The bad news is that Bic Runga is on crutches. The New Zealand-born singer hurt her leg climbing some stairs onto the stage at a recent French gig (yes, the show went on) and is now hobbling precariously round the kitchen of the north London house that she’s borrowed while she has another go at persuading us to love her as much as her compatriots do.
The good news is that Runga’s next single, Get Some Sleep, has just been added to Radio 2’s playlist. With the power of the nation’s taste-making station behind her, Runga should go at least some way towards emulating her extra- ordinary success back in New Zealand, where she’s the biggest-selling local artist of all time, and where her albums head straight to the top of the charts and stay there.
Radio 2 isn’t the first to be struck by the sublime pop of Get Some Sleep. In 2003, when its parent album, Beautiful Collision, was released, we picked Get Some Sleep as one of the Sunday Times Songs of the Year. The song is informed by Runga’s unusual status — huge in New Zealand, little known elsewhere. The verses are a blur of images from her life touring America — taxis, radio shows, interviews. “When you’re touring, you tend to have the same day over and over again, and I think the song sounds like that,” says Runga, who is friendlier and funnier than her somewhat aloof-looking album-cover shots suggest. “Sometimes, when I’m playing it live, I get lost in it. It’s a bit of a Bermuda triangle: when I’m at the third chorus, I still think I’m at the first one.”
The chorus revolves around the line “I do believe I might be having fun”, a telling comment from someone who admits: “I’ve only had fun in hindsight. My memories are quite fun, but at the time I was never having a good time. If you don’t live in the moment ” The sentence tails off, suggesting that this is a skill that Runga has yet to acquire, a thought underlined by the fact that Runga once told an interviewer: “I sometimes feel like getting a job, not because I need the money, but because then I wouldn’t be bored.” How many pop stars with No 1 records can we think of whose fantasy is getting a proper job? If Runga hasn’t quite got the hang of being happy, she’s certainly mastered the art of writing songs that can make other people feel pretty good. Get Some Sleep is the kind of song you simply have to sing along with. The shimmering guitar, the bouncing bass, the invincible chord sequence: all lead inevitably to the killer backing vocals. I suggest that it recalls Out of Time-era REM. Runga was looking further back for inspiration. “It was always written as a Mamas and Papas song, with the call-and-response backing vocals.” She launches into California Dreamin’ — “All the leaves are brown ... all the leaves are brown” — then concedes: “I think REM probably listened to a lot of Mamas and Papas too.”
Great backing vocals are a feature of Beautiful Collision. Many of them are provided by New Zealand’s best known musical export, former Crowded House front man Neil Finn. “I played him the tapes. He said: ‘This song’s finished, this song you need to replace the guitar, this song’s almost finished, but let me do some backing vocals.’ He was very generous with his time. He came to my house and put a load of piano and guitar on things, and said, ‘Keep what you want, I’m not precious.’ I said, ‘Okay, Neil Finn.’” This is said in the kind of tone of voice that one might have said “Okay, Picasso” if the artist had at some time offered you a drawing with the words: “It’s just a scribble — throw it away, if you want.”
Runga didn’t just get good advice and some usable backing tracks from Finn. She also used some of the musicians from his backing band, including Joey Waronker (whose CV includes a spell with REM), who laid down the drum tracks in Los Angeles. The bass was added in New York and the rest of the tracks were recorded in New Zealand. “It was a stupid way to make a record,” says Runga. “Dumb, dumb, dumb!” Runga’s studio-hopping contributed to a lengthy gestation period for Beautiful Collision, which didn’t appear until five years after her debut, Drive. The first two years were spent promoting Drive. “But over the next three years, I never stopped trying to make a record,” says Runga. “I started one and got quite far down the track with it, then aborted the whole thing. Tried again, then turned back to some of the old tapes. Then just lost my mind over it.
Because three years is too long to spend thinking about anything. Then, at the end of it, I won the award for Producer of the Year. Which was a joke, because I was way over budget and way over deadline, which are the two things a producer’s supposed to stop happening.”
Runga is a little cagey about the album she aborted. But further ferreting reveals that she originally tried to make an album with her songs over drum’n’bass rhythms. “It wasn’t me. It was just fashion. Thank God I figured that out eventually.”
Shorn of any fashionable rhythms, Beautiful Collision is full of music that simply demands to be described as “good old- fashioned songwriting”. Listening for the Weather (surely the follow-up single) has a melody that calls to mind the Carpenters, with a little edge added by a fragile harmonica solo; the title track is a Björk-ish ballad; Precious Things is a vocal tour de force that should have Massive Attack booking Runga for a guest spot on their next album (if they make one); Something Good offers an injection of uncharacteristic optimism; and The Be All and End All is a country waltz enhanced by judiciously placed Neil Finn overdubs.
“That song was inspired by hearing Are You Lonesome Tonight on the radio,” says Runga. “I know a lot of people really wish commercial radio could sound like that — that space. I mean space between notes. I really miss space in songs. Especially on commercial radio. Everything’s so compressed, everything’s one volume, no dynamics. That’s the thing that will guide me when I make my next album — just trying to achieve that space.”
Bic Runga plays the Scala, N1, on Wednesday. Get Some Sleep is released on Sony on March 8
www.sonymusic.co.uk/bicrunga
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