Riki

I kind of feel like [the drums] chose me… They were on my frequency, and I resonated with them. You find your instrument, and it's kind of like finding your soulmate… Until you learn to master it; and then it's like—you meet all its cousins, and its friends. (Laughs.)

Yeah man—everybody loves Riki.

Riki—medium height, medium build, street-handsome, baggy clothes, heavy brows—wears a white cloche hat pulled down to his eyes like a teacosy, almost all of the time. He seems very shy until you get to know him. In fact he is warm, serious, cheerful, principled, and engaging. He has a kind of inspired silliness masking a great depth of knowledge: his studio contains rare vinyls in vintage condition from twenty, thirty, forty years ago. He still DJs, though he's mostly known through Trinity Roots now.

Riki does Dumb Maori Boy. You know the one. As deflections go, this is brilliant. No one can object to it (his skin's the wrong colour for anyone to have a right to object to it). It's charming, and funny, and disarming. It's also bullshit. But then Riki doesn't fight with anyone, won't: if this is true, and at the same time you're proud, figuring out how to disarm is important.

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The Dumb Maori Boy thing becomes the more interesting when he tells you he was brought up Pakeha, essentially. ‘Yeah man,’ he says, poker-faced, ‘I grew up in Dunedin.’

There's a very Maori or at least Pacific way of teasing, that involves outrageous claims made deadpan. Riki is a past master at this. When you ask him about the huge drum in his studio, he will turn to look at it. ‘That's my pet cow, man,’ he will say.

‘No it isn't,’ you will say.

Riki will look at you indignantly, his eyes enormous. ‘It is,’ he will say. ‘She died when I was six.’ He's so piteous with this you actually buy it.

Riki also does a superb imitation of Jonathan, although, it has to be said, not, as far as you are aware, in front of him.

Once, parting at three in the morning after a gig at the Matterhorn, Riki and Jonathan stand in the centre of the floor with their heads bent so their foreheads are touching, not exactly embracing, with one arm around each other's shoulders. They stand in this position for at least a minute, breathing in each other's breath. Yeah and they're straight men: standing, stilled, this close to one another for this long: breathing the same breath.

The straight women on either side of them watch in silence: fascinated, moved, amused, and not catching each other's eyes.

I look at him like a brother. And a, and a father as well, in a lot of ways. But more like a bro.