Anika Moa on her wedding

BY VICKI ANDERSON

It will be a big year for singer Anika Moa - new marriage, new album and a new group.

Driving through Hornby it strikes me that it has lost two of its icons, the clock tower which is being dealt to by a piece of heavy machinery as we pass, and the musical treasure who put the suburb on the nation's map, Anika Moa.

It's early Monday morning and arriving at Moa's mum's house in Dunsandel, a quiet house a few doors down from an endless patchwork of paddocks, Moa emerges looking radiantly beautiful without a scrap of makeup and in bare feet.

She and her wife, burlesque artist Azaria Universe, live in Orewa but, with Azaria performing in Melbourne, her mum's house is Moa's bolthole, her quiet place.

I sit at the kitchen table and she makes me a cuppa. Across from me numerous pictures of Moa and her siblings jostle for space. It feels like a happy house.

Moa is wearing a beautiful feather necklace and when I admire it, she touches it and a blissful look crosses her face.

"Boh Runga gave it to me for our wedding. I chose this one and Azaria chose one with two feathers. I'm going to see my nana tonight. She's cooking tea for me and she's probably going to want this and I'll have to give it to her. I give my nana everything that she wants."

The pair, who married last month, spent Christmas with Azaria's family "up north" and Moa was introduced to the gentle game of petanque.

"I married into a white family. They play petanque instead of beating each other up and drinking Lion Red," she laughs.

Moa was at a burlesque show in Melbourne when she first saw the woman she was to marry. Azaria performs as part of her company, the Burlesque Hour, and also in the Tiny Top Sideshow, in which she is a bearded lady doing an act which involves a hula hoop.

"She was naked and I thought, 'Yeaaah'.

"I worship Azaria and she worships me back. I'm very devoted."

Moa says their relationship inspired her new album Love in Motion, which is due for release next month.

"I Am the Woman Who Loves You is about when I first met my wife and I was trying to figure out how I fell in love with her, just by looking at her eyes, I fell in love with her. On Love Me Again I was taking the piss out of my love for Azaria, they are the cheesiest lyrics but they are actually from my heart. I mean every word I say."

Album title track Love In Motion relates partly to all the boys she had crushes on in school.

"It's about how funny it is that I was such a man lover in my youth. I was obsessed with boys. Even up until I was 21, it was men, men, men, as much as I could get, and then I turned gay.

"It makes me laugh. When I met my first girlfriend, I just knew. Boom, that was it. When we broke up, I was single for two years and I just f ... men. Then I met Azaria and fell in love instantly and that was it, I knew I was going to be with her for the rest of my life. I've never loved someone as much as I love her. I idolise her. It's weird for me because usually I'm the one breaking hearts all over the show."

Her mother has raised her with the belief that you fall in love with a person, not their sexual orientation.

"I'm gay, who cares? This is the same mum who, when I say, `Mum, I'm fat', she says, `No, you're in proportion'."

She is the first of her extended eight brothers and sisters to marry. When I ask about the occasion, she visibly bristles.

"Some papers in Auckland said some lies – don't believe everything you read. Journalists are different up there, there are some good ones but some of them are evil. I got hounded by Woman's Day to tell my story and I didn't want to do it. I felt for what Alison Mau went through. I had to get my manager to tell them to back off. The Herald on Sunday has a new gossip column, too, which is just awful. It hurts people."

After their wedding, which was spread over three days and involved 150 mates and both families happily celebrating their civil union, the couple had a honeymoon just out of Kerikeri. However, they have plans for their "real" honeymoon in New York.

"I've been to New York about 10 times but I've never been with my wife. I've always been single there. I've never been married in New York."

Reaching into a bag she pulls out a handful of photos that her best friend, Jessica, her bridesmaid, took of the occasion. They are stunning. Both are wearing gorgeous wedding dresses. Many of the shots are of the pair gazing into each other's eyes or cutting the cake.

"We're traditional lezzos, you know," Moa laughs before finding a picture of her sister, Marcia, whom she lovingly refers to as a "skinny white chick with blonde hair".

"Look at this one, that's a lesbian moment, that's the old missus. That's the cake that someone made for us, she was so kind to us. That's everyone getting pissed. That's me pashing my missus."

Her only regret was her decision to wear gladiator-style sandals with her dress: "Azaria's tall and I'm short, bro. I bet my nana will want that picture."

Moa's ex-girlfriend and her new partner, Ladyhawke, attended the pair's big day.

"They came to our wedding. They are great. They are totally in love and I'm really happy for them. It really has worked out for the best. Ladyhawke is awesome, she's moved back to Auckland and is writing her album where I recorded mine."

Absentmindedly, Moa twirls the ring on her wedding finger. Both chose to wear rings from their nanas. Moa's is a classy band.

"When I first put it on, I didn't like wearing it but after I got married, I love it. Azaria's got a hardcore engagement ring. She's the chick, I'm the man. I bought her a beautiful wedding band and she has an amazing engagement ring from her grandma. There was no proposal, we just discussed it. I've never been into marriage before, it would be suitable to be married if we had kids. We thought we'd have a quick civil union in a building, but then we had the idea to do what we did and all of a sudden, 150 of our mates were there and now I'm poor."

Although celebrating her 30th birthday this year, she says she feels like she's turning 40 instead – "I feel like I've had five lives" – and is keen to have children.

"I really want to be a mum. We're going to have heaps of kids. Azaria's having them first and then I'm having them, maybe four, just as many as we can push out before we get too old. I want to get on the piss with them when they're 18 and not be too old to do that."

When she started writing the songs for Love In Motion, she was in Melbourne last July and bored. As a joke, she decided she wanted to put the word "love" in the title of every song.

"I had to settle for getting it into every song. I was in Melbourne and I had nothing to do and Azaria was working. I have to be completely by myself to write songs, it has to be the last thing I do in my day. Each one of my albums has been about a partner. I also have to draw from experiences and memories, things that happened to me when I was younger, past relationships, past lovers, friendships, family things. I had to draw on all these memories to enable me to write these songs."

She toured some of the songs for six weeks with Julia Dean and Azaria as tour manager. The day after the tour finished she went straight into the studio and recorded the album, taking only two weeks.

"There's me, Nick Gaffaney [Cairo Knife Fight] on drums, Geoff Maddick [Goldenhorse] on electric, Isaac Aesili on trumpet, Chip Matthews and Godfrey de Grut. They were the only musicians I used."

Co-producer Andre Upston had major input into the record.

Moa's next project is to form a band called Illusions (her mum was in a band called Illusions) with Deans and friend Anna Coddington. Deans will play guitar and Coddington the drums. Moa is going to Melbourne in two weeks to write an album with Deans.

Hopefully, Moa says, being in a band containing "three hot chicks" will mean she can be in the background for a while.

"So we can write some good songs. I've got a few ideas, it'll be jangly rock pop, feisty. Anna's really good on drums, she's an evil drummer."

Love in Motion will be toured in May.

"It's during music month but that wasn't intentional, it's just how it happened. Then I'm going to do another massive six week tour, possibly of all the same places I went to last year."

Next week she shoots a video clip and for the first time it will feature her band.

Making music her career has offered her a good living but "I can't buy a Mercedes Benz with it".

It's time to go. Grabbing a bottle of bubbly off the bench she hands it to me with a grin. "For you", she says, and we wander down the driveway, she still in bare feet. Dunsandel clearly agrees with her.

"I spend a lot of time out here because it's peaceful and there's no-one to hassle me.

"Auckland is so massive and Christchurch is just peaceful to me, it's somewhere to rest. Me and Azaria come here to rest. I really like it here and Hornby is just down the road."

- © Fairfax NZ News