Dog Trumpet Reversed ‘Led Zeppelin’ To Come Up With ‘Great South Road’ Album Title

Dog Trumpet’s Peter O’Doherty says he decided to “reverse Led Zeppelin” to come up with the title for ‘Great South Road’.

Peter explains, “Great South Road is a place. It is the road from Auckland to Wellington. I was born in a place called Papakura in the south of Auckland. The Great South Road ran through the middle of Papakura down to Wellington. As we both lived there it became the name of a song on the ‘River of Flowers’ album. We stole our own song title to use for the album title. We did a reversal on Led Zeppelin when they had ‘Houses of the Holy’ as the name of their album and then an album later had the song. I thought it was a cute, interesting thing. I impressed myself doing Led Zeppelin in reverse”.

Peter wrote six of the songs on ‘Great South Road’. His brother Reg Mombassa wrote the other six. “I wrote two thirds of my songs for the album and ‘Not Quite Enough’ came up pretty quickly,” Peter says. “Once I was getting into a songwriting mentality I got a good run. Two or three songs in a short time. It all came from playing a few chords, G and C, those classic sounds you hear in a Creedence song. The songs all sounded different but started from the same point. ‘Not Quite Enough’ was pretty much written as it sounds. I didn’t have to do much with it”.

In the first few lines of the song it says “We have in common all this distance between us”, quite an appropriate lyric for these times. “There are a few songs that turned out topical for the times,” he says. “Its almost like we were clairvoyants. We didn’t know what was coming, this was two years before. Then along comes COVID. We had the album to come out but we had to cancel the gigs. We thought lets go with the record because people still have to listen to music, now more than ever”.

Listen to ‘Not Quite Enough’: