No sleep ‘til Christchurch

It’s four in the afternoon and Bic Runga is crashed out in her dressing room at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre.

The New Zealand born singer-songwriter is waiting to begin the sound-check for what will be the final show of her Irish tour – a marathon trek that saw her perform six out of the last seven nights. The fact that she likes to “hang out with the band” after her shows has taken its toll – last night’s affair in Limerick was, by all accounts, a late one. There’s a bottle of Smirnoff on the table in front of her but for now it remains unopened while she digs into the bowl of fresh fruit.
“I’m tired, really exhausted,” she says, rubbing her eyes, clearly struggling to stay awake. “There was a really good traditional band in Dolan’s Warehouse. All I remember is them doing ‘Cockles And Mussels’ – it’s a terrible song I know, but they did a cool version.”
Despite her success to date – she’s a huge star in her native New Zealand and has made serious inroads in the US and the UK – Runga appears to work harder than most other artists at her level. This is her fourth visit to Ireland in less than 10 months, promoting her second album, Beautiful Collision, which spawned the massive radio hit, ‘Get Some Sleep’. In between, she’s toured the UK, Japan, Australia and her native New Zealand. She heads back there tomorrow for a well-earned break.
“It feels like I’ve been sitting on a bus for the past two years,” she says. “I don’t like the travelling all that much but I love playing live – I can’t wait to get onstage tonight. It’s the best part of it. But I wouldn’t enjoy it if it wasn’t for the band. I’ve got a really cool band who are some of my best friends and I get to hang out with them a lot. I couldn’t do a tour all by myself anymore. It would be very boring for everyone concerned.”
Runga’s story is fairly well known by now. She was born in Christchurch, New Zealand to a Maori father and Chinese mother, hence her exotic good looks, which moved The Guardian to recently describe her, not inaccurately, as “devastatingly beautiful”. A fan of The Smiths and The Cure she spent her teenage years in various bands playing drums before switching to guitar and winning a record deal. Her 1997 debut, Drive, released when she was just 20 became the biggest selling album in New Zealand music history. Her second (and still current) album Beautiful Collision, which features contributions from fellow Kiwi and former Crowded House mainman Neil Finn, has now spent 100 weeks in the New Zealand album charts.
Success in the US came through having two of her songs included on the American Pie soundtrack, though for the past couple of years she has made Paris her European base.
“I don’t have any connections with Paris, it’s just that I always wanted to live there as a child and now I have the opportunity,” she says. “Actually my visa has just run out and I have to go back to New Zealand to get another one. Maybe they won’t let me back in again (laughs). But what I really want to do is to go home and bury my head, write some new songs and make an album. I’d love to just deliver a record to the label and not have to go through a budget or answer to anyone but I’ll have to wait and see what happens.”
Many of Runga’s deceptively complex and melodically mellow songs deal with the intricacies and difficulties of relationships. Has she managed to have any kind of personal life given her almost constant touring over the past few years?
“I’ve got a boyfriend if that’s what you mean,” she smiles. “He lives in New Zealand and I see him about three times a year. It’s fine, it’s sorta cool. It certainly beats being on the make.”
But surely it must be difficult if not impossible maintaining such a long distance relationship. “It’s difficult living with people too,” she replies. “I’ve got to have a life of my own. It’s kinda like a near independence for me but it means that I don’t need anything from anyone. It’s easy to get into a bubble on the road. You tend to live on the same frequency, which is hard for other people to break into so I hang around with the guys in the band.”
Does she see herself settling down at some point in the near future? “Oh I don’t know. I’ll live in New Zealand again definitely but not in the next five years. Most people of my age go away for a few years and come back so it’s very normal for New Zealanders. I could live in Ireland. I really like Cork. I’ve spent time there before and I could see how you could go there and write.
“One thing I’d like to do in the next year is to have a kid,” she adds. “I could do that by this time next year couldn’t I? I’ll have to get cracking. It wouldn’t stop me touring – Neil Finn brings his kids on the road and it’s cool.”
Any hints on what direction the new album will take? “Well, I’m really into Delta Blues at the moment, people like Skip James and Son House. In fact it’s doing my head in right now, which is a real revelation to me. Blues has a bad reputation but if you forget the last 60 years or so and go back to the ’20s and ’30s you’re on safe territory. It’s not like I’ve been to the crossroads or anything like that and I don’t know how much it’ll influence the next album. It has an authenticity that not many people can achieve and I might feel a bit of a phoney. But I’ve just bought myself an autoharp which I might use to write songs. I wanted to try out a new instrument.”
Has she been exposed to any Irish music on her travels around the country?
“Not that much, though I met The Thrills on the Late Late Show and I got their new record which was good. And I quite like Mundy but apart from that I haven’t heard much. In the van on tour we’ve been listening to The Velvet Underground and we bought a Phil Spector Box set which is pretty cool. And I’m always listening to Neil Young’s On The Beach. I give copies of it to people who haven’t heard it.”
At this point a knock comes on the dressing room door ending our conversation.
She hauls herself up from her comfortable couch and heads stage-wards. “I’m really sorry to be so vague about everything today,” she says, with a parting smile and a hug. “It’s just the tiredness.” With that she joins the band for a run through several numbers – including ‘Get Some Sleep’!