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He’s the guy who reckons he should have got the rap Dave Dobbyn copped for the 1984 Queen Street Riot . He missed the brewing brouhaha that started while he was on stage, that darkening summer evening in 1984, because he was on his way home to the wee boat he lived on in Cox’s Bay. He and fellow Mockers songwriter Gary Curtis mined the night for the classic single ‘One Black Friday’.
At the height of their fame The Mockers toured the heck out of New Zealand, including high schools for lunchtime concerts, and the underage “Blue Light” discos hosted by the NZ Police.
“The Mockers were grateful we were playing to so many young impressionable people on such a regular basis,” Fagan recalls. “We’d spent so much time by ourselves in the practice room doing what you have to do to put songs together, and actually having captive audiences at high school lunchtime concerts, and evening socials and balls, was gratifying fun.
Best Song Eva: Andrew Fagan Sunday Morning
“I remember Blue Light discos fondly, especially one in Taupō. They were so well-orchestrated, and seemed positive for all involved. The police presence was almost invisible when it came to performing, and the age group seemed very young, but in a safe place. I curtailed my propensity for lewd humour and sometimes unseemly performance activity, given the circumstances, and the band always delivered a good fun time. Bring back Blue Light discos!”
Andrew Fagan on stage in 2018.
Michael Flynn
Fagan’s own introduction to music happened in the front room of the house he grew up in in Island Bay, Wellington. This is where – in the late 1960s and early 1970s – he found himself “locking onto music as an emotionally uplifting thing”.
“We had a small – by modern standards – vinyl record player and sound system,” he remembers. “My father would play songs he connected with. The Irish Rovers’ ‘Black Velvet Band’ comes to mind. Bread – ‘Aubrey’, ‘It Don’t Matter To Me’, ‘Diary’. These were 45s and 78s played. Old 50s big band stuff that didn’t appeal, but Elvis was in there somewhere.”
He attended Rongotai College, Wellington, where his first band – The Ambitious Vegetables – formed. In a sign of things to come for their singer, the young punks would play their first performance at a lunchtime gig. The college years also marked the emergence of a personal ideology marked by the “Gombolic” symbolism that has been incorporated into all things Fagan ever since.
“The Gombolic represents a new way of thinking based on old ways of thinking that have fallen by the wayside,” he explains.
“Anthropologically these need to be regenerated. But the problem is, introducing a new way of thinking to our aberrant species will meet with firm resistance from the status quo. The Gombolic will be dismissed as a cult, and all relevance of thought negated. At the moment it can be seen as a cult of one, as I am the only member, but that does not dilute the messages contained within. The accumulated knowledge it offers doesn’t need to be distributed yet. Hopefully, that time will come, but patience is a cliché virtue. It’s a portal of something I feel is special, and important, and bigger than myself, and something I have lived with for the last 50 years.”
In 1994, Fagan released a beautiful solo album called Blisters . Its most enduring single was ‘Jerusalem’, for which Shona Laing and Debbie Harwood contributed backing vocals, and Fagan’s wife – broadcaster and writer Karyn Hay – directed the video. The Sony-funded clip saw him performing amid a desert sea of Gombolic flags, on the titular land, and lyrical locales.
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While living in the UK, Fagan’s next project, the band Lig (1995-2001), attracted the attention of the BBC’s John Peel, who championed the white label 12” of their song ‘Empty’.
“That got us a booking agent and manager, and things were going well for a few years,” Fagan recalls. “The video for ‘Empty’ got thrashed on MTV Europe, and we sold 55 albums in Greece without ever playing there! Unfortunately, no copy of it can be found, and it’s the only NZ On Air vid that no longer exists. It was never played in New Zealand and the album, Bacterial Activity , was never released in New Zealand.
“Blur’s record company [Food Records] came to a few gigs, and a year later Blur put out ‘Song 2’, which I was repetitively told was a rip-off of ‘Empty’. It certainly has a similar attitude and vibe, but the chords and lyrics are different.”
Adjacent to his personal music career, by the late 1990s Fagan had become father to two sons, while living on a houseboat moving around the London canals. Since 2001, he has published three volumes of memoir detailing life on his 5.2 metre sailboat, Swirly World in Perpetuity , gaining him an entirely different audience.
In earlier days, there were also four volumes of poetry; and in 2009 a children’s picture book (On Plastic Bag Patrol – Over the Curve of the Earth , illustrated by Jeff Burnett) was released. He has been the subject of an Indonesia episode of the television show Intrepid Journeys ; spent five years as a radio programmer, championing local music for Kiwi FM; and co-hosted a talkback show (working with Hay) on Radio LIVE.
Since 2002 he has been working with Fagan and the People (variously named Andrew Fagan and the People). They have released the EP Ancestor (2014), and two albums – Act Normal (2020), and Admiral on the Narrow Seas (2021). Loud Ghost’s Darryn Harkness is one of “The People”, and Fagan appeared on that band’s ‘You Will Be Haunted’ single last year.
In 2018, in tandem with a tour with English performance people’s poet John Cooper Clarke, he released a limited edition “poetry and soundtrack” CD album It Was Always Going to Be Like This . He tells me about the difference between a good poem and a good song.
“My songs generally have melodies (tunes) so grafting in the words (lyrics) to suit the melody is the hardest discipline,” he says. “Poems, for me, are often about chasing words out of self-conscious corners, and herding them into some kind of form that I personally find subjectively appropriate, without the constricting parameters of music. Both are equally compelling mediums of self-expression.”
Andrew Fagan combining his two great loves – music and sailing.
nationwidebooks.co.nz
Fagan’s latest book – Swirly World Lost at Sea recently won the NZ Mountain Book Competition’s Mountain and Adventure Book Narrative Award. He’s arguably as famous a sailor as he is a singer these days.
“Solo at sea offshore, the brutal realism of self-reliance and self-determination is all consuming,” he says via email. “Survival becomes the primary instinct, and that is a great feeling.
“It is primal and immediate. You live as a being completely detached from any society and normal patterns of behaviour. You either enjoy it or you don’t. I enjoy it and feel emotionally complete at a primal level out there.
“On stage speaking words from my mind that I’ve shaped into ‘poems’ or grafted into ‘songs’, combined with showing off, is self-indulgent simple fun. I feel emotionally complete at a primal level. Same, but not the same. It is an all-consuming application at an emotional and physical level.”
Fagan’s Passage of Time tour, in November 2025, sees the band play small venues all over the country. The singer is particularly keen to air a new work that’s been on his mind for a while. In Swirly World Lost at Sea , he describes writing – while living and working on a 23.4 metre tug off the coast of Samoa – ‘Passage Of Time’.
“It is a one-off single at the moment,” he said in May 2025. “It takes me years to carefully put together what I subjectively think are good, well-recorded songs.
“But, yeah, eventually there will be another album. I look at albums as a simple body of work. No expectations of popularity or recognition or financial remuneration anymore. Just happy to leave a body of work I’m proud of.”
Andrew Fagan at sea, 2024.
nationwidebooks.co.nz
For the time being, he’s keeping on with the hard and dirty work of being a tugboat sailor.
“It’s daylight now, and I’m sitting on this boat,” he wrote in an email, including a photo of the tug Rua,. “It’s the smallest tug in town. I drive it … currently on the Whau river at Te Atatū. The concrete feet of Transpower power pylons in the mud and mangroves are being replaced and I drive stuff across the river to the site.”
He sends more photos of his working day: all mud, sea, metal, high-vis waistcoats and hard hats. “Industrial boating,” he writes, “everything is rusty and has the potential to kill you.”
A couple of months later, a message arrives from a tug 400 nautical miles northeast of Whangārei. A 24-track compilation album – Andrew Fagan: Passage of Time 1991-2025 – is in the works. The views remain the same … hard metal, sailors, and the wild blue sea. A job that’s seen him moving “at the sprightly speed of 3 knots” has afforded him “plenty of time to work on the content of my solo show”.
Best Song Eva: Andrew Fagan Sunday Morning