Greg Fleming is one of our country's top songwriters, with a recording career that goes back almost three decades. William Dart catches up with his latest album, Same City.
Greg Fleming Photo: Ted Baghurst
Greg Fleming’s new album has me plucking up courage and venturing back almost 30 years to the Auckland songwriter’s first appearance on this programme. Dipping into his 1993 album, Ghosts are White, I’m re-discovering the hook that first snared my ear — a squirmy smudge of dissonance preparing the way for a tough if not too bumpy ride ahead in the song 'Mr Clive'.
It's a piece of classic song-writing. I’d use the word "textbook" except I’d hate to think of it being relegated to the graveyard of academic exercises. But it is a model. A situation is set up, with a striking character and a context, and then it’s filled out and shaded in with music, from those first unsettling stabs of dissonance to Clive raucously thanking his lucky stars he’s alive.
Back then, I had this image of Greg Fleming as a troubadour of the dark side of life but, two decades or so on, in his 2014 album Forget the Past, the singer revealed that he was willing to let some light and sunshine infiltrate the seriousness.
Not that all these new songs were anthems for a new Happiness Club. There were still numbers that didn’t pull their punches. One being the song 'Sleepless Kid' in which a youngster lies awake, as if it’s the only way of keeping his family together. As we’ve been made more aware of the blight of family violence over the last few years, it's a track that has become extraordinarily powerful.
But it was in this album that Fleming announced to the world that he’d discovered the joys of unbridled pop in songs that caught a world in which folks went about their carefree pre-lockdown lives.
'Summer in the City' may have borrowed its title from a Lovin' Spoonful hit, but musically it’s more of a homage to the Californian Wilson brothers, right down to its smooth vocal harmonies. Here, in Fleming’s vision of downunder summertime, the asphalt may be melting but, with the car windows wound up to keep the dust at bay, the only escape is to get behind the wheel and drive. I suspect that the writer of 'Little Deuce Coupe' and 'Fun Fun Fun' would have approved
Greg Fleming’s Forget the Past, with that breeziest of summertime escape songs, is now itself firmly in the past. Between 2015 and 2019 Greg Fleming albums would almost become annual events, with release after release confirming him as one our country’s finest and most individual songwriters.
And his latest outing, with the title of Same City, is a welcome reinforcement of his hard-earnt status.
Music Details
ARTIST: Greg Fleming
TITLE: Mr Clive
ALBUM: Ghosts are White
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Festival
ARTIST: Greg Fleming
TITLE: Sleepless Kid
ALBUM: Forget the Past
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Forget the Past
ARTIST: Greg Fleming
TITLE: Summer in the City
ALBUM: Forget the Past
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Forget the Past
ARTIST: Greg Fleming
TITLE: Working Poor Country
ALBUM: Working Poor Country
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Forget the Past
ARTIST: Greg Fleming and the Working Poor
TITLE: Gas Coffee Cigarettes and Gum
ALBUM: Same City
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Private
ARTIST: Greg Fleming and the Working Poor
TITLE: Tourists for a Day
ALBUM: Same City
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Private
ARTIST: Greg Fleming and the Working Poor
TITLE: Same City
ALBUM: Same City
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Private
ARTIST: Greg Fleming and the Working Poor
TITLE: Lucille
ALBUM: To Hell with These Streets
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Private
ARTIST: Greg Fleming and the Working Poor
TITLE: Lucille's Gotta Go Back Home
ALBUM: Same City
COMPOSER: Fleming
LABEL: Private
