Shackleton's Whisky: A tale of shame and redemption, part one

It will come as little surprise to many when I reveal that I have been somewhat interested lately in the storied history of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration.  This interest has had all sorts of agreeable side-effects, many of which are a direct result of tearing around the country over the past year or so telling some of these stories in barns, bar-rooms and back-country halls from Invercargill to Dargaville. It seems like the more you get up and tell stories, the more stories people want to tell you right back, so I've been hearing all kinds of tall tales from all kinds of people, which luckily is one of my favourite ways to pass the time. One of the stories that's been cropping up a lot lately is the one about Shackleton's Whisky, and it has become for me a tale, dear reader, of shame and redemption.

You've probably heard the tale yourself, even if your main source of news is, well, 'The News,' and not grizzled old taproom scholars in South Island bars.  It's a compelling story with a high degree of cross-over interest, and it tests well in a range of demographics, so it has had a good share of what media analysts call 'screen-time' over the past couple of years.  I heard about it in a bar.

It was near the end of a long tour in the winter, I recall, of 2012.  We'd just driven the usual loop - a bunch of nights in the North Island, an early morning ferry crossing playing old Neil Young songs to hung-over travelers in the bar they call the Karori Rip, followed by a dozen or so dates around the South Island, and when we do this, we don't tend to give ourselves a break. It's a lot of late nights and weird mornings; a typical day is an early start and a long drive followed by a scramble to set up the PA, run a soundcheck, play a show, sling some merch, pack down, load out, find the accom, bags the tops bunk then grab the throwaround  guitars and walk out to the darkness at the edge of town to find a quiet spot to sit up for the rest of the night trying to remember how to play old Neil Young songs.  Many days of this in succession on the standard pizza and whisky diet and there is a risk of becoming unhinged.

So I was perhaps a little unhinged as I sat at the bar of the Darkroom in Christchurch there, after the show, having a yarn with Jasper and T'Neale who own the place and trying to summon the motivation to go to bed like a decent human being. The Darkroom, you should understand, is a classy establishment with a discerning clientele and an impressive commitment to quality when it comes to the drinks list, and as my magpie eye strayed to the top shelf I espied something I had not seen before:

I mean, it didn't look exactly like this. It was on a shelf surrounded by other bottles, but it did say 'British Antarctic Expedition 1907' on the side.

This piqued my curiosity, naturally, and I politely asked Jasper what was going on here.

'Oh yeah, I was going to tell you about that actually.  It's a pretty cool story.  Apparently a few years ago they found this whisky under Shackleton's hut in Antarctica.'

'What, and that's it there?'

He could see that explaining the full story to me would take ages and require a certain amount of repetition, so he said something like 'Pretty much, yeah. More or less.'

'Can I have some?'

Jasper explained that it wasn't really for sale - they have a thing for regulars called the Adventurers Club (which of course led me to interrupt to tell him that that's funny, because we've got this thing called the Explorers Club, did I tell you about it? And he said yeah, I know, you just played in my bar) and the thing is you have to try twenty different drinks - not in the same night, obviously, for mental health and legal reasons, but gradually, over a period of perhaps months - and once you've tried these twenty different drinks, and only then, you get a dram of the Shackleton Whisky.

'Cor. So... can I have some?' Remember I was a little unhinged.  I think Jasper raised a single eyebrow to indicate that I would need to do better than that.

I marshaled a clever three-pronged argument - firstly, hadn't I just spent the past hour or so on stage - his stage - telling stories about Shackleton? Surely that put me in some sort of special interest category?  Secondly, Poor Me - which is an important prong for any argument, and the less specific the better I find, and thirdly (which I think actually sealed the deal) I indicated that I was game for earning the Shackleton Whisky by the conventional route, right then and there, which we could all agree would be a ludicrous idea but that's how strongly I felt about the matter.

One or all of the prongs worked, anyhow, and Jasper solemnly took the box from the self and the bottle from the box (how handsome it was!) and poured me a dram.

Now you should know that I am not anything of a gourmet. Things like food and whisky have only instrumental value to me - I carry a hipflask for motivational purposes, as Shackleton himself did, to hand off to band members in times of crisis to prevent mutiny.  On tour, I carry nuts and raisins in my pockets for the same reason, as fuel for myself and others, and results have so far been mixed but events have fallen out broadly in my favour. I like good food, but I will eat bad food if I have the hunger. I like good whisky, but I will drink bad whisky if I have the thirst.  I am, however, a total nerd for history and funny little talismans, so I was aware of the gravity of the moment.  But! I was a little unhinged.

I passed the glass around the band, and everyone took a sniff and sip with appropriate reverence. Adam McGrath, who can smell whisky ten miles away in a snowstorm, appeared as if by magic at my elbow (which is to say his belt was approximately at the level of my elbow; he's a big boy) and of course he needed a sip too, and by this time a small crowd had formed at the bar and there was a certain amount of polite jostling, people getting in each other's breathing space and so on, a bit of a 'what's going on here then' atmosphere and a level of encroachment on elbow room of the sort I can find unnerving at the end of a succession of late nights an weird mornings - a degree of anticipation building and a hum in the ears, and with the eyes of the band upon me, before a bar full of cultured palates, I felt a flush creep up my neck and a devil on my shoulder and when the glass appeared in my unhinged hand dear reader I tossed it back, disgracefully, like a cooking whisky.

There was a silence.  You know the kind. 

Jasper, bless him, did not hit me with a bottle or throw me into the street, but he did look Very Disappointed. I crawled into my sleeping bag that night feeling like the kind of barbarian who goes about the place breaking windows in churches to hear the smash, a loutish boor who appears at garden parties in a dirty anorak and hovers around the buffet table eating caviar with his mouth open and spilling Chianti on the corgis. What a dope! Upon finding the Holy Grail, the hapless pilgrim knocks it to the floor with his elbow and hides the pieces under a rug.  Obviously, I could never go back to The Darkroom.

That's the end of part one - The Shame - it got a little bit longer that I'd anticipated so I'll post the rest - The Redemption - next week. Or when I get around to writing it.

Update! Here it is.

South Island shows in the wintertime

Winter, icy roads, cloudy with snow to 200 meters and gusty Nor'Westers from Bream Head to Cape Colville, geese in the park hiding from the hunters, so it must be time for Bond Street Bridge to fly South to face frostbit fingers and lungs full of woodsmoke on the Central Lakes-Otago-Canterbury circuit. Just a short hop this time around comrades, there's more to come in the Springtime when the record comes out but right now we've got some sweet shows to share with you so stand by...

Wednesday 26 June we're in Invercargill, that's a house concert the the Tattletales told us was worth the drive and they're often the best kind of shows. It's at Brad and Chrissie's place and you can call them on 03 9310599 to get the address so do that if you don't know where it is, or you can get in touch with us on the facebook or something and we'll let you know.

Second up we're up at the Queenstown Winter Festival, and the good folks there are hosting us at Remarkables Park on the 27th. There's tickets from Ticketek and they tell me they're selling like shares in a power company so you might want to get in there quick before they all get bought up by an offshore hedge fund or something, I don't know.

Next day is going to be pretty special; we're over at Arrowtown School in the morning, frightening the children with tales of Antarctic adventure. This is a new thing for us and children as a group are pretty terrifying, but apparently the Explorers Club show is bang up to date with the curriculum or something and teachers keep telling us to do this so we're doing it. The band don't know yet that this is a morning show and I'm planning on not telling them till the day of so keep it under your hat if you can.

If we get out of that in one piece we'll jump in the rental and boot it - carefully, with chains on most likely - down to Dunedin, where we've been lucky enough to persuade Mr Neville Peat, author of the remarkable book 'Shackleton's Whisky,' to give a talk at our show in the beautiful surrounds of the Orokonui Ecosanctuary. This will be nerd heaven for me, but it will no doubt bring back uncomfortable memories of the time I disgraced myself with a glass of that same whisky, late at night, of which more later no doubt. If you want to come along to that one you'd be advised to call ahead and secure a ticket from the venue - they are on the telephone at 03 4821755.

Then it's up the line, and we're on at the Darkroom on Saturday night, where I know for a fact they have a bottle of Shackleton's Whisky on the top shelf, but I willl be very surprised if they give me any after what happened last time. We shall just have to see. Tommy Chang's the next night over in Lyttelton with Aldous Harding, who I will freely admit to being a little bit scared of, then on the Monday we've got a couple of shows at South New Brighton School. Which, again, wasn't my idea, but could just possibly be a real hoot.

That'll do for a week of shows, and we'll head back up to Auckland after that where we'll be playing with The Bads and Great North (plus a mystery guest mandolin player if the rumors are true) at Lucha on the 13th pf July so if you don't live in the South Island perhaps we'll see you there, and I shall look forward to that.

Righto.

Wednesday 26 June - Invercargill house concert at Brad and Chrissie's, call 03 9310599

Thursday 27th June - Queenstown Winter Festival, Remarkables Park, tickets from Ticketek

Friday 28th June - Dunedin, Orokonui Ecosanctuary with Neville Peat, tickets from the venue 03 4821755 or secretary@orokonui.org

Saturday 29th June - Christchurch, Darkroom with Happiness Stan

Sunday 30th June - Lyttelton, Tommy Chang's with Aldous Harding

Saturday 13 July - Auckland, Lucha Lounge with Great North and The Bads

Great God! This Is An Awful Place

It's amazing what you can get for a bottle of whiskey.  As we rolled out of Otaki at the end of the first leg of the Explorers Club:Antarctica tour, having just played 16 shows in the past 14 days, and driven the van four and a half thousand ks over that same period - a lot of winding and climbing, three times through the Lindis Pass, down the Buller Gorge, up the Haast, to Milford and back with the smell of clutch and brake hanging heavy in the air like brimstone, like napalm, like victory - well we'd been up late the night before finishing off the fizzy wine that they gave us in lieu of payment for the last show (the fee, oh promoters and future partners of Bond Street Bridge, has since increased), we had the music turned loud to promote wakeful driving, and we weren't sure at first whether we were hearing things when the van started making a noise like a an old yak coughing up his breakfast.  We'd cashed our chips at the main gas station in town - I forget what we did, but we couldn't face going back there - but Thor* was on our side, and the next gas station had a mechanic on duty and this mechanic needed only a little persuasion to take a blowtorch to our undercarriage in exchange for what was left of a bottle of Jameson's.

Whatever he did to the van, it's holding good, and thus was inaugurated whiskey as the principle medium of exchange in the Bond St economy.  (Again - promoters, festival bookers and the like: we actually prefer cash or bitcoins, this story is mainly just rock'n'roll posturing.)  So when we got back to Auckland, we thought we'd try our luck with a stash of very fine 12-year-old single malt we'd picked up from the New Zealand Whiskey Company in Oamaru, who are as premium a parcel of moonshiners as you'd hope to meet in that still-studded corner of the country.  We shopped round for tenders and by far the best deal we've been offered was from Hazel Gibson, who in a trice rustled up a film crew and with their new-fangled patent cinematograph-photolithography process, captured these bright crisp images of our performance at the Wine Cellar in the Auckland Fringe Festival:

I think you will agree that we came out on top in this particular deal, which I guess means that now we owe Hazel a favour. Which means she wins!  Curses, foiled again etc, but I gather that she filmed the whole thing, so there ought to be more videos like this coming out over the next few months.  The audio was all recorded live on the night as well, thanks to Rohan Evans' wizardry on the mixing console.  He also got whiskey, and of course it goes without saying that we are also in his debt, as we have been for a number of years.  If Rohan Evans called in all his debts at once, every musician in Auckland would have to put every piece of gear they own up on trademe.

For those of you who don't know the story, this song is about the arrival of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and his men at the South Pole, just over one hundred and one years ago.  They had hoped to get there first, of course, but they did know that Amundsen was also heading for the pole and that he had a head start.  For most of the journey, however, they had been able to convince themselves that they must be in the lead, not having found any sign of the Norwegian team.  It was only a matter of days before their arrival at the pole that the British team came across Amundsen's tracks, and at this point the tone of Scott's diary takes a decidedly dark turn.  At the pole, he writes 'Great God! This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority... now for the run home, and a desperate struggle.  I wonder if we can do it.'  I almost always get a manly tear in my eye when I read this entry; it's simple and brutal and there is only one way out.  The writing remains extraordinarily lyrical under the harshest conditions, and it was straightforward enough to turn this part of Scott's diary and some of his last letters into a song.  I hope it does him and his party justice.

*God of all things van-related.  Full disclosure: the van is a people-mover.