GRAHAM BRAZIER, LEFT TURN AT MIDNITE, DISCOVERED (2017): Long gone for good

To be honest, I didn't know of the existence of this album by the legendary Graham Brazier until I ran into producer Alan Jansson at the 2025 music awards.

Jansson is perhaps best known for producing OMC's classic How Bizarre, the Proud collection (including the hit In the Neighbourhood for Sisters Underground) and Nathan Haines' breakout album Shift Left.

Of the latter he said “I didn't know anything about jazz and initially didn't want anything to do with it. I loved Nathan and didn't want his baby to be my bastard”.

However Jansson is one of those producers who can turn his ears and hands to any number of genres, so it was little surprise to see his name also on albums by country singer Aly Cook a decade ago.

But the Brazier album was something else.

Left Turn at Midnite was a posthumous album, released in 2017, two years after Brazier's death at 63 from a heart-attack then a stroke.

Chris Bourke, writing for audioculture on the occasion of Brazier's death, noted that at the time the respected singer-songwriter was working on his (then unnamed) fourth solo album with Jansson and that “the sessions were going well, if slowly”.

At the time Brazier – of Hello Sailor who'd continued to be an off-on working band – seemed to be in a slightly better place than he had been too often in his life.

He'd lost Sailor bandmate Dave McArtney two years previous but was running his mother's famous bookshop on Dominion Rd (when the sign on the door didn't read “Closed”) and he was certainly looking fit and well, if a little paunchy round the jowls.

Brazier took great pride in his appearance and worked out with the same enthusiasm he embraced Beat poetry and his reputation as a bard, even though he seems never to have published a poetry collection.

He could certainly quote poetry, the Beats and others, and his own pieces.

When I came back from the US one time I brought him a City Lights Bookshop t-shirt from San Francisco and he was delighted. He generously gave me a rare flexidisc of William Burroughs readings.

He was a lovely man – at the 2011 Silver Scrolls when Hello Sailor were inducted into the Hall of Fame he was drunk and happy, gave me the biggest bear hug then staggering off.

So you can understand Jansson's grief when Brazier died during the recording of Left Turn at Midnite.

"Losing him was heartbreaking. I have lost family and not cried but when I was told about Graham I just broke down," Jansson told the New Zealand herald.

"It was the saddest day of my life."

But Jansson persisted with polishing and releasing the album although it was emotionally difficult. As it had been for Brazier.

The ballad Round the Bend with synth strings is his tribute to McArtney: “Saturday game and where are you my friend? Come walking through my door about this time each weekend. Those cavalier days we thought they'd never end, come what's round the bend, what's waiting around the bend . . .

"Said we'd play together til the day we die but we didn't understand. So now I just drink and cry, c'mon friend, tell me what's waiting around the bend”.

With longtime friends drummer Jim Laurie, Harry Lyon on mandolin and guitar (of Sailor), Kara Gordon (guitars), bassist Fred Renata and others, Brazier offers upbeat country rock (Storm Coming), soulful balladry (Hosanna with backing vocals by Taisha) and a kind of skiffle on the vaguely autobiographical University (with Finn Scholes on trumpet).

In Autumn his deep baritone is ideally suited to the reflective tone about those days before the winter of your life arrives: “Remember when everything was truthful, innocent. I see the people pass me by . . . whatever happened to those days?”.

Autumn

 

Jansson:  "The majority of songs were one take. Graham wanted me to record the guitar and vocal together as he felt a lot more comfortable doing it that way.

"I have to say he was a bloody good acoustic guitar player.

"I still dearly miss him."

With posthumous albums we tend to look for clues that the artist anticipated their demise.

You can find such evidence here, and these songs do seem to be the work of a man in his 60s reflecting and “I remember when everything was beautiful”.

There are thoughtful words here from the bard of local rock.

And Graham Brazier gets a poem into the world.

Right at the end is White.

It is a spiralling explosion of surreal images which hauls in Yorick, a reference to Kurt Cobain, the Titanic, boxer Henry Cooper, valium, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Donny Osmond . . .

It pivots around things white. Sometimes.

Very glad I learned of this album, albeit 10 years after Graham's death.

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White

 

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There is a 2004 interview with Graham Brazier at Elsewhere here. Reviews of the recent Hello Sailor albums are here.

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Left Turn at Midnite is available at iTunes here and on Spotify here