A new five-part series on New Zealand music is screening on Prime TV throughout NZ Music Month.
Anthems: New Zealand’s Iconic Hits tells the story of New Zealand music through some of this country's biggest songs, and features musicians including Lorde, Dave Dobbyn, Bic Runga, Neil Finn and Anika Moa.
Someone had to make the hard calls on which songs should be included in the new Kiwi music doco Anthems: New Zealand’s Iconic Hits. That task fell to the show's producer, Julia Parnell, head of Notable Pictures.
Julia is uniquely qualified, having worked on a bunch of NZ music programmes including Prime TV documentaries on Dragon and The Exponents, and a new feature film on legendary Dunedin band The Chills. She’s currently putting together a new documentary on Kiwi superstars Six60.
Anthems: New Zealand’s Iconic Hits tells the story of New Zealand music through some of this country's biggest songs, including Th’ Dudes’ ‘Bliss’, Bic Runga’s ‘Drive’, The Mutton Birds’ ‘Dominion Road’, Lorde’s ‘Royals’ and Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Welcome Home’.
RNZ spoke to Julia ahead of the series, which screens on Sundays at 8.30pm on Prime TV.
Lynn Freeman: What makes a track like 'Welcome Home' more than just a great song?
Julia Parnell: It's one of our most beloved anthems and I think it sums up what it means to be a New Zealander.
The way we’ve used music to help us come together and heal after the Christchurch mosque attacks I think is the essence of what New Zealand music is.
It is who we are and certainly I'm driven to understand what the actual ingredients of those kind of magical pieces are, that make us fall in love so much with a song and take it into our hearts.
What are those elements?
We've had like 100 interviews with different people and I don't know that many of the artists really even knew how to answer that question!
But, I think... there's just some songs that we can put ourselves inside. It's kind of like ‘Welcome Home’, there's space in there for us to identify with, whether it's a sadness, whether it's bravery, whether it's joy, whatever.
I think those songs, and everyone that we have in the series – over 50 of them – each have something that we can connect with. It’s got a hook, a chorus, a message that we like, that we'd like to see reflected in our nation.
From ‘Chains’ to ‘French Letter’ or ‘Nature’ or ‘Bliss’ – they're just some of the songs – but they each have those ingredients I think. There is a hook there. There's a lyric that is Kiwi. The songs that have truly become anthemic, every one of them had something, a lyric or a hook that was special that we can connect with.
Was it hard to narrow down your list, or did the songs sing out to be chosen?
You know there's the obvious ones that you go to straight away. ‘Welcome Home’ is obviously one. ‘Victoria’, ‘Don't Dream It's Over’. But we really worked very closely with our artists. We wanted them to be them telling their own stories, giving us access to the behind-the-scenes of the making of their greatest hits.
So part of that was about letting the artists come forward and talk about the ones that they felt perhaps hadn't been discussed before. Songs they hadn't had the opportunity to really drill into, maybe with the benefit of hindsight, given that we haven't really seen anything like this for 15 years.
I think maybe people were ready to tell some of the stories they hadn't told before, but I don't know. We decided to make the series thematic – a different theme for each episode – so that did help.
And what are the themes that you've chosen?
The first that's going to air is ‘Live and Amplified’, which is kind of my favourite episode. It's got some killer footage of Shihad and the Dance Exponents, and especially talks about Dave Dobbyn coming forward as a front man of Th’ Dudes. It's got Lorde’s ‘Greenlight’ in there.
The next episode ‘Making a Hit’, that's our real songwriter's episode. We’ve got Bic Runga, we've got Scribe’s ‘Not Many’. There’s some really special archive around Scribe that people haven't seen before. Netherworld Dancing Toys and so on.
And then there’s the ‘Independent Spirit’ episode. It's not so much about the independent artists – of course they're recognized – but it's about the tenacity of the New Zealand spirit. Being an artist and creating a song against the odds… having no money.
‘Finding an Audience’ is about those songs that perhaps found their way into our consciousness, maybe by surprise, or through controversy. We've got Lorde in there talking about ‘Royals’ – that groundbreaking moment when that song just spread all around the world.
Then a big-hitter episode, which is ‘Taking the World Stage’, about the songs that have broken through internationally. Songs like ‘How Bizarre’, Split Enz’ ‘I See Red’, and Lorde’s ‘Greenlight’. Really in-depth stories about them.
Lorde is a pretty straight up young woman.
For us on Anthems, having Lorde in the series is a real privilege. She doesn't do interviews really unless it's around publicizing her work, and she came in and gave us three hours to talk about ‘Royals’ and ‘Greenlight’.
It was certainly one of my highlights of the series. We wanted to really explore how she's the instigator and the driver of her own career because I think maybe in the past there's been a sense that there's this man who's helping her or she's the co-writer. So I really wanted to put her in prime position.
We took her into Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios with a recording of ‘Greenlight’ and she actually breaks it open for us and talks about the most minute details of how she envisioned that song.
It blew me away. It absolutely blew me away.
I think people are going to fall in love with ‘Greenlight’ all over again once they understand a little bit more about how she wanted that song to be and how it's so in contrast with ‘Royals’.
‘Royals’ is very stripped back. It kind of cut through because there hadn't been anything like that in the pop charts before, but not long after it came out, everybody was making that kind of music. So Lorde had this challenge to write something new and fresh, and she wanted people to dance.
That's some of the behind-the-scenes story of ‘Greenlight’.
Watching the recent Aroha Nui concert, you see the audience singing to these songs. That response that musicians get from the audience – you explore that in the series.
Very much. The first episode ‘Live and Amplified’ is the probably the perfect example of that.
For me, it's Six60 that really shows how an audience and band come together. The Six60 story is really about a group of people learning how to interact with an audience and that magic moment when you kind of become one. The band is gone. It's just the free flow between an audience and an artist and it's a very, very special thing.
Anthems: New Zealand's Iconic Hits screens on Sundays at 8.30pm on Prime.
