“Some days, I can’t put a sentence together and finish it because I’ll forget what I was talking about.”
That is how Sir Dave Dobbyn describes the worst of his Parkinson’s disease. He told RNZ’s Sunday Morning that the cognitive trouble annoys him most. It could be age, he allowed, “but I’m pretty sure it’s a Parkinson’s symptom.” Mornings are hard.
The ideas still come. Dobbyn says he can spot a really good one, usually when he is in a hurry or about to leave the room. “In the middle of it, I’ll go ‘ta-da!’ and then run back into the studio and try and capture what I did.”
He is writing a book, a “lyric book with anecdotes”, and has a one-night show in Auckland booked for the month after the interview. For the book’s title, he asked an AI. It offered ‘Beside You’, the name of his 1998 hit. “Which I thought was quite clever,” he said, “but then it said ‘History Never Repeats’. I thought that was very funny.” That one is a Split Enz song.
Reading the room
Last year’s Selected Songs tour, which he called “wonderful”, reminded him that audiences own his songs. “It just reminds them of tough times or good times or whatever,” he said. At gigs he studies faces and guesses at the stories behind them. “It’s a game I play.”
For him, that comes with the job. A musician, Dobbyn reckons, has to love people, and he does. “Travelling around New Zealand, playing theatres. To me, that’s bliss.”
He also had a sharper view of the world outside the theatre. “There’s so much negative stuff around. In fact, most of it is designed to make you feel less than human. Demanding your humanity is an important thing for me.” Music, he said, sits in the middle of a community. “It’s us, you know, not us and them.”
Auckland’s 96-year-old Civic Theatre, which inspired his 1993 song ‘Palace’, is “almost like a church” to him, and it stirs “wonderful nostalgic feelings”. As a kid he came into town on old diesel buses along Tamaki Drive, and he and his friends walked up the street holding each other’s shirt tails. Halfway up Queen Street stood an American milk bar with booths and a jukebox, where they bought huge milkshakes in aluminium cans.
