Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You want to support the Dom Harvey podcast and help it grow in 2026? Well, now you can. Just go to dom.co.nz and click the orange button to make a one-off contribution or even better, a regular payment. dom.co.nz Look for the orange button. Hello and welcome to the Dom Harvey Podcast, this episode sponsored by the Generate Kiwi Saver Scheme. Coming up, Don McGlashan.
He looked at me and said, what did you say to me? And I said, shut up you dickhead. And in that moment, I realised who he was, I realised who I was talking to the Speaker of the House, but there didn't seem to be anything more to say. I could have said, shut up you honourable dickhead. Don McGlashan is a national treasure, one of the greatest New Zealand songwriters of all time.
He's responsible for songs like this. And this. And even this. And at the time of recording this, in mid-January 2026, a documentary about his life is being released. Anchor Me, the Don McGlashan story.
In this candid, funny, and at times emotional conversation, we talk about how the documentary came about, his thoughts on now being a pensioner, the grief of losing his brother when he was 15 years old, his mental health struggles, playing Glastonbury, how his hits like Anchor Me, Bathe in the River, Dominion Road came about, and why he called Chris Bishop a dickhead, and so much more.
Look, I'm a fanboy, so I was always going to love this conversation, but I think and I hope you will as well. Massive thanks to my long-term podcast sponsors, Generate. If I could ask you to do one huge favour, actually it would be a favour for me and also a favour for yourself, it would be to consider getting KiwiSaver advice from Generate, like I did when they came on board as a sponsor.
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Don McGlashan on the Dom Harvey Podcast. It's great to be here, Don. It's an absolute honour to have you here. I need full disclosure from the outset. I'm a fanboy. Aw.
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Chapter 2: How did Don McGlashan cope with the grief of losing his brother?
Look at this. Oh, that's an old CD. This is my CD of The Front Lawn, and I think this is when I first discovered Don McGlashan. I was too young for Blam Blam Blam, which came out in the early 80s. I think I was into commercial music at the time, and then I suppose I was 16 or 17, and there were shows on TV like Radio With Pictures and another show that no one will remember called C.V.,
No, I don't remember that. Eh? I don't remember that either. Don't you with Mark Turney and Robert Rackety? Oh, many, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's when I discovered the front lawn, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard. It was like unapologetically Kiwi, and yeah, I've been a fan of you and your journey and your music ever since.
If you look at the back of that CD, you'll see that there's side one and side two, because neither Harry or I knew, we didn't have a CD player, so we didn't know that you didn't turn the CD over. LAUGHTER I have noticed that. I wondered if that was a joke. It was not a joke. It was just us being really stupid. There was another really cute line in here in the sleeve.
It's like, support New Zealand music, please don't tape. Yeah. Because this was an era where people would buy the CD, buy a blank cassette tape and dub it across. Yeah, that's right. Phenomenal stuff. Hey, we've got a lot to talk about. First of all, Anchor Me, the Don McGlashan story, like a documentary about you and your life. How did this come about?
I have to admit that over the past, I don't know, decades, there's been six or seven people that have wanted to do a documentary about either me or the front lawn or the mutton birds or the blams.
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Chapter 3: What inspired the documentary 'Anchor Me: The Don McGlashan Story'?
And generally they call up. And then they'll say, you know, can we meet for coffee? And I'll go, yeah, it'd be great, you know. And then we meet for coffee. They take a box of clippings, you know, so they can start to do some research. And then a couple of months later, I usually get a call saying we can't get funding for it. So you can have your box of clippings back.
And I must admit that when Shirley Horrocks called me out, And I love Shirley's work. She's done some really beautiful documentaries about people like my friend, the visual artist John Reynolds, or the poet Alan Kernow. I loved her stuff. But I must admit, when she called me, I didn't expect it to happen. So I sort of said, great, we can have a cup of coffee. I've got the box of clippings.
It's still got the masking tape on it from the last person. But I really didn't expect her to do it. But she is incredibly dogged and committed and really passionate about her work. So she made it happen. And the world premiere was at the Civic Theatre yesterday. Yeah, how's that for you, sitting there watching? Who are you there with? Who's in your inner circle that you're watching it with?
I think my family came. I tried to stop people coming. I tried to stop my family and close friends coming because I was pretty... Getting to the end of the film process, I was pretty ungracious about the whole thing, and I thought, oh, man, this is going to be just an hour of watching me or an hour and a half of watching me. LAUGHTER Like self-indulgent or something? Yeah, man.
So I was in a really bad place, I must admit. People would call me up and say, we're going to come. And I would say, haven't you got anything better to do? What's on TV that night? But when I watched it, I really enjoyed it because it was a time capsule. It was all this cool footage of bands, other bands that were getting going around the time that the Blams were getting going.
Other theatre groups, Richard von Sturmer and The Plague performing naked and painted different colours. It was just exciting and full of colour and I got over myself and stopped being such a whinger. Yeah, how does it sit with you in an environment like that? Like getting a round of applause at the end? I don't know. I wasn't there. Was there a standing ovation?
Being the centre of attention, is it uncomfortable for you, even though you are a frontman in response? It's extremely uncomfortable. And I was trying to work out why. And I think it's because there's a protocol when you're on stage and you're holding your guitar. You've got a microphone in front of you. People have come...
paid to come and hear the songs, to hear a bunch of songs, and that I can handle all of that. But just to be there without a guitar, without a microphone, without singing songs to people, I found really weird. How old are you now? 66? Yep. You're looking great. Thank you. You feeling good? I'm feeling really good. I was just out sailing.
I went down to Christchurch to work on – or actually to do a Q&A after a screening of the movie. And I also had a bunch of meetings and did some work with the animation team who are working on Kiri and Lou, the feature film. So Kiri and Lou is the kids' TV series that I've been doing with – with my old mate Harry Sinclair from the front lawn for about the last eight years or so.
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Chapter 4: What were Don's experiences playing at Glastonbury?
Wow. Because I was 15 and he was 20. Yes, that's quite a big age gap, hey, at that age growing up. Yeah. Yes. Who was your brother? What was he like? He was great. His name's not Andy, eh? No, his name was Alec and in the family we called him Sandy because in Scottish families quite often Alec will be shortened to Sandy. But I changed the name because I didn't want it to be too close.
to my family's story i didn't you know i felt worried that my uh you know my family would you know my my sisters and my mom and dad would would would it would be painful for them to hear it you know um and he was in it was in a like a drowning a boating accident with two others and you were being respectful of the other families as well yeah that's true that's true um uh and um
Yeah, sometimes I go through periods where I don't perform that one. But I think also it sort of keys me back to living in New York and because I went over there after the blams and I kind of didn't know what I wanted to do. I just soaked up all this amazing stuff and I was going out to see incredible bands and performance artists and all sorts of crazy stuff and
I didn't know what I was going to do when I came back to New Zealand. I didn't even know if I was going to come back. But I met a girl who was also in a kind of avant-garde music ensemble. She was a singer in a group called Steve Rush, Steve Rush and Musicians, and they did some fantastic sort of minimal stuff, like repetitive, really avant-garde sort of stuff. But at home...
in the apartment, we would listen to old Irish folk tunes together. And the stories about big stuff and about loss and about love and about family, they got deep inside me at that point. And instead of staying in New York and being in a music and dance type world or being in some sort of cool, groovy band or something, I thought I'll come home to New Zealand and I'll learn how to write songs.
And in a way, Andy was kind of the first one. Wow. Because it relates musically to Irish folk or Irish or Scots or English folk song. You know, I think the melody, it's... It's a song where, for me, which is quite atypical for me, the melody came sort of first. I had a melodic line and a few words, and then I finished it from that. Normally I work the other way around.
Can you remember the first time you played it too, or your parents or your sister listened to it? I kind of... Yeah, probably, but I probably... Yeah, I probably kind of avoided talking to them about it. We've talked about it since, but I think at that stage I was kind of racing off, performing all over the place and not being attentive enough to... what they felt about it.
So I've flipped back and forth about that over the years. Sometimes I feel really bad that I didn't have a big family meeting and say, I'd like to write this song or I've written this song, I'd like to perform it. How does everybody feel about that? But I never did that because in a way, once you've written a song, it wants to come out.
and it wants to come out and it can sort of ride roughshod over anybody's feelings. But they've been really cool about it. They've said to me, you know, we're glad you did it and it means something to us. I guess I've got that song and they've got pictures of my brother all around their houses and I tend not to do that. I tend to keep it more inside. I'm a real literal guy.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Don face during his music career?
But it was a big thing. Every time he did it, he sort of had this smile on his face as if he'd just learnt a new language. Mm. When I was Googling you for this podcast a couple of days ago, there was a story on staff about your dad's passing, and the photo they have is one of you two hugging. Oh yeah, we got good at it after a while. He was a gentle... As I say, old school.
He had a way of coming into a room and he would be very, very quiet, so people would just chat. But after a while, he would be the most important guy in the room just because of a few things he said, because of the sort of quiet authority he had. I remember he used to come down to the sailing club and help me rig my boat when he was really old.
And he didn't say much at all, but the other sailors just all really loved him. They really liked him. Yeah. Yeah, a tragedy like that, I just can't imagine how it rips a family apart and also how it shapes you as a person at the age of 15. Yeah, well, everybody reacted in their own way. And I think what I did is I just exploded in all directions at once and wanted to be...
you want to be the, you know, the best drummer and the best French horn player and be in every band and, you know, learn every, every kind of music, you know? And, um, and I, I was kind of, uh, kind of filled with kind of energy in a way. Just a laser distraction, just keeping busy.
Yeah, and the lid had come off too because the family, you know, there wasn't, you know, because my parents were sort of incapacitated by their own grief, they weren't kind of... they weren't kind of, I don't know, uh, stopping me doing things, you know, so I was kind of marauding around the neighborhood, uh, you know, in bands.
Um, we, we, we were, we were an underage band playing in an, in a, in a, in an adult venue. Um, that wasn't a good idea. Um, um, and, um, and, uh, yeah, everybody went in different directions. My, my mom, uh, read all the books she could and, you know, studied. She stopped. She left a job as a high school English teacher and retrained and went to university to become a guidance counsellor.
And so she was doing psychology papers at university and I was at uni too. So we would meet in the CAF and go to lectures together. And it was kind of like she was learning how to be a young person again. And my dad, he kind of... kind of retreated into the world of things.
He got the driveway reconcreted and he bought three versions of a particular old car and cannibalised the engines to make one of them that went. Just... working really hard to avoid thinking about things too much, I think. And they got a new property. They bought a property up north and built a house on it and put a huge amount of energy into that. So, yeah, and I guess I didn't really...
It didn't catch up with me until I was in my 30s, really. So all of that band stuff and being in the blams and being in the front lawn and then starting the mutton birds, all of that was kind of me running to escape it. Eventually you have to face it, don't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that stuff. You said you still sort of feel him around now.
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Chapter 6: How did Don McGlashan create the iconic song 'Anchor Me'?
I'm sure if I was in that position again, I'd probably reach for the gag. Yeah. We'll move on from the politics and we'll get back to the far more interesting story of your musical career. But there was, yeah, this is just coming to my mind now. You were involved in the Chris Bishop thing at the last... Music Awards? Was that you? Yes. You told them off. Yeah. Yes, what happened?
So Stan Walker was playing. Yes. Stan Walker was playing. I was about to go on because I was part of like a big medley at the end. And somebody said, you want to just go into the auditorium and look at the show before you have to go on. So I went and I was standing there. standing by the wall, and somebody said, oh, there's a free seat over there, come and sit there. So I went and sat there.
And then Stan Walker started a song, a huge amount of flag waving, sort of a whole representation of the Hikoi came on stage. It was a really uplifting moment. And, you know, the audience sort of stood up and cheered. And there was one guy that I could hear, and he'd been... being more and more upset sort of as that, all of that imagery started to appear on stage.
Couldn't quite work out what he was saying, but it was sort of like, what a pile of crap and everybody sit down and that sort of stuff. And I just thought he was a sort of out of control heckler. And, you know, I sort of drew on 40 years of being, playing in pubs in New Zealand and dealing with out of control hecklers. So I went over to him and said, shut up, you dickhead.
Which was actually probably, I think there's better anti-heckler lines. But that was all I could think of at the time. And then he looked at me and said, what did you say to me? And I said, shut up, you dickhead. And in that moment, I realized who he was. I realized I was talking to the Speaker of the House. But there didn't seem to be anything more to say.
I could have said, shut up, you honourable dickhead. But I didn't. Have you grown into being this person or have you always been this person that sees something that you strenuously disagree with and calls it out? I don't know. I don't know.
I am a bit short-fused, and when I was at school, all of my school reports tended to say things like, must keep smart remarks to himself, must learn to express himself privately, that sort of stuff. It's always been in the DNA. I think it's always been there, yeah. Okay, so you leave school. There's a bunch of band stuff. You're in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
By the way, what's the perfect band size? You've been in duos, three-piece, four-piece, five-piece, orchestras. You've done just about everything. What is the perfect dynamic? I really like three because you can play really loud. It can be really intense, but there's nobody that's kind of – taking a back seat. Everybody's soloing the whole time.
I mean, just the sort of sinewy thing about the Blams was really great. I loved that. But then with the Muttonbirds, it was kind of obvious that I couldn't be the lead singer and play the drums at the same time. And then we auditioned a whole bunch of drummers, and Ross Burge joined, who was just this fabulous drummer. He's
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Chapter 7: How has Don's approach to songwriting evolved over the years?
And we came back. I didn't want to start another band because I kind of felt that bands were a bit restricting. I thought it would be really neat to start something which was a bit like a band and had some storytelling or more theatrical sort of possibilities. He didn't want to go back to being an actor, which is what he'd been doing before he left New Zealand. And so we kind of gelled.
We'd been at school together. He was one year behind me. We didn't know each other very well. Well, we started this thing, which was kind of like, if you went to see a front lawn show, it was kind of like watching two people trying to do a Broadway musical, but with no resources at all. No chorus, no orchestra, no lights, you know, just nothing.
two people trying to tell a story and play all the instruments themselves. Generally it was electric guitar, me playing electric guitar and him playing concertina. But we'd do all the characters and we'd also play the score at the same time quite often. So it was like somebody said it was like a Swiss army knife of performance. And some real funny songs.
And I wondered if there was any connection between Flood of the Concords and The Front Lawn and maybe being inspired by it. And there Brett McKenzie was on your documentary. Yeah, yeah. So who inspired you guys? Was it like Fred Dagg to a degree or the Top Twins? Who was doing comedy songs before The Front Lawn? Well, we – well, there's lots of answers to that.
We were – there was a really rich sort of theatre and comedy sort of tradition in New Zealand. There's sort of like anarchic sort of things like Rats Theatrics and Debbie and the Dum Dums, Red Mole, Fred Dagg, of course, but – Because we didn't think we were doing comedy, we took ourselves ridiculously seriously.
And when we first started working with some ideas, we'd come up with an idea that was... I'd come up with an idea that was kind of about madness.
I remember the beginnings of this thing and I'd bring it into our practice room and we'd start mucking around with it and it was sort of like... The guts of it was sort of like when you have a conversation, like I'm talking to you, if I say, how are you doing, Dom? And you go, I'm fine, then you've reached into the right bag. But if you go... If I say, how you doing, Dom?
And you say, a rooster, then you've reached into the wrong bag, haven't you? And so that was the beginnings of this idea. Well, that's one of the songs, too, called How You Doing. That's right. And that turned into that song. And then we ended up with this thing, which is basically a conversation that goes wrong. It's basically, how are you doing? I'm fine. Where are you living?
And instead of saying, where are you living? Oh, I'm living in Glen Eden. One guy says, well, you'd hardly call it living. And then it goes into this, it's like the wrong response. And then we had a bunch of stuff like that and we thought, well, what is this? Is this a song or is it a sketch or is it a piece of a film or something like that?
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