I recorded this on a Tascam 4-track with a farfisa organ
Animation made in Blender
Inspired by driving through the Lyttelton tunnel
Title is a reference to this song by fellow Dunedin band King Loser

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I recorded this on a Tascam 4-track with a farfisa organ
Animation made in Blender
Inspired by driving through the Lyttelton tunnel
Title is a reference to this song by fellow Dunedin band King Loser

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Celia Mancini (King Loser) Interview
New Zealand rock ‘n’ roller Celia Mancini is the genuine article. She’s been hit by cars, broken bones at venues and yet continues to come back for more, no stranger to playing shows likely against doctor’s orders.
Performing since the 1980s, Mancini’s played in various bands whose influence can’t be measured in record sales and whose music generally ran contrary to what was popular in New Zealand at the time. (Take her former band, Christchurch’s seminal the Axel Grinders, who would’ve been more at home on Estrus Records than Kiwi label Flying Nun. In fact, the group only released a record on American Lee Joseph’s Dionysus imprint.) Celia is best known for starting King Loser with Chris Heazlewood; the duo also backed Peter Gutteridge in a 1990s incarnation of Snapper. Celia stresses that King Loser was “never a Flying Nun band,” which is true. Nevertheless, Flying Nun released three King Loser albums in the 1990s, all of them musically varied—from surf rock to experimental—and excellent. When the group ground down in the late ‘90s, Celia formed the short-lived Mothertrucker.
King Loser has been active again. Late last year (2016) they toured New Zealand. The shows were filmed by Andrew Moore and a King Loser documentary appears to be in the works. As mentioned earlier, Mancini is no stranger to injury and is currently recuperating from injuries sustained from getting hit by a car; she’s currently biding her time on house arrest. King Loser is set to record and start again once Celia breaks free from the long arm of the law.
Interview by Ryan Leach
Ryan: Did you grow up in Christchurch?
Celia: No. I was actually born in Auckland. I had a really good childhood—one of the best in the world. I’d go sailing and shit like that. My dad was a doctor. My mother’s side was from Scotland. She was fifth-generation Port Chalmers which is part of Dunedin. I realized Auckland sucked by 1985, so I went down and lived in Christchurch.
Ryan: You skateboarded when you lived in Auckland, didn’t you?
Celia: I was a New Zealand skateboarding champ in 1976. There are photos of me that I still have from the newspaper. I was really interested in sports when I was in school. In the 1970s, I was doing slalom. I always rode my trucks loose as. We’d clean up the trophies. It was wide open. There was no designation for men and women in the competitions then. I started skating again in the 1980s. I remember buying a Vision board. I’d skate with my boombox, listening to the Beastie Boys.
In 1988, Duane Zarakov, who was an early drummer for King Loser, asked me to play in his band The Axel Grinders. I was up in Auckland again at the time for some reason. I would move all over the country. I wasn’t into one scene. I remember getting Duane’s postcard to move down so I quit my job. I was in Christchurch two days later. They went from being a covers band to performing original material. We started writing songs together.
Ryan: Had the Axel Grinders released their sole vinyl release yet—the “Apparatus of Love” single on Dionysus?
Celia: No. I wrote “Apparatus of Love,” but they recorded that later on. I had gotten Rita (Le Quesne) to replace me and she appeared on that one. I had gotten kicked out of the Axel Grinders for being too Iggy. They were a bit jealous because I was playing in four different bands and managed Into the Void. Rita played in one of my other bands, The Stepford 5, who had a release on Munster Records. I had a group called The Ono Band which was a Beatles cover band that had some members of Into the Void in it. I also had a lounge band in the ‘80s. David Bowie’s entertainment lawyer was in Christchurch and he used to see us. It was very flashy and we’d play very nice places. All of that was fine by me because we liked the music and I loved the dresses. David Bowie’s entertainment lawyer said we were the best lounge act he’d ever seen. This was sort of pre-lounge, though. I called the music “easy listening.” I’d make enough money off the lounge band to support my rock bands.
Ryan: Was the lounge group the one you had with Bill Vosburgh (Perfect Strangers), After Dinner Mints?
Celia: He was in After Dinner Mints and we also had a duo. Not many people know about the duo we had. Christchurch was really amazing.
Ryan: Right around the time you and Chris (Heazlewood) got King Loser together, you were also both playing in a latter incarnation of Snapper.
Celia: Chris and I were in Dunedin. We had formed King Loser before we joined Snapper. We are both so flexible—into different styles of music. I had just arrived back to New Zealand from a trip I had taken to the States. Pete needed a keyboard player so he asked me to join. And of course, Chris was in on guitar. It was great playing with Peter; we spent a lot of time together. Gutman and I blended so well. Peter had stage fright. He used to drink vodka before playing; skull it. That’s all it was. Chris and I heard some tapes last year of our time in Snapper. We really liked them. I told Chris, “Chris, I thought we were shit in Snapper. This sounds quite good.” Chris said, “I thought so too!”
It was incredibly sad when Peter died. I was busy in court for some rubbish. Heazlewood was on the phone getting Gutman back from Los Angeles to Auckland. We got him back and then he died shortly afterwards.
Ryan: You appear on Snapper’s A.D.M. (1996) record. Snapper was essentially Gutteridge and Mike Dooley by that point, correct?
Celia: Yeah. Brendan Hoffman was involved too. He was a sound-mixer guy. He lives in the States now. Chris and I were quite busy with King Loser by that point so we couldn’t really play with Peter anymore. A.D.M. wasn’t recorded how I would have liked to have heard it recorded. Pete’s vocals needed to be more pronounced. Simple, little Phil Spector things would have helped a lot.
Ryan: I like the single you released on Flying Nun, “Kiasu” (1996).
Celia: I did that in one afternoon! I fucked around, fucked around and then they needed the tracks. I made up “Kiasu” on the spot.
Ryan: What was your relationship like with Flying Nun? Was Lesley Paris your point of contact at the label?
Celia: Lesley is my second cousin. Paul McKessar was at Flying Nun at the time handling A&R. He was a total cunt. Paul McKessar hated me. Shayne Carter informed me that the label wasn’t too happy with me right before a New Zealand tour. At the end of it we arrived at Flying Nun’s offices in Auckland and Paul McKessar started yelling at me. It was like the voice from the intercom on the cartoon show The Peanuts. Unbelievably, he tried to kick me out of my own band!
Ryan: Did this happen around 1996’s Nunfest and the release of Caul of the Outlaw?
Celia: Yeah. Paul was just an A&R guy. I still can’t believe he tried to kick me out of my own band.
Flying Nun was told by other people to sign us. We didn’t care about being on Flying Nun. David Mitchell (3Ds, Chug, Ghost Club, etc.) was telling Flying Nun about us. We rejected their contracts. We signed a three-record deal and we retained the rights to our work—all our merchandising and publishing. We had the right to release records with other labels as well. When I say we did three records with Flying Nun, one of them (Sonic Super Free Hi-Fi) was a rerelease.
Ryan: Right. That one came out on Turbulence Records first.
Celia: Yeah. They were from Belgium. We’ve honestly got about thirty records completed. Chris and I were and remain prolific. We just couldn’t help it. Sean (O’Reilly) is a songwriter now and he’s doing really well. But, again, we were never a Flying Nun band. I just looked at them as a distributor for our records.
Ryan: Looking back on your three LPs, is there one you prefer over the other two?
Celia: I like them all. And like I said, we’ve got heaps more. When we toured last September (2016), new songs came together. That’s why Chris and I were always recording. We were never certain we’d remember songs later on. We’d record stuff and just shove it into a bloody box. The only time we didn’t do that was when we were consciously making an album. Chris would record us on our reel-to-reel.
Ryan: When Flying Nun was presumably spending more money on records and getting slicker, you and Chris were recording on the cheap on your eight-track.
Celia: We always made our own recordings. We didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on recordings. We didn’t need to do that.
Ryan: I remember chatting with Andrew Tolley (Hasselhoff Experiment, Blood Bags, Perpetrator Records, etc.) and he mentioned Axel Grinders being revelatory. King Loser as well. You were doing something very unique in New Zealand in the 1990s, especially compared to what was popular at the time.
Celia: I’ve always felt that King Loser was really different from other bands. Axel Grinders were too. King Loser was one of the weirdest bands around. Musically, we were always doing different things. Duane and I used to release Axel Grinders tapes ourselves. We’re starting to digitize all of our old stuff, so it’ll start coming out all over the place. There’s Snapper stuff too.
Ryan: There’s footage of you and Chris playing at your old place on K Road. I heard stories of you guys endlessly recording there.
Celia: Yeah, yeah. We were together then….We went on tour to Australia.
Ryan: Was that the tour with Garageland?
Celia: Fuck that band. We went on tour with Loves Ugly Children as well. Garageland opened for us. People came to see us, not them. We were on every fucking magazine cover in New Zealand. It was kind of weird. Once I get out of my criminal situation and get this damn ankle bracelet off of me I want to go back to Australia. I want to go to Japan too. But this ankle bracelet shit is ridiculous. The judge said I was “a danger to society.” So stupid.
Sean (O’Reilly) lives in Auckland currently. We get together. Tribal Thunder and Chris are in Dunedin. Chris is coming up here to Auckland in about six days. So we’ll have a powwow then. We’re going to record again when I can get mobile.
Ryan: How were those King Loser shows that you played last year (2016)?
Celia: Fucking awesome. Great. I loved it.
Ryan: Isn’t Andrew Moore making a King Loser documentary?
Celia: Yeah. He made a New Zealand skateboard documentary (No More Heroes). He left us ladies out. It was such a small subject. I was a skate champ in ’76. He held a question and answer session after the film premiere in Auckland and I could tell he was frightened when he saw me standing up: “Oh, god, Celia’s grabbing the mic!” I wasn’t going to be unpolite. I politely asked him where the ladies where and walked off. But I guess the film was big for him. We’ll see how the King Loser one shapes up.
Go well, Celia
The first time I saw Celia Mancini was on celluloid.
Three years ago, my flatmates and I headed out in the rain to catch a screening of Margaret Gordon’s documentary about the Christchurch band Into the Void at Alice’s, a theatre in the centre of town that holds about 30 people.
Most of the documentary consisted of the band laughing about how they drank together far more often than they made music.
But the atmosphere changed when a clip from King Loser’s ’76 Come Back Special video jumped off the screen. A presence appeared: a femme fatale with jet black hair and red lips. She sprinted in short heels through the streets of Auckland, picking off men with whatever she had lying around: a car, a rifle, a karate chop.
King Loser, ‘76 Come Back Special
“Wow,” I breathed.
drew my lips and hers
R.I.P. Celia Patel aka Mancini of King Loser We are very sad to report that Celia Patel aka Celia Mancini, of King Loser, has passed away.

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