Radio with Pictures - Red Mole (Life is a Zoo)

Music was indispensable for Alan. He used incidental music and song to create atmosphere, to assist narratives, to intensify or relax theatrical threads and to generate cooperative commentary. The band he used rather like a chorus in Ancient Greek theatre, and he wrote songs with musicians, keeping a sharp eye on their style, drawing maximum mileage out of their aptitude for his messages, humour and disturbing happenings.

– Musician Bill Direen on Red Mole frontman Alan Brunton, AudioCulture, 16 May 2018

Just a little deal, what could he lose? A million dollars worth of dope in his shoes...

– Alan Brunton's lyrics from Red Mole song 'Mr Asia'

Good evening viewers. This afternoon we were in the Horowhenua freezing works, talking with Fred Gurnett, union delegate ... now, Fred's involved with slaughtering animals for the Muslims.

– Sally Rodwell plays the part of a roving reporter in a brief (and bloody) sketch

I'm a dioxin, I'm a skin disease, turn your blood into feta cheese. For nine years I took the grand slam, eleven million gallons poured on Vietnam..

– Lyrics to Red Mole song 'Agent Orange'

No more labour in the woollen mills! Free the Mainland! The smelters will destroy the hills! Free the Mainland...

– Caged South Island protestors make their concerns heard

[Red Mole] was in the vanguard, and that could really mean anti-anything, ahead of everything. They threatened, they amused, they dared, they shocked, they converted existing genres to new uses. They turned existing conventions — above all, musical ones — on their heads, while working the small venues and the large ones, opening up minds from Bluff to Cape Reinga.

– Bill Direen on Alan Brunton, AudioCulture, 16 May 2018

Red Mole's all about a missionary attempt to convert the natives to another way of life. And we're a group of evangelicals who are touring round the nation with the wrath of God in us at the moment, proclaiming the second coming, in the vague hope that the second coming might come.

– Red Mole frontman Alan Brunton on his group's mission, in 1979 documentary Red Mole on the Road

Co-founders Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell, along with their arch collaborator, Deborah Hunt, and a floating ensemble of others, were restless wanderers, always on the road...

– Ex Red Mole Martin Edmond, in his backgrounder on this title

We hit the ground running. Our first gig was at Sweetwaters, the rock festival outside of Ngāruawāhia, where we headlined the third night, Monday 28 January ... our performance was divided into sequences: black, green and white. It began with giant effigies and ended in fire ... our avant-punk evangelical show was prodigious, alarming and equal in intensity to any of the rock'n'roll shows.

– Red Mole member Martin Edmond on performing in New Zealand after time overseas, in his 2020 book Bus Stops on the Moon - Red Mole Days, page 246 1974 - 1980