The Pacific Blues of Pacifist Graeme Allwright

We often mistake the singer for the song and forget that the timbre depends on the luthier's choice of timber. Whether he was defined by the geography of the Pacific or the ideology of the Pacifist, Allwright's discography tells us about the artist.

For, we like to file artists under browsable crates like "Alternative" or "World Music", but Allwright defied such standard categorisation because his career followed a trajectory of cross-cultural synthesis. The tension in his strings derived from a colonial isolation that sparked an engagement with distant cultures, a connection he tuned in Aotearoa and played in France.

In fact, he did not arrive in Paris seeking the spotlight or the chic and bourgeois. He entered the so-called "trimardeur" years of manual labour that grounded his later folk persona in genuine proletarian experience. When he sang of the working man, the audience heard the truth in the grain of his voice because he had worked as a theatrical carpenter and a beekeeper. He absorbed the French language on construction sites and in apiaries, an organic acquisition that allowed him to translate cultural sentiments with the colloquial ease that academia lacks.

While the "Yé-yé" phenomenon of the 1960s touted pop frivolity, Allwright amplified the signal of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to satisfy a generation hungry for authenticity. He was a cultural interlocutor who decoded the spirit of Greenwich Village for the Latin Quarter, notably shifting the metre of "Blowin' in the Wind" to twelve syllables to accommodate the French lilt. This capacity for tuning foreign ideas to local harmonies tells a lot of the Pacific influence, as he retained the rugged and nature-centric imagery of his New Zealand homeland in his original compositions.

The Pacifist element eventually dominated the ensemble as he absorbed the protest ethos of the 1960s and filtered it through a wandering humanism. His adaptation of "Qui a tué Davy Moore?" became a signature tune that allowed the French public to engage with a critique of systemic violence, while "Il faut que je m'en aille" became an anthem for a generation seeking to escape domestic confinement.

A dissonance eventually threatened to crack the soundboard when the French government began nuclear testing in the Pacific at Mōururoa and Fangataufā atolls, colliding the culture of his birth with his adopted culture. Allwright remained firm in the middle of this acoustic clash to vocally oppose the militarisation of his home region, and the sinking of the Aberdeen-built Rainbow Warrior docked in the Waitematā by French intelligence agents in 1985 was a severe shock that solidified his resistance.

This realisation that true harmony meant a rejection of nationalistic violence led to the most audacious move of lutherie in his career when he decided to re-voice "La Marseillaise". He sanded down the edges of the now archaic lyrics by replacing calls for "impure blood" with a plea for "love and liberty", arguing that a national anthem should reflect the highest aspirations of a people.

His later years displayed a refusal to let the sound decay as he explored jazz textures with the Glenn Ferris Quartet and closed the circle by releasing an album of Georges Brassens covers. Whether he was Pacific or Pacifist lies in the sustain of his notes, for his Pacific roots gave him the distance to see the French culture clearly while his Pacifist conviction gave him the courage to change it.

There is a quiet irony in how we remember him, for despite our depiction of his protests and philosophy, the children of France all learn a simple song in school every winter. They sing Christmas song "Petit Garçon", Allwright's adaptation of "Old Toy Trains" by Roger Miller, which transformed a country tune into a gentle lullaby that became a standard nursery rhyme. When the politics fade and the ocean recedes, all that remains is a voice in the dark singing a child to sleep.