Dalvanius Prime interview, 1991

‘Poi E’ wins the award for the best Polynesian recording, 1984. Dalvanius with lead singer Hui Kahu.

June/July 1991 issue #4, p31-32, published in Scope magazine by Cadre Communications, Editors: Jim Scott, Mark Cubey, Michael Lockhart. Digitised by Wellington Libraries in 2022, see more. It's a great snapshot of Welli life in the early 1990s.

PRIME and Prejudice

Dalvanius Prime has been around the New Zealand music scene for a long time, and he seems to have the ability to play the music industry at its own game. His latest musical offering is the soundtrack to Barry Barclay’s latest film, Te Rua. Tired of just doing film soundtracks he has a film about shrunken Maori heads called Moko in the pipeline; also on the horizon is a musical of the classic Patea Maori Club hit “Poi E”. SCOPE caught up with the big man at the Deluxe....

Your latest single “Chudka Pa Poy” is based on an Api Taylor poem. How much are you influenced by other people’s work?

I've always been a collaborator. Mostly when I write in English I write by myself but in this case because it was used in Te Rua, John O’Shea (Te Rua producer) said I bet you can’t write a song called “Chudka Papoy Ugh Cha Cha”. Because the Maori struggle in the film about the carvings is the same type of struggle that other indigenous people have, I based the rest of the lyrics on that type of kaupapa. I wouldn't say it is a Maori kaupapa really, it’s more African flavoured, because the characters in the film sought the assistance of the African embassies. And so I leant more towards that type of lyric. There is one line “Apartheid is dead, freedom is in sight’, a lot of people have asked me why did you write that, and I say cultural apartheid is just as bad as racial apartheid, and so it could be either way. I tend to write songs with lyrics like that, you can... like the Maori language, that has maybe one word which means about three things and I try to make my lyrics that way too.

You did the Ngati soundtrack as well, which is the better film?

I will always have a soft spot for Ngati. Ngati was very rural and less cluttered. It had a lot of space to it. If I did the ending of Te Rua it would have been a bit different because I get a bit tired of seeing us portrayed as victims, even though we are. There is a question left unanswered: “Did they get the carvings back?” You don’t know really.

I heard you were a bit pissed off at some of the musical editing in the film?

Well I was in a way. I was hurt because the music was relegated to “lift” music. Barry [Barclay] kept everything apart from a few stings which were very “Predatorish”, but they turned down the only Maori lyric song in the whole thing.

Where was that?

That's exactly what I say, where was that? The style in movies these days is that when there is a bit of action and no dialogue, is that the music pumps up very loud and I wanted the music to pump up loud especially in that part of the film where they‘re all sitting round contemplating whether they are going to go to jail. Peter Sharp is wondering whether he is going to sign the charter and the nanny in the tribe is standing on the hillside wondering what is going to happen, so it is a very poignant moment. And because we had spent so many hours working on this heavy Wagner/ Schubert type piece, I was a bit peed off that it wasn’t heard louder. And also everything I’ve ever done in the Maori language has been quite adventurous and I thought this piece which is an aria written by myself and a Maori lyricist called Ngamaru Reirero, he is one of New Zealand’s foremost lyricists, and when he heard it he was so disappointed that it had been turned down. Otherwise I’m very happy with the rest of the soundtrack.

Will you do more Barclay scores?

I don’t know, it depends on whether he wants me to.

Recently there was a headline in Truth about you sleeping with the dead. What was that all about?

I've always been into Egyptology. I have this bedroom which is done out in Egyptian antiquities. I’ve always been into pyramids, into mummies, astrology, palm reading, reflexology, biorhythms, the whole lot. That was what that article was all about, it says I sleep with the dead; well, I mean you know what it is like with Truth. But then again, all of us, like Maoris especially, we do sleep with our ancestors, and that is the way that article was supposed to have read but of course with Truth... but I got a front page and that’s advertising. They said, do you sleep with the dead? I said, I don’t think, I know I do. I have dreams about things and they happen.

For example?

I had a dream that I was going to be singing with a real black bitch, meaning not as in dog bitch, meaning a woman who was really bitchy. And that woman turned out to be Shirley Bassey. I told my clairvoyant Jackie St Cloud, I’ve been going to her for fifteen years now, and she described the woman having things in her hair. Anyway the Patea Maori Club and I did a royal command performance in Scotland, and we were rehearsing and it came our rehearsal time. Shirley Bassey had taken up all our rehearsal time, we were sitting in the wings waiting for Shirley Bassey to finish, when she finally came off stage I looked in her hair, and there were rollers in it. I told Jackie about her, and she said I bet she was a real bitch, and I said, yip, she was.

It seems a bit strange performing for the Queen. Doesn't she stand for everything that is anti Maori?

I weighed it up, in fact a lot of club members didn’t want to go. In our contract it said that we were to sing in Maori, not in English and I looked at it from that aspect. We got criticised, when we were there. One of the big frames came down and injured two of our people and I thought, oh god, should we be here? It wasn’t without its moments. But then I saw it as vehicle for ourlanguage to be heard. As I have always said to the Patea Maori Club, we are not the stars of this show, the Maori language is. That's what I said to John O'Shea about the aria, the film, it was the Maori language that was the star. And that was the attitude that I took when we went over fo Scotland.

In 1980 you went back to school to learn Maori, are you the Maori version of a born again?

lam a born again. I have no desire to further my knowledge of the Maori language. I have other priorities. To learn Maori in the last ten years has become profitable for some people. I am a text book Maori, I learnt for me so I would feel better in the studio when I was doing waiata. I have had people coming up to me saying you shouldn’t do this because you can’t speak the language. I don’t want to stand on the marae and be a great orator, that’s not my trip. My trip is to capture on record things I believe in. I feel comfortable with what I do. I believe in breaking barriers down, not putting them up.

Are you a disciple of Mana Motuhake?

I don’t have political beliefs, but I believe in the concept of Mana Motuhake. You asked the question before, why did you go and sing for the Queen. You never saw the press we got over there, but there were things like a front page article in the main Scottish paper where I talked about basically how we'd gone back from the freezing works which had controlled all of our lives, and all of a sudden out economic sustenance was taken away. We had to revert back to what we did first and that was back to the land. For the first time on the marae carvings started appearing. It was a great thing, I celebrated it; the instances of wife beating and sexual abuse all went down. If you can imagine a man beating and pulling off skin from carcasses all day, and then going back and beating up on his wife, imagine the emotional and physical strain those women went through. And so it was the greatest thing that ever happened. I celebrated.

Is the Patea community still quite strong?

Um... it’s very strong, but it’s sort of like a retirement settlement now, an older element is coming in now. But there are the real stalwarts who are staying and hoping something is going to happen. Millions of dollars of government money went through that town, I am talking about unemployment money, but nothing ever came out of it. That was because it was controlled by a handful of real smart cookies, who had made their living on the misery of our people, and continue to do so today, they've just moved to another town... Hawera... hah, hah. It's still the same key players. The same people the Labour government used, the National government are using the same people to deliver those Access schemes etc, with no or minimal accountability.

I believe the Pakeha has a lot to answer for but then I also believe I am not going to carry on and make a new generation of Pakeha people suffer for what their forefathers did, I'm not one of those Maoris. If I am going to say my politics, I'll say it through my songs. With “Chudka Pa Poy”, I had a lot of criticism from Maori people who said what are those boongas doing in that video.

You mean Pacific Islanders?

No they said boongas, they didn’t say Pacific Islanders. One guy up in Auckland just about walloped me, I said fuck off, who are you, you do it your way. I said what do we all say when we die: Haere ki Hawaiiki nui, Hawaiiki o Hawaiiki Pa Ma Mau. I said where the fuck’s that mate, it’s right in the middle of coconut country as far as I’m concerned. That’s my politics and I’ve got heaps of Pacific Island friends and heaps of Indian friends or whatever, for me it is not a priority. If you want to write about coconuts going back to coconut land, you write your own song and see how far you go. I said to him the fact that Samoa was once governed by Germans, you couldn’t possibly see the connection between “Chudka Pa Poy” and Samoa, could you? I used Polynesian rhythms right in the middle even though you probably don’t hear it. I said to this guy, and he is a very famous Maori musician, who I won't name, and I said you go and write your own shit, I don’t have a problem with it, but you do, obviously.

The German museum used in the film has the worlds largest ant collection, another link fo the song. [The Api Taylor poem “Chudka Pa Poy” is about Reihana the ant shifting a mountain to get fo his loved one.]

Some of the things in the museum were amazing. The museum also had one of the largest collections of prehistoric dinosaurs. I'm really saddened that Barry didn’t utilise some of those visual things. But as he said to me, it is actors who are acting, but you would never know you were in Berlin. Shit we were there when they were tearing down the Berlin wall. But as I’ve said you don’t criticise other people’s work, you do your own.

How did you get the name Dalvanius?

My real name is Maui Karari Paraimu... Prime. My father was in Crete in the Second World War and on the first day of action he got wounded so he never saw any action really. He was taken to hospital and met a Greek guy there called Dalvanius, and he nicknamed me after him.

What is a Maori song?

For me if it is sung by a Maori and if it is sung from the heart of a Maori, whether it is in English or in Maori. You know how sometimes you can go in to see an artist perform and that artist communicates and that is very rare with some people. That artist can communicate in two ways, emotionally from the heart or they can communicate in a physical reaction which is rhythmic. I pay my rent by singing 50s rock’n’roll and I mean that sincerely. I sing Fats Domino etc, not because I have to but because I love those songs. Tui Teka was the true multi-media Maori artist because whether he sang in Maori or English he communicated, so for me Tui Teka was a very rural roots Maori singer and entertainer. 

On the other flip of the coin Ricky May was also a very emotional entertainer, but he was an entertainer of technique. But he was a Maori musician, he put the Maori thythm into what he was doing. I think what a lot of our fundamentalist Maoris do is say this is Maori and I will put a Maori perspective into this, because one, it is expected, very vogue at the moment, two, it takes care of my consciousness, which is very urban influenced. So for me a description of what a true Maori artist is, it is like art, you don’t talk about art, you paint pictures. You don’t talk about music you sing it. IF you communicate as an artist as a singer, if someone gets moved by you, whether it is in English or whether it is in Maori, it is irrelevant, for me anyway. This is my song, this is the way I feel. It’s like anything in life; if it Functions for you, that’s what's important, but if it functions for a whole lot of people and they all get moved at the same time, that’s art, that’s true communication. 

I didn’t like the way “Chudka Pa Poy” was used three times in the film because for me, you know I wrote that song in ten minutes in Berlin on a ukelele, I write all my songs on a ukelele. I went and saw this African band, and I just started ripping off their rhythms basically, and people say okay, the guy from Rip It Up says, but you wouldn't call it Maori music. And I says why not, I'm a Maori, I wrote it. He says but it isn’t, what is the Maori sound, and I said as far as I’m concerned if you want to be fundamentalist and you're talking to me like a fundamentalist, and he was white, right, I said you are trying to pinpoint and find a so-called Maori sound and that is fundamentalism as far as I am concerned, My analysis of Maori music is your chants, your hakas, your waiatas, your really old uris and all those things, and all of those were performed in one note, there were no harmonies, music, guitars, instrumentation... they were a post- colonial influence, so the music I create would be a hybrid of that type of influence from my ancestors or from other musicians but if I wanted to be a real fundamentalist then I would be singing the basics and after an hour unless you are totally immersed on it on a marae for me it would be a bit much.

In the contemporary music department what do you like?

I've always been Kiwi. My ultimate Kiwi hero is Midge Marsden, his new album shows a maturity. I like rap, then I like Wagner, if I'm in a downer I like Schubert. I like Pavarotti, people like that. When the Headless Chickens came out, they were a totally original innovative band. In the local scene at the moment Adeva 2, they are really good even though they are very top 40, covers, but there is nothing wrong with covers. Moana and the Moa Hunters... 

Two women you have worked with are both lawyers, Moana and Kara Peiwhairangi. Do you like working with lawyers?

I just like working with women. I like women who have strong Maori politics. People say I’m not political, I say I am, do you know what the lyrics of the songs are about? Do you know what the political struggle to get them made is about? Everything Moana had made up until “Black Pearl” was done in the Maori language, which was politically important for us, but when she had a hit with “Black Pearl”, for me she compromised her politics, but it functioned for her.

What happened to Kara Peiwhairangi? “Haere Mai” is a classic; is she still singing? 

She fell in love and went over to Australia, I believe she’s back now and recording again. “Haere Mai” for me was a really emotional experience. You said what is Maori music? I'll go back, Maori music is for me, there have been songs where at the finish I have been reduced to tears when they finish, for me, that is Maori music. That happened with the aria from Te Rua, that happened with “Haere Mai”, it happened with “Poi E”.