Connan Mockasin

About the Artist

Somewhere between fantasy and reality, innocence and wisdom, pop music and an art form as yet unnamed, is the world of Connan Mockasin.

Enter that world and you may find yourself, as one UK reviewer did, “giddy with the oxygen of originality”. Put simply, Connan Mockasin is not like anyone else.

Whether he is singing an ode to a favourite pet, parading one of his handmade costumes, strumming his autoharp, performing fretboard heroics or manipulating one of his home-styled instruments, he has the uncommon ability to make an entire crowd smile.

Since relocating to the UK from his native New Zealand just over two years ago, he has charmed audiences everywhere; from Hyde Park (where he played alongside the White Stripes) and Green Man (Robert Plant, Joanna Newsom) to London’s legendary Durr club, where he remains the only artist to have been invited back three times.

He has collaborated with Fatboy Slim on a track for the multi-million selling DJ/producer’s new album Brighton Port Authority, which also includes contributions from David Byrne and Iggy Pop.

Creativity has always been Connan’s engine. Growing up in rural Hawkes Bay, he was already playing guitar in a blues band by the age of ten while pursuing overlapping interests in art and invention.

In 2004 he formed the trio Connan and the Mockasins who toured tirelessly, initially in New Zealand, then in Europe, releasing a pair of EPs, plus a single, “Sneaky Sneaky Dogfriend” for EMI’s distinguished Parlophone label. The first pressing sold out in just days.

The group dissolved in 2008, leaving Connan free to collaborate with a wide variety of musicians as he developed his singular ideas, the first fruits of which can be found in Connan Mockasin’s self-titled set.

In these songs Connan introduces you to cats with larger-than-life personalities, unicorns in uniform, and friends like Macheeky who skins bush rats to make moccasins. In Connan’s world, the workaday seems surreal, the humdrum exotic, the mundane hallucinatory, and everyone is welcome.