Sad news, Hamish Kilgour has skipped off this mortal coil Most people would first know of him as the drummer for THE CLEAN
Hamish had a direct influence on the path of my career. Back in the early 1980s I was playing bass in a band and we decided to apply for an Arts Council grant to record & release a cassette tape. There was no way anyone was going to fund us to go into a recording studio, so thanks to Bryce our clever live engineer and local sound system/PA company owner Terry Mulloy I put together a grant application that totalled $500, which covered renting a desk, mics & stands as well as a Teac A3340 4 track and some 1/4″ tape stock. At that time Hamish was working at the Christchurch City Council as a Youth Art Coordinator, so he was my point of contact while putting together the application. And I can only presume it was with his support that our application was successful. We then converted our rented house into a studio for a weekend, and I helped Bryce as he set up, with a bedroom used as a control room, drum kit & bass in the lounge, guitar in the kitchen etc… It was a lot of fun & we all learned a lot…
Why I recount this anecdote is simply because when you are in your youth, it sometimes only takes one person, in the right place at the right time, to set in motion events with far reaching consequences. This experience confirmed to me I had made the right choice dropping out of an Electrical Engineering degree and it was music & sound & recording that I wanted to pursue. I had no delusions about ‘making it’ as a band or whatever, but the creative process of recording & mixing was such a pleasure, and a few days later with all the gear returned, our flat was back to normal… But that experience is really what started me down the path of my lifes work. And here I am, many decades later, with a studio in my house…
Another vivid memory I have involving Hamish was seeing Nelsh Bailter Space play at Canterbury University. It might be an unpopular opinion but early synth music in NZ tended to often tended towards lightweight pop. But I had heard of a new band Nelsh Bailter Space which was a four piece with Hamish on drums, Alistair Parker ex The Gordons on guitar & vocals, Ross Humphries on bass & Glenda Bills on synth. But it wasn’t synth pop. Driven by Hamishs hypnotic drumming & Parkers guitar & vocals, the synth lines were often more like manually played arps or basslines, and I can still rememebr one track where Humphries put his bass down & picked up a big length of chain and the bassline was played by Bills on synth while he rhythmically smashed the chain down in to the floor… It felt futuristic, and more progressive than the ‘guitary songwriter’ Flying Nun bands at the time… They released one EP, and then broke up with Parker going on to form the equally great but purely guitar driven Bailter Space.