teased to this day for having made the grave mistake of buying a crate of Lion Brown when sent into a bottle store to score for his mates.

‘As teenagers we used to send in Richard to buy the beer — I don’t know why we thought he would be successful, maybe his unusual speech made him seem older … Whatever the reason, we’d send him off and sit with our fingers crossed and he usually came back with the goods,’ David Stedman said.

‘But this one day, he was sent in to get DB and he came back with Lion Brown. We were outraged that he could have made such a mistake. Later, when he was in Edinburgh during his dad’s sabbatical, I used to see ads in the Otago Daily Times for Lion Brown and I would cut them out and post them to Richard — no letter, nothing — just the advertisement. I did that a number of times, much to Richard’s ongoing annoyance.

‘Even years later, if he was in the middle of conversation and I wanted to trip him up, I would mouth it to him, “Lion Brown”. It was a big mistake and he paid.’

From an early age, with my friends I had to be independent. I couldn’t ring them up on the phone because I couldn’t hear them. I had to walk around to their house and physically see them. I had to knock on the door and ask if they wanted to come out and play. That helped cement my early friendships because I had to see the people. But I’m not naturally outgoing.

The downside of that in my teenage years was that I had no girlfriends because I couldn’t ring them up and say, ‘Will you go out with me?’ and I couldn’t ask anyone to ring up a girl for me because I didn’t want them to know about my relationships. I was very private about that. Some girls were nice enough to invite me out to their places, but I didn’t have much luck in that area.

Richard’s inability to use the telephone made life both interesting and complicated in the Emerson household. He took a couple of approaches to the phone — in one, he would dial a friend and ask if he could come around without ever being certain he would understand the answer; the other involved getting Helen to make his calls.

‘He used to ring me at home asking if he could come around,’ said Stedman, ‘and I’d be saying as clearly as possible “Yes” or “No”, but it was never a conversation. I’d be going “NO! NO!” but it was fifty-fifty as to whether he would get the message. You were never sure, so you had to brace yourself for him coming around despite the fact you said “No”. But it summed up Richard. He was not afraid to try to overcome his disability — he didn’t let the idea that he wasn’t able to use the phone stop him from using the phone.’

Helen hated her role as personal assistant but felt she had no choice. ‘I found it incredibly hard as a young girl to have to call these older boys. I didn’t resent it; I just knew Richard needed someone to do it. It was like doing homework; you didn’t like it, but you knuckled down and did it. And as a little sister, I thought I was doing something nice for my big brother.’

She’d be embarrassed when someone other than Richard’s friend answered the phone and she’d hear them saying: ‘Ooooh, it’s a girl for you,’ and Helen would shout: ‘No, no, it’s Richard’s sister, it’s actually Richard calling.’

She would then have a conversation, relaying messages back and forth by mouthing the words to Richard who would lip-read her silent responses. The brother and sister got so good at this type of communication they could ‘talk’ to each other across a crowded room.

Where Richard was stymied in his pursuit of teenage love, he was gung-ho in all other aspects of his life — he was always on the go, exploring, bashing through the bush with his mates, rushing to look around the next corner.

He thrived on the physical contact of bullrush and wrestling, but the competitor in Richard needed an outlet, which he found on his Healing 10-speed bike. As a teenager, he had various methods of getting to school, including a 30-minute walk, but he preferred biking, swooping down from his home high in the hills towards Logan Park High School on the flat.

There was a little bit of resistance from my father about the gooseneck handlebars I’d originally chosen for my bike, so I had to compromise by installing the normal bike bars, but once that was done I discovered speed.

Hoo boy! I could get to school so quick as the chosen direct route goes down one of the steepest streets in Dunedin with a sharp bend. I could whip up a great speed pedalling hard in top gear until I could pedal no more, then I’d crouch down for aerodynamic effects. I reckon I was doing 70kph down towards Warrender Street and once I got around the sharp bend, I’d slam on the brakes for the final descent to George Street. It was pretty cool stuff. I even had an escape plan should the brakes fail, which was to roll up Queen Street, after the bend, until the bike stopped.

One day, I needed that escape plan. The brake-block composition materials were not great in the 1980s before mountain bikes came on the scene. That fateful day, it was raining and the road was streaming with water. Immediately after heading downhill, the brakes were having very little effect in the wet and my speed was slowly creeping up … I thought I’d better try to slow down by putting a foot on the road as another form of braking.

There was a lady in a car ahead of me slowing down for the sharp bend and there was me gaining on her with my heart in my mouth. Shit! Should I overtake her now? Will I get past her fast enough to get up Queen Street? Nah … too late … my front wheel was just a metre away from her bumper, my foot on the road spraying water up my leg, and I had a terrified look on my face.

The Queen Street exit was coming up so close … it was now or never! I squeezed past the car and slipped up the street until the bike stopped. Oh my god! My heart was beating hard and my legs were a little wobbly as I walked the bike down the rest of the hill.

Richard’s passion for speed caught up with him when Ingrid got a complaint from a neighbour that her son was not only speeding, but had overtaken three cars on the way down the hill. Ingrid didn’t mind her son having a bit of a wild streak, but Richard got a first warning.

Things became more serious when George caught him going down Pine Hill Road — the main route into Dunedin from the north — at 70kph. George ‘punished’ Richard by making him install a speedometer on the bike and vow to keep within the speed limits.

As a parenting decision, this didn’t have the same effect as a piece of wood across the backside. It turned out George had completely misread his son’s attitude to rule-breaking as Richard’s goal soon became pushing the speedometer as far as it would go.

It didn’t take much encouragement from Rob Smillie to test the limits — Rob had learned to drive and borrowed his mum’s Mini so Richard could draught behind him and build speed downhill. One day, Richard managed to push his bike towards 75kph … a piece of information he never relayed to his father!

Towards the end of his high-school years, Richard and his friends took off on a cycling adventure that somewhat mirrored George’s teenage excursion to Southland to photograph trains. The main difference was that Richard didn’t go with the purpose of trainspotting, but his trip with Rob Smillie, and two of Rob’s Otago Boys’ High School mates, Angus Barclay and Les McNoe, was no less epic.

Rob’s father Alistair loaded up the four boys’ bikes on a trailer and drove them to Omarama, at the western end of the Waitaki Valley. From there the quartet rode over the Lindis Pass to Wanaka, where they bought a few beers and set up camp.

During the night, Les started throwing up and became so ill the others took him to the local doctor, who sent him off by ambulance to Dunedin Hospital. Richard can’t remember the cause of the illness, but after they’d waved him off in the ambulance, Rob, Angus and Richard pushed on with their journey undeterred.

The next day involved a traverse of the Crown Range towards Queenstown. In those days, the road was unsealed and demanding, a jolting ride for novice touring cyclists on their thin-wheeled, light-framed, 10-speed bikes. They got part way — as far as where the Cardrona Distillery now sits — when an axle broke on Richard’s bike. What to do? He decided to hitch a ride back to Wanaka where the group had left Les’s bike. Richard took the axle from the abandoned bike, hitched a ride back up the Crown Range and put the new axle onto his bike.

Slowly, we got up Cardrona but, boy, were we stuffed. We were resting by the road at the top when a local farmer pulled up beside us and offered us a cold beer … We then had to go down the other side and, oh my god, that was frightening. The brake pads in those days were nowhere near as good as they are now and the gravel and dust just wore them out. The more we used the brakes, the hotter they got and the more worn down and less effective they became. Towards the bottom of the road, the rim of my wheel was too hot to touch.

Eventually, the trio cranked into Queenstown, exhausted, exhilarated and thirsty. A few too many beers preceded some poor attempts at chatting up a group of young women, and — as things do when teenagers and beer combine — an altercation broke out between Richard and another man.

It was near the waterfront in Queenstown and I must have told him to F-off or something. He punched me and my hearing aid flew off my ear and disappeared in the darkness. I was saying, “Fuck, you fucking wanker, I’ve lost my hearing aid!” and I was crawling around looking around for it.

He must have felt sorry for me as he stopped fighting and started helping me look for it. I got a torch, but that didn’t help, we couldn’t find it anywhere. I was devastated because hearing aids are so precious to me.

I got up the next morning and was determined to find it because the weather had changed and there were waves crashing over from Lake Wakatipu — I was thinking that if it’s on the ground it will be wet and not working at all. But remarkably I found it! It was hanging on a branch in some bushes just above the ground. The battery had run down but it was still in good working order — it was a miracle!

From Queenstown, the crew rode along both the Kawarau and Cromwell gorges, down to Alexandra, through to the Maniototo — closely following the route of what is now the famed Otago Central Rail Trail — and on to Kokonga, where they camped by the river. The next morning, after just 14 kilometres of riding for the day, Rob Smillie snapped a crankshaft and, with no way to fix it, abandoned the ride at Hyde. He hitched a ride with an ice-cream delivery truck, putting his bike on the back and taking a ride all the way home to Dunedin. That left Richard and Angus, who in a bout of sheer bloody-mindedness decided to try to make it all the way home to Dunedin that day.

The hills between Middlemarch and Outram were quite devastating, so we did a lot of walking up the steep hills and then we’d get on the bikes and ride downhill. Finally, we got through to the Taieri Plains, but by the time we got to Three Mile Hill on the way into Dunedin, it was nearly nine o’clock at night and we’d left Kokonga at eight o’clock in the morning.

We were at the end of our tether and wondering if we’d make it up Three Mile Hill — but just as we were wondering if we’d make it home one of Angus’s mates pulled up in a flat-deck truck and offered us a lift. We didn’t have to think twice about getting a ride home!