Madeleine Chapman - writer and editor of The Spinoff. Photo: Supplied
Madeleine Chapman is editor of news and culture website The Spinoff and well-known for her controversial list of New Zealand's best potato chips.
After recently calling out RNZ's Music 101 for broadcasting a song containing the word "motherf*****', the Samoan-Kiwi writer shares some of her own favourite tunes on The Mixtape.
Chapman chats to Charlotte Ryan about overcoming competitiveness, being surveilled by Dame Jacinda Ardern and the irresistible power of queer pop supernova Chappell Roan.
Madeleine Chapman (middle of the back row) with her parents and siblings. Photo: Supplied
'Our house was a high-stress performance scenario at all times'
Chapman was born in Wellington in 1994 to a Samoan mother and an American father and is one of 10 siblings.
In her family's two-storey house, the kitchen CD player was usually blasting classic hits radio or one of her mum's three favourite albums - Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits, Elvis Presley's Greatest Hits and Mariah Carey's Merry Christmas.
The kids occupied the lower level and Chapman's older siblings, who she idolised, would play a mix of music while home for university holidays.
"I have lots of my memories of being a kid sitting quietly and absorbing what is going on around and sometimes having something that I thought would be funny to say and being too scared to say it, so just leaving it in my head.
"If you said something that you were trying to be funny and it wasn't funny, you might as well be bombing at a comedy club. You could not live it down for quite a while ... it was high risk, high reward and stressful now that I think about it."
'I'm trying to re-emerge back into sport without bringing old baggage with me'
Chapman excelled in sports as a teenager. Photo: Supplied
As a teenage member of the Samoa women's cricket team and a champion javelin thrower, Chapman had developed what she calls "a bit of an unhealthy relationship" with sport.
"I had grown up playing a lot of it and being quite good at it, and having all sorts of expectations ... so I went way the other way and didn't want anything to do with it," she said.
"I competed one year at university and then promptly injured myself and went, 'nah, I guess I don't need to do that anymore.'
"Now, in the interests of keeping a work-life health balance, I'm trying to re-emerge back into sport without bringing all that old baggage with me and the competitiveness."
'Jacinda Ardern was watching me the whole time'
Dame Jacinda Ardern, pictured in 2023. Photo: AFP
After co-writing basketball player Steven Adams' autobiography My Life, My Fight, in 2019 Chapman was invited by an Australian publisher to write a biography of then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
At that time, the international media "just absolutely fawned over" the then-prime minister, Chapman said, and locally there was "a bit of a backlash" to the adulation.
"You know, 'you don't know all the problems we've got going on here.'"
Although Ardern declined to speak to Chapman for the 2020 book A New Kind of Leader, the former Labour leader seemed to be "extremely across everything" to do with Chapman's investigation, she said, including the participation of some "pretty random people" from her deep past.
"She knew every single person who was going to talk to me. Somehow I guess everyone was polite enough to check in with her before they talked to me.
"She didn't stop people from talking to me so there's that. But I was definitely going 'Oh gosh'. You know when you think that you're doing something really secretive and you find out that someone's been watching you the whole time."
Ardern could not have disapproved too much of the final product, though, Chapman said, and she later sent her a photo of her dad reading A New Kind of Leader.
"I think his review was that it was very well researched so I guess that's about as high a compliment as you can expect having not spoken to her for any of it."
Madeleine Chapman played:
'Lace Covered Window' by The New Faces
This 1967 hit reminds Chapman of being "a very, very small child".
"My mum used to just sing it all the time in the kitchen. I never even heard the actual song. All I heard was her singing the three lines that she knew.
"It wasn't until I got older I thought I should actually look up what that song is and it's a great song."
'Never Let Me Go' by Florence and The Machine
When Florence and The Machine's second album Ceremonials came out in 2012, Chapman was in her last year of high school and would drive herself to cricket or basketball training playing the CD loud and sing along.
"It all felt very like, this is what the movies are like. I have freedom. I'm doing what I want, I'm listening to what I want. It felt like the beginning of me realising potentially what my own specific music taste is."
'Love U 4 Life' by Jodeci
"As soon as this comes on I go 'Oh yes, I could sing this. I could sing this easy'.
"I kind of get transported back to being a 10-year-old, you know, sitting in my 25-year-old brother's bedroom while he just kind of played us his music.
"It was just a regular thing to just go 'Oh, he's home. Let's all go and sit around his room.' You didn't say anything. What do a 25-year-old and a 10-year-old talk about? You wouldn't really say anything. You would just kind of hang out."
Teeks and the kapa haka group Ngā Tūmanako performing 'Te Ahi Kai Pō' by Ria Hall at the 2018 Silver Scroll Awards
Chapman had never heard this Ria Hall song before Teek's "stunning" live cover version. Now she keeps a YouTube tab open constantly to watch the video.
As someone who cannot work while listening to music with English lyrics, 'Te Ahi Kai Pō' on loop was for a long time her writing soundtrack.
"If I had to write a story, which was most days, I would just put it on, click the loop button and it would just play for eight or nine hours on repeat. Maybe not a sane thing to do, but it just became [my soundtrack] for about a year."
'Heaven' by Talking Heads
Chapman had "comprehensively" burnt herself out and recently resigned as a full-time Spinoff writer when she fell in love with this 1979 Talking Heads song - lyrics first, music second.
"The lyrics are 'Heaven is a place where nothing happens'. I was like 'what a joy, what a beautiful sentiment'. And then got really into it and then subsequently got very into just Talking Heads in general."
The live version of this song from the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense is Chapman's funeral song, no less.
"I don't want to be someone who has a song called 'Heaven' at their funeral, which feels like somehow real cringe. But it is just a beautiful song and I could listen to it endlessly."
'Naked In Manhattan' by Chappell Roan
"She is like a rare pop star who people try to resist getting hooked as long as they can and then just find themselves back in it.
"The lyrics in the song are cool. It's like there's a lot of resistance and there's a lot of tension. You wouldn't expect perhaps the biggest pop star in the world to be writing music that's this on the nose and honest and horny."
For Chapman - "a person who realised they were gay much later than everyone else in their life knew they were gay" - Roan's proud gayness is a beautiful thing.
"If I had heard Chappell Roan while driving myself to cricket practice I would have maybe come to some realisations a little bit earlier, which might have saved me some inner turmoil in my 20s."
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