“It’s also memorable as it’s the gig where I was set on fire”: Talking with MSU before Contact’s 50th birthday party

Like that one friend who’s great at parties but who you’d never let into your own house, the Mobile Stud Unit (MSU) were a riotous, hilarious, and stupidly popular mainstay of Hamilton’s music scene through the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Their proudly inappropriate pus rock was loved by Contact FM listeners, who may or may not have known quite how many band members (and one of their mums) were the voices they heard on the radio between songs like ‘Stroke Victim’ and ‘Grutsniffer’.
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MSU are on the bill at Contact’s 50th birthday party on Saturday, so Max put two or three questions to lead singer Rohan Marx. He responded with more tales of ridiculous gigs than you’d think could possibly be true. It was only while writing this intro that we realised his list of New Zealand bands they’d pissed off somehow missed Head Like A Hole. Maybe there wasn’t time, or maybe he thought that his song ‘Head Up Yr Hole’ says enough. Either way, enjoy this walk through the more unhinged side of Hamilton’s rock scene in the late Contact years, and be assured that there’s more where it all came from.

HUP: Could MSU have happened without Contact FM?
Marxi: MSU’s first official outing was the 1993 O-Week Busking Competition organised by Contact FM. So MSU and Contact are tied at the umbilical cord, so to speak. Various combinations of MSU members had been busking around Hamilton for maybe six months, but winning that competition and getting to support King Biscuit and The Mutton Birds on the big stage at Orientation that night was definitely our first proper band experience.
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Contact were big supporters of MSU through to 1997. We had, I think, maybe three number 1s on their Top 13 in our first couple of years and having those on high rotate for several weeks definitely helped lift our popularity. One of my favourite performances was the first live-to-air we played in the Contact studio. It was a complete shambles but really encapsulates the energy, rawness and humour that the original MSU line up had. We never won it but we always considered the Contact 89FM Battle Of The Bands as big outings for us too. 
MSU would have happened without Contact but we wouldn’t have been as well known or popular in those earlier days.


You've gone through a few band members over the years. How many were also Contact DJs?
I couldn’t tell you how many band members we have had over the years. As the sole remaining original member, I’m starting to think I might be a bit difficult to work with. 
In terms of Contact DJs there’s myself, the dearly departed Dean Ballinger [drums] and Aaron Watkinson [formerly bass, now keyboards, but we’ll get to that] who was also paid staff at Contact for a few years, I think he was in charge of studio productions. Our sometimes fill-in bassist Clinton Swan was also a DJ on Contact and the Uni Activities Co-ordinator for a few years, which I suspect helped us gain a few extra support slots for bigger bands coming through on tour!

Whatever happened to the other guy from Contact's Marxi & Mulligan show?
Jesse Mulligan? No idea. He got a law degree so he’s probably doing Property Conveyancing somewhere. Jesse and I had great fun on the Marxi and Mulligan Friday Drive show. That year (1996) we were also running Static TV, the Uni TV station which was in an office in the Cowshed. So we used the Friday Drive show to plug Static TV as much as we could.

We had some real funny regular segments on that show and our sponsor was Eastside Robbie Burns. That came with a rider of a dozen beers each week. After we finished the Drive show at 7pm we would then go and film the Pub Report for Static TV, which was essentially us standing in pubs and reading out what was coming up in the next week to camera. We’d get free beer from most of those pubs as well so we’d be trashed by the time we’d finished “work” on a Friday.


After that you teamed up with a bandmate on air, right?
Jesse left to front his own solo show and of course went on to bigger things, so the Friday Drive show became the Marxi and Ballinger Show with Dean Ballinger which was more shambolic but just as good. We got my Mum, Janice, to do a 5 minute ramble called The Otorohanga Report each week, and my favourite memory of Marxi and Ballinger was her calling in as we were interviewing Greg Johnson. She didn’t know we were in the middle of an interview but we were running late for her segment and she had to get the tea on for Dad. We patched her through and she basically took over the interviewing of Greg Johnson. Turns out his aunty was related to my grandmother, as explained to him by my mother. After the genealogy lesson she started giving him a dressing down for drinking too much. He then completely opened up about his problems with drinking even though we’d been told by his agent not to go there. It was the best interview that we ever did. Well, that she did. My mother gained her own following with her Otorohanga Reports and started getting invites to student parties via us.

Did you ever get her along to any MSU shows?
Due to our lyrical content and subject matter we tend not to get our parents lining up at gigs. My mother finally came to one of our gigs in around 1999–2000 at a packed out Ward Lane. It was the second or third iteration of the band where a large percentage of the songs were about some sort of sexual depravity - ‘Grutsniffer’, ‘Brazilian Baby’, ‘Marmite Man’, ‘Sexual Health Clinic’, ‘Snapped Out’, ‘Beef Curtains’ (my favourite MSU song). At the end of the gig she looked at me, shook her head in disgust and said “after 10 years of piano lessons, musicals and choir groups and this is how you repay me!”

Deep down she must have been secretly impressed though. 

What stands out in your memories about your early gigs, and building a local following before you had your own radio shows?
The first thing that still stands out for me was the relatively meteoric rise we had in 1993 into 1994. It was weird and cool in equal measures, especially given that none of us had ever played in a proper band before. We went from a busking band in late February to being the warmup for The Able Tasmans at the end of year party, which packed out a Marquee and Downstairs Oranga. That was a great gig. We’d practiced our little hearts out and had learned a few tricks about crowd management and stage craft by then. Having 200–300 people singing the choruses of your songs back at you while you scull a jug of Double Brown on stage is a great feeling.

I think we went on our first Nationwide O-Week tour the next year – 1994. There were some hilarious moments during that tour, including when we turned up at Canterbury University to find out that they had cancelled our appearance a month earlier. We got a consolation gig for $200 cash to play an acoustic set on the lawn in front of an endless line of first year students who were all enrolling. It had been raining so at the end of our last song I tore off down the hill and slid off the bank stomach first and into the Avon River, which I’d assumed was about 6 foot deep. Turns out it was about 18 inches deep, so I pretty well fucked myself up when I hit the rocky bottom. As I clamoured back out Dean Ballinger had just frisbeed a cymbal, and it sliced my shoulder open. I think he ended up in the drink as well.


The Mutton Birds and Able Tasmans were great opening slots for such a young band to grab.
Getting to support a ton of national and even a few international acts at various Universities was a great part of being in the band. We managed to piss a few of them off over the years. Particularly Don McGlashan, whom I rugby tackled on stage as he was sound checking his French horn at our very first gig. When asked by someone after the gig what he thought of us he called us “a bunch of pissed wankers”, so we used that in all of our press material for years.   

Shihad weren’t big fans of us thanks to Dean Ballinger wrecking the rack on their fancy drum kit that we had borrowed at an O-Week gig at Massey University. Dean climbed on the rack and jumped off it, onto me, at the end of our set. Bailter Space just shook their heads in disbelief when we opened for them. I do still have a nice letter from the Able Tasmans who “thanked the MSU” for getting their drummer so pissed after the gig we played with them that he could hardly play their gig the next night in Auckland. Pretty funny. 

By the time I was old enough to sneak into your gigs, you were the main act.
In late 1994 or possibly 1995, we ran our own gig, the MSU Extravaganza, at the Wailing Bongo. It may have been our first break up gig as well? I’m not sure. There were 6 bands with us headlining, and entry was $3. The Wailing Bongo had a capacity of 600 and apparently around 100–150 people were turned away as the place was full. It was the largest crowd we had played to, and all of our own making. 

It’s also particularly memorable for me as it’s the gig where I was set on fire. I had two litres of petrol and a home-made fire suit which consisted of wet t-shirts, jeans, jerseys, a balaclava, gauze bandages, welding gloves and an oilskin, which proved to be a bad choice. When set on fire I pretty well exploded, and I remember the flames rushing off me sounded like a jet plane in the distance. There was footage of me on fire, but it’s been lost. The flames coming off of me are at least 2 feet higher than myself and funneling down the inside of the outer garments, out past my hands which I wouldn’t have today if it wasn’t for the welding gloves I stole from my old man’s workshop. All of the water on my clothes started to turn into steam and I started broiling in the end. The fire extinguisher went missing, so I was eventually put out by about 4 members of the audience, smothering me after I went to ground. I only ended up with a couple of small burns, luckily.

But the big shame was we did the stunt before we started playing, so of the massive audience that were there about 90% were lined up for the bar or the toilets. Probably only 50 people saw it.

There are heaps of stories about memorable gigs. These are just a few of the earlier ones. But yeah, I guess it was this sort of commitment to ensuring our crowds had a good time that gave MSU its loyal following.

Why have so many MSU fans stayed so loyal for so long?
Because we’re fun. And for many we were front and centre in their social outings during their Uni years or 20s. When MSU started out there was nothing like us in Hamilton (if not New Zealand) and we just saw the other local bands as a bunch of shoe gazing woke guitar wanks who took themselves too seriously. Plus the white middle class male, which we all were (well, lower middle), was a somewhat picked-upon minority at Waikato Uni. 
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I remember us discussing what style we wanted to be right from the outset and it was agreed that a fun band that you could sing along to and get pissed with was what we needed or wanted to do. Musical proficiency mattered not in the early days, and making sure that the crowd had a great time was the main goal. So right from the get-go most of our songs were designed as singalongs with funny, irreverent and sometimes bizarre lyrics and subject matter. We coined our style of music “Pus Rock”, sort of punk but more putrid. I always looked at my lead singer role as that of a narrator or storyteller, and as a conduit between the audience and the band, hooking them in to listen to stories about losers and the ill-fated, which most of them are.

One of the things for me is spotting that one individual in the crowd who’s not really moving that much, just standing there with their head turned towards us, and you can tell that they're trying to make out the lyrics. Like, “what are these guys on about?”. Eventually you see them start laughing. Or just shake their head, which can be even better.

You’ve already mentioned that MSU’s gone through quite a few lineups. Has that made it any harder or easier to hold onto fans?  
There’s been three distinct iterations of MSU over the years and the first two definitely picked up their own loyal and different followings. The second iteration became a harder punkier band so we started getting some harder core geezas turning up to gigs there for a while. The current lineup has carried on the legacy of both of the earlier bands and added quite a few songs over the years that tend to have a more advanced musical structure. We’re too old or out of shape to punch out 90 minutes of quicker punk songs.

What are you most looking forward to about the 50th birthday party?
We have a couple of newish songs which a lot of those attending wouldn’t have heard before, so I am looking forward to rolling those out. I’m curious to see if we can get a whole crowd singing the singalongs back to us as well. I’m not as fit or light on my feet as I used to be so it would be good to take a couple of breathers and let everyone else sing for a bit.

There have been a few MSU reunions and shows over recent years and even new songs. Any surprises in store for Saturday?
There’s one. We have a new bass player premiering at this gig. “Skid Marx” is his stage name. Off stage he’s my 17 year old son Ivan. He’s been teaching himself guitar for about 18 months, so bass is new to him. But he’s come to a couple of rehearsals and he’s already like, “these songs aren’t that hard, Dad”.

Aaron Watkinson is still with us but he got sick of playing the same songs on bass. So he’s stolen keyboard duties off me, which is good because I’m fucken useless. It does mean that I’m more exposed though; no more hiding behind or leaning on the keyboard when I run out of breath.

I can guarantee that I won’t be setting myself on fire. One and done there.


Any chance you’ll be in the green jumpsuit?
Yeah, that’s a horrible question to ask. It’s a size 14 women’s lime green Crimpalene jumpsuit from the ‘70s and I think I’m probably rocking a size 22 at the moment. I still have it but after 20 years of corporate lunches and dinners, and several years of drinking wine watching Netflix instead of exercising, there is approximately zero chance I would get that jumpsuit past my knees. I did ask The Carpenter’s Daughter if they could recreate something for me in a Size 22–24 but I never heard back from them.

I weighed less than 70kg and was fighting fit when I used to wear that thing back in my heyday. So unless I get some sort of parasitic infection or a stomach stapling procedure, I can’t see that jumpsuit making a comeback any time soon. And before anyone criticises me for getting out of shape – you go for a fast jog and scream offensive lyrics at the top of your lungs at the same time. It’s not easy and neither is being the frontman of MSU.


A couple of questions about songs that I’ve seen you play live but which I think you wrote since your last album. Firstly, what inspired ‘Weather Bomb’?
Jim Hickey came out with the term with great solemnity back in the mid-2000s while announcing some major weather event and I instantly thought, shit, that would be a great song title. That’s why there’s a verse devoted to Jim Hickey, and he was probably the influence for the biblical references because he was a massive God-botherer. I think the Datsuns were still kicking about NZ and on the rise and I actually offered the song to one of them. It’s a Datsuns sounding song, musically influenced by them by osmosis probably, it wasn’t a Datsuns rip off. It’s a great song and one we haven’t recorded yet.


Secondly, did you get your dog back?
Ha, yeah I did. Poor Ben, he was one of the casualties of my first marriage breaking up. I’ll admit that ‘Give Me Back My Fucken Dog’ is quite unfair to my ex-wife. She didn’t withhold the dog from me. But after I got moved out of home I made the mistake of taking on an apartment as a rental instead of something with a yard, so it was physically impossible for a large boxer dog to come with me. But “Now I can’t see my fucken dog because I live in an apartment” lacks punch, so I took some artistic license with that one. Yeah, that’s the only song I’ll write about the break-up of my first marriage.
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And yes, I did get him back when I finally bought myself a new house with a yard. And when he moved back in with me he was dark with me for days. Because he had never been to my apartment, he thought I’d been living in this big house with a big yard for the previous two years and had never invited him around. I had to put him down a couple of years ago, sadly. His back went on him from too much acrobatic frisbee action over the years.


You’ve drawn a bit of material from break-ups. 
I’ve written a few decent MSU break up songs. ‘Bob’ was written after breaking up with my girlfriend Juliet. But Rohan and Juliet are far harder to come up with rhyming quartets for than names like Kate and Bob. The song ‘Sexually Unattractive’ came about after that was what I was called by another girlfriend a couple of weeks before she departed. I’ve turned up to band practice a few times over the years with heartfelt “woe is me” break-up songs or soppy love songs and been told by the others that they aren’t MSU songs and to shove them up my arse. So they need to be distanced a bit, and have a funny angle thrown on top. But, yeah, there’s quite a bit of hurt hidden behind some of those songs which makes them work. That’s why ‘Stu’s Pie Cart’ works too; that’s essentially a break up song.

Marxi unmasked at Hamilton Circle Jerk, 2018

Of all your songs, which was fastest to write?
Probably ‘Salesman’. One of the most memorable as well. I wrote the lyrics in 5 minutes flat in my Yellow Pages car outside the public toilets in Matamata. It was approximately 10.35am on a Tuesday, after being pushed out of a real estate agents’ office and told by the woman owner that I was “the worst salesman she had ever come across”. I was trying to sell Local Directory advertising for Telecom Directories (The Yellow Pages) and was pretty well on my last warning from my boss for being useless as well.

I actually trained in Film and TV and wanted to be a TV presenter, writer or director, but I sucked at that as well, which had led to several years on the dole. So I was sort of in the last chance saloon that day.  That’s why the song cycles through different professions that I would like to be good at but, “for now I’m a Salesman, but I’m no good at sales…”

As funny and flippant as that song is, it’s deeply personal and comes from a pretty dark specific moment or event. That bitch real estate agency owner did me a massive favour though. It was also because of her dressing down that I devoted myself to learning the art of selling, first for the Yellow Pages and then into other roles and now I’ve become pretty successful in business with sales and account management as a background or core skill. ‘Salesman’ is also one of the only MSU songs where I’m responsible for the music as well. You can sort of tell because it’s about grade 2 level piano (Trinity Music School not ABRSM).


Which song took the longest?
That’s a harder question. It would have to be one of the more technically difficult pieces that we have since forgotten how to play. ‘E (Is Good For Me)’ took us forever to get right. There have been a few over the years that we rewrote a few times. ‘I Wish I Was A Lesbian’ was one of them. Just as we got that right we sort of fell apart again as a band. Another one that took us a while to get right, and which I really loved, was our cover of ‘99 Luft Balloons’. We’d really made that our own and it cranked, but then Goldfinger came out with their cover of it which went to number 1. It was similar to our version too. It just looked like we were playing a cover of a recent cover and we had to dump it.


Possibly an obvious question but, umm, is E good for you?
Around 2000–2002, a couple of us thought it would be a good idea to take an ecstasy pill before we played. We’d been to a couple of raves previously and ‘E (Is Good For Me)’ was in the set, so thought it would be appropriate. Back then the pills were pretty grunty and it kicked in about 3 songs in, at which point I stage-dived into a tight crowd at Ward Lane. The rest of the boys were pretty polished at that time so they started the next song without me on stage and kept cycling through the opening riff as they waited for me to reappear. 

However, thanks to the ecstasy taking control, instead of getting back on stage I went into a bit of a trance and started dancing inside the crowd, like, “this is a good song!”. I remember looking up and seeing MSU on stage and going to myself, “Awesome! I’ve never seen MSU play before!” and kept boogying away. About a minute later someone from the crowd tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me I had a gig to do, so back on stage I went. A word of advice for any young frontmen out there: don’t front a pus/punk rock band on ecstasy. The next hour was a real mindbender as I struggled to remember—let alone annunciate, in tune—about 500 rhyming couplets in the right order while being hit with waves of (now unwanted) euphoria.
 
With unreleased songs building up and a lot of fans still keen to hear you, why aren't you on Bandcamp or Spotify, etc?
Ahem, yeah….  I could give you a long rant about those platforms ripping artists off or say something like well I’ve still got 400 physical copies of Flaps on CD that I want to sell first and don’t want to eat into my potential customer base, but both would be bullshit.  The real reason is we’re ‘Old Cunts’ and despite all being relatively successful in most areas of our lives we are too fucken useless to spend a few hours curating everything and getting it up and onto these platforms. I get asked this question about once every six weeks. So we just need to get our shit together after 32 years and get it done.


Where’s MSU going next? 
This old dog has some life in it yet. We reckon there is another album to be had out of MSU, and want to get into some songwriting sessions shortly. I’d also love to do an international tour of non-English speaking countries with a film crew.
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I reckon we can make it to a 40th anniversary gig as well. Or maybe having Ivan in the band opens up the possibility of MSU playing the Auckland school ball circuit.

What could possibly go wrong? We’ll see you guys on Saturday to find out.