BRENT ECCLES of THE DISAPPOINTMENTS – Summing It Up In Two Words
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
A musically taut, lyrically strong, emotionally deep and memorably classy collection of songs” – Graham Reid
High praise indeed from one of New Zealand’s most iconic journalists and music reviewers; but just who are The Disappointments? At first glance the name might not ring any bells, but look just beneath the surface and the three musicians who make up the band are a colourful collection of well-known kiwi music personalities.
With Hammond Gamble, New Zealand’s own true bluesman and prolific songwriter at the helm, The Disappointments also includes Andy Macdonald [Blind Date] on bass and Brent Eccles [The Angels] on drums. The three certainly have history, having played together as Street Talk in the 1970’s; each branching off in later years to follow their own career paths. Fast forward to 2018 and I am sitting in the board room of Eccles Entertainment with Brent Eccles himself. Having returned to New Zealand in 1999 after twenty years with The Angels, Eccles was in his own words “done” with ever being a professional drummer again and instead set out on the path to become a promoter. Forming Eccles Entertainment in 2000 with his wife Helen, Eccles continued to build the business, eventually outgrowing their home-based beginnings. Now occupying a gorgeous 1950’s building in Sandringham, Auckland, to say that the business became a success would be an understatement; Eccles Entertainment being the exclusive New Zealand representatives of both Frontier Touring Company and Roundhouse Entertainment.
With Brent sipping from a cup of freshly made coffee we exchange pleasantries before I ask my slightly audacious opening question;
Why? With everything that the three of you already have going on in your lives, why form the band now?
“Well interestingly enough I probably drove it, when there was no need to because as you say I’ve got plenty to do.
When I came back to New Zealand in 2000 I really didn’t want to play anymore. I’d played professionally for 20 – 30 years so I had done enough, really done enough. The only person I ever really thought I would want to work with again was Hammond, because he is such an extraordinary guitar player – first and foremost – but also a great singer and a great songwriter as well; an unsung hero.
To me he’s the most talented musician in New Zealand by a long way, but was never really recognised – a little bit – but never really. That aside I always thought to play with Hammond, to have the opportunity to make a proper record without the time constraints, without having to think about a professional career or worry about whether the band was making any money, would be great fun.”
So how did the ball start rolling?
“We had the opportunity to play a gig opening for Seasick Steve [aka Steven Gene Wold, American blues musician] at the Mangawhai Tavern which we did, the three of us, me, Andy and Hammond.
I refused to rehearse [laughs] so we turned up at the gig with a song list and I went ‘Ok, I’ll just follow along’ and we had fun. At the time my son [Matt Eccles of Betchadupa and Das Pop] had been staying with us in Mt Eden – he lives in LA – and he had set up a drum kit; so I’d just take my laptop in there, play a drum track and email it to Hammond. Next day he would send a song back; lyrics, arrangement, guitar playing, everything! So I did that more and more and he would just send more and more songs back! It’s just amazing, he’s just that talented, and lyrically he’s very strong, he can knock out a set of lyrics in a very short space of time that most people would pore and pore over, he’s got that talent.
So the ball started rolling and I kinda felt ‘Well I better deliver on this, because I started this’. We got a bunch of songs together and we said ‘Why don’t we go and record them?’
So we went to Roundhead Studios, and recorded them over two or three days, including the guitar parts and vocals. I think the way Hammond would have worked in the past, he would have brought the masters home and put the guitar tracks and vocals down by himself; whereas we did it all in the studio with everyone there. So slightly different work ethic for him, which I love as I didn’t want to put that pressure on him, I just wanted him to be looked after you know?”
And Roundhead’s beautiful, such a wonderful vibe there.
“Yeah! So why wouldn’t you?
First session went great, we did seven or eight songs, then we wrote a few more – well Hammond did, I say we, it’s all Hammond – and we had an album! So then it was mixing time; my friend Terry Manning in Australia who I’ve worked with in The Angels and Johnny Diesel, he ran compass point studios in Nassau, in the Bahamas – it’s where Rolling Stones, The Police, Bob Marley all recorded their big albums…”
The greats …
“Yeah. It’s steeped in history. So we ended up mixing the album in Nassau which is why it sounds like it sounds; it sounds very punchy, it’s really good, you notice it. And then once we had it, it was like ‘Ah what are we gonna do now?’
I didn’t really have the time to play, but you know I can’t really let these guys down! So we discussed it and originally we wanted to play the Windsor Castle because that’s where we cut our teeth, but it’s just closed. We wanted to be the last act in there but for many different reasons it didn’t happen. So we thought ‘Ok we’ll just go down the road to The Tuning Fork’.
The album cover is actually photographs of the boards and the floor of the Windsor Castle.”
It’s a nice little piece of history. It’s terrible we are losing all these venues, The Windsor Castle, The Kings Arms etc.
“Yeah, gone. Others will come through, it’s just the way it goes, ebbs and flows.”
The show is only $1 a ticket, unheard of in the year 2018! So tell me about the ‘A Buck a Head’ concept that this ticket price is based on.
“We dug back into history again and the whole ‘A Buck a Head’ idea came up. Back then in the 70’s something – to get an audience come and pay a dollar was an easy thing to do! Radio Hauraki would subsidize the shows and we got to play in a nice theatre with nice production to a big audience. That worked well, so we thought ‘Oh we’ll just do that again, it’s fun’”
I must admit I really do love that. ‘A Buck a Head’, it’s such a brilliant idea!
“It is brilliant; I’ve always wanted to do it. This wasn’t about making money; this was about having some fun! We’re just trying to draw in those thoughts, the emotion of that time, to tie in with us who are of that era as well, and try and get the same people who used to come and see us at The Windsor Castle – if they’re still alive – to come. Also it’s Anzac Day which seems to have some kind of thing about it as well”
I was going to ask if that was a tie in, holding the show on such a prominent day.
“It just felt good. It’s a very emotional day for people, so finish your day off with a few beers and listening to a blues rock band launch their latest album.” [laughs]
Yeah I like the idea of that; as you say, it’s a very emotional day; there are the ties to the past and the present. Would have been lovely if it could have been at The Windsor, would have been like the cherry on top!
“It would have been yeah and for a minute there we thought we’d rename The Tuning Fork, The Windsor Castle for the night, but it sort of got a bit too convoluted and a bit confusing.”
Seeing as we are on the history trail, how about a little history on you? What made you first pick up the sticks? And where did that all lead to?
“My parents would take myself and my sister on a Sunday – to give Mum a break from cooking imagine that – to the White Heron or La Boheme or Logan Park for dinner and there would always be a band there playing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ or something like that, the standards you know?
So we would sit there and not say much. I’d just watch the drummer and go ‘Wow that’s incredible, that’s amazing!’ So I sort of said to Mum and Dad ‘I’d love to play drums!’ and they sort of said ‘Oh yeah…’ and tried to push it aside, but I always wanted to do it. So one day my Dad turned up at our house in Hillsborough with a drum kit.”
Nice! That must have been pretty exciting…
“It was just mind-blowing, I got a drum kit! It was incredible! I didn’t know how to set it up or how it all worked; I sort of had to look at pictures to work it all out. It was a Beverley drum kit, red.
I got lessons for a while and when I was at school I started a school band which was the first thing I did, it was a band called The Breed. We started playing a lot of socials, it was quite a good covers band but then that kind of faded away. I left school and went to work for the United Empire Box Company in Mangere as a sales cadet or some kind of cadet bullshit thing, and then Lion Breweries had a circuit where they would just tour bands around all the lion pubs and I found out about it so I put an ad in the paper saying I had a way in and would musicans want to join up with me and do it.
Two people of the four that ended up in the band responded to that newspaper ad in the ‘Acts, Bands, and Halls’ column in The Herald; Eddie Rayner [Split Enz] was one and Alastair Riddell [Space Waltz] was the other.
So we did that for a while, we got sent to the Kawerau Hotel for the first one, we ended up staying there for eight weeks.”
Wow, good run!
“Kawerau at that time, it was 1970 something, it was… interesting.
Alastair always talked about original songs and that kinda morphed into Space Waltz, the bass player was Peter Cuddihy, and then we got guitar player Greg Clark who was a friend of mine so it became five of us and then Eddie kinda bounced out because he went to Split Enz.
But that was the band that recorded ‘Out on the Street’ for the New Faces thing [New Faces was the talent section of Studio One, a popular New Zealand TV show], I was eighteen or something. We then went to Australia which was disastrous, absolute disaster, sorta crawled back to New Zealand completely broke and then the penny dropped as it often does with me – ‘Well if you wanna really do something with playing drums, get off your ass and start getting a lot better’.
So I got lessons from Frank Gibson Jr. and I practiced everyday for two-three hours every day for a long time and without even realizing it, got good. People would say ‘Shit you’ve really improved as a player’. I got a lot more confident and really started to enjoy it and Frank was a big help. That was around the time of Citizen Band, but I might have played in Street Talk for a while and Citizen Band and something else, I had a few different bands… lots of bands going on in there!”
You have certainly been in a few!
“We went to Australia with Citizen Band after making a couple of albums here, we gave it a good crack. We lasted for about eighteen months there, we were self-sufficient, and we were making money, paying the rent. But half the band had gone so it ended up being a three piece, Geoff Chunn, myself and Roland Killeen and then we just weren’t getting anywhere so kinda fell in a heap.
Around that same time Mondo Rock were looking for a drummer so they asked me to come and audition. On the way there the current bass player said ‘Oh The Angels are looking for a drummer as well.’
The audition with Mondo Rock wasn’t good, so I immediately got in touch with The Angels and right from the first time we played together it was like ‘Ah this is cool’. I think they enjoyed the fact that I was a no one in Australia as well; all the people that were trying to get into the band were drummers from other well-known bands and I was a fresh face and they liked that. I had gained quite a lot of experience in New Zealand so I was able to sit at that level with them because they were reasonably high-flying.
There I stayed for twenty years; I even ended up managing The Angels [laughs] for ten years!”
I was going to ask you about that – while you were performing with The Angels you were simultaneously managing several bands. Did you just not want to sleep? [laughs]
“I remember when I got that Angels gig, I was looking out of the rehearsal room and I almost fell on my head because it was like ‘What’s just happened here, this has changed my life!’ And then I thought ‘Well if I’ve got this opportunity for god’s sake don’t let it fall by the wayside; use it, learn, watch, talk to agents, talk to other managers, talk to other musicians, suck it in because you’re going to need to do something in the future’.”
That’s some pretty smart self-advice!
“So that’s what I did, I read all the band contracts; I just read them so I knew. I mean I knew more about The Angels structures than The Angels did, because I read the stuff, understood it, and made notes. So really I was always going to get into management. I managed Johnny Diesel and The Injectors, I managed The Poor, I managed The Angels; I had a radio show on Triple M. It was all going on there for a while, crazy stuff. But it didn’t seem that hectic, because Helen [Eccles] was always there at my side helping.
I also often did things in partnership with people; I would co-manage a band with someone else, so that when I was off and couldn’t be doing certain things someone else would pick it up.”
It must have given you a great advantage in many ways; you understood both sides of the story; from a musicans point of view and a manager’s one.
“You certainly don’t respond to the bullshit at all; one thing I have learnt though is that it doesn’t change. The same problems that we had as a band, bands have now. Exactly the same, they don’t change.
So I did see both sides; some would say it’s a good thing, some would say it’s a bad thing; for me it was what it was. I guess I know too much in some senses… no one would wanna manage me, put it that way” [mutual laughter]
I don’t think anyone’s going to try!
Obviously The Angels was where you spent the biggest part of your career as a musician. May I ask how did it affect you when Doc Neeson passed away?
“Doc and I were very close and when I left to come to New Zealand – I hadn’t actually left the band – I just came to New Zealand and the band was just going to keep going, but it didn’t happen that way, and probably would never happen.
Doc set off on his own career and I managed Doc and his band for a while from New Zealand, but it didn’t work out… for a lot of reasons. Doc… [sighs] the excesses of rock n roll, he was right in there with the best of them; it was a long decay and it was gonna happen unfortunately. When he went I wasn’t working with him, it was kinda sad, but you know, I’m not sure you can do that to your body for as long as he did.”
No, we have our limits.
“Doc, he was haunted by excesses and other things, and you know like a lot of lead singers that I’ve met, he always found it difficult to deal with the adulation because it didn’t necessarily mean a better lifestyle. It meant you were always in demand, you were always recognised, you were always the first person to go to but you weren’t necessarily in the best position.”
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be instantly recognised everywhere you go!
“I think people can enjoy that, but I think it’s also the need to live up to it all the time, to perform, on stage, and in the studio, and you can’t have a moment where you just go “Well I can’t deal with this, I’m gonna have a drink’.”
How would you describe him as a person from your relationship with him?
“Oh he was sweet, a lovely, lovely person. The real person was incredible, very caring.”
So how did you personally find your time with The Angels, I mean you were with them for twenty years, did it go just like that [clicks fingers]?
“Well some of it was very painful, it was not easy, and then sometimes it was fantastic. You know the highs and lows of playing in a rock band…the disappointments.
Not only having to deal with how the band was perceived in the business, but what business it did internally. It was a difficult animal … brothers …all sorts of things going on, all the time, it didn’t stop, it was relentless. So you had to really be able to deal with that and if you couldn’t deal with that it would push you out to a place you didn’t want to be.”
In some ways is that what led you to manage the band?
“No; although I certainly worked out a way to deal with the business and deal with being in the band at the same time and how to make it all work.”
It must have been a hard balance?
“The disappointments…”
[mutual laughter]
“That’s why it’s such a great name for a blues band, it’s a great name!”
It certainly sums up history doesn’t it?
“Yeah it does.”
Getting back to The Disappointments; I love the fact that you guys have this wonderful history with each other. Did it make the process of playing together again easier? Did everything just fall back into place?
“Oh yeah. The first time we got together and played it was like ‘Here we go, just like it’s always been’
I suppose the other thing is because we’d all professionally been everywhere and were reasonably happy with life, when we came back together there was no angst, there was no need for us to worry about what the band was doing next, because we were just having some fun. I mean Andy is a very successful real estate guy, Hammond is Hammond and I have done what I have done. So that allowed all this stuff to come through which was kinda fun.
And we poke fun, we give each other shit all the time, it’s great!”
[laughs] I can imagine
“It’s just a barrel of laughs because it’s so funny. It has its serious moments too, but it’s good fun.”
So what were the ideas behind the album; were there any overarching themes?
“For me, from my perspective, what I wanted to do with Hammond was make an album that felt good. And I think we did that.”
Yes, and I think that joy comes through in the music too…
“I have no illusions about it, I think it’s made for a specific audience and I guess it’s out there to give people the opportunity to get it if they want it, but I have no illusions about it being a hit or anything like that.”
I think that anyone who has any sort of love for the blues would be into it.
“Yeah I think so too, but you gotta get to those people.”
Speaking earlier of how you had become jaded with being a drummer, how does it feel to be back behind the kit again?
“Well funnily enough, I really didn’t want to do this, I didn’t think I had it in me; I would be working here til 3:30-5 o’clock and then going to Hammonds place for rehearsal and I was pretty mentally exhausted.
But I would get there, play for two hours and I’m just jumping out of my skin, it’s like I was invigorated you know? But this will be it though.” [raucous laughter]
So we’re not going to see a nationwide tour? [laughs]
“No, no, no. It would be a miracle if that happened. So we’ll do this and hopefully we’ll have a great time.”
I am sure you will, the humour and camaraderie that you all have certainly comes through; especially on the last track … ah let’s see “Fuck off Instrumental’ [laughs]
[laughs] “There had been some discussion about ‘We shouldn’t do that, we shouldn’t put it on the record’ and I’m going ‘Well let me tell you, the first thing people are gonna say when they look at the set list is ‘Fuck off Instrumental’ … Oooo what’s that!? So that’s gotta go in there!
Anyway they use fuck on TV now so what’s the problem? But yeah it’s funny, there is a bit of humour in there.”
So what’s your favourite track?
“Probably, ‘Will to Live’ it’s an incredible blues song, we just nailed it beautifully. I could just listen to that song over and over. I mean it’s just straight blues, but everything about that song got it right, bang on.”
What can people expect from the show? Obviously there will be songs from the new album, but what else? A little bit of history with a few covers etc?
“The band will expand to a five piece, we’ve got Larry Killip playing guitar and we’ve got Stephen Small playing keyboards, Stephen played the keyboard parts on the album too. So we’re playing every album track, plus four or five of Hammonds songs or songs he’s recorded before, they’re quite standard blues but stretch out a bit, so more solo’s and that kinda stuff, whereas the songs on this album are quite short, quite confined. So it will be an hour or so, just us, no support.”
I was about to ask who was in support…
“An album launch to me… you’re already testing people enough because it’s new material, so why have a support band there?
No… they’ll see us play, we’ll have a few beers with them afterwards and sign a couple of albums and away we go…”
The Disappointments play Auckland’s Tuning Fork TONIGHT (25th April 2018), for the special “Buck A Head” price of just $1 entry fee. Make sure you get along as early as you can as it’s going to be jam packed!
