Breakfast radio host and veteran entertainer Gary McCormick is on the move again. He tells Adam Dudding that he really won’t miss Taylor Swift.
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Gary McCormick will have the salmon. He always has the salmon – it’s almost a philosophical matter.
“You remove the lint out of life. By getting all the small details sorted out in advance you don’t waste any time on a daily basis.”
So, like always, it’s the salmon with greens and a poached egg on the side, plus a glass or two of sauvignon blanc at the cafe near MediaWorks Canterbury, immediately after McCormick’s 5.30-10.30am shift as the most elderly third of More FM’s morning team, the Breakfast Club.
On a regular day he’d also usually be reading, or perhaps scribbling some notes for tomorrow’s show, or even a few lines of verse. Today though, there’s a recorder running and he’s talking instead: about the time Neil Finn put him in a Crowded House song; about the great luck but also great tragedies that have marked his life; about his 71-year-old knees. And especially about the fact that his streamlined, lint-free daily routines are all about to change, because after 18 years at More FM Gary McCormick is moving sideways to a 7-9pm Friday show at sister station Today FM.
What will he miss most?
“The adrenaline rush, because of the instant nature of breakfast radio, and the fact that you do so much material, from interviews to humour to commentary to sports to interviewing the prime minister.”
What will he miss least?
“Ummm – Miley Cyrus? Closely followed by Taylor Swift.”
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Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero had been playing when I’d tuned in at 6.30am that morning, getting myself up to speed before a visit to the studio.
The chat was as light as the music: McCormick and co-hosts Lana Searle and Adam Percival compared the different names we use for grandparents. McCormick coined a word for that phenomenon where too many baby wipes come out of the packet at once: “clumpitis”.
By 8am, when I reached the studio, the banter had turned to the relative merits of songs by Elton John, Whitney Houston and Dave Dobbyn. Elton won, so they played I’m Still Standing, before moving on to a bit about how disgustingly messy Adam’s car is. It was often inane, but always slick and energetic – it clearly takes a lot of planning and focus to make it sound this easy.
During a break, McCormick handed me a printout of the notes for a monologue he’d just delivered. It was a thoughtful celebration of Jacinda Ardern, who’d just announced her resignation as prime minister. The point he was making, I think, was that this show wasn’t entirely fluffy.
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Gary McCormick (right) with his then morning co-host Simon Barnett in 2009. The pair were on air together at More FM from 2004 until 2018, when Barnett left the show.
The purpose of breakfast radio, says McCormick over his salmon, is “basically to cheer people up and get their day off to a good start. People want a bit of a lift in the morning. You know, I hear criticism of Radio New Zealand now that it’s too much of a grind in the morning”.
McCormick started at More’s Canterbury morning show in 2004, replacing Phil Gifford as the other half of a double act with Simon Barnett.
Since then everything’s changed. The regional show is now national, the double-act is a three-hander and all the hosts have been swapped out, Ship of Theseus style: Barnett left, Searle arrived, Jason Mac came and went, Percival arrived – and now McCormick’s off too.
Friday, February 10 is his last day. He’ll be replaced by Paul Ego of 7 Days and Pak’n’Save voiceover fame.
McCormick is 71. Ego’s in his 50s. Was the Breakfast Club’s resident old bugger pushed to make way for the next generation?
“No, I wasn’t pushed,” says McCormick. “The word was used, ‘transition’ – that it was possibly time to transition and I thought, transition to what? And the answer came back, ‘Well, you’re good at interviewing and you could have an opportunity to do longer interviews.’ And I thought, that’s good.”
His new two-hour show, McCormick Unleashed, launches February 24. There’ll be a couple of long interviews each show, “and I will choose some songs, which I’ve always wanted to do”. A digest will air 7-8am Sundays, and he’ll also pop up on Tova O’Brien’s and Lloyd Burr’s shows as a weekly panellist.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the 18-year More FM gig is that McCormick stuck at one thing so long.
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Gary McCormick (right) with his touring mates poet Sam Hunt (left) and musician Hammond Gamble
The CV of the preceding decades was that of a man who couldn’t sit still: a local councillor in his teens; a touring poet alongside Sam Hunt but also musicians such as DD Smash and Split Enz (that’s when Finn wrote the song that would become Mean to Me – McCormick was the poet who got the girl). An impresario, a lothario, a celebrity debater. He compèred the Sweetwaters music festival. He made a documentary about Raglan, which won an award and paved the way for the hit doco series Heartland. He was, for a time, everywhere, including on ads for Mitre 10.
What happened to the restless multitasking of that Gary McCormick?
“I’ve got a critically low boredom threshold,” says McCormick. Back then, “I probably felt that I wasn’t fully absorbed.
“But the great thing about breakfast radio has been that it’s very demanding. When I walk out I’m knackered. I’ll sit down for half an hour, have a glass of wine and let the adrenaline flow away. You’ve been in the trenches.”
This new gig is far fewer hours. Will he ever retire completely?
“I wouldn’t know how to. I said to a friend recently, the good fortune in my life is that no-one can stop me reading or writing, so I will always be working. If I wasn’t doing radio I’d be finishing a play or writing other things.”
He has other responsibilities too – he and second wife Katherine Cottier have three school-age daughters. (He also has two adult daughters from his first marriage). He was pushing 60 when he became the father of babies once more. How are the knees holding up?
“The knees are fine, which is surprising given the number of years I spent surfing and kneeling on them. But I have had one hip replaced, which was inconvenient. Apart from that, I’m a bit lucky. Mind you, I don’t go to the doctor, so I wouldn’t know. I might be on death’s door.”
Peter Meecham/Stuff
Gary McCormick with a couple of his favourite things: a glass of wine and a good book. He’s currently reading Circus of Dreams, a memoir by UK journalist John Walsh about his adventures among the 1980s literati.
McCormick is very easy company. His likeability and his gift for the gab are the unifying threads of that restless CV. But public figures attract haters, and on this matter McCormick takes himself down a curious rabbit hole.
He’s explaining how, despite awful personal tragedies (his girlfriend Diane Columbus died in a car crash in 1983, and his partner Jane Devine died of cancer in 1998), he does think of himself as lucky. One of the lucky things is that he truly knows himself – and self-knowledge makes him robust in the face of the trolls and critics.
“Why would I care? They could say anything they like.” But then he clarifies: “If they cross a certain line, I will go after them!”
That sounds ominous. Explain?
Well, says McCormick, four or five times, when someone’s been badmouthing him, he’s worked out who and where they are, “and then I go and see them.” He tells the person he is going to file papers for defamation or slander, so the good news for them is that they’ll have a chance to repeat that thing they’ve been saying.
“I say, ‘Good on you! I admire your courage! So we’ll be in touch!’”
Then, usually within 12 hours, “I’ve had an apology and a grovelling withdrawal”.
What are these terrible insults that need facing down?
“There was one about me having a fight in a pub when I didn’t – I wasn’t even in the town. Somebody claimed that I’d stolen something trivial, like a bottle of beer from a pub.”
These visits were necessary, says McCormick, because “How can I go around commenting on the government’s behaviour, when I’m going around nicking bottles of beer?”
Fair point.
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Tim Shadbolt and Gary McCormick. For years the old friends toured the country doing live shows, but that’s slowed down in recent years.
Except … there was that time, which McCormick doesn’t contest, when he had a sneaky glass of wine from the Koru club (and was reportedly banned from flying with Air NZ for a while). There have been other flight-related stoushes. Once, he smashed up his own car in a tow truck yard. And now he’s admitting to making house visits to people who’ve upset him? Is it possible that a bloke who’s built a career on his affability might actually be … an arsehole?
McCormick seems delighted by this.
“That’s a jolly good question! But no. I’m a bloody committed activist!”
Really? Barging into the Koru club is activism?
“It is! Because what happened there was …” and he gives a lengthy account of a delayed Air New Zealand flight, ending with “… so it was a matter of principle”.
He then explains the tow truck thing in similar detail, and ends: “… so there’s always a reason why I do things”.
They’re entertaining stories, sure, and you suspect McCormick was at least partly in the right. But doesn’t this righteousness, this bumptiousness, actually prove the opposite point?
McCormick folds. All right. Maybe he is an arsehole.
“Yes. Of course I am. I am an organisation’s worst nightmare if they cross me. It’s just if I think something’s going wrong, then I’m not going to take it.”
But he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t need to be thought of as “nice”. And the counterpoint is that he doesn’t lack for courage. He says on several occasions he’s stepped in to defend women being beaten up, “at some risk to myself”. Not because he’s some kind of hero, just “because I couldn’t live with myself if I had done nothing.
“Human beings are too complicated. I’m complicated. Everybody’s complicated.”
Perhaps that’s why he keeps the day-to-day decisions so simple: salmon and sav at that place near work. Then he’s off to a bar closer to his home in Lyttelton for a little more wine, more reading, more scribbling. Around 4.30pm he’ll migrate to the more proletarian bar across the street, because that’s when the sailors and other interesting people come in.
“I can spend half a day in the Lyttelton pub and write all day, and there is more than enough there to entertain my brain and keep me occupied.”
