Barnaby and Dick Weir
Barnaby and Dick Weir
Photo by Pat Shepherd ©
Every school day during that long hot summer, a cheeky pair of piwaiwaka greeted the twins when they stepped off the school bus …
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Go to good.net.nz/loop to download ‘Heavy Weather’ by Barnaby Weir from Fly My Pretties: A Story, plus tracks by Rhian Sheehan, Samuel Flynn Scott and Paul McLaney.
So begins Fly My Pretties: A Story, a tale of ecological adventure narrated by legendary storyteller Dick Weir for his son Barnaby’s Fly My Pretties project, an ambitious multimedia show and musical collaboration bringing together 16 of New Zealand’s top independent musicians.
Dick’s voice is instantly recognisable, reassuring, rich and deep. He’s spent his life making TV and radio for children, receiving the Queen’s Service Medal for his Services to Children’s Broadcasting in 1998. And he’s always had a thing about piwaiwaka. “I love the Maori custom of thinking of the piwaiwaka—the fantail—as a precursor of news of some sort. I’ve made up a few stories about piwaiwaka … there’s that slight fairytale, mystic thing of them perhaps being helpful messengers.”
Perhaps those stories settled in his son’s subconscious: the fantail has been the Fly My Pretties motif since Barnaby, frontman of The Black Seeds, called up a handful of musician mates in 2004 and convinced them to do a one-off series of live shows with him. A phenomenal success, Fly My Pretties returned by popular demand the following year, and live recordings of the shows became gold-selling albums.
Dick has been to all of his son’s shows at least once. He’s justifiably proud of Barnaby’s musical talents—singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer, creative director—but his greatest admiration is reserved for his son’s knack of pulling people together. “He’s always had the ability to glue people together. He was like that as a child, and it has come out in this enterprise … He’s easy-going, but he’s actually quite intense, like I am—but his intensity doesn’t manifest itself in an overly bossy, commanding way. He doesn’t tell people what to do; he somehow gets them to do what’s best for the project without them realising!”
Dick never expected he’d be drawn into his son’s network of collaborators, but when Barnaby concocted the idea of centring his third Fly My Pretties project on a story, his father was the obvious choice. They wrote the story of Pi and Wai together, then Barnaby asked the musicians to write songs around the story’s themes. “The story is about losing the specialness of what we’ve got,” says Barnaby. “We definitely don’t want to soapbox—it’s about entertainment, and the music is the main focus of the show—but New Zealand’s clean, green thing isn’t totally accurate, and the story couldn’t really be more relevant.”
Dick’s interest in the environment stretches back 35 years, “but it’s another thing entirely to ask ‘what am I going to do about it?’” he says. “I’ve only started to face up to that in the last few years.” He sees hope in younger generations. “Young people these days seem to be better than my generation at negotiating with each other and collaborating. Young people understand that if you want things done you have to be inclusive. One would like to think that’s because of good parenting, but I certainly can’t take any credit for that.”
Father and son share a modest nature, and Barnaby is reluctant to take credit for his show’s success. The music comes first, he insists, and with 17 people making up the Fly My Pretties ensemble, and another 18 or so crew at every show, “it really is the power of many”.
