Tomorrow night. I can barely hold on to the banister of life as I descend into the downstairs world of Herman's Hermits. The first overseas band I ever saw.
This is something I never admit. I am not even admitting it now, this is merely a drawn-out typo with a smidgen of truth. For I was alive and well and utterly consumed by music when the Beatles came here, and the Stones, and, then most importantly, the Pretty Things.
All my friends saw these bands at the Dunedin Town Hall. I saw none of them, I just stood next to these pumped-up little turd classmates the next morning, wide-eared and numb with slime-green envy as they went through the night before. My friends either had rich parents who could afford the 54 shillings and sixpence the Beatles charged, or they were burgeoning criminals, crawling up the harbourside wall of the town hall to wedge their malleable fifth-form bodies through the toilet windows.
Dishonest wretched bastards. I was so jealous.
So now in the 21st century when media people ring, asking not if I saw these world-shattering bands, because obviously I did, only an idiot would have stayed home and stared at the wall, but what were they like, I say I never saw them and they say you're kidding me.
No. The first overseas band I saw was Herman's Hermits. It is like a fan of the Olympics saying he's only ever seen the Taieri Highland Games.
1966.
Herman's Hermits came with Tom Jones and Ray Columbus and the Invaders. The last-named were stupefyingly good. I remember opening the thick sound-absorbing downstairs door at the town hall and being hit by a wall of sound I will never forget.
"Is it the Rolling Stones?" I asked my friend, who was wearing a lace shirt like what the Kinks wore.
"No," he said, "it's Ray Columbus and the Invaders. New Zealand band. Shit."
They were not shit. They were magnificent. Twenty-five years later joining key Invader Billy Kristian on a Creative New Zealand music panel, I hugged him like a lost child to thank him for that concert. But I had a special liking for the Hermits because earlier in the day, wagging school, I had run into guitarist "Lek" Leckenby at the Southern Cross hotel. Herman was the prize of course, the one to tell the guys back at school I had a cigarette with, even though he had the face of a potato. But Leckenby was the lead guitarist, and lead guitarists were tremendously cool.
I have never been able to call famous people by their nicknames. When working with the Nuggets basketball team in the early 1990s, I was instructed by American import Leonard King to call him King, as in king of the court. But I had enormous difficulty hailing a large black American by his surname. I had seen In The Heat Of The Night. So I called him Leonard the whole time he was here.
"LEK!!!" I shouted with all my lungs. He turned around, gliding like the ice-cool lead guitarist he was. My teeth were chattering like marbles in a glass jar.
"Welcome to Dunedin!" I riposted afresh, an indication of how deep my questions would be in later years when interviewing international rock stars.
"What do you kids do for thrills here?" he asked, as if he was in a small town at the bottom of the world.
"Not much," I said, trying to look cool, even though I was in food-stained school uniform.
"Oh," said Lek. And he walked off. Magic.
It would have been lovely zipping up to Oamaru tomorrow to catch up on old times with Lek, but he died in 1994. Herman won't be there either. The band is now led by early member, Barry "The Bean" Whitwam. But listen people, these Hermits aren't a must to avoid, they have apparently been giving great shows for 40 years. They must still be into something good.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
