UPSIDE DOWN UNDER: The Verlaines' Poetic License
by Karen Schoemer (Option Magazine No. 20, May/June 1988)

A little print of a painting by the Russian artist Marc Chagall sits on the wall of my room. In the painting a man with a green face holds up a sprig of flowers to a blue-maned horse; in the background, across the crest of a hill, is a row of houses, some of which are upside down. Every time I look at that painting I think about those houses and wonder why Chagall painted them upside down. I'm glad they're upside down, but I'm not sure why I'm glad or why Chagall made them the way they are. So I look away and forget about it for a while, but those upside down houses gestate in the back of my brain. I figure sometime, somewhere down the road, without any warning, I'm going to realize that at last I understand why they are the way they are.

It's the same thing with the Verlaines. Their songs are full of upside down houses: shifting tempos, counter-melodies, strange instrumentation that I can't quite explain, but I'm sure glad are there.

Graeme Downes founded the Verlaines in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1980. A schoolkid whose first love was classical music, Downes wanted a band that would embrace rock's punkish abandon and rugged expression without forsaking the structural tenets and romantic lyricism he had learned from favorite composers such as Mahler, who is currently the study of his doctoral thesis. "I like rock music," he explains, "and I like what I think I can do with it, which is basically bring the two of them together a bit more. I think there's really a lot of bad rock! I think a lot of people that are listening to it are looking for something more distinctive, something that's going to hopefully stick around for more than a couple of months and then disappear forever. And," he adds, "it's a good ground for using techniques and things that are rude."

Downes handles lead vocals, guitar, and the occasional oboe; the bass and drum lineup see-sawed until roughly 1982, when Jane Dodd logged in as permanent bassist. Alan Haig, on loan from the Chills, filled in on drums for about a year and was replaced by Rob Yeats, who balances out the trio today. Downes does most of the songwriting and arranging, except the drum parts. "Quite often I end up teaching the song to Robbie before I teach it to Jane, and he tends to do what he feels is applicable. The drums turn out a little bit more jazzy than rock sometimes, because he's trying to hit some of the offbeat accents that are on the guitar, as opposed to providing a beat, as it were. So from the start the traditional rhythm section doesn't quite work."

As for the other parts, Downes admits that he "basically dictates," especially when the band records with outside players on strings, horns or woodwinds. "I have parts all written out, complete, so it's just a case of any session musicians reading through the notes themselves, as opposed to consulting and talking out what they're going to play. It doesn't take very long, which is a real advantage, because it means we can do a lot of things very quickly in the studio and not waste too much time and money."

In 1982 the Verlaines recorded three tracks for a four-band showcase called The Dunedin Double EP on the New Zealand indie label Flying Nun. Primitive production only marginally obscured the well-refined tendencies that would become the band's trademark: jousting rhythms and dynamics, carefully fettered by Downes' omnipresent electric guitar clang and often splayed into chaotic crescendos.

By the end of the year Flying Nun had released a single, "Death and the Maiden", backed by an unnamed lengthy second track which would later resurface on a later Verlaines LP. The A-side enchanted ears with its brisk, jangly riffing and peppy singalong chorus "Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine," trammeled midway by a sturdy round of cheesy carnival oompah. Coincidentally, a song in a string quartet by Schubert, also titled "Death and the Maiden," has "nothing at all to do with" Downes' incantation, and references to French Symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud and band namesake Paul Verlaine are "tongue-in-cheek. I just found the image to be an interesting one, the image of innocence, and not knowing how to handle it, and facing some of the hairier issues that come along with maturity. The song was written a long time ago, toward the end of adolescence, really. I haven't read much Verlaine," adds Downes somewhat apologetically. "I like Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot."

"I usually start with the music, and finish that as a song, but I know approximately what it's supposed to be about. I know what the words have to sound like, 'cause that's important. The words have a musical quality of their own. You work around with what the music sort of says it wants. I usually have an idea of the meaning, but you've got to try and say that meaning and create nice sounds with the words. So I have to try to say what I mean, but make it sound good. It's almost like poetry. Consequently it takes me ages to write lyrics. For lyrics, too, there's influences of people like Dylan, Randy Newman, or great lyricists in rock music who've probably read through the same poetry, when it comes down to it."

1984 saw the release of Ten O'Clock in the Afternoon, an EP whose six songs showed Downes mucking about even more drastically with structures and dynamics, especially in the butchered hysterics of "Burlesque". Meanwhile tracks such as "Windsong" and "Joed Out", with its ashen acoustics, contrast with the others in their simplicity. (The Verlaines oeuvre up to this point has been collected under the heading Juvenilia, and was released by Flying Nun overseas and Homestead in the U.S.)

The Verlaines' first full-length album, 1985's Hallelujah All the Way Home, evidenced medieval accents ("Don't Send Me Away"), tempered moralizing ("All Laid On"), and more complex instrumental orchestrations ("The Lady and the Lizard"). Graeme: "We miscalculated a little bit with Hallelujah, 'cause the sound is a bit middly and thick. I wasn't very confident in arranging at the time, and especially not high instruments to give it a bit of color and lightness in places. So the playing and the sound and the other instruments that are bordered all tend to be doing middle range; it tends to a very middly sound. I think the songs on Hallelujah are good. They're a little depressing, some of them, gloomy maybe. But they're supposed to be; I was trying to write something that was that way."

One of Hallelujah's songs, "The Lady and the Lizard," even has a passage which alludes to a classical composer who occasionally sets his own poems to music: "Nobody, nobody at all risked going down to get up any higher. I listened to Mahler, looked over my shoulder..." "That image is a private one, and no one else is going to understand what it means," elaborates Downes. ""The Lady and the Lizard" is probably one of the more personal songs, in a way... it's just a reference. Mahler's been around in my music listening for quite a long time, since I was a young teenager, really."

This year, the Verlaines release their second album, Bird-Dog, on Flying Nun (Homestead in the U.S.), a more cohesive and focused effort than Hallelujah, if every bit as cunningly unpredictable. The band doesn't tour much. "We're all pretty busy with our own lives," Downes says, "and we live in different parts of the country at the moment, which doesn't help. We're amateurs being as professional as we can afford to be as far as playing and recording are concerned, but we don't make a living from it. That's the way it goes." Being a rock musician, though perhaps more economically feasible than composing symphonies, has its limitations.

Overall Downes seems quite pleased with the way the new album turned out as compared to Hallelujah: "Much better production; I think it sounds better. My vocals are better -- I've become more proficient at singing in the studio in the time between. Mainly our ability to use the technology better and arrange things better -- that's the difference. It's a bit brighter all around, the kind of songs and the sound."

Bird-Dog includes a new version of the "Death and the Maiden" B-side, the epic and exhilarating "C.D. Jimmy Jazz and Me". "When we did it the first time it was too long and too complicated for us to play," explains Downes. "We were doing it back then with really primitive technology. I didn't know enough about music to write good arrangements, so it's sort of like stringing the guitar lines and the oboe lines along and seeing what happened. The pressing in New Zealand was all scrunched up; the cutting plant scrunched up all the grooves so that it was actually shorter than the A-side in terms of vinyl space. They made a seven-minute song about three minutes wide, so that it lost what little good sound quality it had. The song irritated the hell out of me. But as things progressed I thought that was probably one song out of all the early stuff that I knew fell well short of what it could or should be. The first version was recorded between the hours of two and six in the morning in a four-track studio. This one I took about a day and a half to do all the recording and overdubbing on a 24-track, and about a day to mix it."

Asked what the new LP's title track was really about, Downes said, "It's just a story about someone's decline, really, in a moral or physical sense, essentially going to the dogs! The bird and the dog are two different symbols; it's a negative-positive thing, I suppose. The bird ends up being poisoned by the dog, and at the end it is a chorus of imaging the bird has come back when you're drunk. "Our love is imported German beer, they know how to make it over there, the bird returns to soothe my ear, our love is imported German beer." If you look through the lyrics again you'd probably be able to see that a lot easier: the split, the dichotomy between the dog and the bird, as to what one and the other symbolizes.

"A friend of mine that wasn't at all interested in my music said that reading through my lyrics, they seem very impressionistic," Downes says with a slight laugh. "Like they give you an impression of something, but they don't actually tell you anything definite."