The road, his dominion

As he heads home for a national tour, Don McGlashan looks back on where his musical travels have taken him.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Don McGlashan has long been a study in movement, both in genre and geography. He went from the drum stool of Blam Blam Blam, the percussion-pipe racks of art-music ensemble From Scratch and the theatre stage of the Front Lawn to being the frontman microphone of the Mutton Birds then making it in a solo career. And that's not all of it.

There was the year or so he spent in New York as the drummer in a dance company that toured behind the Iron Curtain. And being a ring-in on a Crowded House reunion that took him, via some very big audiences, to an even larger one at Glastonbury.

And that time he and Dave Dobbyn toured the country's churches, then, a few years later he and Shayne Carter hived off through the nation's arts festivals.

Late last year, he returned from Vancouver where he lives with Canadian wife Ann McDonell - not far from Stanley Park, biking distance to the community garden, he says - for a pandemic-postponed New Zealand tour off the back of Bright November Morning, his chart-topping fourth and fiercest solo album.

That one was with a band. Next month he's back to start an 18-date jaunt through smaller venues in smaller places, accompanied by Anita Clark (who records and performs under the moniker Motte) on violin and keyboards.

"When you play a place where there are a hundred people in the room, as a performer it's easier to look out into the audience and see a hundred stories. Or because there are a hundred people, there'll be many more than a hundred stories. And as it gets bigger, that capacity to read what's going on in the audience and to let your own stories go out and dance with those stories that are on the dance floor, that capacity doesn't expand in a linear fashion. It diminishes to a degree.