Kiwi music's unsung hero

Guitar-slinging songsmith among the best

Whether it's on stage or screen, expat New Zealand rocker John Kempt has been there and done it. Southland musician Chris Chilton talks to a performer living the dream.

In the New Zealand music industry in the late 1980s, if you weren't Split Enz, Dave Dobbyn, or The Exponents, you were pushing effluent uphill trying to get played on the radio.

Bad luck if you were in an Auckland alternative pop band like the Scissormen, flogging your guts out touring New Zealand trying to make it happen.

The Scissormen played intelligent songs that didn't follow the normal linear path. Too clever by half for the fledgling New Zealand music industry, as it turned out.

The songs were written by The Scissormen's guitarist/vocalist/frontman John Kempt, a gifted songwriter and performer who would make his mark on Australasian stages playing Buddy Holly in the musical Buddy through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

The upbeat and articulate Kempt is one of New Zealand's unsung heroes. He has flown just under the mainstream radar for more than 30 years, despite his extraordinary contribution to performing arts.

The 47-year-old has won international songwriting awards, been a tour manager and sideman for Aussie guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel, collaborated with Kiwi pop godfather Rikki Morris and soulman Rick Bryant, gigged as a session musician, been a Hollywood studio engineer, played on a Dutch No1 hit single and award-winning recordings in the United States, produced albums, written ad jingles, scored and appeared in television shows, acted in a Cannes-selected movie and taught Terminator II movie star Robert Patrick how to play guitar.

These are edited highlights of an almost overwhelming body of work by the London-born, Auckland-raised musical nomad, who has been based in Los Angeles for the best part of a decade.

"I see myself as a multimedia artist," Kempt says from LA. "Let's say, for laughs, a male Bette Midler. Bottom line, I'd like to continue to do creative work at the highest level. It's about the journey."

The journey's far from over for Kempt, but what a hell of a ride. Buckle up ...

Little Johnny didn't know it, but a play in Manurewa was about to open doors.

It was 1979 and Kempt was 13, a bit of an oddball at a time when any Kiwi boy treading the boards in amateur theatre and not ploughing up rugby paddocks was clearly a sissy. The play was Noah's Ark, and actor Warren Lindberg, who would go on to become a human rights commissioner, was playing Noah.

Lindberg suggested Kempt try out for new director Sam Pillsbury's upcoming movie The Scarecrow, based on New Zealand writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson's novel, and starring United States screen veteran John Carradine.

Kempt read for and won the role of young upstart Peachy Blair. At least, that's what it said on his contract. "When I got to the set they said `see that fat guy over there, he's Peachy Blair. You're skinny. You're Skin Hughson'," Kempt says.

"Then they gave me another script. It made sense to me."

The Scarecrow was the first Kiwi film to win official selection at Cannes.

Acting was Kempt's real obsession as a kid, but most of his spare time went on music.

There were always guitars lying around the Kempt house and Johnny taught himself to play on his sister's battered nylon-string guitar with a "One Way Jesus" sticker on it. Initially playing guitar was just something to do, for up to eight hours a day.

"When I left school I found some of the pretensions of the local theatre scene hard to take. So I thought, `stuff this, I'm going to play some punk rock'. So I invested all my energy into learning to write and play guitar.

"Many years later, when the role of Buddy came up, I was well prepared. I'd always kept my finger in acting anyway.

"I did a terrible audition for Buddy, actually. My voice was blown out. But I smiled and played the guitar behind my head. I've always had a taste for fine cheese."

Kempt says the role was a once-in-a-lifetime gig, and extremely demanding. He performed the show on three New Zealand, Australian and Asian tours, in 1992 and 2001.

"You needed a lot of different skills to perform the role," he says. "It took it out of you, though. I'd come off some nights and throw up in the sink. Playing dead rock legends plays with your psyche. I started doing acupuncture, things I would never consider, to keep my head together.

"It was a fantastic experience, though. It made so much sense. Buddy was the first punk rocker. Peggy Sue was all downstrokes."

The Scissormen were also a giant part of Kempt's musical development. He acknowledges the band was "definitely too clever" but harbours no resentment that they never clawed into the major league.

"We were either 10 years ahead or behind the times," he says. "In recent times, being a smart pop band has become popular again, which is a good thing. Radiohead, Muse, Arcade Fire – we had a lot in common with those groups."

Another part of the problem may have been that the Scissormen didn't look or sound like a New Zealand band, perhaps the result of Kempt's trans-hemispheric upbringing. Always snappily dressed and with state-of-the-art gear, they looked like they were from England.

Look up the video of their 1990 single Rediscovering You on YouTube and you'll see a top-end band that's thinking of someplace else.

"We didn't really care though," Kempt says. "We had a vision and we were having fun with it. It worked with the crowd as well. We were so committed to it on every level. People pick up on that. We could fill the Gluepot, or say Sammy's [in Dunedin], playing off-kilter pop music.

"Did we make life difficult for ourselves? Absolutely, yes, but really only when record companies were involved. Bad contracts strangled us to death. The age-old story."

Kempt saw that his days in New Zealand were numbered as far back as 1990.

Then, New Zealand songwriters were stifled by the lack of a media outlet. Radio wouldn't touch Kiwi music. Ray Columbus had been championing the concept of a New Zealand music radio quota for some years and the Labour Party picked up the ball and ran with it.

"I remember watching the election after a gig," Kempt says.

"National won that night. I remember thinking, `I'm done'."

It took Kempt another decade before he applied for a US "01" work visa, a temporary permit granted to applicants who demonstrate "extraordinary ability or achievement" in science, athletics, education, or the arts.

By then, Kempt says, if you were serious you had to leave New Zealand. "I was serious."

His longtime friend and music collaborator Rikki Morris says it was New Zealand's loss when Kempt headed Stateside.

"In my 30 years working in the music industry I've played with, recorded, mixed live sound for, been produced by and generally hung out with some massively talented people ... In my humble opinion John Kempt is up there with all of them," Morris says.

"He is a highly respected songwriter, musician, and producer – world class, in fact ... The New Zealand music scene just isn't the same without him."

Kempt says it took him two years to work through his immigration paperwork.

"As Freddie Mercury would say, the first years in the US were no pleasure cruise."

He was granted a visa in 2002 and found himself in an America suffering from the terrible injury of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"Everyone was stunned for a very long time – unable to move forward, myself included."

Undeterred, Kempt threw himself head-first into the Hollywood music scene, as a session muso, studio engineer, and guitar teacher to the rich and famous.

Spoiler alert: shameless name-dropping follows.

"My first celebrity client was [Monty Python star] Eric Idle. I taught his daughter. I met Eric on Christmas night 2002, at a friend's place. We had great jams. Beatles and Python songs ...

"I taught [Guns N' Roses bass player] Duff McKagan's daughter guitar. Cool guy and nice family. He was even cool about the fact I didn't like Guns N' Roses much.

"I taught Robert Patrick – the Terminator. I was teaching the after-school music programme at a school in the Valley up until the financial bubble burst in 2009.

"Then, of course, music was the first thing to go.

"Pretty much every major celebrity in Hollywood had a child in that school. It was a very unpretentious environment for the kids to learn in. ... It had an almost Kiwi vibe about it. I loved it."

Kempt has fronted the hard-gigging band Helicopter in California for the past seven years.

A few months ago, 1980s Footloose singer Kenny Loggins got up on stage with Helicopter in San Diego to sing Kings Of Leon's Sex On Fire, reading the words off his cellphone. "It was so wrong it was right," Kempt says.

Helicopter have "a really good following" in southern California. "We work all the time and make a living from it, but a lot of profit goes into costs."

Influenced by diverse American rock institutions such as Cheap Trick and The Band, Kempt says living in the US has inevitably coloured his songwriting.

"I'm still a strong purveyor of power pop, but I've definitely absorbed American roots influences. It just happens. You just soak it up in everyday living.

"The Doors make so much more sense to me since I've lived in LA. Now, when I hear LA Woman it can have the same visceral impact as, say, hearing Whaling by Dave Dobbyn."

Kempt has been the one-stop motor shop at producer Dino Maddalone's Torrance studio on and off for 10 years, working as Pro Tools engineer and session musician on countless recordings – not always credited, but such is the lot of a session muso, he says.

Maddalone has enabled Kempt to stay in the US by being his visa sponsor, and the Kiwi says they work well together.

"He's a big Italian, so he can be scary sometimes when he's in a bad mood, but he's also fiercely loyal ... We've had hits and won awards."

In 2008, Maddalone produced and Kempt played guitar and bass on British singer Kris Searle's debut album Slowly Diabolical, which won a stack of prizes at the LA Music Awards.

Two years later the pair had a No1 hit in the Netherlands with a rock remake of rap star Skee Lo's 1995 hit I Wish, and they wrote and recorded the cue music for hit television show The Price Is Right.

As well as working west coast gigs with Helicopter, Kempt is a member of two classic American acts: 1960s Texas rockers the Legendary Gentlemen and soul-R'n'B band the Chambers Brothers.

The Gentlemen recorded what is considered one of the essential garage singles of all time, It's A Cry'n Shame, in 1967. Kempt was asked to join the re-formed band three years ago.

It's his husky voice you can hear on the remake of the band's classic single, and their current album In Your Face.

Kempt says he had laryngitis when they recorded 18 tracks in two days in a San Diego studio, so he just "shouted through it".

He was asked to join the Chambers Brothers after Willie Chambers spotted Kempt doing his funky thing on stage at the Kibitz room, a hip venue for star-studded jam sessions since the 1960s.

"It's the single most organic and insane gig I've ever played anywhere," Kempt says of the lounge room.

"I've played there routinely since I arrived in LA.

"Thank God I found it. It's like a crazed gospel church bash – like something out of a movie. People of all ages and types falling around to the music almost possessed."

Kempt doesn't think he's a workaholic but he admits he does get a little nutty about his music.

"I read [Paul] McCartney wouldn't eat until he got his bass parts right on Sgt Pepper's. I'm sure a lot of artists do that. I do it. It's almost obsessive compulsion, like jumping cracks in the pavement."

After total immersion in the California music scene for a decade, John Kempt hasn't forgotten his Kiwi roots. He's writing a solo album, with the great working title Paua Shell Sun.

"They all say it, but I'm writing the best I ever have right now."

- © Fairfax NZ News