NIKITA 雅涵 TU-BRYANT of KITA: Love Lies Here, Special Edition
An interview by Tim Gruar.
Hot off a summer jam-packed with festival shows, including SPLORE and WOMAD, Pōneke three-piece KITA are getting set to embark on their first headline tour since 2021. I recently had the opportunity to chat with lead singer Nikita 雅涵 Tu-Bryant about her current acting gigs, looking for love in their latest e.p, making movies with music, and seeking inspiration from a bedsit studio.
The last time I caught up with singer/ actor Nikita was in December last year as she was preparing with her bandmates, Moog master Ed Zuccollo (Zuke) and drummer Rick Cranson (Little Bushman, The Woods) for a crazy summer of festivals and silly seasonal mayhem.
This time, she’s hunkering down in seaside holiday village of Ōakura, just outside New Plymouth for some well-earned R’n’R after wrapping up more filming. Nikita has appeared in a number of high-profile productions on our screens lately including ‘Avatar: The Way Of The Water’, ‘Sister, Please’, ‘Close Enough’ and most recently the new TV show, ‘Far North’, about a meth drop that goes spectacularly south.
“It’s such a ridiculous story,” she says, speaking about the true story that inspired the TV show. “… the fact that they lost that much meth because of a comedy of errors. Some of the script is verbatim from interviews with customs officers. This actually happened. These guys are meant to be massive mastermind drug lords and they are just making mistakes left right and centre!“
The show, which airs on Monday nights on THREE or on demand on THREEnow, is a reconstruction of events that took place in 2016, when a local mechanic and his wife became involved in an international drug deal involving Chinese drug lords, Australian-Tongan smugglers and a cache of meth worth over half a billion dollars.
The story centres around the small coastal town of Ahipara, near Kaitaia, following Ed (Temuera Morrison) and Heather (Robyn Malcom) who, as good Samaritans, offer a bunch of rag-tag townies a hand to launch their boat into the rough waters off 90 Mile Beach and invertedly get dragged into the whirlpool of a record-breaking drug deal.
And did she get to meet actor Robyn Malcom? “No, we never meet her because if you see in the show, all of our storylines are so separate. We’re predominantly on a boat. But I did meet her at the cast and crew premier and she’s super lovely.”
Nikita goes on to tell me that much of the production was filmed on location in Ahipara. “But a lot of our scenes on a boat were filmed on a specially built set at South Pacific studios in Henderson, Tamaki Makaurau. Then we went to Hawkes Bay to shoot the outdoor boat scenes (with) 14-18 hours of shooting…some of us were really seasick, vomiting in between scenes [laughs]. Pretty gnarly!”
“What you see in the scene is minimal but behind the scenes are capacity people – all the camera, sound, lighting crew – all just pushed up against the wall shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek (and on a support boat there’s catering, safety people, hair and makeup, costumes, etc). But in front of the lens, we are acting – like we are the only people on the boat!” Such a contrast.
One of the funniest moments was during a tense scene when Nikita and another actor were desperately scouring the decks of their boat for water, dehydrated and clinging to life. “And at that moment, the boat’s captain, who’d never been on a set before, breaks the silence, loudly announcing to his crew mate: “Ow, there’s fucken’ fish over there!”. “We all cracked up. It took a while to get back into the zone after that.” Ah, the perils of filming on location.
The last time we talked we discussed Nikita’s Taiwanese whakapapa, with her mother holding the more traditional family values and her father’s more relaxed Kiwi ways. How did her mother feel about her playing a drug mule? “For someone who brought me up in such a strict environment, I am so amazed at her, she is now so open to how different I live my life (as a musician and actor). I remember acting in Miss Saigon, years ago. The opening scene was us as Vietnamese prostitutes. And she was watching me in that role. So, she’s come a really long way. I think I had great joy in making the character, Hoy, in ‘Far North’, as disgusting as possible because it would make her laugh. She knows me and sees me, not the character, on the screen. Could I be that horrible person?”
So, that’s Nikita’s day job. But she is so much more that. She’s an artist, a playwright, and of course, a musician. For some it’s hard to get their head around people who have other lives outside music. But we forget that we are all multi-facetted. We all do the ordinary and the extraordinary. “Yeah. I also eat and sleep. Sometimes, I walk places. Drive my car. [laughs] And I write and play music.”
The last time we spoke KITA, Nikita’s band, had just made their e.p ‘Love Lives Here’, which they took to the festivals this summer just gone. But they’d not had a chance to really tour the new songs. In September/October this year, the band will head out on the road to put that right.
“We actually have two extra tracks, too. That’s ‘Kites’, with a video made in Ed’s studio and a new remix: ‘Mariana’s Trenchcoat (Zuke’s ‘I’ll Dream of Sleep’ remix). So that makes it ‘Love Lives Here: Special Edition’.”
How do you describe KITA’s sound? Well, the best description I can find is a melding of inspirations from the folk, soul, psychedelic and pop worlds, with just a hint to jazz.
You might have gathered from our korero above that Nikita is a spirited storyteller, and that comes out in her lyrics. Her guitars and bolstered by the thick lush, fudginess of Ed Zucullo’s (Zuke) Moog synth and Fender Rhodes and the filthy drive from the drum kit of Rick Cranson (Little Bushman).
“I remember being in Ed’s room (their studio space) after we came out of lockdowns and I said that I felt really dark…that I didn’t have very much hope. I generally write from a place that can bring that out for people, music of hope. But I felt really, really dark. It seemed the world was so scary and uncertain – people losing their jobs and their direction, the economy going down and wars breaking out. Everything felt really heavy. Ed said that he thought the world just didn’t need more heavy stuff. We needed lighter, uplifting stuff.”
“So, for me the title of the e.p, which doesn’t come from a song or a lyric, was this concept: that in spite of all this turmoil, in spite of the storms that everyone is enduring, we are still here. In spite of all of that: ‘Love Lives Here”.
All four songs are about love she says. The first track on the e.p, ‘Too Much Of A Good Thing’, came out of a Lockdown writing effort. “That song is also about a relationship that turned rather ‘sour’. It’s “about love that is really not good for you. You are drawn to it. Toxic, an addiction. You are aware in your logical mind that you shouldn’t be drawn to this – but you still are. You lose yourself in it and end up being controlled by it.”
The second song that comes, ‘Under The Orange Moon’ “is the kind of love that you experience for the first time. Love that makes you believe in magic. It’s beautiful and sweet. It’s technicolour. It’s ‘Singing In The Rain’, all senses heightened. It’s like seeing the sunrise for the first time.” That song also came out of the Lockdowns when “a friend and I were exchanging love stories over the phone during this time. I told him about an old love story – and he turned that into a song. And then he told me a story and I wrote this song, inspired by that.”
Next is ‘Red Light’. “It’s also a type of love that’s not good for you,” Nikita notes, “but it turns you into the worst version of yourself. It’s the inversion of what’s in ‘Too Much Of A Good Thing’. You become the dangerous person in that relationship! All things destructive – thoughts, unhealthy habits, emotional manipulation, control.”
“And finally, ‘Mariana’s Trenchcoat’. We end our festival sets with this. People say “where is this song? We want a recording of it!” So, that’s why it’s there.
That is the last song we play in concert, and it leaves people feeling euphoric and hopeful. It’s actually a song about grief, coming out of a relationship but finding out the most important thing, the most important connection is your connection to yourself. Above all else, before you can love and connect with others on a true level you have to do that with yourself first.”
Nikita reveals that she is making a film inspired by all of these songs – to be called ‘Love Lives Here’. “It’s a very ambitious project. I don’t know how to even start to tell you about it,” she laughs when I ask her to describe it. “It’s the narrative of the e.p – all these things.
‘Mariana’s Trenchcoat’ is a pivotal song in that film. “She is grieving. So, she goes into her closet. There, she decides to stop. She reaches for the red trench coat. That red trench coat is a symbol for the love for herself. That was with her all that time. She just needed to dig a little deeper.”
“I wrote quite a few years ago but I didn’t know it was gonna be a song. It was when I came out of a three and a half year relationship. I was kind of in shock for a little while. For that whole time all the curtains were drawn. I was just wearing all grey – and I’m generally quite a colourful person. Every day, I would write two lines of poetry. I wouldn’t read the lines before. That’s how the lyrics were written.
I ended up using those lyrics and then putting it with the music that Ed had written. And just as a spin to that, the person I was writing about was Ed, himself! The relationship was years ago – it was both our faults. But, yeah, that’s the context of that song!
I love writing…creating visuals. For the last few months, I’ve just been living in the world of the film version of ‘Love Lives Here’ and diving into this narrative for these tracks. The film is in four parts, four genres inspired by these songs, the elements of the songs will come through as echoes. The film itself is predominantly non-verbal, a filmic experience. Its intention is to be really emotionally provocative. But most importantly for people to realise that even though all these things are happening, the thing that we’re all looking for exists in ourselves.”
The latest track is ‘Kites’, a super funk-inspired uplifting groove the band recorded live at Ed’s recording room in Newtown. Written in the theme of ‘Love Lives Here’, the song is a “little bit of blue in the sky” as part of the lyric speaks of searching for the blue – for even when we are surrounded by dark clouds, there is beauty to be found.
The video is a beautiful and intimate insight into KITA’s recording space – Ed’s room. “I used to live in that whare. That room is where Alfredo lives, Ed’s mixing desk, built by Ekadeck, this amazing mad scientist in Matamata. We’ve recorded on it quite a bit. There are things everywhere. You go in and there’s so much to inspire you. Toys, retro books, music – a whole wall of vinyl and CDs. A Tubbs Audio sound system, customised. Big sub woofers. Great, because so much of our music is so bassy. And the mini-Moog. But it’s quite a small space because he has a bed in there, where he sleeps as well. He does his own production. We collaborate there. We often bring in a tune, written elsewhere but we’ll workshop it in there.”
“I remember there was one song we were working on. But couldn’t work out the chorus. We wasted a whole day. We came back the next day and started listening to other music from the studio and then we heard songs in a particular vibe or feeling and that was what we needed.
That studio, it’s where the magic happens. So, in this video, you get to see a bit of that alchemy at work.”
KITA are planning to release their earlier e.p “Try to Find A Way’ back-to-back with ‘Love Lives Here’ on Vinyl in the coming months. Look out for that. ‘Try And Find A Way’ is available to stream on all the usual platforms. In the meantime, check out their live magic across the North Island and Nelson over September and October.
KITA will be hitting the road for an extensive NZ Tour, kicking off in Karanema / Havelock North on the 23rd September before winding their way around the country ending up in Whakatū / Nelson on the 21st October. Check out Banished Music for more details on the tour including where you can score tickets of your own!
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