NZ music man's joys and sorrows
Ray Columbus is the godfather of New Zealand pop music, and his two great hits – She's a Mod and Till We Kissed – are still famous after 45 years. In his new book he reveals some astounding secrets about his very public life. Anthony Hubbard reports.
RAY COLUMBUS burst on to the world at 21 and rattled and shook till he was old. And then last year he crumbled.
At the Band Together concert for Christchurch, "I knew as soon as I opened my mouth that I was no longer good enough." He started his dance and nearly tripped.
"I just wanted the earthquake to open up again and swallow me," he recalls. He staggered through his three songs "and then I fell into the arms of the prime minister, John Key – an absolutely wonderful man. Bob Parker came over and said, `Wonderful, Ray', and I said, `No, it was just terrible."'
A stroke two years before that did for him. Columbus took up smoking – as well as tap-dancing – at six. The pretty boy entertainer had smoker's wrinkles in his 20s, and heart attacks stored up for later.
The pop star is now 68 and he won't be doing his famous Mod's Nod dance – arms swimming, head tossing and jerking – any more. The stroke still sometimes makes him slur his words. Long years of mop-shaking have given him an arthritic neck. But he's cheerful. "I'm not a person who lives with regrets," he tells the Sunday Star-Times. "I don't have an ulcer."
That is just as well, because he became famous with two hits very young and never soared so high again. He became a long-serving TV performer in New Zealand and a recycler of past glories, Rocking Retro Ray. But Columbus is a tough character and was raised to bend with the blasts. He's had a few, the working-class boy from Woolston.
When he was 15, a group of women tried to rape him. Columbus was working in a dairy, and he minded the shop one night while the owner, Eileen, went out with three women friends. When they got back they were all drunk, and they attacked the tiny lad (he never grew taller than 168cm, or 5'6").
"They start off as if it's all fun and silly, but it turns serious. They hold me down and pull my jeans and my underwear off me, and all the time I'm fighting and shouting and terrified," he writes in Ray Columbus: The Modfather.
"They want to rape me. They try but they can't get any response out of me. Thank goodness I don't get an erection, or I would have been history. I am just revolted.
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