At the Colony Club Kiri learned to make every member of the audience feel as if she were singing for their personal pleasure. ‘She could hold them in the palm of her hand,’ Sell remembered. By the end of 1963 it was a feeling Rodney Macann understood better than most. In the months since the Song Quest Kiri’s relationship with Macann had intensified. ‘She made you feel at times that you were the only person in the world, and it was genuine,’ said Macann. ‘She gave me lovely presents, sent me endless photos and we wrote a letter a week.’
To the straight-laced Macann, Kiri could be a maddening collection of contradictions. He was in no doubt that she saw her career as her primary concern. ‘The career came first from a very early stage and the boys came second. She had a huge determination to succeed, to be the best. She was absolutely single minded,’ he said. Yet beneath the outgoing exterior lurked a deep and at times painfully obvious insecurity. Macann would constantly hear Kiri complain about her rivals. ‘One of the things that characterised her in the early days was she needed a rival. She had to have somebody she could set her sights on.’
The placid Macann found her occasionally poisonous outbursts hard to handle. ‘She would veer between very lovable and hugely frustrating. She was enormously giving as a person but she could be pretty difficult at times. She’d drive you crazy because she’d do very silly things, which I found incredibly irritating being a more sedate person. Things like saying something so bitchy and stupid about another singer that it was totally unnecessary because she was so much better than that person anyway.’ Kiri was still demonstrating this thinly disguised disdain for her rivals many years later. She once described herself as blossoming ‘like a petunia in an onion patch’.
It was hardly difficult to detect the influence that had produced her straight-talking manner. ‘My grandmother would say exactly what she thought, and if you didn’t like it, too bad. She wasn’t going to back down,’ said Judy Evans-Hita.
‘It may have been something that was instilled by Nell,’ agreed Macann. ‘Kiri was not a devious person in any sense, and therefore if she was thinking something that was a bit bitchy she would say it.’ Macann wondered whether Kiri had the dedication to go with her mother’s overpowering ambition. ‘She was lackadaisical because she had a limited intellectual ability to grasp some things and therefore she got very, very bored,’ he said. ‘She just had a lot of energy and found the discipline of concentrating on musical things very frustrating, I think.’ As he watched her perform, however, her talent was unmistakable. ‘Kiri is not someone like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf who has a very intellectual approach to music. There was something within her which was innately musical, and it’s not something that you can train somebody to have. You had the voice, you had the personality which communicates itself, but then you had this amazing musical gift as well. She was also a person, at that time, really without inhibition on stage. It was just there.’ Soon that gift was winning a wider audience.
In the two years since she had performed ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ for Tony Vercoe, Kiri had begun to wonder whether she would ever be given an opportunity to become a recording star. By the winter of 1964, however, the wait was over. Vercoe contacted Nell with the news that he was finally ready to record her daughter for the first time.
Vercoe had resisted the temptation to release a choral work first. His instincts told him that the key to Kiri’s success lay in her Maori heritage. ‘It was just a feeling I had. I felt the time was right perhaps for someone of a Maori background to emerge,’ said Vercoe. Yet the Uwane débâcle had reinforced Vercoe’s hunch that the New Zealand public were not quite ready for musical marriages between European and Maori music. Kiri’s first careful steps should be taken down the traditional path, he felt sure. Vercoe understood the Maori sensibility better than most. He had been a close friend of Inia Te Wiata while studying opera and theatre at London’s Royal College of Music after World War II. He commissioned the composer Ashley Heenan to arrange five traditional Maori love songs. On 5 June 1964, in Wellington, Kiri, a rising Maori tenor Hohepa Mutu and an instrumental quartet began recording work on the songs: ‘Hokihoki tonu mai’, ‘Hine e hine’, ‘Tahi nei teru kino’, ‘Haere re e hoa ma’ and ‘E rere ra te Matangi’. Mutu recalls the studio sessions as ‘quite arduous’ and with good reason, according to Tony Vercoe.
To the experienced and perfectionist Vercoe, Kiri was the rawest of raw recruits. It fell to him to instil the effervescent twenty-year-old with a touch of discipline. ‘She had other interests and she was very outgoing,’ he recalled. ‘She was part of a group of young girls and wanted to be out doing things with them.
‘I was a bit of a restricting influence on her. I would demand all her time while she was going to be recording and that was a bit hard for her.’ Punctuality was never his new protégée’s strong suit. ‘We would get into the studio at nine o’clock and she mightn’t be on time. I would be as tough as I felt I needed to be,’ he said. Vercoe also insisted on perfectionism in the studio. ‘She had the voice and a fairly natural musical feeling. But she was not so wonderful note for note. Instead of a crotchet, a dot and a quaver, she might put in two crotchets and say, “Oh, that’s near enough.”’
Inevitably Kiri’s devil-may-care attitude drew Vercoe’s fire at times. ‘I wouldn’t say they were fights, but I insisted on it being right. Not in an unpleasant way, but for a while she kicked against it,’ he added.
Vercoe would not be the first nor the last to detect a streak of laziness in Kiri. It is something she has freely admitted to herself, over and over again. ‘She didn’t like hard work very much. And of course it is hard work in a recording studio. You can get away with singing a song in public and people think it’s marvellous, but put that on tape and all the flaws show up,’ he said. ‘The number of takes we would have to do irritated her slightly.’
In truth, Kiri was actually working hard to moderate her behaviour in Vercoe’s presence. Don Hutchings, Vercoe’s sales manager at Kiwi Records, got to know the high-spirited soloist socially as well as professionally. He saw her temper her behaviour in front of one of New Zealand’s leading musical lights. ‘For Kiri, Tony was a stepping stone to something very bright and he was someone to be respected,’ he said. ‘With others, she would use all sorts of language but she was very demure around Tony.’
Ultimately, the balance of power would shift and Vercoe would pay the price for his exacting standards. He, more than anyone, saw the likely scenario from the start. ‘There was a future, and I saw that to some extent I had to prepare her, not just for the recording, but for whatever might follow. She was going to need this discipline and I was the mug who was going to have to impose it initially,’ he said philosophically.
Kiri’s impatience was understandable enough. By now her growing reputation had begun to draw interest from a variety of quarters. As she had taken her first tentative steps into the recording studio, she had already made her debut as a screen actress. The producer and director John O’Shea had raised the £67,000 he would need to make his film Runaway himself. Before she had completed her recording work with Vercoe, he contracted Kiri to play the female lead, a young girl who undertakes an illicit affair with an older man. Nell agreed on a fee of £20 for the week’s work.
Kiri had been suggested for the part by O’Shea’s male lead, Colin Broadley. Broadley had known her through his Auckland record store The Loft and his television show, In The Groove. Around Auckland, Broadley knew Kiri had earned herself a reputation as something of a wild, party-loving spirit. As O’Shea prepared for a three-week shoot near Opononi, towards the northernmost tip of the North Island, she remained a paragon of decorum, a good Catholic girl of whom Sister Mary Leo could be proud.
Kiri insisted on one crucial change to the original script. ‘She wouldn’t get into bed with the leading actor,’ recalled O’Shea. Broadley had originally raised no objections to the love scene in which he and Kiri would end