More than 30 years after performing in a teenage rock group, Rachael King has written a book to turn girls, in particular, on to the joys of playing in a band.
Violet and the Velvets: the case of the missing stuff follows a schoolgirls’ punk rock band that also solves mysteries.
King’s own music career began at 15, just six weeks after she had first picked up a bass guitar.
Her teenage band, Battling Strings, opened for The Chills and Straitjacket Fits, playing at iconic Auckland venues like the Gluepot despite being years below the legal drinking age of 20.
After joining The Cakekitchen at 17, she went on to play with four more bands, including Flying Nun act the 3Ds in Dunedin.
"Coming from Auckland, it was just so nice to be in a small city where there were lots of people who were really into playing music," she says. "And I remember how cold it was as well. All these old houses weren’t insulated so we would sit around drinking in sleeping bags, huddled around a one-bar heater."
King says she wrote Violet and the Velvets to convey the "joy" of the DIY punk ethos and to show girls they don’t have to be singers to be in a band.
In the male-dominated alternative music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was one of only a few women bass players, but her male counterparts treated her as an equal. It was the punters who assumed she must either be a singer or carrying her boyfriend’s guitar.
"I’ve actually fed a few of those things into the [next] Violet books ... They’re going to be encountering quite a lot of sexism and most of it is drawn from real life."
She also wants girls to know they don’t have to be proficient musicians to be in a band.
At first, she played one note at a time but that was the point of punk music, which was often "DIY, three chords and two minutes long".
"We just gave it a go and we had so much fun."
"I often say to my friends who have daughters, ‘Make sure you give her a guitar’ because I feel like joining a band [so] early in my life really shaped my confidence as a person. I mean, I was always the shy one ... but being part of something that drew a big crowd and [the fact] people liked the music, it was kind of empowering for a young woman."
The first in a series of books aimed at seven- to 11-year-olds, Violet and the Velvets was intended to be short and fun to read. The illustrations, large font and different kinds of typeface were all designed to be inviting, even for reluctant readers.
Children today have shorter attention spans and find it difficult to read "big, dense books full of small type", she says.
"Reading for pleasure is so important and apparently the rates are declining so we just need to do everything we can to keep kids choosing to read . . . "
There’s a direct correlation between declining literacy and school libraries disappearing, yet the government plan, Teaching the Basics Brilliantly, makes no mention of the words library, librarian or book, she adds.
"There’s so much research out there that the number one way to raise literacy is to get kids reading for pleasure. And the way you do that is you have librarians who give them good books to read. It’s not about analysing texts [for meaning]."
"My kids have been going through this system where they don’t read books any more. They get given excerpts of things and they have to read them and then they get tested on them. I mean, this is a perfect way to kill the love of reading right?"
As well as being accessible, her latest book features a diverse range of characters. Violet, for example, has inattentive ADHD. The condition often goes undetected in girls and King did not get her diagnosis until she was 52.
"That’s another reason I wanted to write the book," she explains. "There’s not a lot of fun children’s books about neurodiversity. A lot of them are about overcoming problems ... whereas I wanted to write one where the character just happened to have ADHD."
At school, King was seen as disorganised and "a bit of a daydreamer", hyperfocusing on some projects while failing to finish others: "My teachers were constantly saying, ‘Rachael could be doing better’."
In her adult life, 12 years passed between her publishing her third and fourth books.
"The diagnosis made my life better because I understood how my brain works and it made me better able to work with it ... Since I’ve been diagnosed, I’ve written three books in two or three years so it’s made a huge difference."
With a mother who was a publisher and acclaimed historian and author Michael King as her father, King grew up surrounded by books and says it was "kind of inevitable" that she would eventually become a writer.
Her first two novels were for adults. The Sound of Butterflies won the award for best first novel at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards while Magpie Hall was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
They were followed by two fantasies for young readers, both of which reflect her obsession with Scottish folklore.
Her 2012 novel, Red Rocks, took the Celtic myth of the selkie and transplanted it into a New Zealand setting.
The Grimmelings, published last year, is set on a South Island horse trekking farm, where 13-year-old Ella finds herself the target of a malevolent kelpie.
"The kelpie is a fascinating creature that takes the form of a beautiful horse, lures children onto its back, and then takes them into a lake and drowns them. It just totally appeals to my sense of weirdness and danger and horses ..."
"I basically wrote the book that I would have loved when I was 12."
King has often railed against the idea that children’s books are less important than those for adults.
"Children’s books are the most important books when you think about it because if you don’t give children something they love to read, then when they’re adults they’re not going to be buying adult books to read."
They can also be as complex and challenging as adult titles, and adults who think they aren’t for them are "missing out", she says.
It’s been a busy few weeks for the Christchurch author, who is a Frank Sargeson Fellow and writing a new young adult "folk horror fantasy", Song of the Saltings.
Recently, she landed a two-book deal with Margaret K. McElderry Books (MKM), a division of publishing giant Simon & Schuster.
The American young adult market is notoriously difficult to break into and what makes the deal even more meaningful is that MKM published two of her personal heroes, Susan Cooper and Margaret Mahy.
Along with this, Red Rocks was recently released as a TV series, Secrets at Red Rocks on Sky Open and Neon.
She is looking forward to speaking at the Wānaka Festival of Colour on April 5 — the session about The Grimmelings, will fittingly be held at a riding stables and include the chance to interact with horses.
Although she has not played in a band since her 20s, she has also recorded a song she wrote for Violet and the Velvets, releasing it on YouTube.
There’s an earlier clip on YouTube, too. In it, King is playing in her first band, wearing bracelets and a shiny blue vintage dress. One of her fellow band members wears a hippie waistcoat and a button-up shirt with impossibly large collars. Another plays the entire song with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
"It’s funny actually. I recently saw a photo of myself when I was 17 and I have exactly the same hairstyle now as I did then, which is long red hair with a fringe, and I still pretty much wear the same kinds of clothes as well — dresses and boots and black jeans. Some things don’t change."
The talk
• Rachael King talks about her novel, The Grimmelings, as part of the Wānaka Festival of Colour, at the Waterfall Equestrian Centre, Saturday, April 5 at 3pm. See more at festivalofcolour.co.nz.
• Read it
Violet and the Velvets: The Case of the Missing Stuff, by Rachael King, (Allen & Unwin), $19, is out now.
