A Tribute to Jools & Lynda
One of the questions you can get asked a lot is, “What made you get into comedy?” I don’t really have an answer except that it never really occurred to me that I wouldn’t do this with my life.
A better question is, “Who showed you this was possible?” and one of my clearest answers is The Topp Twins.
In March 1985, the Topp Twins were touring New Zealand with Peter Garrett, lead singer of Midnight Oil and lawyer, environmental activist and, later, an Australian politician.
“The Nuclear Disarmament Tour” - public gigs, campus shows – was organised by Peace Movement Aotearoa with the New Zealand Students’ Arts Council. Associate Director of NZSAC, Margi Mellsop, travelled with them as tour manager, driving the trio around in her own orange VW.
I was working as a journalist back then. I was also Margi’s flatmate, so I got to join them for a few days - Margi driving, Peter (who is ridiculously tall) in the front seat, folded in half and in half again, and Jools and Lynda in the back, me in the middle. My qualifications for the gig were a certificate in journalism and short legs.
At the gigs, Peter would make a speech and the Topps would perform. “We don’t talk,” they said, “we sing speeches.”
The songs they were singing – their anti-nuclear songs – had been written two years before, Jools said, but they were having more effect now with the tour becoming a “political art thing”.
Lynda explained audiences were “hearing” the politics in the Topps’ songs because of the context of the tour - the nuclear issue was number one on the agenda in Aotearoa because Prime Minister David Lange had just said “No” to nuclear ships.
To which Jools said, “He’s backing up this tour beautifully, really, isn’t he …”
I was already onboard. Their activism during the 1981 Springbok Tour had been noted, and their ability to see the connection between racism, sexism and what was then called “nuclearism” was impactful.
And I’d experienced the power of the Topp Twins music when, in 1983, I’d been at their lunchtime gig at Canterbury University. There had been songs, comedy, possibly some yodelling, then they’d finished their set with a powerful, emotional anti-nuke song, “Radiation”.
They’d got that whole audience out of their seats and following them, Pied-Piper-style, out of the theatre and onto the campus, turning a lunchtime gig into a spontaneous political protest.
I’d asked them about that for the piece I wrote in 1985. “If you want to sing something about a really strong issue you have to feel it in your gut before it comes out any good as a song,” Jools had told me. “Everything you experience in your life is political … It’s just being aware of what is around you, what’s happening to you.”
At a tribute concert for the Topp Twins in 2022 at Auckland’s Civic Theatre, I said this to Dame Lynda and Dame Jools from the stage: “Thank you for more than 40 years of being all the things. Thank you for the songs, the comedy, the yodelling, Camp Mother & Camp Leader, Ken and (my personal favourite) Ken.
“Thank you for making us laugh and cry and think and sing along, and be better. For showing us that art is at its best – we are at our best – when we have something we are burning to say. And thank you for making someone like me think a life woven out of art and politics was possible.”
Love to Lynda. Rest in love, Jools.