Deja Voodoo

Biography

There are two bands with this name. 1 - Deja Voodoo began as the fictional house band for the New Zealand show Back Of The Y Masterpiece Television. In the show, the 15 seconds of mimed rock n' roll of the band and three posers produced at the start of each episode was enough to score them a nationwide orientation tour. But first they had to become a real band, so after a week of intensive song learning and writing the band were ready to roll. Deja Voodoo weren't good but they weren’t as bad as...

There are two bands with this name.

1 - Deja Voodoo began as the fictional house band for the New Zealand show Back Of The Y Masterpiece Television. In the show, the 15 seconds of mimed rock n' roll of the band and three posers produced at the start of each episode was enough to score them a nationwide orientation tour. But first they had to become a real band, so after a week of intensive song learning and writing the band were ready to roll.
Deja Voodoo weren't good but they weren’t as bad as some had hoped. They bemused audiences from Dunedin to Auckland, the only saving grace being the finale when the band member smashed ten burning acoustic guitars over Chris Stapp's head. The tour was featured in the now legendary TV special 'Back of the Y goes to Hollywood', with the band supplying the entire soundtrack.
On returning from the tour the band hit its first obstacle when drummer Phil 'Spanners Watson' Bruff quit the band in disgust and went off to the UK. He was replaced by Matt's girlfriend’s little brother James and they were off again. This time they were determined to become the best band in Auckland. After several practices they realised that this was an impossible dream. They settled for not being the worst and celebrated by building a massive Deja Voodoo sign and playing five sold out gigs around Auckland.
Things were looking up for Deja Voodoo, but tragedy struck again when Chris and Matt sold their TV show to MTV and decided to go off to the UK. At London, the people turned out to be booing at them and they were back within six months. On arrival in New Zealand they signed a four figure record deal with Liberation Records and went into the studio to record their first and possibly last studio album, the ominously titled Brown Sabbath. It was to be a beer drinking concept album of epic proportions. Songs included 'Beers', 'We are Deja Voodoo', and their fantastic ode to a sleepy South Island town, 'Today Tomorrow Timaru'.
Brown Sabbath was released in July 2004. The release party was held at Shadows, the bar of the University of Auckland. Thousands of copies have been sold New Zealand wide, and the album has even made it to Australian record shelves.
In 2009 they released the album 'The Shape of Grunge to Come...'.

2 - Deja Voodoo was a two-man band from the early to late 1980s, composed of Gerard van Herk and Tony Dewald. Based in Montreal, Quebec, they played a stripped down version of garage rock mixed with rockabilly, heavily influenced by the likes of The Cramps, that they called sludgeabilly. They played fast, short songs about such things as monsters, money, and bugs. While never enjoying significant national chart success, the band was very popular with Canadian alternative campus radio stations. Their main influence on the Canadian alternative music scene was their launching of the Og Music record company, which was home to many other influential Canadian alternative bands, including the Gruesomes and Ray Condo. Their It Came from Canada compilations helped launch the careers of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and Cowboy Junkies. The band and the label were retired when the band members turned thirty years old, and they left the music business to pursue other careers.
Deja Voodoo were the Canadian masters of sludgeabilly. They played songs about monsters and food and roamed the countryside in a crumbling Edsel: what the Frankenstein monster with a crystal meth problem would sound like if he started a rockabilly band. Big in Finland and Greece. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.