Throwback files: Connan Mockasin

My 2014 backgrounder on Connan Mockasin. Photographs, lots of photographs.

This week’s photographs were shot in Auckland with 35mm Lomochrome purple film on a Nikon F60 camera.

I’ve talked about this before, and I’ll talk about it again. In 2014, I was at a crossroads of sorts. I’d spent the previous seven years freelancing as a music, culture and hospitality journalist across New Zealand. Between writing for a few music magazines (print), a couple of more generalist publications (sometimes I wrote advertorials on spa pools, honestly), and doing bits and pieces of broadcast work with radio stations across the country, I’d cobbled together a living of sorts. Getting through the global financial recession of the late 2000s was pretty challenging, but I managed to pivot and pivot again.

Then, in around 2012, the bottom just fell out of the print magazine world down here (for a bit). Luckily, I was able to jump into a bit of digital journalism work via a couple of retainer based jobs with local creative houses and the like. Doing web-based work got me thinking about whether I might be able to write beyond the borders of home. Being published in magazines in the UK and the US was a long held dream of mine, but every time I mailed out portfolios (physically, via mail, which cost a lot of money), the response was crickets.

Anyway, in 2014, I got an email from my friend Shea Bermingham. Shea’s a New Zealander who probably clicked to the limitations of being based in NZ a few years before me. He had a background in music blogging and had scored a job at the New York-based label, Mexican Summer. Mexican Summer were handling the US releases of a couple of albums from an oddball singer-songwriter and producer known as Connan Mockasin.

Connan was another New Zealander who had clocked that living in an archipelago at the ends of the Earth wasn’t an amazing business move in music, and had spent the previous five (or maybe seven) years living and touring through the US, UK and Europe. He had a bit of a cult following coming together and was going to do a live performance for Boiler Room TV in New York. At that time, they were trying out these band live streams under the In Stereo banner and Gabriel Szatan was looking after editorial for them. Boiler Room was hoping that a New Zealand journalist might write a background on Connan for their website and Shea had put me forward. An opportunity to write for an overseas media outlet?! I was over the moon.

Not long after that piece ran, I was asked to assemble a mix of New Zealand music for The State, a boutique music, arts and culture journal-based in the UAE. A few months after that, I received an invitation to attend the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo and write about it for the Red Bulletin. While I was there, I met the talented Chilean producer and DJ Valesuchi, the remarkable Black American psychedelic soul artist Kadhja Bonet and many other talents. We saw The Tom Tom Club make a live performance with the Japanese post-punk band Plastics and listened to Harry Hosono tell the story of his storied career.

The following year (2015), I started freelancing for The 405 and Dummy Mag in the UK. From there, opportunities emerged with Dazed, Bandcamp Daily, The Wire, NTS, Dublab, The Vinyl Factory, Test Pressing and numerous other offshore media outlets and internet radio stations. After eight years, I was finally there. Of course, I quickly realised that I’d viewed the international music and media industries through rose-tinted lenses, but that is a story for another time.

Anyway, this week Connan Mockasin is releasing a new album. It’s Just Wind is a collaboration he recorded - before the global pandemic set in - with his father Ade at Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths festival in Marfa, Texas. They’re releasing it on the 14th of July to celebrate Ade’s 72nd birthday. Although Connan’s dad has been a lifelong musician, It’s Just Wind is his debut album. The story behind it is interesting, but I’m not going to get to it today. Instead, I thought I might re-share the backgrounder I wrote about him for Boiler Room TV in 2014. It’s funny, in 2021, I have very mixed emotions about Boiler Room, but regardless, that commission was the first page of a new chapter in my journey as a music writer. You can read it below. it’s imperfect, but most things are.

IN STEREO: CONNAN MOCKASIN

How deep is the wellspring of creativity that New Zealand musician Connan Mockasin drinks from? Since first stepping properly onto the international stage close to a decade ago, he's applied his helium-toned falsetto, imaginative lyrics and unfettered arrangements to lo-fi blues pop, celestial jazz rock and syrupy psychedelic soul with a yacht rock lean. In the process, over two solo albums Forever Dolphin Love and Caramel, collaborations with Norman Cook and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and boundary bending performances worldwide, he's cultivated himself a cult reputation in open-eared music circles everywhere. With a loose-limbed skinny frame, pale skin, and pristine blonde hair falling to his chin, Connan, once a rock star Peter Pan, has become an increasingly sensual figure. Sauntering his way though videos for 'I'm The Man, That Will Find You' and 'Do I Make You Feel Shy?', he makes it clear that while his music is rooted in the freedom of childhood, he's all grown up with a wicked sense of humour.

An early 80s baby, Connan grew up in the coastal village of Te Awanga. Raised by nurturing parents, Connan and his two brothers were eagerly encouraged to create art. As he related to me during an interview for Rip It Up Magazine in 2010, "...[They] let us turn the whole backyard into a junkyard to encourage what we enjoyed doing." In his case this was a complimentary mixture of music, D.I.Y amusement park construction, and visual arts. He recorded rudimentary songs from as young as age five, built ramshackle carnival rides, painted, and played guitar obsessively, all to a soundtrack of classic blues, soul and soft rock tunes. After high school Connan worked at vineyards and acted in theatre before relocating to Wellington, New Zealand's capital. There he formed Grampa Moff, who became lo-fi blues-pop trio Connan And The Mockasins.

With a buzz behind them, they moved to London in 2006, going their separate ways following some disillusioning experiences with the recording industry. Connan returned home to Te Awanga for a spell. In response to gentle nudging from his mother, he gathered up some basic home recording equipment and created Forever Dolphin Love (originally titled Please Turn Me Into The Snat when he self-released it in 2010) before returning to the UK.

Vibrant, shimmering and dreamlike, its soundworld, populated by fantasy animals and imaginary friends, and articulated through an interzone connecting jangly indie, space jazz and psyche-pop caught the ears of Erol Alkan's Phantasy Sound label, leading to an international reissue in 2011. Amplifying the otherworldliness of Forever Dolphin Love with a series of surreal Alejandro Jodorowsky redolent music videos helmed by directors Sam Handley, Daniel Brereton and Fleur & Manu, Connan began approaching live band shows with a freeform strategy; brief rehearsals bleeding into fresh improvised interpretations. Audiences and music critics either locked in, or felt locked out. In the wake of Forever Dolphin Love Connan shared bills with Crowded House, Warpaint and Radiohead. He also befriended Charlotte Gainsbourg, worked on her album Stage Whisper, and began joining her on stages. Resale prices for the first Phantasy Sound vinyl editions of Forever Dolphin Love soared on ebay and discogs.

Two years later, he released Caramel via Phantasy Sound, Because Music and Mexican Summer. Where Forever Dolphin Love was as expansive as a galaxy, Caramel is as intimate as a cold winter night shared with a lover inside a warm room. After returning to Te Awanga in 2013 to visit his father, who he was recovering from a heart attack, Connan spent a month creating the work in a Tokyo hotel room with assistance from friends and strangers. As he told The Quietus this year, "…I wanted it to sound like a record called Caramel…"

Inflating slinky 80s RnB with the smooth rock daydreams of Donnie & Joe Emerson, Doug Hream Blunt and Ariel Pink, it interweaves lithe sing-alongs and filmic interludes. Still indebted to the surrealism of his debut, Caramel and its accompanying yacht rock videos rendered his fringe artistry though exaggerated glamour lighting. Watching live YouTube clips of 'I'm The Man, That Will Find You', it's easy to convince yourself you just heard him sing "fuck" instead of "find". Caramel hit the sweet spot, leading to a US tour alongside Australia's Kirin J. Callinan.

Casual and unassuming in person, Connan is a great storyteller. As with his songs, it's sometimes hard to differentiate fantasy from reality. This could be attributed to the extent his imagination was encouraged as a child, or perhaps his understanding of theatre. Regardless, it's this blurring between the real and the unreal and an instinct-driven writing style that powers his continuing creative vitality. In recent interviews Connan has talked of combining his music with amusement rides, or even venturing into stand-up comedy. Who knows which rabbit hole he'll lead us down next?

Five years later, I interviewed Connan for Dummy Mag (UK). You can read that story here.