Penguin Books, 2011
“What’ll it be like, Ray, when we’re famous?”
“Oh well, Pete, there’ll be chicks waiting to go out with us and hold us tight. There’ll be so many, we’ll get to choose.”
“I want one who looks like Natalie Wood. Hey, Pete, you’ll be the world’s most famous drummer, and I’ll be the most famous singer.”
“I want one who looks like Marilyn Monroe.”
“Kids all over the country will dance to our songs!”
“We’ll be the number one band in New Zealand!”
The memoir of New Zealand entertainment icon Ray Columbus — The Modfather: The Life and Times of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Pioneer — garnered great reviews and much feature coverage.
“I am delighted with the job you did. You got stuff out of me that amazed the people closest to me. It is so good I’m gob smacked…really thrilled with the ways you shaped my story” – Ray Columbus
“I was very much looking forward to this. Ray is such an icon in New Zealand popular music, and to get the story of those early days with the Invaders in his own words was a real gem. The book in itself and what it covers is terrific. It’s a great read. It’s a very engaging style of writing that he’s got. His personality really does come though. It’s a really valuable document in our history and I’m very glad he’s written it” – Ian Chapman, Executant Lecturer in Contemporary Music, University of Otago, reviewing Modfather on Radio New Zealand National, Speaking Volumes.
“He never took drugs and when he found groupies in his hotel bed he called security. For a rock’n’roll memoir, that doesn’t sound too promising. Yet Ray Columbus: The Modfather is the most engaging and entertaining book of its kind I’ve read since Keith Richards’s Life’ — Nick Bollinger, NZ Listener