Space Waltz return after almost 50 years with album 'Victory'

Space Waltz were Aotearoa's 1970s glam rock band and their appearance stopped New Zealanders in their tracks. With frontman Alastair Riddell's flamboyant style and gender bending performance, they were compared to T Rex and David Bowie.

Formed in 1974 by Riddell, they shared members with bands like Split Enz.

Now they're back. They've reformed, recorded an album - Victory - and will tour later this year.

"We've still got three original members," Riddell says; "Peter Cuddihy on bass, Eddie Rayner of course on keyboards and myself.

"And we've got two excellent newbies - they're extremely experienced professional musicians; we've got Solomon on guitar, and Pat Kuhtze on drums now, and Nicky and Meredith will be on tour with us as backing vocalists ... to give it that full onstage sound and it really makes it sound amazing."  

Riddell says so far, it's going great. He doesn't know where their sound would fit in today's world of music, but says it's very true to themselves.

"You play in lots of bands you play with lots of people, but ... I always felt that the band had this core natural feeling, style ... we always had this feeling that it worked. You could introduce a new song, you could all play it and very quickly the whole thing would start to feel right.

"And that hasn't gone away. It feels completely natural. And of course we're all more experienced, so in some ways it's a very tight professional sound, and I'm loving it.

"I don't know how big an audience we'll draw."

Creating an album and letting it go so it can be finished up is always hard, Riddell says: "It's never perfect ... it's hard to let go."

But he's excited to see what's next for the group, and what they've done so far has made him hopeful they'll head back to the studio again 'quick smart'.

Making a splash in the 1970s

Space Waltz shot to fame after performing their hit 'Out on the Street' on the national TV show New Faces.

At the time, New Zealand was comparatively much more culturally conservative and homogenous than today.

"It was very orthodox and straight down the middle," Riddell says of the atmosphere they broke through in.

"We had a brass band playing in lederhosen on the show with us. We sort of blew the socks off the country, and of course everybody - I think it was something like 86 percent of the country - watched that show on a Sunday night, people just loved that show."

Riddell himself says their style was "a glam rock prog rock mash-up".

"It was a very conservative staid atmosphere, and of course what we did was totally current with what was going on out in the UK. We used to get Melody Maker every week and listen to Top of the Pops with Brian Matthews on National Radio."

Their appearance on New Faces made them recognisable just about overnight, so much so that Riddell says even going down to the supermarket became a problem.

"In those days I think in New Zealand, it was rather like The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, you could make a huge splash very quickly if you sounded good and were galvanising.

"With a programme like that you could get in front of the nation, which you can't do now. It's so much harder if you're a young artist you've got quite an uphill crawl, a struggle to piece together all the different social media and elements that you need to."

Riddell says his life changed after that performance: "In a way I wasn't really ready for."

"The idea of having some success was great, musically I really loved it, but I found the social - going out in the world - quite different, ... [and] there was no-one to suggest what would be a way you could even psychologically cope with it."

And while things began to happen for Space Waltz, that shock was part of why the band fell apart in the end, he says.

After the show, doors began to open to them, confirming his belief they could make it internationally.

They shifted to Australia.

But Riddell says in early 1975 they lost member Eddie Rayner who until then had been working as part of both Space Waltz and Split Enz, and who was pulled away as Split Enz took off.

Then a burgeoning working relationship with manager Michael Browning fell apart, just as Browning took AC/DC to the UK.  

Riddell says they'd come within cooee of making the leap internationally, but just narrowly missed pulling it off.

"It was a huge effort to get to Australia ... in today's world that seems insane, people travel so much, but [from] little old parochial New Zealand - it was putting the guys out of their safety zone.

"At Christmas time they all came back to New Zealand, and I could never really get them back to Australia. In the end Browning went to the UK with AC/DC, and the rest is history - of course later he had INXS.

"I always feel it was the most stupid thing that we did, that we left, and we kind of betrayed his trust. It was a complete disaster."

After that, promising talk of Riddell making an album in the US with CBS fell through after that producer was pulled away by EMI at the last minute, Riddell said.

"That was a huge disappointment."

Since then, Riddell has remained involved with music, playing in an Irish band in Auckland, and writing songs. And he hopes some of those songs could potentially be used by Space Waltz in the future.

Space Waltz plays Auckland city's Real Groovy tonight, 20 May.

And they plan to tour later this year, playing in Wellington on 29 September, Auckland on 30 September at the Tuning Fork, 27 October in Hamilton and late October they will play a gig in Waitara, Taranaki.