Memoir of Hello Sailor’s Dave McArtney to be published posthumously

The long-anticipated memoir by the late Dave McArtney, founding member of Hello Sailor and the Pink Flamingos, will be released by HarperCollins New Zealand in May.

Having worked on the book for well over a decade, Dave finally delivered the completed manuscript in March 2013, only weeks before his tragic and untimely death, aged 62.

Gutter Black is the candid, funny, irreverent and sometimes shocking story – told fully for the first time –of Hello Sailor’s emergence from ‘Mandrax Mansion’ in pre-gentrification Ponsonby in the early 1970s, to the band’s rapid rise to national fame and eventual ill-fated attempt to break into the American music industry.

The adventures, misadventures and near-disasters are all there. But the book is also the personal story of a hugely talented musician and song-writer who grew up in public and went on to become one of New Zealand’s best loved performing artists.

“We had spoken about the book, on and off, for years,” says HarperCollins’ New Zealand publisher Finlay Macdonald, “and it is everything I knew it would be. It’s an eye-witness account of a formative period in local music, but it’s also a kind of social history of those times, as well as an intimate memoir by an amazingly creative individual.”

With contributions by Dave’s wife, Donna, and band mates Harry Lyon and Graham Brazier, Gutter Black is fully illustrated throughout, and includes many previously unpublished images.

Released in time for New Zealand Music Month in May 2014, with its launch planned for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Gutter Black is literally the final word by one of our greatest musical sons.