I loved The Mutton Birds, a New Zealand band who spent some time in London in the late 1990s. This interview with their singer Don McGlashan was done around the corner from Virgin Records. It appeared in Mojo, July 1997.

When you’ve sold a record to nearly every human being in New Zealand, argues Don McGlashan, there is nobody left except the sheep. Then again, since they’re sheep, you’d only have to interest one of them because the rest would follow anyway… As a marketing plan it’s magnificent, yet somehow flawed. Fortunately for his band, The Mutton Birds’ Don McGlashan is profoundly better at songwriting than at marketing.
    Failing the woolly embrace, he says, a top New Zealand band would normally move on to Australia. “Then they get beaten up. The Australian music scene is not all that friendly to New Zealand music. Crowded House were generally considered to be an Australian band so they didn’t figure in that equation.” The Mutton Birds were spared this fate when a three-month visit to England turned to an indefinite stay, thanks to interest from Virgin Records. The band’s two “platinum” NZ albums (sales of 15,000 each) were compiled into a 1995 set called Nature, followed this month by the UK-recorded Envy Of Angels. Carrying the recent single Come Around, their new record is lean and tuneful, bright with harmonies and guitars, yet with a darker undercurrent of melancholia. McGlashan believes it’s something to do with coming from the edge of the world.
    “There is a thread running through a lot of New Zealand songs that is a fear of falling off the edge. You’re so far away from the centre of things that you might disappear and nobody would know. A lot of my songs seem to involve driving along, looking at the countryside with ambivalent feelings. It’s a strange place because it’s apparently very normal, but there’s a sense of the absurd. The whole Anglo-Saxon part was conceived as a bit of Britain miles away from Britain, so the idea of being an outpost, rather than a real place, is somewhere in everybody’s psyche. There is that sense of being marginal, of being from nowhere.”
    McGlashan’s own ancestors left their farm in Scotland, unable to pay the rent. And in the jangling beauty of The Mutton Birds’ music there is often something unsettling. One song, The Heater, has a man talking to a domestic appliance. There are tales of rural suicides. McGlashan’s original manifesto was: “Write about ordinary things – cars, streets, gunshop owners, mad people on the street. Use well worn phrases that make you shudder.” He draws inspiration from the neat suburbs of Auckland, “where you express yourself through your choice of car-port roof rather than through words.”
    He’s also worked in theatre groups and with film maker Jane Campion, hence the narrative strength of his own songs. “Wherever you’re from, you’re writing about your childhood. Overt or covert, you write about the place that surrounds you. We also come from a long line of New Zealand bands who are strummy and jangly and have somewhere in their record collections The Byrds, Neil Young, Big Star and the Velvets. The major consideration when we formed was finding the centre of each song.”
    A reluctant exile, McGlashan liked the freedom New Zealand gave him as a young writer. There isn’t the crippling hipness of Britain, nor the forlorn craving for fame. “If you do the wrong thing, you’re denied fame. But fame in New Zealand is not something that anybody worries about, because it’s a small thing anyway. The Prime Minister flies around the country on domestic flights and probably does his own shopping in the supermarket.” Pausing at our restaurant table, the Kiwi waitress hears Don’s accent, correctly guesses he’s a Mutton Bird, and declares him a real “Jafa”, just like her.
    A Jafa? Even McGlashan looks puzzled.
   “Oh, you know,” replies his starry-eyed admirer. “Just Another Fucking Aucklander.”