New Zealand Listener – August 24, 2019

56 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019

HERBS: SONGS OF FREEDOM

directed by Tearepa Kahi

T

he best thing in this documen-

tary feature film about the great

Pacific reggae band Herbs is that it

throws the marvel of their music

back at us, a cinema-trembling

reminder of what Herbs added to the great

New Zealand soundtrack. It reminds us,

too, of what freedom fighters they were in

their songs.

Like Bob Marley, who inspired them,

Herbs filled their seductive, melodic

reggae with the politics of the people and

of the times – the 1980s – confronting the

French over nuclear testing in the Pacific,

calling out our cops on race-based harass-

ment, firing shots at apartheid, singing for

the downtrodden.

And, all the while, imbuing their music

with a cross-cultural spirit that felt like us

and sounded, somehow, like the Pacific.

The music, in archive and revived, still

pulls that magic in Herbs: Songs of Freedom.

But when it comes to telling a coherent

story, this film is a patchy and sometimes

frustrating experience, though sprinkled

with some indelible moments.

At times, the film wants to be the story

of the band, and at others it weighs in

heavily on the tale of the 80s New Zealand

protest movement, with reminders of the

Polynesian Panthers and some powerful

archive from Bastion Pt and the Springbok

tour street battles.

Then, stitched through that, it’s a record

of a reunion of some of the key Herbs

survivors for a 40th anniversary concert.

The parts are linked in historical reality,

but not nailed together particularly well

for the movie.

It might be that, faced with the chal-

lenge of a rock-band tale as populous

and complex and conflicted as Fleet-

wood Mac and The Chills combined, the

director decided to leave more out of the

Herbs story than he put in. Then there’s

the problem of the band members and

managers interviewed being strangely

uncharismatic witnesses to their own past

in the interview pieces.

The story is told of the night the band

got the break of their lives when they won

over a huge crowd in a rain storm at Auck-

land’s Western Springs, supporting Stevie

Wonder and being the only act to show

when the weather made the headliner

cancel.

But there’s no mention that, in Herbs’

later days, Joe Walsh of the Eagles joined

the band for a period, touring and making

an album with them. Or of Herbs playing

before 10,000 people in Japan, filling a

stadium in Fiji and touring Australia with,

of all people, Rick Wakeman. And the

infamous Queen St riots. Herbs were there.

But nothing of that.

And there’s little made of the band’s

ongoing loss of key players, though

there’s lovely footage of them reunited.

Some of the most affecting of it is the

most intimate – an acoustic duet between

longtime Herbs leader Dilworth Karaka

and one of the band’s great songwriters,

Tama Lundon.

And guitarist Tama Renata, asked to

play something for the camera, rises from

his own physical ruin (he died before the

film was completed) to play a spellbind-

ing take on Jimi Hendrix’s Angel, fingers

flying, voice intact. But those moments

are a little few and far between in a film

that feels constructed in the edit suite and

has the feel of a television doco rather

than a big-screen feature.

It has spirit, but there is a great story

trying to get out and it’s a pity it doesn’t

quite manage to. Though, as mentioned,

it does sound terrific.

IN CINEMAS NOW

Colin Hogg

A former music journalist, Hogg covered Herbs

in the band’s 80s and 90s heyday.

Long ago

left untold

A doco on reggae

legends Herbs skirts

the band’s history,

but the music is

still sublime.

FILM

The story is told of the

night the band got the

break of their lives at

Auckland’s Western

Springs, supporting

Stevie Wonder.

BOOKS&CULTURE

Seductive, melodic

reggae: Herbs

performing at their

reunion concert.