Andrew Schmidt’s The Other Side of Reason is the long-awaited biography of musician Peter Jefferies.
The book covers Jefferies’ long musical legacy, from the post-punk of Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, to his solo works.
Having decamped to Dunedin in 1986, he was at the centre of many musical endeavors in the city. Jefferies was involved with Xpressway Records, was a member of Plagal Grind, and eventually gained traction in the US with solo albums including 1994’s Electricity.
Schmidt, who’s spent a decade working on the book, answers some questions about its creation.
What was the initial spark for The Other Side of Reason?
I was working as a historian/ writer for the online New Zealand music history site, Audioculture, and asked if I could write Peter’s profile and that of his first recorded group, Nocturnal Projections. I’d been a fan of his music since the beginning. It always spoke to me. Peter liked the story and got in contact. He’d kept a low profile working as a music teacher in Taranaki secondary schools for over a decade. However, he’d recently returned to the stage in July 2014, a sell-out show at Auckland’s Kings Arms prompted by the successful American reissue of his first solo album, The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World, I always thought there was a book in him so we met up at his New Plymouth home in August 2014 and started talking. A conversation that went on for the next six years.
To what extent was Peter involved?
There was never any doubt Peter would play a big part in the book’s gestation and he remained supportive throughout. Once he sets his mind to something, he’s a force. That’s how he survived over twenty years as an active and productive creative in New Zealand and the US living on barely anything. Peter had a great personal archive and was a brilliant orator with a fantastic memory and the stories just flowed. He’d lived intensely with his art for a long time and still cared deeply about it. I’ve never met a musician as able as he was to talk about their music in detail and not undersell it. The challenge was to find the lesser-examined parts of his experience to add and expand upon.
The Xpressway Records archives at the Hocken Library proved fruitful?
I’m a bit of an archive geek and I love spending time in them. The Hocken is a pretty special place where I felt comfortable and welcome. My old friend Jon Chapman, an Audioculture writer, worked there part-time, and Amanda Mills, another writer for the site, whose work I was familiar with, was the music librarian. I misread the catalogue and thought there were five files placed in the archives by Xpressway Records’ Bruce Russell, when it was actually five file boxes; a huge resource that enabled the real-time construction of an important part of the story. To have the insight to first hold onto the records as Bruce did and then place them in an archive where they are freely available showed amazing forethought.
Were there new discoveries in the story that surprised you?
Peter’s early days in Auckland in 1979 and early 1980 at the height of the city’s belated punk scene were news to me. He’d never really talked about it. He was briefly at Elam Art School at the University of Auckland and formed his first proper functioning group, Dull Emma, while there. And when he returned home for good from the US in 1997 settling back in Stratford, he developed a strong presence on the east coast of Australia, where he toured twice. It was another blind spot that produced his brilliant final solo album, Closed Circuit, from 2001, which was overlooked, but now seems finally to have found the audience it deserves. But really, there was more to add to every part of his journey. Our punk, post-punk, and indie history is still chronically underwritten.
Peter was at the centre of a lot of things in Dunedin. How important was that time here to his story?
It was vital. Peter’s never lived anywhere else apart from Taranaki for anywhere near that long. He found a supportive environment in Dunedin that inspired and enabled him to function effectively. Dunedin’s early Flying Nun Records groups and their ambition and success added to the allure. There were still plenty of musicians in the city who had yet to fully realise their potential, including Bruce, Alastair Galbraith, Sandra Bell and Michael Morley to team up with. On a more practical level, the cost of living was lower and there were lots of warehouse spaces and pub rooms for bands to play.
He's from a small town. Do you think being from one yourself gave you a deeper insight?
That we had similar backgrounds and music tastes and lived through the same era with some of the same desires was one of the project’s greatest strengths. Neither of us are from creative or academic backgrounds. We grew up in small rural service towns in the central North Island and went to the local schools and everything outside that was new and fresh to us. We were learning on our feet the whole time. I hope I captured the excitement that hung in the air and the sense of history unfolding in front of us (not behind as most historians do), and the slightly naïve small-town awe we had about it all.
- Peter Jefferies - The Other Side of Reason by Andrew Schmidt is published by Hozac Books.
What’s author Andrew Schmidt reading?
“I’m never happy unless there’s a small pile of unread books next to my chair. They are usually good creative nonfiction, memoirs, and history. I’ve just finished Amy Liptrot’s The Instant, her follow-up to The Outrun, where she pursues urban wildlife and love in Berlin, and Joel Selvin’s Hollywood Eden - Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise, his history of the pioneering days of the Los Angeles recording industry, involving Jan and Dean, The Beach Boys, Nancy Sinatra and the early days of chart R&B, rock’n’roll, and pop in the city. My head’s in Candy Darling – Dreamer, Icon, Superstar at the moment.”
