Bic Runga’s new record is called Birds, not because the singer adores our feathered cousins but because they creep her out a little. “Birds,” she says, rolling the word on her tongue and wrinkling a nose that, perched beneath vast mirror-dish eyes, looks implausibly tiny.
“They’re a little strange, don’t you think?” offers the New Zealand songstress, who hunches forward when she talks, as if preparing to share secrets. “There’s something otherworldly about them – have you ever had the feeling they know things that we don’t?”
Runga (30) speaks very deliberately; her conversation is as concise and elegant as her music, a folk derived drive-time pop that brings to mind a spikier Beth Orton or – and we mean this as a complement – Natalie Imbruglia with song-writing chops.
Today, we find Runga engaging but deeply knackered. She’s on the Dublin leg of a pan-European jaunt in promotion of Birds, to be released in Ireland six months after it debuted at the top of the New Zealand charts, refusing to budge for weeks.
“Europe is a transition. In New Zealand I’m basically quite a large star. I’m properly famous,” says Runga, the biggest selling artist in her country’s history, trumping Crowded House at a canter. “I’ve got a following here and in the UK, but in New Zealand it’s at an entirely other level.”
I ask how her much of much a millstone being a celebrity in New Zealand is. Can Runga go out in Auckland (the city where she took her first steps in music) without fans pestering her? At restaurants, do people follow her with camera phones in the hope she’ll twat a waiter or start dancing on the tables.
“Oh no,” gasps Runga, as though the idea of fame having a downside had never previously occurred. “We’re not so in your face in New Zealand. People give you space. While they may recognise you in the street, they don’t like to intrude.”
One reason Runga’s so drained is that Birds is, in large part, a eulogy to her father who passed last summer. For the past six hours, she’s been holding forth to sundry media on the pain of losing a parent. Before meeting me she was interviewed by a ditzy TV reporter, whose froth – “Do you like Ireland?”, “God, New Zealand’s a long way away isn’t it?” – came nearly as a relief.
“Having your dad die on you... y’know, it’s tough,” says Runga, sounding suspiciously like a human being rather than someone with a record to sell.
“Did it influence the song-writing? Yeah, I’m sure it did. I think that maybe someone else listening to the record could tell better than me, however. I’m still too close to it.”
Runga is of mixed Maori–oriental parentage. Her mother was a Chinese-Malaysian lounge singer, her father a soldier from Christchurch. They met in Kuala Lumper in the early ‘70s – she was warbling in a downtown club, he was on leave from Vietnam.
Growing up in Christchurch, Runga admits she wasn’t really aware of her Maori heritage. As a teenager the slow pace of life in Christchurch, New Zealand’s second largest city with a population of 300,000, seemed almost physically oppressive. Her dreams were of escaping New Zealand rather than embracing Maori culture.
“I’d listen to gospel and blues music from America and compared to what I knew it was like something from another planet. To an adolescent in Christchurch in the ‘80s, the music of the American south from the ‘30s really was alien. I found it fascinating.”
It took her father’s death – as peaceful and natural a passing as anyone could hope for – to awaken her curiosity in Maori culture.
“Obviously, the Maori thing had always been there at home, in the background. But the way my culture deals with death was such a new thing for me. A Maori funeral lasts for three days and is a very elaborate and moving ritual. Of course, birds are have a symbolic significance in Maori tradition, so I guess that informed the record as well.”
For seasoned Runga fans – she is arguably more popular in Ireland than anywhere outside New Zealand – the new record is an often confounding thing.
In place of the lush harmonies and day-break melodies of 2003’s Beautiful Collision, her international break-out LP, Runga has embraced an elaborate pre-rock ‘n roll sound. Birds is awash with tentative piano notes and bruised string flourishes, illuminated by Runga’s voice, a smokey presence drifting in the rich spaces between the music.
She recorded the album in a tumbledown mansion outside of Auckland. “It’s really secluded,” Runga recalls. “You have to watch you don’t go feral. It was a house built for the Hall family, of Walker and Hall fame - a big jewelry company, in the ‘50s. It’s a kind of would-be Hollywood mansion. Though there’s a bit of disrepair.”
Runga is a self confessed control freak – she produced and played all of the instrument on her first two records. On Birds, she attempted to something more collaborative. By New Zealand standards, the band she put together had the ring of a super-group : Neil Finn plays guitar, Shayne Carter (of underrated Dunedin psych-rockers Straightjacket Fits) is a backing vocalist.
“Initially, I suppose it did feel a little strange working with Neil because he’s such a huge figure in New Zealand,” she says. “As a kid I had would have grown up listening to Crowded House. They were the first New Zealand band to really have an impact overseas. But we’re friends now, so it was cool to get a chance to collaborate.”
Shortly before making Birds, Runga returned to New Zealand from a year long sojourn in Paris. Did a Pariasian sensibility seep into the music’s bones?
“Living in France was definitely an influence, to the extent that I was encouraged to try different instruments and to make something that was outside of the traditional rock format,” she says.”But the biggest thing I took away from the experience of Paris was just the scale – it’s so much bigger than New Zealand and culturally, very diverse. I’m moving to London now. If you’ve international ambitions as an artist, it’s important you look outside New Zealand.“
With her manager, an affable fellow who counts a lock-in at a Dublin pub popular among the rock cognscenti as a highlight of Runga’s last Irish tour, hovering and glancing at his watch, there is time for one final question. How, I would like to know, should one pronounce ‘Bic’? She’s not named after a popular brand of biro, surely?
“You say it Bec, rather than Bic,’ says the singer, smiling generously . ‘It’s Chinese, it’s a strange vowel sound which doesn’t seem to translate in English. It means the colour of jade.”