Dragon "Happy I Am" 2009

…Recruiting sax player Billy Rogers and vocalist/violinist Richard Lee, Dragon continued for a year and cut a further album Power Play, shifting away from pop towards a more virtuosic rock. But the hits stopped dead, and by 1980 the band had dissolved…

...However, debts remained from the wild years and so in 1982 Dragon reformed, complete with a rehabilitated Marc Hunter, initially for a one-off, coffer-replenishing tour. So successful was the reunion – with capacity crowds singing along to the five-year-old hits – they decided to continue. A 1983 single ‘Rain’, composed by Marc, Todd and Todd’s partner Johanna Pigott, gave Dragon a brand new hit; it was followed by another successful single, ‘Magic’, and album, Body And The Beat.
The new recordings were produced by Alan Mansfield, an American multi-instrumentalist who had previously worked with Robert Palmer and Bette Midler, and brought an 80s sheen to the traditional Dragon pop sound.
In 1983, Kerry Jacobson – still prone to the excesses of their late-70s heyday – left the group “for health reasons”, to be replaced by former XTC drummer Terry Chambers. Robert Taylor and Paul Hewson left not long after, Hewson returning to New Zealand where he died of a drug overdose in early 1985.
With only the Hunter brothers remaining from the original hitmakers, the group began to operate something of a revolving door, through which Australian guitarist Tommy Emmanuel and American drummer Doane Perry came and went. Both played on the Todd Rundgren-produced 1986 album Dreams Of Ordinary Men.
By now Dragon was becoming more a brand than a band. The Dragon sound was a trademark that could seemingly be stamped on anything the Hunters touched, even a 1987 cover of Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration’.
Yet another line-up (with New Zealand drummer Barton Price) cut the Bondi Road album in 1989, with its signature single ‘Young Years’ – written by Alan Mansfield and his partner, former New Zealand hitmaker Sharon O’Neill – again invoking the classic Dragon sound. Dragon continued with a core of Mansfield and the Hunters until 1995, when Todd retired from the band. In 1997 the group disbanded once more, after Marc was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.
After Marc’s death in July 1998, it would be almost a decade before Todd Hunter would play any Dragon material. “It was never going to happen again. It was like some lurid airport novel that I’d read once,” he says.
Instead, he turned his attention to composing soundtracks for Australian television. But in 2006, he started rehearsing a new Dragon line-up, featuring former New Zealand pop star Mark Williams in Marc Hunter’s old role.
“You get in a room, you start playing the songs … I could actually feel the goddamn Dragon lift itself out of the primeval mud.”
Taking to the road with “a bunch of songs that just about play themselves,” Hunter realised that “they are not our songs anymore. The songs belong to everyone.”
Yet in playing the old hits – the audience taking over much of the singing – the old Dragon seemed to all but become flesh once more. “Without getting too metaphysical, it’s like Paul and Marc are there. And they were such sardonic bastards, so cynical about everything, you just see them up in the back going ’Aw, you fucking idiots’.”
A late 2013 Acoustic Church Tour of New Zealand was a huge success and proved that Dragon, some 40 years since their debut, retained that same magic and pulling power - audioculture

trax:
1. The Road 2. Happy I Am 3. God Of Small Things 4. Chico 5. Let's Come Together 6. Carousel 7. Find My Way Home 8. Long Grass 9. Goodbye Babylon 10. Who I Am
…served by Gaius…