"We Have Rules That We Stick By": A Q&A with DEAN

Lo-fi instrumentalists ‘DEAN’ have been active since the mid-1990s, featuring (at least, initially) 24 strings, (and still) 4 tracks… and an attitude. Ahead of the Contact 50th anniversary gig and party, we spoke with Garry Dean and Andrew Dean about their rules for songwriting, career highlights, the importance of Contact, and more! 

HUP: DEAN have had a massive number of releases over the years, but your very first song released was ‘Unfortunate Flux’ on the 1995 compilation The Fridge, recorded at Contact’s recording studio of the same name. How important was Contact to DEAN?

Garry Dean: Contact FM was a huge thing to us. We could rock up with a demo tape, and they would play it on the air, ask us to do live-to-air performances, and the compilation as you said, it gave us self-esteem as group.

Andrew Dean: In 1994 there was some extremely home-made stuff getting lots of airplay on Contact. I think Spatula Death's recording of a toilet flush may have got in the Top 13. We were not cool kids who were down with your Jandeks or your Guided By Voiceses, so we were very much stuck in the orthodoxy of 'studio recording equals real recording'. For us, the things we made on our 4-track were 'demos'. Initially, the fact that Contact played home-made stuff seemed a bit of a joke — a low bar for getting our silly stuff on air — but soon enough there was that realisation that a proper recording is whatever you want it to be.
 
HUP: What have been the highlights for DEAN over the last 30 years?

Garry Dean: The live-to-air was a big thing for me personally. And we have played some cool gigs, but we just love making DEAN. The next album is always the highlight.
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Andrew Dean: There was that one time in 2003 or so we played a mafia karaoke bar in K Road with The Kiwi Animal. It was our first gig with Stefan Neville in the band and I guess word got out because suddenly all these COOL AUCKLAND PEOPLE wanted to see us. People who were far too cool to speak to us were crowded into this smokey fake Korean bar to hear us play. It was very Mulholland Drive. I sarcastically asked my Auckland-dwelling mate if Misery had showed up yet, and he un-sarcastically replied "that's her over there in the nurse outfit."

HUP: The basic recipe for the band has remained the same over the years, dominated by 24 strings. However, listening to your earlier releases, the drum machine sounds like various Casiotone presets. Your more recent releases, however, have a drum sound that go beyond the capability of my MT45. What do you use for your drums now? 

Garry Dean: Actually we have rules that we stick by; always the same rock preset from the MT35.

No more than 4 tracks to record and its always instrumental.

But that’s what makes it fun. We use pedals to mess with that drumbeat, to give it a new sound. We always start with that rock preset, go crazy messing it up, and then go where the song takes us.

There is one song called "from parts unknown" where we used an organ with built in drums (but we were cranking the speed up and down on the organ drums so it sounds more like an effect than a drum machine), but that was as well as the Casio. Casio T Dean is always first and its always there.

Andrew Dean: The thing with using the exact same drum beat on over 300 songs, you'd think it would be super obvious and people would write you off as a joke or a gimmick. Instead, people don't even seem to notice. Not even musicians. I'm not sure what that says about our collective relationship to drumbeats.
 
HUP: That is a massive number of songs under your belt. How do you decide what you might play live? Do you tend to play new songs, or should we expect to get a classic hit from back in the day?

Garry Dean: We have a lot of albums. Usually we try to put a few songs off whatever new album’s just been, then songs that would go with it. This time we've put three songs together that are personal favourites, and we really hope you like them too.
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Andrew Dean: All our favourite DEAN albums happened after the Contact years, when we were pretty much just making music for ourselves. We really love doing covers live, and we're often sending each other links to top 40 songs if they have a 3-chord bit that might sound good played over and over. "White Iverson" was a great song to play live because those are three really cool chords. 

HUP: You have had a few lineup changes over the years. Who is in the band in 2025?

Garry Dean: Andrew Dean created the band, and the ‘formentioned rules (partly because none of us could sing, lolz), I think with Byron Dean and Scott Dean.

I was asked to join because Andrew and I had been mates for ages. I could barely play three chords, and more importantly I had a cassette 4 track.

Byron and Scott drifted away after a while and that just left Andrew and I doing the do. Playing live up until recently we had played with four guitarists so we would get mates to help out, but we are now a two piece to make things easier.
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Andrew Dean: We have had some fairly regular live bonus Deans over the years, especially Gordon Bassett, Stan Jagger, Stefan Neville and Indira Neville. Surreal because at one point I was a 15-year-old listening to those people on Contact. Sometimes we ask people to play with us and they say no because they'd rather be out front listening.  

Ian Duggan