My Account
Poet, philosopher and keen observer of people, Wellsford’s Terence O’Neill-Joyce was recently recognised with a national award for outstanding services to New Zealand music. This record producer, who recorded a 17-year-old Russell Crowe singing, ‘I Just Want to be Like Marlon Brando’, and helped launch Prince Tui Teka’s career, told Jannette Thompson that sometimes the way his life has turned out has made him believe in guardian angels …
The first time I got a sense my angel was keeping an eye on for me was when I was 15. I’d just finished a six-week Sea Training School course at Gravesend, near London. I went to meet the pantryman I would be working under and he dropped a threepenny piece on the deck of the ship. When I bent down to pick it up, he put his hand on my backside. Until that moment, I’d never realised that I could get that angry. I didn’t hit him, but I did tell him in no uncertain terms that he was never to do that again. He got the message.
I’d decided to go to sea because I wanted to travel and I also wanted to get away from my stepfather, who was a 22-stone bully. My uncle once told me that when my Dad died, the last thing he’d said to Mum was, “Don’t marry Judge”. But that’s exactly what she went and did. My stepfather was the export manager for a Sheffield steel company, which involved a lot of travel to South America. Inadvertently, it was his travel stories and the souvenirs he brought home that whetted my appetite to travel.
On my first ship with the Royal Mail line, working as a cabin boy we did ‘home trade’. It was mainly across the channel and up to places like Germany and the Netherlands. Then I transferred to a 5000-tonne refrigerated frigate, the MVDrina. Our first trip was to South America where we loaded beef in Buenos Aires. On our way out we ran into a storm in the South Atlantic. I remember looking up at the waves crashing over the ship – it was pretty scary. We stopped at Montevideo, in Uruguay, where we saw the wreckage of the German battleship the Admiral Graf Spee. The ship had put into Montevideo during World War II to do repairs after being hit by British warships, but when she was bottled in by three New Zealand ships, the captain decided to scuttle her rather than surrender to the British. We also crossed the Sargasso Sea and by the time I got back to Dover, I’d really got a taste for long sea voyages.
I joined the Cunard line and worked as a First Class waiter on the ocean liner Scythia. Our destination was Quebec, but as we entered the St Lawrence River, doing about two knots on a foggy morning, there was a terrible crash and I thought we’d hit an iceberg. The emergency sirens went off and everyone was told to get their lifejackets and head for the lifeboats. It turned out we’d hit a 3000-tonne freighter, which left a 24-foot gash in our bow. In a strange way, this is how I eventually ended up in New Zealand. We were stranded in Quebec for three weeks and one night I went for a beer at the historic Chateau Frontenac, which overlooks Quebec. I started chatting to the young waitresses and then walked her home. I leaned over to kiss her goodnight when suddenly her father opened the door and roared at me. The girl was my first real infatuation – I was completely bowled over by her and when I got back to Southampton, I decided I had to get on the first ship back to Quebec. I went to Leadenhall Street, in London, which is lined with the offices of shipping houses. In one of the windows was a model of the NZ Shipping Company’s Rangitoto. I needed work and I needed money, so I walked in and showed them my discharge papers and the man behind the desk said, “Can you start in the morning?” That’s how I found myself on my way to NZ, of which I knew absolutely nothing about, instead of Canada.
Sailing into Wellington Harbour on a sunny morning was unforgettable. I just fell in love with the place. And then I met some people from Ngauranga, who made me feel very much at home. Long story short, when the ship left port, I wasn’t on it. I got a job at the Ngauranga freezing works, which was quite an education. On my first day I watched a guy with a stun gun put it to the head of the first cow and in a very short space of time, the cow was hanging in two pieces. My job was to push the carcasses along the chain and label them. I did this for about a year, but the smell of death is not pleasant so I quit and got a job making stampers to press LPs in the matrix department at His Masters Voice (HMV), in Wakefield Street. The fact that I wasn’t legally in NZ started to play on my mind so one day I walked into the police station, across the road from HMV, and tried to turn myself in. The officer on duty told me to come back the next day because he didn’t know what to do with someone who had jumped ship. In the end I was charged and sentenced to a month in prison pending deportation. They sent me to Mt Crawford and put me in a cell with a guy who had woken up one morning and chopped his wife into pieces. At the end of the month, I was transported to the MV Sussex and shipped back to England.
By this time I was old enough for national service, a sort of peacetime conscription, so I opted for the Air Force. I trained for about a year in air electronics at Cardington and became a radio telephonic direction finding officer.
About the most memorable incident from this time was the morning I decided to mimic our sergeant. Every morning about 5am he’d yell at us, “Hands off your cocks, on your socks and report outside”. On this particular day, I got up at 3am and yelled the command. It must have been convincing because everyone turned out, including a not-so-happy sergeant. He made me dig the garden with a bayonet and paint the garden stones with blanco, but I got the impression he’d enjoyed the joke even though he warned me never to get an idea like that again. At the end of training, I was posted to Malaya where I spent two years fighting communist guerrillas in the jungle, being scared by gibbons and snakes, and bitten by centipedes. It was where I had my first encounter with Islam. I walked into a mosque in Kuala Lumpur and was struck by the contrast between it and the Anglican church in England where I’d been a choirboy – there was a single chandelier but no ornate decorations, just one man kneeling, reading the Koran. It started what has since been a lifelong interest in meditation and thinking about what life is all about and why we are here.
Through all this I’d stayed in touch with my old boss at HMV, Morrie Hoy, so when my service was up and he offered me a job, I headed back to NZ. Later, when I was working with an Indonesia diplomat who had been given asylum in NZ, we decided to form Apollo Records and our first recording was a hypnosis LP! The partnership didn’t last, but from there I went on to found Ode Records, which I ran for 40 years. I started with a record of simple songs and nursery rhymes for children, but went on to make about 600 recordings supporting Polynesian and Maori performers, popular music and jazz.
I’ve heard people call Russell Crowe selfish, but when he was still a teenager, I recorded a single for him and then went on to do an album called All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Play. What he did was round up lots of young bands to each do a song on the album. It wasn’t a great success financially, but I think it showed a side of Russell that he was really interested in helping people. Years later, when he had made a name for himself in the movies, I got a phone call from Los Angeles telling me that Russell wanted me to have the NZ rights to a new album he was putting out with his group, Ten Feet of Grunt. It didn’t work out in the end because they wanted $20,000 up front for promotion, which I didn’t have, but it was nice to be remembered.
The first night I saw Tui Teka perform in a bar in Hastings, there was standing room only. He was amazing – he played five instruments, sang and was really funny. I talked to him afterwards and said, “I’ve got a song for you – For The Life of Me”. He listened to Roy Clark’s version, liked it and agreed to record it. The Yandall Sisters did the harmony and it became a Gold record. We did four albums together and he was a delight to work with. The only problem was he ate too much. I once saw him at a leagues club in Australia sit down and eat a steak, chips and six eggs, and then ask the waitress for the same again.
About two months ago, I recorded a jazz album by the New Bop Quintet, a tribute band to jazz in the 50s and 60s, which will probably be my last recording. David Innes had the idea of getting the musicians together, organising some gigs and then making the record. We only did 300 CDs, but it hasn’t sold well. I think we are losing something very important with the loss of live music venues and ‘Mum and Dad’ music shops. Music is something that feeds and nourishes the soul, but you don’t get that by downloading it onto your phone. It is efficient and its giving the customer want they want, but the experience of listening to that music can never replace a live performance.
