Essential New Zealand Albums: Shona Laing – South

Shona Laing was just 17 when she had her first national hit with '1905' in 1972.

Fifteen years later, she was reintroducing herself as a different kind of artist with the 1987 album South.

In a career spanning more than five decades, Shona Laing has made albums that mark each stage of her musical life.

When South was released in 1987, Laing was already 15 years into a career that had begun with a TV talent quest that beamed the then-teenage singer-songwriter into all the nation's living rooms.

Laing followed this with a series of local hits, a long spell in Britain, including a stint with Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and her return to a New Zealand that had gone through some big cultural changes in her absence.

As Laing would later reflect, she entirely missed 'the Muldoon years'.

Though she was absent for the Springbok Tour protests of '81, Laing would later address the subject of apartheid on South, along with another issue that was emblematic of the 1980s - New Zealand's nuclear-free policy.

As a musician, Laing had gone through some changes of her own.

Last time the country heard from her, she was an acoustic guitar-strumming singer-songwriter.

One song in particular defined those early years. A hit even before she had finished high school, '1905' was a meditation on time, framed as an unsent letter to the American actor Henry Fonda, whose son Peter had recently co-written and starred in the film Easy Rider. Peter Fonda's sister Jane Fonda was a figurehead of the anti-war movement.

Laing may have been the only teenager in the world obsessing not over the young Fondas, but their father, whose heartthrob heyday had been in the 1940s.

'1905' was an early example of the unconventional angles at which Laing approaches her subjects, and which help make her songs so unique.

In 1972, '1905' was a top 5 hit for the 17-year-old Laing, but it touched on a theme that would recur in her songwriting more than a decade later: of America's cult of celebrity, the dominance of its imagery, and its influence on New Zealand.

This was something that stood out to her even more clearly after almost seven years away.

One of her new songs, '(Glad I'm Not) A Kennedy', became South's best-known track. Like '1905', it ruminates on a particular American type of fame, its promises and its perils.

Beyond the fact that, for a country as small as New Zealand, America's influence is impossible to ignore, there's a personal reason why America looms so large in Laing's writing, including being the subject of her two biggest local hits, as she explained in a 2022 interview with RNZ.

"You know all through my career people have said, 'Your songs are very personal, aren't they?' and I'd go, 'Well, actually no, I'm writing about the world here.'

"But I was writing about the world from a very personal place, which is my life. My father was going to the States when I was about three years old. He had a business importing things that New Zealand needed, because he met people during the war, and he had business relationships with America and Japan. So America was a thing in our family."

"Then [I spent] seven years in Britain, which at that time in the world was pretty much the core of anti-Americanism; they would take the mickey out of America, they had no respect.

"When I came home, I found the transition from New Zealand being more British than the British to just blatant American culture sprawled all over the place, shocking. So the fundamental physical, personal response to that was songs like 'America', 'Kennedy' and 'Neutral and Nuclear Free'."