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Bird on the wing

Grant Smithies - Sunday Star Times

The singing on Alan Gregg's debut solo album is a touch shaky. Perhaps the ex-Mutton Bird should have asked his drummer Bic Runga for some tips. Grant Smithies reports.

The biggest challenge when recording your own songs, croaked noir-as-tar musical auteur Tom Waits in a recent interview, is that so many other people are involved in the process that it's easy to lose sight of the original song and "end up listening to the feathers instead of the bird".

One solution, if you have the musical skill, is to play all the instruments, and sing, record and produce your songs yourself, which is precisely what former Mutton Bird Alan Gregg has done on his debut solo album - Marshmallow (CRS/Universal).

During his 10 years with the Mutton Birds Gregg primarily played bass, though he managed to sneak a few of his own songs in among Don McGlashan's on a couple of albums. One of these - Come Around from Envy of Angels - was the Mutton Birds' biggest radio hit when the band lived in the UK.

Gregg is living there still, in a house in London with a tiny studio in the attic.

It is here he strapped together Marshmallow in a bid to "clear the decks" after so many songs built up that he started tripping over them.

"My record's not going to worry Radiohead too much," quips Gregg down the line from grey old Blighty. He's just woken up from dozing on the couch and sounds slightly distressed to have been jerked back to the material world from the middle of a pleasant dream.

"But hopefully it will find an audience, however small, of people who are looking for things that are more heartfelt. A lot of music I hear these days is primarily about attitude and marketing; there's not much genuine emotion.

"I'm not interested in all that fake angst. I wanted to make something that felt uplifting and life-affirming, and that wasn't trying to be deep and meaningful in any way. A lot of my songs have a sort of naivety that I didn't want to disguise. I didn't try to be hip or current, and I hate the whole moaning "complaint rock" style that's everywhere these days. I prefer little personal stories, really."

"I never really had any ambitions as a singer, but after auditioning a few other singers I thought I'd be better to do it myself. I played 90% of the instruments too, up there in the attic, so it's ended up with a real home-baked quality that I like."

Some might even say half-baked, when faced with some of the more twee and cutesy offerings, but the best songs here sparkle with wit and whimsy and give your day a perceptible lift. Come Sunday, which features Bic Runga on drums and Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith on backing vocals, is one such delight.

The guitar jangles away slowly like a Byrds song on valium, Runga whacks the drums like a carpenter banging home nails, and Gregg raises his endearingly shaky voice to the rafters with Sexsmith beside him to prop it up where required - it's a hit.

Elsewhere there are songs about surprise pregnancies, Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng, surreptitious London love affairs, sexy girls riding scooters over Grafton Bridge, the importance of living passionately in case you're hit by a bus tomorrow, even the occasional wobbly electronic interlude, and lots of unashamedly corny rhymes because Gregg loves the way they stick in your head and compel you to sing along.

Some songs are so sweet you'd probably want to only sample them very occasionally (hence the name Marshmallow, perhaps?) but there's a guilelessness here that many will find appealing.

"I didn't have to please anybody else when I made it," says Gregg. "Nobody cared whether I made an album or not, or whether I wrote another song in my life. On one hand that thought was kind of depressing, but on the other hand it meant I didn't have to cater to anyone's tastes but my own.

"I just had to be brave enough to go ahead and do it because, playing bass, I've always been able to hide behind somebody else. Suddenly I'm having to step out into the spotlight. It's liberating in some ways and frightening in others, but what the hell. If it doesn't work out I can always just go back to hiding behind someone else again."