Combining classic pop influences with a DIY sensibility learned from Chris Knox, Auckland band Goodshirt's album from 2000 lives up to its name, writes Nick Bollinger. Photo: supplied
Opinion - Back in the early 2000s, for what seems like too brief a time, this country saw a small explosion of quirky but incredibly catchy songs in a genre you might broadly describe as power pop. And they all seemed to be coming from one band.
Goodshirt's 2001 album Good is not just good. It's an essential New Zealand album.
What better way to introduce yourselves as a pop group than with a song in which the name of your band is repeated a couple of dozen times in two minutes? And even if they somewhat counterintuitively titled that song 'Green' rather 'Goodshirt', as a debut single it certainly ensured that the message got across.
Though Goodshirt credits their songs to the entire group, including drummer Mike Beehre, they essentially had three songwriters, each with their own distinctive styles yet all in the habit of adding something to each other's songs that made them even better.
Frontman Rodney Fisher had a strong indie sensibility that showed in his off-kilter lyrics and art-damaged musical ideas. But many of the songs originated with his younger brother Murray, who was also the group's recording engineer, while it was bass and synth boffin Gareth Thomas who brought timeless popcraft to a song like 'Sophie' but also gave the group those queasy '70s synthesiser lines that would become a Goodshirt signature.
Rodney, Gareth and Mike Beehre would first play music together in an Irish covers band, named The Trouser Weasels, after the cultish sport (also known as ferret legging) of seeing how long a person can endure having a weasel, or ferret, trapped inside their trousers.
Their approach to Irish music was about as serious as their name, and everything from Beatles to Split Enz songs were given the Celtic treatment.
But Rodney and Gareth were also writing songs of their own and trying them out in rehearsals.
Goodshirt album cover Photo: supplied
Goodshirt would ultimately play most of the songs on Good live on stage. But the album had a particular quality that was not just the sound of a band playing in a studio. There were things you could do with the computer - cutting and pasting, distorting and twisting, looping and editing.
This was DIY home recording, not dissimilar in principle to Chris Knox's pioneering reel-to-reel recordings of more than a decade earlier, but this time in the digital realm. And it became their sound.
You'll hear other influences throughout the album; classic ones like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and others much closer to home. Split Enz had been an exemplar for Gareth as a songwriter, ever since he had first heard them in Canada as a kid, while a powerful model for Rodney was The Mutton Birds, another four-piece whose big melodic guitar-based pop songs had a distinctly local sense of place.
And in a song like 'Slippy' Rodney Fisher takes a cue from The Mutton Birds' Don McGlashan, starting at his own Grey Lynn back door, before stepping off into the dreamlike surrealism that is a particular Fisher flavour.
'Sophie' was an ode to a girlfriend that Gareth Thomas had written many years earlier, long before Goodshirt was formed. It became the fourth single to be released from Good and was the one that took them to the top slot on the New Zealand pop charts.
For a chunk of the public, this track will probably be the thing they most remember about Goodshirt. But there was always a whole lot more and it was all good.
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