Julia Deans: 50, fiery and back on the road with Fur Patrol

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Julia Deans in action on a 2022 Fur Patrol tour. The band (Deans, Andrew Bain and Simon Braxton) are back with a four-date tour celebrating 20 years since the release of second album Collider. Photo / Nick Paulsen

It’s nearly quarter of a century since the hit single Lydia knocked Destiny’s Child off the number one spot in the New Zealand music charts. Now, Fur Patrol are reuniting for
a short, sharp tour. Kim Knight caught up with frontwoman Julia Deans as the band prepared to get back on the road to celebrate Collider, the lesser-known second album. (Don’t worry, they’ll definitely be playing Lydia).

Julia Deans is running the numbers.
“We would all stay in this room that slept seven of us. Seven?”
She counts out loud, checking off cast, crew and architectural shortcomings.
“Me. Andrew, Simon, Steve. Our manager, our sound engineer and our guitar tech. One bathroom. And thin walls in that bathroom.”
Things the Fur Patrol frontwoman doesn’t miss about Fur Patrol: “Sharing a motel room with all of the boys. We had no ****ing money and we were touring all over Australia…”
Some more numbers: the band’s hit single Lydia is almost 25 years old. And this week, the lead singer turned 50.
“The passage of time?” says Deans. “We found some old footage of an old gig and three songs in, I was exhausted! It was relentless. I don’t know if I can do that anymore – but we’ll give it a go!”
In the North Shore rental she shares with the sound engineer she met on a 2000 tour with Shihad and Weta, a seagull stomps across the skylight. A whiteboard tracks progress on her next solo album but it, like plans for a milestone birthday party, is momentarily on hold. Fur Patrol are back in the rehearsal room. This Saturday, they kick off a short, sharp tour with a setlist that will always include Lydia, will definitely traverse the should-have-been-bigger second album Collider and – well, it’s a work in progress.
“We’re hoping we can convert some people to new faves. New old faves? Or old new faves? I don’t know,” Deans says.
“We were talking about Dominoes, which was the first song we ever released and somebody has requested we play it. Simon and Andrew are like ‘yeah, let’s do it’ and I’m like ‘it’s really high, I don’t know if I’m feeling it’. Last night I was practising by myself and oh man, that’s actually a really good song. So I think it’s going to make the cut.”
Cue the 1998 NZ on Air video. Fur Patrol are performing in a swimming pool that is rapidly filling with water. A viewer comments: “I was with a mate one day and he said ‘come with me we’re going to put a false floor into a pool for a band video’, it was this video, wow I was so young then.” And another: “Nice song. You see a band like this with folks in their early 20s and think the world could be theirs…”
For one golden Aotearoa summer, it definitely was.
Fur Patrol released their debut album Pet in September, 2000. When the single Lydia went to number one on Christmas Eve, it pushed Destiny’s Child into second place and Backstreet Boys back to third. Artists bringing up the rear of that week’s New Zealand top 10 included Robbie Williams, Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow and Westlife. At home, Fur Patrol were a juggernaut. Then they went to Australia, made a second album, and weren’t.
The upcoming reunion loosely marks two decades since Collider’s release. It’s a harder, rockier listen than Pet; an album that is, on every level, kind of… brutal?
“It is!” says Deans. “There was definitely a break-up album.”
Last week, reimmersed in the music and trying to fix the songs in her head, Deans found herself writing out lyrics. Track four: Enemy.
“I’m so proud of it, but… I got to the end and I was like, ouch! That’s vitriolic… but there’s a bit of poetic licence and, you know, break-up songs are a purge. There’s also an element of the other things that were going on.”
Things like a “stupid” deal with a record label, and the moments when the band went against their gut, spending money they didn’t have and would never earn back.
“Lots of our peers ended up with houses and shit, and we ended up with a giant legal bill,” says Deans. “But, you know, you live and learn. And sometimes you don’t learn and you do something similar again.
“It’s just how the market is set up. The record companies are throwing money at an artist, and they take off, you have someone like a Beyonce or a Taylor Swift, and I guess they’re making so much money off those artists that it kind of covers the failed projects.”
One minute you’re pushing Beyonce et al down the charts and the next you’re sleeping seven-to-a-single-bathroomed room in central Sydney. In Australia, Deans recalls tours with 20-plus people and the only other woman would be the one selling band merch. Sometimes, she says, they missed out on bookings because “we already have a female-fronted rock band on our roster”.
She rolls her eyes. “Female musician is not a genre.”
Fur Patrol were like a family, says Deans, and when the band get back together, everything just clicks. The banter, the stupid jokes, the muscle memory of the guitar chords.
“I do some mentoring in schools,” says Deans. “High school bands getting ready for Rockquest and stuff. I tell them they have to step outside of themself and become part of a unit. ‘You’re no longer individual musicians, you are one animal and you have to go on stage and be the beast. You have to think like one creature… you have to be vulnerable with your bandmates and know they are going to back you. And they also have to know that you’ve got them.”
A not-very-often-reported fact from the Rockquest archives is that, in 1991, Deans competed as a member of Burnside High’s The Far Side. Bradley, Laughton and Francis Kora’s band Aunty Beatrice took out the national finals, but Deans was awarded that year’s best original song. Her take on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s recent suggestion that maths and reading be prioritised in schools over arts and music?
“What a ****ing dumb thing to say. Music IS mathematics. Music IS language. Art is mathematics. Art is language. Art is science. Music is science. Honestly, it’s stupid. How backwards and narrow-minded do you have to be to think that we don’t need art and music… oh, honestly.”
Deans was 18 and living in Wellington when she wrote her first – and so far only – five-year plan.
“I wanted to have played in a band, toured overseas, recorded and released an album.”
All of those things happened with Banshee Reel (country, Irish, Celtic and rock, depending which website descriptor you read). And then they happened all over again with Fur Patrol, the band that became a three-piece in 2004 and went into hiatus in 2008. Deans has subsequently made two solo albums, Modern Fables and We Light Fire. An incomplete list of other musical ventures includes work with the likes of The Adults, SJD and Neil Finn and tribute shows around the music of Jacques Brel, Joni Mitchell and Shakespeare.
Any regrets?
“It’s kind of a pointless question because it’s done now, isn’t it? You just have to embrace the decisions you made.”
Best decision she’s made recently?
“Ohhh…“ she’s thinking hard. “Buying that $30 coffee machine!”
The rehabilitated DeLonghi is a TradeMe purchase, its worn symbols carefully redrawn in black marker pen by a retired aviation engineer. On the wall is an unfinished landscape from her famous grandfather, the war painter Austen Deans. She has just taken possession of a watercolour tōtara tree he made as a student. It too is incomplete. A metaphor for life? Of the landscape, she says: “I like the bareness. The space and just this hint of detail.”
Her grandfather once suggested she make music that was “a little jollier”. Her grandmother once inquired as to when she was going to give up this music malarky and become a real artist (“she was always really supportive but I just love that she actually asked me that one day”). Her father is a sculptor and her mother bought her her first guitar.
It is a famous family. “She is one of the prominent Christchurch Deans” noted the Herald in a 2011 profile, with an obligatory mention of All Blacks fullback turned Wallabies coach Robbie and the ancestors who were among the first European settlers in Canterbury. Riccarton House, now owned by Christchurch City Council, was commissioned by Deans’ great-great-great grandmother in 1856. The mansion has been repaired and reopened, post-Canterbury earthquakes, but another family home is unlikely to survive.
“The house that my grandfather and his brother grew up in got smashed, not to the point where it was in pieces on the ground but…”
Deans says it’s been “really nice” to be involved in the wider family discussions about what to do next.
“After I finished school, I didn’t have much to do with the larger family for years probably, until I moved back to New Zealand… It’s been really grounding. It makes me go, ‘I actually missed out on a whole lot of stuff’.”
Fifty and reflective.
On nostalgia: “It’s a yearning for things. For a moment in time you’re never going to have again. You can be sad about it, or you can go ‘oh man, it was a great time’. There’s also that element of nostalgia where it’s like, ‘oooof, I’m glad I’m not doing THAT anymore.”
On getting older: “I remember working on the Jacques Brel show a few years back with Tama Waipara, Jon Toogood and Jennifer Ward-Lealand. That was the first time I’d met Jen. Early in the run she’d turned 50. She’s such an inspirational and motivated human being. I was, ‘ah, I want to be that passionate about life and doing stuff’. I mean, I wish I could be that organised and that motivated, but you’ve got to have something to work on, right?!”
Fur Patrol never formally broke up (“we stopped working and then it was always an open-ended question”) but going solo was, Deans admits, lonely.
“Suddenly you have to make all the decisions. We’ve always been very democratic with how we’ve run things. So making decisions without someone else to push back… am I doing the right thing? And I’m a terribly indecisive person at the best of times. I like to cover every option and then I get torn. Was that the right one? Is that one better?”
Actually, she says, “I also don’t really like being told what to do”.
Fur Patrol (with support from Tom Lark) play Wellington’s Great Sounds Great festival (August 31), Nelson’s Theatre Royal (September 5), Lyttelton’s The Loons (September 6) and Auckland’s Double Whammy (September 7).
Kim Knight is a senior journalist with the New Zealand Herald’s premium lifestyle team.
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