By Bronwen Beechey
The Topp Twins are one of New Zealand's most successful acts, with a career spanning 10 years. Their music, combining beautiful harmonies with comedy and incisive social comment, has been heard at Australian venues including the Melbourne and Sydney Lesbian Festivals and the 1990 Brunswick Music Festival. The Twins recently returned to Melbourne for the 1992 Brunswick Festival, this time with percussionist and vocalist Nettie Bird.
Their concert delighted a capacity audience with country- flavoured music and up-front humour.
One song was dedicated to their mother for "making us what we are". Jools explained that their mum had told them one day, "You'll never find a man as good as your father". "We decided", the straight-faced Jools commented, "that if that was the case we might as well give up now, so we did". Another highlight of the evening was a marmalade recipe set to a reggae beat!
While the content of the songs at this concert was less political than in recent years, the Twins are well known in New Zealand for their involvement in campaigns including the anti-nuclear movement and the lesbian and gay movement.
The addition of Nettie Bird had caused some speculation that the Twins were perhaps about to become the Topp Triplets, but they assured Green Left that their name and basic style were not about to change.
"The Topp Twins will always be Jools and Lynda Topp. We invited Nettie to play drums for us when we did a theatre show in New Zealand, and we've got her to perform in Melbourne with us because it's been working really well. It's a little different for people to see us with a drummer", Lynda said.
Jools added: "We have an obligation to keep coming up with new ideas, new songs, new images, new ways of expressing ourselves and being seen on stage. We've come to a point where we feel confident enough as performers to let someone else in. We know Nettie as a friend too, which is really helpful. She's been a performer for a very long time in NZ. She's sensitive enough to play our music.
"We've been using the name Topp Twins for such a long time. If Crowded House got a keyboard player, they wouldn't suddenly call themselves Crowded Motel, would they?"
Since the Topp Twins were last in Australia for the 1991 Sydney Lesbian Festival, they have written and performed The Camping Out Show, which went on a national tour of New Zealand.
"It is actually a show about camping", Lynda explained, "based on some of our experiences when we were growing up in the 1950s.
"I play the camp mother and Jools and Nettie are camp leaders, to participate in camping games. Basically its a fun thing, but there is one moment in the show where we do bring in politics. The Happy Valley Camping Ground is renamed the Happy Valley Nuclear Free Camping Ground, and we sing 'Radiation', which is a bit of a party-killer of a song, but it's just one moment in the show where we remind the audience how important it is that New Zealand stay nuclear free."
Jools added: "When you're political performers like we are, you can make the mistake of going over and over the same old story. So we felt that just putting that one song in the show was enough. We also had a petition out in the foyer for people to sign saying that we don't want any change in the nuclear free policy. We also had a representative from Greenpeace travelling with us who set up a stall in the foyer."
Lynda says, "I think that, worldwide, there's been a backlash going on. In NZ people have become a bit complacent because we've had the anti-nuclear policy. In the '90s we're going to have to mobilise again because right-wing governments are very quietly slipping in all these changes."
The Topp Twins have also been involved in struggles against the right-wing economic policies and large-scale privatisation taking place under the National government. "When we finished our tour and got back to Auckland", Jools said, "we found out that the Auckland Regional Council had put up the port of Auckland for sale. I don't know of anywhere else where a port has been put up for sale; it's ridiculous. We were saying 'Who gives the Auckland Regional Council, which is supposed to be working for the people of Auckland, the authority to sell off the beaches that they use for swimming and yachting and so on?' So there was a massive public outcry - people just basically stood up and said 'no way'."
Despite such successes, Jools and Lynda feel it is becoming more difficult to get people to mobilise, because of the effects of long-term unemployment. "You've got a whole generation coming up with no experience of mobilisation or struggle. All that they are thinking about is how to survive day to day", Lynda says.
"Maori people are particularly disadvantaged - like most indigenous people they have high rates of employment, imprisonment and so on. In some areas you have a second generation growing up in families where no-one has worked. It's a very frustrating situation, and it's easy to develop a no-hope syndrome."
The Twins have mixed feelings on the Alliance of four alternative parties, which is posing a radical alternative to Labour and National. They see the high vote received by the Alliance in the recent Tamaki by-election as mainly an expression of anger at National's cutbacks, and feel that the Alliance will have to work on a lot of its policies if it wants to stay together as a viable coalition. They were also concerned that, under New Zealand's first-past-the-post system, the high vote for the Alliance allowed the Nationals to stay in.
Jools and Lynda foresee continuing battles around the National government's slashing of benefits, health and education, and also ssues. They regard the unity achieved by the lesbian and gay community as an example for others. "There's been a real breakdown of the separation between gay male and lesbian issues recently", Lynda says. "There aren't even any separate social venues at the moment."
"Government policies affect everyone", Jools continues. "They affect lesbians and gay men, mums and dads, children, pensioners. Its important to recognise that all these groups have to stand up together to change these policies."