At the bottom of Sir Dave Dobbyn’s garden sits a room with no windows. Its walls are curved brick in orange and beige. Guitars hang from the ceiling, gold records lean over an old piano, and cables snake between the microphones, amps and desks. The studio was already there when the family bought the house.
This is where the 69-year-old singer still goes to work.
Dobbyn was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2022. Since then he has also had prostate cancer (“that’s gone, along with the prostate,” he told the New Zealand Herald’s Bridget Jones) and what he describes as mild emphysema, like COPD, which leaves him puffed when he tries aerobic exercise. He walks a little slower now, talks a little slower, and his strength is not what it was. At one point he had to step away from the stage for what he thinks was the longest break from live playing since his Th’ Dudes days in the mid 70s.
Retire? “Retirement doesn’t sit well with me,” he said. “I thought there’d be some kind of off-ramp, but there isn’t. And I wouldn’t take it if there was, because I’d miss it too much.”
A different set of rules on stage
The house itself is a noisy, crowded, loved place: books along the lounge walls, a doorframe near the fridge covered in wobbly scribbles that track the family’s growth, a three-legged orange cat that likes to be carried upstairs. His wife of more than 40 years, Anneliesje, comes into the studio with a cup of tea. A laptop there is plastered with label-maker words: “Love one another.”
Dobbyn says performing is the one place the illness eases off. “I can sing and play and it hasn’t affected my voice,” he said. “It’s almost like it’s a different set of rules once you’re performing.” Some chords he can no longer play the way he used to. Then a solo arrives and he wonders where it came from. He doesn’t rage about any of it. Anger, he reckons, is “a waste of energy.”
Off stage the symptoms show up in other ways. He told RNZ’s Sunday Morning that the most annoying part is the cognitive trouble. “Some days, I can’t put a sentence together and finish it because I’ll forget what I was talking about.” He pays attention to pacing himself, and he goes to boxing lessons with other people who have Parkinson’s.
The ideas keep coming, usually when he is about to leave a room, and he runs back to the studio to catch them. He is also working on a lyric book with anecdotes.
The Civic
In June, Dobbyn was preparing a one-night show, Selected Songs Encore, at Auckland’s Civic Theatre on 25 July, following a sold-out Selected Songs tour the year before. His eight-piece band was to include his son Eli on percussion. He called the 96-year-old theatre, which inspired his 1993 song “Palace”, “almost like a church.”
“I can’t do it forever but I’ll try,” he said, “I’ll give it my darndest.”
Sources
- Sir Dave Dobbyn on Parkinson’s disease and why he won’t retire
- Sir Dave Dobbyn: 'Some days I can't put a sentence together and finish it'
