In 1963 I was born in Dunedin - the southernmost city of New Zealand. My mum lectured in Psychology at the local university and my father worked for the Medical School. When I was young we did a lot of traveling spending a couple of years in Sweden and a similar amount of time in England. My parents were both very involved in the peace movement and I sort of grew up believing that the end of the world was just around the corner.

I was what is known today as a nerd. Not only was I really short - until I finally grew in the sixth form - I also had bad asthma and eczema. To make things even worse my father forced me to go to the barber's all the time. This was in the seventies and the only people that had short hair were me and my dad. Like most other nerds I took refuge in books and study. I just couldn't have been more un-cool.                                                                         

When I was 17 I left school and moved into this grungy flat with my good mate, Michael Weston. The house had been the headquarters of one of the local motorcycle gangs and it still had a lot of barbed wire and other fortifications around the edges of the property. We quickly turned the place into party central and started a band called Crystal Zoom.

If you were a guy and you lived in Dunedin in the early 1980's you had to be in a band. You couldn't hold your head up socially without one. Unlike most of our contemporaries - the so-called 'Dunedin Sound' - we weren't influenced by sixties American guitar pop. We also didn't approve of the way many of the local bands put little or no effort into their performances. The rules seemed to be that you had to wear black and you weren't allowed to look at or talk to the audience while you were playing. Crystal Zoom was a reaction to this. We used to dress up in weird colorful clothing. We had stage effects like slide-shows and dry-ice and we tried hard to engage our audiences with jokes and playful banter. But like most bands when they start out we  weren't great  musicians to begin with and there was a period when we the first to admit that we were 'all icing and no cake.'.

Sample tracks

As with most other local bands we learned to 'master' our instruments at tiny venues like the infamous Empire Tavern. One night Mike Dagg - a DJ from one of the local radio stations - saw us play and he offered to help put out a record of one of our songs. 'Uptown Sheep' wasn't really so much of a song. It was more of a skit with a lot of barking and sheep being horribly killed noises. Strangely enough the record companies didn't exactly fall over themselves in their rush to release this Dada-ist masterpiece. Not, that is, until we put it together with another of ‘our songs' - 'Dunedin Sound 45'. This satirical (some would say ’cynical’) little number was inspired by the early 80's ‘Hit’ - ‘Hooked on Classics' which was just one of a series of medleys of music by famous acts that came out at this time. For some reason every single one of them was played over the top of an endlessly repeating disco handclap. 'Dunedin Sound 45' continued this ghastly trend with a medley of songs by 'famous' Dunedin acts like the Chills, the Clean and the Verlaines - all naturally performed over the top of this mindless disco back-beat. In 1984 Flying Nun Records grudgingly released it as a single (a 45rpm) with 'Uptown Sheep' on the B side. It wasn't any kind of a hit but because some 'famous' names from Dunedin bands played on it the disc has become something of a sought after rarity and now sells for around $75(NZ) if you can find a copy. Needless to say many people never spoke to us again….

In 1985 Michael and I moved Crystal Zoom to Waiheke Island near Auckland. In those days Waiheke was still a relatively unspoiled sanctuary for "Dopers, Dykes and Dole Bludgers" - a 'Truth' Newspaper Headline of the period. Now it's full of upwardly mobile types who have worked out that it's nicer to ride the ferry into work and back rather than sitting in a queue for hours on the motorway. The band was going through a heavy existentialist period at this time and we were trying hard to divorce our personalities from our music. This manifested itself in us wearing masks all the time and using fake names. Mine was Brucie Prole because with my bleached hair I supposedly looked a tiny bit like Billy Idol - but better looking...

If a newspaper wanted a photo of the band we might give them a picture of a building or some trees. The masks in particular made it difficult to connect with the audience and we were having trouble with our new rhythm section. Dick Libido and Sin Drum were good musos but they didn't cook the way our previous bass player (Rob Murphy) and drummer (Barry Blackler) did. Things were getting progressively unhinged when my partner suddenly died in Australia. She was an amazing person and I have no doubt she would have done something really special, In 1990 New Zealand's Premier Dance Choreographer - Doulgas Wright - dedicated his dance-work, 'Gloria', to her memory. And I've mentioned her now out of respect and affection for her in life and now in memory.

                    Deirdre by Wellington artist - David Jones (2009) Photo by Kat Spears (1984)

I got pretty depressed and moved back to Dunedin where I went back to University and finished my Psychology Degree. I also began to draw a series of cartoons featuring a character called Zak Water Buffalo and these were published in Rip it Up Magazine and some of the student newspapers. I also started another band - 'Let's Get Naked' - with legendary local bass player Rob Murphy. 'Let's Get Naked' were all professional musicians, aside from myself. Just about all of them had been in 'The Idles' who were a very well-known New Zealand band in the early 1980's. We did a lot of playing and a bit of touring and in 1987 we put out an album called 'Something Like That'. One of the songs, 'Funky Dunedin' was a minor local hit and was used in a TV advertisement for the University. The lyrics made out that Dunedin was this great little city to play music in and all the bands got on really well without any unnecessary competition, bitchiness or back stabbing. Of course in reality it was completely the opposite. I tried to forge links between the opposing factions but it was an uphill struggle and by the late eighties the music scene in Dunedin was beginning to turn in on itself in any case.

In 1989 I shifted to Auckland and moved into a central city flat with Mike Weston and his partner, Isolde Byron. They were both 'involved' with avant-garde Auckland clothing label - Virus. Mike taught me to screen-print and we started a clothing label called Seed. At this time I was heavily influenced by the pop art of Andy Warhol and began to make clothing which was covered in social and political messages - well - mine was anyway.

                                                     Mike Weston/ Mahalski - Auckland 1989

 I  also made moves to get into the soft toy business with a product called the ‘Cuddly Bomb' - essentially a plush representation of a nuclear missile about the size of a teddy-bear. New Zealand had just gone nuclear free and David Lange was ‘kicking it’ overseas! Obviously for adults the bombs all came with air-force insignia attached to their sides denoting which country they came from.

I made American/British/French/New Zealand /Australian/Russian/Libyan and Iranian bombs (Iraq wasn't much of a player at this point). A small soft-toy company in Auckland manufactured the bombs from my designs and for a while it looked like they might go over big.

 
The largest soft toy manufacturer in the country - Harrison's ('Toys with a Heart') - was interested and for a bit it looked like they were going to take over production and sales of the toy. People seemed to be getting the joke, I was getting good publicity, the bombs were selling well and I was quietly kicking back some of the profits to the peace movement. Suddenly without warning there was this huge backlash - the result of a particularly biased and nasty newspaper article in the now defunct 'Auckland Star' - I personally suspected it was because the reporter was angry when I wouldn't give her a free one! She managed to get quotes from Greenpeace, Play for Life and the New Zealand Foundation for Peace Studies which all condemned the Cuddly Bomb as some sort of subversive right-wing plot against the local toddler population. Apparently, and unbeknownst to my 'morally bankrupt' self, my soft toys were evil! It was probably a good thing I decided not to release the 'Cuddly Jesus' (joke) although for a while I did continue to manufacture another soft-toy, the 'Cuddly Cigarette'. This was another adult soft-toy aimed at 'people who'd tried to give up smoking but failed or always wanted to smoke but been too scared by the consequences.’

 In 1990 my partner had our first child and we moved down to Wellington. I attempted to 'go straight' and took a 9-5 job as a lab assistant at MAFFISH. After about a year I got bored of staring down a microscope all day and quit to start up my own screen-printed clothing and design business, 'Fantastic Life'. My 'political' clothing had never sold that well so this time I chose designs which reflected my interest in New Zealand's natural history and especially its marine life. I made things like shirts covered with weird deep-water fish, leggings covered in whales and pillowcase covered with crabs. Throughout much of the nineties I produced many of the clothes that featured in the Forest and Bird Society's Mail Order Catalogue. I also had a shop and wholesaled my own range around the country. Our second child was born in 1992 and around this time I began to produce a range of children's clothing, which featured designs inspired by drawings I had done when I was very young (Age 3-6). These proved popular but it was becoming stressful working seven days a week and having a young family. I also become allergic to some of my screen-printing inks. I decided to stop making clothes and concentrate more on commercial and contemporary art.

Since 2004 I've been working as a teacher at Williams School of Art at Inverlochy as well as other teaching gigs around town. I have illustrated a ton of books and websites and still draw the occasional cartoon. I’ve had four children’s books published that I wrote – two about local history and two about NZ’s natural history. I also try and have an exhibition of contemporary art every year or so and I’m represented by Ron Eskamp at the Exhibition's Gallery in Featherston Street in Wellington.

Mahalski- 2010.