A Cowgirl Named Outlaw

Celia Mancini, in my life

Celia Mancini at the King’s Arms 2016 - Hayley Theyers

I first encountered Celia Pavlova (nee Patel, later Mancini) circa 1989, but who was counting, when the Axel Grinders played with The Puddle at the Wharf Hotel in Dunedin. There’s some amusing footage of the band bowling up to this venue, maybe then, maybe on another occasion, in Andrew Moore and Cushla Dillon’s documentary King Loser – Celia and her set’s dedication to recording (and if possible releasing or broadcasting) everything was going to ensure a great film in the present, which was their very distant future. At soundcheck I also met wildman drummer Duane Zarakov (Pat Faigan) and ace guitarist John Segovia (John Markle) both of whom I’d play with later, but I couldn’t take my eyes and ears off Celia, to this day the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen on a stage, in fishnets, leather miniskirt, bustier and peaked leather cap, purring and growling her way through ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ with all the right moves. The band’s originals showed that they were keen students of garage rock, biker rock and other exciting trash.

Celia’s voice has an irresistible rasp to it and a sweet side, and even in my drug-addled state I’m starting to realise that I need to work with a woman like this. The thought of meeting her at the bar is all kinds of intimidating, but she’s talkative and I quickly realise how smart she is, well-read and learned in all the things that matter. The rest of that weekend is a blur and I’m not even sure I made the second night’s performance, but a seed was planted. Later, I’d hear Celia mentioned from time to time in that vague way we kept up with people we didn’t know before the internet. When I visited Bill Vosburgh and Sally Mulcahy in Christchurch on a rare Puddle tour, Bill showed me a new electric piano and told me he was playing keys in a lounge act, The After Dinner Mints, backing Celia Pavlova, and making good money entertaining the business class, which reminded me that, one day, I needed to do something similar.
Suddenly, it’s the 90’s, I have a new Puddle line-up, and we seem to be getting plenty of gigs. And there’s a new band in town, King Loser, playing some of those same gigs, who play a wild mix of surf, space rock, and implausible covers¹; they’re noisy in their music and in the game they talk, and this is when I meet Celia again and her partner Chris Heazlewood, a dapper, poised chap who already has some pedigree as an extremist of the electric guitar. We bond over our frustration with the reserved nature of the Dunedin scene, its resistance to notions of glamour and sleaze and the other interesting bits of popular culture. It’s the 90’s, the world is opening up, and we’re the self-appointed emissaries of change in this cold dark town. But we also bond over a shared love of history, especially military history, something we have in common with Peter Gutteridge, and if any Dunedin act is an influence on King Loser it’s Snapper, a band Chris and Celia will join when King Loser rests.
My sense of dates and the general order in which things happened is untrustworthy, so I’m grateful to Audioculture for telling me that
“Celia was also busy telling Dun fanzine that she was active mixing Piki Riwai and playing with and recording George Henderson and Snapper in a feature titled Profiling Women in New Zealand Music, published in mid-1993”. This is around the time King Loser’s first LP, the great Sonic Super Free Hi Fi, the first of three, is released on Belgian label Turbulence.

There was, for example, the time when I’d just written ‘Southern Man’ in a flat in Vogel street and that morning, as if deputised by God, Celia turned up with the Tascam portastudio and recorded a multitrack demo for me.

Later, or possibly earlier, who knows, Chris recorded the first, slow version of ‘Somebody To Love’ on the Tascam at Pete’s house with me multitracking the instruments and Celia and I singing; we sent a cassette mix to Radio One under the name George and Celia and it went to number 1 on the Radio 1 Top 11 for a few weeks, still the biggest chart hit I’ve been involved with.

This couple are so sympatico I find myself walking across town to play them songs I’ve just written, especially if I think there’s a part for Celia to sing. I bring her ‘Duette’, the song that plays at the end of the King Loser movie, my first (maybe only) two-character song, the night I write it. Chris sets up the Tascam to record our first version, and Celia says “Ah! You want me to sing this like a 12-year old” which I would never say, but she gets it.

George and Celia promo shot, by Chris Heazlewood

When it’s time for The Puddle to record our 90’s studio album Songs For Emily Valentine, I want Celia’s vocals on as many songs as possible, using as many tracks as necessary, and she excels herself building harmonies and colouring in the songs.

But a chance to release Songs For Emily Valentine doesn’t appeal to Flying Nun (who, as the film reveals, already have their hands full trying to sell King Loser as a less apocalyptic version of themselves). It’ll have to wait till 2006 to be heard. I’m not feeling well, King Loser are returning to Auckland to enter a more calamitous phase, we’ll lose touch for a while, but not before Celia is brought in to record the definitive version of ‘Duette’ with Mink.

At around the same time (who knows) Celia sang on ‘Lock And Load’ on Snapper’s A.D.M. album (1996); the demo of this song, called ‘Bad Girl’, surfaced on the Celia Mancini Tapes LP in 2019.

And made this single:

(It was some time after this, I assume, that I was first shown the original version of the new-fangled internet, because one Chris Heazlewood had blown up Pitchfork, then a forum, with outrageously picaresque yarns about his visit to America. The other Pitchfork forum users were aghast at this debasement of their temple, and I was seriously impressed. This was rock’n’roll, being played as something extra to the music.)


Much later, in 2004, I start to get The Puddle back together with Ross Jackson and Heath Te Au and we’re, against all odds, invited to play live on TV at the NZ National Anthem Play It Strange fundraiser. Celia is around so naturally we want to make the very most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and practice ‘Season Of The Wolf’ from Songs From Emily Valentine. I heard recently from Danny Mañetto that the producers were warned to expect chaos, but were pleasantly surprised, and certainly we were a bit late to make-up because Celia dithered for various reasons, but we made the stage on time and gave a thoroughly professional show.

Celia posted her own version of this on Facebook in 2013,
“[George] kindly called me up to do this..we got put on earlier than planned. .Flash make-up artists etc.I said 'I'll do it myself", 5mins later (change of clothes included), they were 'surprised. .dried my hair behind the drum riser during their first song..and..Anyway, afterwards Chris Knox got on bended knee and kissed my hand saying "I've never seen you so still, Celia."

I finally got to Auckland in 2006, with Hayley, subject of ‘Somebody To Love’, who had been hanging out with both Chris and Celia in the intervening years. I don’t remember exactly how Celia came back into our lives, but it came to pass that Celia’s band The Cigarettes played at my 50^th birthday bash at the Whammy Bar. They were supposed to play early in the evening but turned up after The Puddle played, indeed almost at closing time, and I think actually played a couple of decent songs before Celia, who had fucked around with the equipment for too long, some Peter Gutteridge influence there, drove her band off the stage then told the random who jumped up to play drums for her to fuck off. In my experience this was a wise move, any random emboldened enough to want to drum for a stranded muso is never up to it. This was the other side of Celia, and for me it was as if she’d crossed to this side pretty much overnight, but at the same time, it wasn’t surprising. After that we started seeing more of Celia, and she was hard work, but you’d want to see her again after a while, because she was still stimulating, funny, and charming. She’d come to our house promising to cook dinner, with a special kitset of Indian spices, get talking, and by 9pm the chicken still wasn’t in the oven. We’re not 20-somethings that stay up all night, in fact we have kids, and they can’t stay up all night waiting for dinner, they need to go to school tomorrow! Celia was like a rock’n’roll godmother to Poppy and Sage, funny, no doubt scary, and as brilliant at swearing as she is in the film. And now Poppy’s performing King Loser songs (and those unexpected covers) with Chris and Ca$h Guitar as the King Loser film wreaks its way around the country, and that couldn’t have turned out better.

Cushla Dillon made a good comment at the movie Q&A in Auckland, the day after Sinead O’Connor died, to the extent that our culture doesn’t know how to appreciate difficult women. The French have a term, monstre sacré, to apply to people of outsized personalities but solid achievements. It doesn’t quite mean, in French, what it looks like in English, but if it did, that would be the right way to appreciate someone like Celia, and all the other difficult people who could use some appreciation while they’re still with us.

Great musicians often make subjects for disappointing films, especially if those involved are too protective of their memories. Celia personally directed Andrew Moore to leave nothing out. That version of the film was fantastic but maybe not one the public was ready for, especially once Celia (who died in 2017) was no longer around to fight for it. Cushla Dillon’s rearrangement of the material is inspired; especially the way Chris’s interviews, fraught in the original, have been turned into voiceovers, wherein his careful search for each unclichéd expression to describe the universal truth of his experience becomes a kind of magical incantation that ends up making it real, especially when set over King Loser’s cosmic jams.
One of my last memories of sharing good times with Celia is of staying up on Christmas night to watch Michael Jackson’s This Is It, the rehearsals of the show he was working on when he died. Her enthusiasm for his talent was infectious, her appreciation for his artistry was educational. Celia despised the cowardly way petty people pick apart the reputations of the great, naturally; she’d read history (the last two books she borrowed from, then discussed with, me were Saul David’s The Indian Mutiny and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar) and knew the fundamental truths about human nature. But she was, of course, also outspoken, to put it mildly – I remember, on a visit to her at home in Onehunga, entering a store where the shopkeeper had a shrine to Meher Baba, and her regaling me loudly about the guru’s sex scandals, which the poor guy had no choice but to overhear.
A few years ago, while watching Toa Fraser’s film The Dead Lands on TV, I had the realisation that my dead friends are my tūpuna, the spirits that live in me, the voices I consult. I want them to hear and see what I can, to bring to them, as I used to, the new ideas. When, for example, I discover some bad girl music too wild for those around me, I can think “Celia would have got this”, and there’s still some comfort in that. And, thanks to Andrew and Cushla, who were also Celia’s friends, I will hereafter hear her voice with more clarity, and see her personality more completely than ever.

And also better appreciate the survivors, Chris, Sean, Lance and most of the other drummers, for those qualities that you’ll come to appreciate too if you see the film.

Postscript: thanks to Ryan Leach from Bored Out for this interview with Celia from 2017.

1. the most outstanding of these was probably Elton John’s “Daniel’