Poetry Live! Presents Siobhan Harvey and Gerhard Lottermoser

Guest Poet: Siobhan Harvey

Guest Musician: Gerhard Lottermoser

Emcee Rhona

when: Wednesday 20 March 2024 bamboo Tiger, K-Road

7.30 pm - 11 pm

Siobhan Harvey

is an author of eight books, including the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards long-listed poetry and creative nonfiction collection, Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021). She won the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition. Her other awards and honours include 2021 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry, 2020 New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship, 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems, 2019 Robert Burns Poetry Prize and 2016 Write Well Award (Fiction, US). Recently her poems have been included in international and local journals and anthologies such as Acumen (UK), Best New Zealand Poems 2022, A Kind of Shelter (MUP, 2023), Landfall, Mslexia (UK) and Tarot. 

Gerhard Lottermoser

Singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist-climatechanger-gentrifier-cyclist

Happy with little, blessed with the ability to appreciate everyone and everything and an utter lack of ambition, I still believe that doing nothing, or at least as little as possible, is the most responsible course of “action” in the face of rampant consumerism and the work-status mindset, so detrimental to life on this planet.

Which is why I am not a little surprised to find myself, at the ripe old age of 62, already out of bed on a Sunday morning typing on my wife’s old laptop, wracking my poor starveling brain over what to say. About myself.

 If it weren’t for my parents I wouldn’t be here, and in New Zealand, as far away as possible from the rest of humanity. Thank you, Mama-Papa.

Growing up in Deutschland in the 60s, at the height of the Cold War, with Phantom fighter jets breaking the sound barrier right above our little house on the edge of the forest, it was natural for me to assume the worst. We’re fucked. Why bother. Plus, the music we played in the Voluntary Fire Brigade Marching Band didn’t exactly turn me on, hence me never getting good enough to play first trumpet. Gave me an ear for harmonising though.

Somewhere along the way I picked up the classical guitar and encountered the joys of finger style ragtime playing. Syncopation, bouncy bass lines, The Entertainer, fun! Then my Papa started putting his dream of running away from everyone and everything into action and happiness. Aotearoa here we come!

In the course of my 42 years in the land of the kiwifreaks I’ve acquired degrees in Microbiology and Psychology, owner-operated a crazy, critically acclaimed café, where people could paint whatever on the walls while waiting for their order to arrive and played guitar in some severely underground bands nobody’s ever heard of. Trolley, Red Tractor, Kelston Pylon, anyone, one? Told ya.

The songwriting started late, after a traumatic breakup left me no option but to sing away the pain. A “Song-Cycle in Celebration of the Virtues of Celibacy” evolved, performed by Red Tractor, my very own super-cool band. Violin, double bass, saxophone, drums and me on vocals and my cherry-red Gibson 335.

Since then, I’ve gotten into the habit of home-recording dopey little ditties and dropping them on SoundCloud, over 200 by now, listened to by a select few with the odd encouraging comment and that would have been it. Had I not walked into a studio and met the producer, seducer, transmogrifier extraordinaire, Mr Alex. “Gerhard. You are talented and original and funny and entertaining but your recordings and song structures are hopelessly shit. Let me guide you to a land of silken sounds beyond imagining.” Wow, yes please, let me call Mum and get some cash and…here we are. Thanks Mum, and Alex. Album coming out soon. Look out for “ Kitschtown Kabarette”. Prost!