.
Casserly had been a drummer, Tierney had some skills as a keyboard player, but both were less interested in live performing than in what could be achieved in a studio with the technology available.
This was DIY recording, but with a different approach – and a very different result – from the minimalist and punkishly independent recordings of someone like Chris Knox .
Mark Tierney and Paul Casserly of Strawpeople.
Simon Grigg
Tierney and Casserly were inspired by the dance music and electronica coming out of Britain and the US, which made use of drum machines, samples, loops and synthesisers.
They were also jazz fans and curious to find ways of combining some of the classic acoustic jazz they listened to with contemporary urban beats.
Although the bFM studio was relatively primitive, by using a combination of borrowed equipment and Kiwi ingenuity, they put together their first completed tracks.
Naming themselves after the group of Scottish pagans in the ’70s cult classic The Wicker Man , and seeing themselves more as producer/engineers than songwriter/musicians, Strawpeople’s first release was a bubbling, funky remake of The Swingers’ early ’80s guitar banger ‘One Good Reason’.
Paul Casserly, Merinia and Mark Tierney of Strawpeople in 1990.
Simon Grigg
On vocals was Merenia (Urewarewa) – a husky-voiced teenager from Whakatāne who’d been recommended to Tierney and Casserly by Trevor Reekie of independent label Pagan.
Pagan would release a second Strawpeople album, Worldservice , in 1992. Again, the flagship single was an inventive remake of someone else’s song; this time from the American roots artist John Hiatt, whose ‘Have A Little Faith In Me’ was given a soulful makeover by local singer (and future Shortland Street star) Stephanie Tauevihi.
An early version of Strawpeople – Mark Tierney, Stephanie Tauevihi and Paul Casserly.
Supplied
By now, listeners were starting to catch on. Strawpeople were getting airplay, and not just on the student stations.
And while there was still some puzzlement around the fact that the group didn’t perform live – and, beyond that, didn’t even seem to have a fixed line-up – they were in many ways the local vanguard of a global trend: studio-based groups, often just duos or trios, such as Massive Attack and Portishead , whose focus was on creating not just catchy songs but taking their listeners on sonic adventures.
For their third album, Strawpeople were signed to major label Sony, and with a bigger budget and eyes on a possible international market, they set about completing new material as well as revisiting some of the standout tracks from Worldservice .
This would be the album that was eventually released as Broadcast.
Fiona McDonald and Paul Casserly of Strawpeople.
Simon Grigg
It was Stephanie Tauevihi who sang the album’s first single, a creative reimagining of ‘Under The Milky Way’, originally by Australian psych-rockers The Church . The album also included a re-recording of ‘Have A Little Faith In Me’ with Stephanie singing.
But the very first voice you hear on the album is that of Fiona McDonald . Fiona already had a high profile as the singer of Headless Chickens ‘ top ten hit from 1991, ‘Cruise Control’, and she would later become a full-time member of that group.
‘Crying’ isn’t just a haunting track. It represented a leap in confidence and creativity for Strawpeople as songwriters. Where the original material on the earlier albums would sometimes be more little more than instrumental collages with vocals often borrowed from movie soundtracks or radio interviews, ‘Crying’ was a real song with a well-crafted lyric.
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Leza Corban sang what would become the album’s most successful song of all, ‘Sweet Disorder’, which went on to win the 1995 Silver Scroll Award for its composers, Mark Tierney, Paul Casserly, and Anthony Ioassa of the R&B trio Grace.
But there were still more – and even more unexpected – successes to come from Broadcast .
‘Wings Of Desire’ – named after a Wim Wenders film that was a favourite of Mark and Paul’s, was picked up and prominently used in the soundtrack to another international film, Gus Van Sant’s 1995 black comedy To Die For .
Now more than 30 years old, Broadcast has held up remarkably well.
As Mark Tierney said in an interview with Audioculture , “You could remaster most of the Broadcast era, with a pinch of Worldservice , put three younger, cooler people on the artwork and release it to positive reviews today.”
