So far, the Great Multi-lingual Healthcare Crisis has passed by without any damage to life, or to limbs. To date, no-one appears to have mistaken the Hindi word for “lunch-break” for the Filipino word for “tracheotomy.” But then, the risk of bad clinical outcomes was never really the point, was it?

Reportedly, it was all about reducing the risk of patients feeling excluded or resentful if their carers happened to converse in their native language, within earshot. Frankly, I think I’d feel OK if the people caring for me in New Zealand chose to share pleasantries in their own language with another emigre far from home. Arguably, it might be healthier for all concerned if they did so, given the chronic workloads on the ward, and how alienating it must sometimes feel to be caring for strangers while living thousands of kilometres away from home and family.

No doubt, there’s a point to having medical staff talking in the same language on the job, and English is a global common denominator. But need that convenience be turned into a mandate? No. Trust the staff. Trust them to know when it's vital to impart facts and clinical knowledge to and about the patient, in the language the patient understands. But again, that may not be what we’re really talking about here.

What is the issue? Keep in mind that 44% of the nursing staff working in New Zealand’s public health system were trained elsewhere. Many of them come from India – primarily, from the state of Kerala. Many are from the Philippines. Like nursing staff in general, most are women.

IMO, the demand that they speak always, and only, in English is about the denial of agency. All very well for them to serve at bedside in English – there are age-old colonial traditions of non-European nurses and housekeepers, cooks, cleaners and other service staff caring for the needs of Europeans.

Yet once they begin conversing in languages unknown to monolingual New Zealanders of European stock, who knows what they’re saying, and what mischief may be afoot? Let them be dutiful, and make them speak only in English. That’s what this storm in a teacup (dash of milk with two sugars, dear) is really about.

Footnote: Just in case you think those Filipina nurses are up to something, be on your mettle if you hear them say “Ang taong into ay nagiging masakit sa pwet” while looking in your direction. Then ask yourself why.

The DeVille Inside

A few weeks ago, I resolved to do an extra column each week on films, music, or culture in general. Thanks partly to the recent server crash at Scoop/Werewolf – that commitment didn’t happen, but now the server is all fixed. So here goes...on a trip back in time to when punk was first breaking out of CBGBs club in New York (the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie etc) before crossing the Atlantic, and going global.

Even at the time, I felt a bit sorry for Capitol Records. In its greed to get down with the kids and ransack their pockets, Capitol joined the rush and signed… the house band at CBGBs, thinking this had to be Ground Zero of this Punk Thing, right? Instead, they found that in signing Mink DeVille, they had landed themselves with a soulful throwback to the early 1960s era of Latin-inflected pop music (the Drifters. Ben E. King) with lashings of French chanson and Cajun r& b on the side.

Despite the influences he wore on his carefully buttoned sleeves, Willy DeVille was an absolute original – one of the few artists able to inhabit a past era, and illuminate it. On the marketing front, it didn’t help that Willy was a heroin addict, and so was his intimidating wife, Toots - who became notorious for flipping into violent mode at any music critic or audience member who wasn’t giving her man his due. Like, by calling Mink DeVille a punk band.

After two soul-drenched albums that gave Capitol a sole UK top 20 hit (“Spanish Stroll”) to show for their investment, Willy and Toots left for Paris, where they made a truly great album called Le Chat Bleu. It featured Toots’ tattooed arm on the album cover, and also contained in its original playlist, an accordion instrumental.

Furious at funding an album with no commercial potential, Capitol shelved Le Chat Bleu for a year, until critics who had heard the tapes began putting it on their “Best Albums of the Year” lists. To drop you in right at the deep end, here’s his late-in-a-hard-life rendition of the final cut from Le Chat Bleu...

Here’s a younger, fitter Willy and the band doing the nearest thing that Mink DeVille ever had to a hit:

Inevitably in the career depths of the late 1970s, Willy DeVille crossed paths with the legendary song-writer Doc Pomus, who had been the co-creator – with Mort Shuman – of several of the early 1960s hits that Willy adored, including “Save the Last Dance For Me.”

In childhood, Pomus had been crippled by polio and he wrote the poignant lyrics to “ Save The Last Dance For Me” from his wheelchair on his wedding night, as he watched his wife dancing with the guests. Pomus was a New York celebrity, having written hits with Shuman for everyone from Ray Charles to the Drifters to Elvis Presley. An early patron of Lou Reed, Pomus’ death inspired Reed’s Magic and Loss album.

In Willy, the pencil-moustached dandy with a rare feel for the music that Pomus loved, he found a soulmate and the pair began writing together. By then Pomus was divorced, and holding regular court in the lobby of New York’s Westover Hotel.

One night, Willy brought Pomus a fragment of a lyric he had on his mind about “There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do/just to walk that little girl home.” As recounted in the Pomus biography Lonely Avenue, Pomus leaned back in his wheelchair, gestured maniacally and as if pulling the lyric out of thin air, spoke a possible opening line “It’s closing time/in this nowhere cafe...” This became the central track on Le Chat Bleu:

DeVille was always far more popular in France and Spain than he was in the US. This version of “Each Word’s A Beat Of My Heart” was recorded in 1984, at the height of his vampire junkie phase:

In the late 1990s, DeVille finally kicked heroin, bought a small ranch near New Orleans and began to lead the simple rural life, as this charming documentary relates. But then the darkness returned in force. The IRS confiscated the ranch for unpaid taxes, and he found the body of his second wife Lisa,who had just committed suicide. DeVille then smashed his car so badly that he walked on crutches and with a cane for the next three years.

In August 2009, Willy DeVille died just before what would have been his 59th birthday. In this track from Le Chat Bleu, love is a refuge, the thing that enabled him to get by in that world outside.

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