An energetic live performance by Australian '80s band The Fruit Pastilles is inspiring writer Hera Lindsay Bird's novel-in-progress.
The award-winning poet shares six of her favourite songs and talks life with Charlotte Ryan for The Mixtape.
Poet Hera Lyndsay Bird Photo: Supplied
Hera Lindsay Bird is a writer and children's bookseller based in Dunedin. She pens the Help Me Hera advice column for The Spinoff.
Bird says she's about halfway through writing two books at the moment; a novel inspired by this Fruit Pastilles performance, and a kids' book.
"I have an absolute obsession with children's poetry. I collect kids' stuff from around the world and particularly stuff that hasn't been edited by teachers for sense or meaning."
Six years old is the peak age for producing good poetry, she says.
"Most of the poets I love have spent their entire lives trying to figure out how to access that six-year-old energy again. You've got so much to say at that age. I feel like I don't have that much to say anymore.'
Bird was 26 when her self-titled debut poetry collection was released and later won several major New Zealand awards.
She has always wanted to be a writer but is happy to combine it with bookselling for now. She says she'd get cabin fever "really really quickly" trying to do it full-time.
Bird is also having fun writing her own advice column, although admits she's not the most likely person to be offering life advice.
"It's sort of a stupid job because I'm the last candidate for giving anyone good advice about their life. Even if mine is not particularly relevant or good, people just like having their problems heard and discussed. That's about as much as I can offer, really... I have no mental health qualifications."
The cover of Hera Lindsay Bird's self-titled debut poetry collection (2017) Photo: Victoria University Press
Bird spends a lot of her spare time absorbing words, sometimes via her Kobo e-reader ("I don't like Jeff Bezos") and often via audiobooks (she recommends LibriVox for free public-domain audiobooks recorded by people around the world).
"I love going for long walks and listening to books. You can kind of clean the kitchen and listen to Hilary Mantel at the same time."
Audiobook readers have to be of a certain standard, she says.
"They have to have a good reader, otherwise I would prefer to read it myself … It's one of those things, you don't notice till it's bad and then you turn it off immediately."
A couple of months ago, Bird and her Welsh partner moved to Dunedin – a city she has lived in before.
"I just love waking up and looking at the sky, it's so ominous... you know you're in Dunedin.
"I walk down the street here and I feel like I'm in the middle of a Ronald Hugh Morrieson story and they haven't even needed to repaint the street signs and stuff... There's something really amazing and really magical about Dunedin. I'm happy to be back."
Hera Lindsay Bird's song picks:
The Fruit Pastilles: 'I Don't Ever Want To See You Again' (1982)
Singer Shirley Barrett wrote this song with her high school friends and it unexpectedly rose to the top of the Australian charts where they performed it drunk on vodka.
"The lyrics of this song just crack me up every time … I live in mortal terror of them taking this clip down from YouTube one day."
The Partridge Family: 'I Think I Love You' (1970)
"The opening 10 seconds are so good ... The lyrics are really great as well. He just suddenly shouts out by accident 'I think I love you!.
This experimental noise musician Betinna Koester bears an "unbelievable" resemblance to the American thriller writer Patricia Highsmith, Bird says, adding that her singing voice sounds something like Tom Waits as a German lesbian.
"I don't know what it is about this song, it gets me so pumped up. If I listen to this on my headphones on the bus I feel like kicking the door down whenever I arrive at wherever I'm supposed to be. It's got such a good, ominous energy."
Jake Thackray: 'The Rain On The Mountainside' (1977)
"He's such an interesting weird character."
Bird is "obsessed" with the avant grade music of Scott Walker, and sometimes she and her partner play this song for their cat who loves to spring around the house super fast after his nightly visit to the litter box.
"It's the sort of song you should listen to on the loudest possible volume setting, driving over a desert road as fast as you can at night. That's how this music should be enjoyed, I think."
The late musician and poet David Berman (who co-founded Silver Jews) wrote one of Bird's top five poetry books of all time - Actual Air (1999).
"Part of the reason l love David Berman and the Silver Jews is his lyrics are just unbelievable. This song has got my favourite lyric of all time in it… Ain't you heard the news / Adam and Eve were Jews / And I always loved you to the max.
"It sounds like nonsense when you say out it aloud but when you hear it in a song… You could never get away with it in poetry but in the context of a song it's stunning, hilarious, amazing."
Related:
Hera Lindsay Bird adds 'agony aunt' to her CV
