NYC-based, New Zealand-bred rocker Miriam Clancy has memorialized the Erebus Disaster on its 43rd anniversary, in which Air New Zealand Flight 901 flew into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, Antarctica, killing all 257 people onboard, including 25 Americans, with her new single and haunting video “Roelof,” off her upcoming album Black Heart, out January 20, 2023. Watch + share the video via YouTube.
“Roelof” is a song of love and loss in the aftermath of a disaster on Mt. Erebus. With the brooding darkness of an old western soundtrack, Miriam’s voice and her nylon guitar along with her Brooklyn band lead you through deep canyons and windswept peaks to find the sound of the loneliest man in the world.
“Roelof is a ballad of endings, like a scene from a Tarantino or Lynch movie – but it’s real. His wife Marie (my aunt) was an Air New Zealand flight attendant aboard the ill-fated plane in 1979. She had a sparkling personality, was reliable with a mint sense of style too… Roelof adored her and decided he couldn’t live without her.
I have faint memories of them, of eating jelly beans at their table and of sitting on my mum’s knee at Marie’s funeral while my dad and his brother Kevin – both then guitarists about town – played Romanza / Jeux Interdits in the old catholic church just for her. This music went deep into my soul, the flamenco forever marked me with a language of tragedy and that vibe came out when I decided to write Roelof’s tale into a song, with details as told by my dad.
So this is a moment in time for some people my family will forever miss. And in this last scene of a good man’s grief it is a moment to walk tenderly alongside him, to hear the words he didn’t get to say, and to learn more about my own origins and heart.”
Filmed and directed by Winger Brothers alongside director Brendan Donovan back in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, the video for “Roelof” pulled in old news pieces from around the time of the crash, with the eerie addition of a passenger’s footage found in the wreckage. And being U.S.-based, Miriam’s scenes were shot in the faraway yet similar terrain of the Badlands in South Dakota, tying it all together on the family tree. “We were trying to find a feel of the last frontier, for wild was the feeling on the ice (I spoke with a few of the brave recovery crew – that mountain slope was no place for humans). But filming in the Badlands was otherworldly, it felt a bit tapu (Maori – meaning sacred) and come dusk the bats swooped over my head in a breathtaking bat murmuration – it was incredible, like we were being acknowledged.”
This song and its companion video is a memorial, the sound of history beaming in from the future – a reminder of things we lost.
