This is from around 2004/2005 when I was working at Strategy Design in Christchurch. One Friday afternoon we all watched a presentation by Chris Waind (sadly passed away now), a creative from Manchester who came to work at Strategy via Canada – Chris was really great at web design and build and his presentation was all about that, it was cool. After we had watched it my boss, Guy Pask, told us that we would all be doing one over the next weeks, on a subject of our own choosing – which shocked everyone and no-one really wanted to do it. But it was such a good thing to have us do – good for planning, confidence, and presenting information in an interesting way that holds peoples’ attention. I was nervous about doing it but in the end I enjoyed it. (Slightly edited and shortened below.)
I called my presentation “Trainspotting – From Timaru to London”, describing my life’s musical journey, and with a soundtrack that played while I spoke and showed stuff, via the slides shown on this page.
The soundtrack:
T.Rex “The Slider”
Led Zeppelin “Immigrant Song”
Neil Young & Crazy Horse “Thrasher”
Joy Division “Isolation”
The Bats “North By North”
Cabaret Voltaire “Just Fascination”
The Fall “Fantastic Life”
Einstürzende Neubauten “12305(te Nacht)”
REM “Driver 8”
Tall Dwarfs “The Slide”
New Order “Dreams Never End”
REM “Star Me Kitten”
The Fall “Lie Dream of a Casino Soul”
The Fall “Container Drivers”
If anyone is ever asked to list their interests, ‘music’ will almost certainly be included – I’m no different. I can’t play any musical instrument, but my Dad (RIP) plays fiddle really well, and I grew up with country music – all my parents’ friends listened to it too (Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Charley Pryde, John Denver), and I hated it. But in less than 10 years my opinion had changed on that, and while living in London I even went to see Johnny Cash and the Carter Family play live. From around the age of 10 or 11 I started collecting music, the interest beginning with the likes of the “20 Solid Gold Hits” compilations. On Vol.3 was “The Slider” by T.Rex – I ended up owning “The Slider”, “Electric Warrior” and “Tanx” albums; once I got interested in a band I made it a mission to get everything I could by them, until something else came along. My first real musical style interest was glam – T.Rex, The Sweet, Slade, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro…
The first live concert I went to was Gary Glitter at the Theatre Royal in Timaru in 1975, support from Mark Williams, with my friend Peter Howey. (The next was Deep Purple at QEII Park in Christchurch, also with Peter, and Russell de Joux.) I started keeping scrapbooks around this time. Like a lot of people, my best friend’s older brother had a ‘good stereo’ and cool record collection, and from that is where my taste went to next, so-called ‘heavy rock”: Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath. The older brother forbade us to play Slade on his stereo though, and he didn’t like Black Sabbath either. This was where, and when, I first heard “Dark Side of the Moon”.
In 1975 I discovered Led Zeppelin by reading about them and deciding they sounded cool, so I sold my collection of ‘war comics’ to a second-hand bookshop to buy “Physical Graffiti” brand new and without hearing it first. I then went backwards to buy all the previous albums, and carried on to until the end of the band. I couldn’t wait to see the live movie, and had to really beg for this poster – it was so precious at the time.
The glam thing carried on with Bowie and lots of Alice Cooper, even Kiss. The Rolling Stones also took my interest, and when I discovered this poster I had to have it for my bedroom wall.
Neil Young became even bigger than Led Zeppelin – the attraction is still there, but at the end of the 70s it was huge for me. I was stoked to tell my Mum and Dad that I was into a kind-of country artist, but they just couldn’t stand his singing/voice.
When the “Live Rust” movie came out I saw it about four times in a week, for various reasons. At the time I had re-acquainted myself with an old school buddy, Al McIver, and that led me to a new bunch of friends, whose music tastes were largely in a new area for me.
At the time that punk surfaced, one of my heroes (Jimmy Page) was quoted as saying “fuck rock, I call it”, and I thought “yeah, that’s right”. But about a year later the Led Zeppelin albums had all disappeared into a cupboard, and I was listening to and buying very different music. I loved the movie of “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle”, watched it a few times. However, it was more the other bands than the Pistols themselves that really attracted me – The Damned, Clash, Stranglers, Banshees and the immediate post-punk stuff that dominated my tastes for some time.
Joy Division, New Order, The Cure, Magazine, Echo and the Bunnymen, Simple Minds, Psychedelic Furs, Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, Teardrop Explodes, Killing Joke, Birthday Party, Bauhaus… At this time I was also buying everything by The Doors.
I moved to Christchurch from Timaru to go to Fine Arts School, and in the studio we listened to a radio tuned to the station based in the UCSA students’ union building, Radio U, and nothing else – our tutor, Max Hailstone, hated it (he liked classical music).
I was buying music from what I heard on Radio U, it had a huge influence on me, and I still listen to it as rdu these days. Around 2001/2002 I was a DJ there for a year or so co-hosting a ‘world music’ show, which was fun.
I had a girlfriend at the time who was a promoter of gigs by local bands in Christchurch, and I also got interested in ‘local’ music through friends that played in bands, mainly in Timaru but also Christchurch in the end.
I was spending time between Timaru and Christchurch, and my friends and I were going to see a band called Basement a lot, in Timaru, Temuka and around South Canterbury, who played great covers of music we loved: Clash, Jam, Buzzcocks… Around this time my girlfriend was Chrissie, who later became my lovely wife.
The singer in Basement was Jordan Luck, and one of our group, Brian Jones, joined as guitarist just as the band was transforming into Dance Exponents – we all stayed loyal fans.
The Wastrels were a cool Christchurch band kind of Velvet Underground-ey, and they became very good friends with Dance Exponents, the two playing together a lot.
Every weekend we’d be going along to see friends and bands from out of town play live, and got to know many of the artists. At that time New Zealand music had to fight hard for recognition in NZ as worthy of airplay (on commercial radio), or attention of any kind, apart from Radio With Pictures of course.
I was part of a group of people who considered NZ music great, and couldn’t understand why commercial radio programmers wouldn’t just try it, put it on the air… nothing wrong with the songs, or the recording quality. (I think they had been put off by the lo-fi-ness of the Flying Nun releases, even though the songs were excellent.) But we were buying the records, and watching the bands anyway, and loving it all.
This gig was at the iconic Gladstone pub on Durham Street, and only just demolished about a month ago. Chrissie and I came up from Timaru for the weekend with our friends Barrie and Sue. We all went to the gig on the first night, but Barrie and I loved it so much we went back again for the second night, leaving the girls to their own devices…
Of course I wasn’t only listening to NZ music, I was still buying lots of other stuff too.
My first design job after graduating from Fine Arts School was back in Timaru, at local newspaper The Timaru Herald, servicing both the advertising department and the associated commercial printer TH Print – doing ads, brochures, posters (not this TH one though), logos, etc.
After a short time a journalist friend (Andy Fyfe) asked me if I’d like to help him with album reviews for the paper – the idea really excited me, I said ‘yes’ straight away. The first was “Law of Nature” by Laughing Clowns, a band formed by guitarist Ed Keupper after he left Australian punk band The Saints. I was even happier when I found out I get to keep the records! Shortly afterwards I got to review the new album by my then most favourite band in the world: “The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall” (actually still one of my favourite Fall albums).
During student years I had holiday work in Timaru for much-needed money. One end-of-term I was down to my last few dollars in the bank, and found this Fall single at Roundabout Records in Papanui – I had to have it regardless. Anyway, reviewing records became a regular thing, and then when Andy left to go overseas I inherited all reviewing – over a three year period I reviewed and got to keep around 300 records, the bulk of which I was actually able to request from the record companies. I was in heaven, and probably the envy of my friends.
I was reading the NME, along with Rip It Up, like a bible and ordering as much as possible the records I was reading about and felt interested in from there…
… even bands like Hüsker Dü, that would have had only a handful of people knowing who they were in Timaru. Very selfish. One time I ran into a guy I knew who said “I like reading your reviews, even though most of time I don’t know who you’re talking about”, which I took as a compliment.
I was also writing the weekly music column, which grew to include both reviews and touring band information. Sometimes I was disappointed to open the paper (Thursday) to find it had been bumped out due to space issues – so then it would be another week to wait… consequently I would get behind on the reviewing, and the weekend visit by a touring band might not get its publicity unfortunately (every now and then they would put the column in on Saturday to make up for that, but not often).
I started to receive lots of Flying Nun releases from Roger Shepherd, and the review selection above includes “Throw a Sickie” by Tall Dwarfs. (At the time of this presentation I was working alongside Alec Bathgate at Strategy, which was very cool.)
I was stoked to get that EP because at that time my favourite NZ bands were Tall Dwarfs and The Bats.
Two Timaru bands full of our friends, with the posters designed by Ross Ellen, also one of our friend group (Ross went on to do lots of design work for Salmonella Dub).
The Punch were all Timaru boys, and the band shifted to Big Smoke Christchurch to live, work and play. Left to right: Jeff Thompson, Steve Cowan, Geoff Hopkins, Kieran Scott and Rodney Hewson.
A couple of years later The Punch had broken up, but Kieran Scott (guitar) formed The Orchids with best friend Brian Graham (bass) – a two-piece that played melodic guitar pop. Kieran, Brian and I all shared a love of REM (mid-80s), and that had an influence on The Orchids’ music.
Kieran’s older brother Paul was a founding member of Pop Mechanix, which went through several phases, and at this time was touring extensively with Jim Wilson (who went on to set up Phantom Billstickers) as promoter and kind-of manager (Jim had been Dance Exponents manager).
I became good friends with Jim, and he got me into a few gigs, including The Saints at the Gladstone – he took me up on to the roof of the building for a chat before the gig, where you could look over the city a bit more then than you can these days. I had dropped in to the Flying Nun offices in the Square earlier in the day to meet Roger, but Gary Cope told me that he had gone to Wellington to see The Saints gig there.
Sometimes I was able to get gig entry through the record companies, like this Billy Bragg one we saw at the Carlton via Festival Records (also Shriekback twice, at the Carlton and the Town Hall).
I left all that behind at the end of 1987 when Chrissie and I went to live in London. Now I was living right in the middle of the world I had been reading about in the NME. I was going to roughly a gig a week in the first few years, and went to see The Fall every time they came to London if I was there.
I was doing all my shopping and gigging from the NME and from listening to John Peel’s shows. It was so great to actually listen to him live on the radio after all those years of imagining what he might be like. I brought home about 30 tapes of his shows, and sent loads of them home to friends while I was living there. I sent Peelie a custom-made card on his 50th birthday and received a handwritten reply (see the More posters + other stuff page). Sadly, Peelie died suddenly last year – London club Fabric ran their homepage as shown right for a few days, as he had recently put together the Fabriclive.07 compilation for them.
You’ve probably seen this book in the Strategy library – in mid-1988 I bought it too, at the exhibition at the V&A Museum. It was fantastic seeing the work of Brody, and finding out more about the guy who had done the graphics for a lot of the material put out by one of my favourite acts, Cabaret Voltaire.
When I found this poster I just had to have it – I wasn’t a massive Cure fan but loved the look of it, and so did everyone who visited our flat.
This was actually then first Fall gig I went to – drove there with Rodney Hewson in his work truck (landscape gardening) to Hammersmith from Chiswick in rainy, Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic, nightmare.
I read about Pixies in NME, and then went to their first UK gig, a double bill with Throwing Muses at Kentish Town’s Town & Country Club, both new US artists on UK label 4AD – this gig is now rated as a ‘classic’. When gigs were over there would be people selling posters for bands and gigs outside, with them all weighted down with rocks or whatever on the corners, on the pavement; a few quid each, you would roll them up to take home on the tube or bus.
There were plenty of NZ bands to see in London too – Flying Nun had a Camden office, and they had good publicity from NME, and of course the expat mags like TNT.
I was keeping scrapbooks for all the gigs I went to – tickets, ads clipped from NME, and reviews from NME (if not the gig I went to, then one from the same tour). Very trainspotter-ish but glad I did it.
Mark E. Smith’s The Fall teamed up with Michael Clark’s dance company for a theatrical production (the second time The Fall had done this) – it was not to be missed, a fantastic show.
My first opportunity to see Sonic Youth – they played a London gig, but a couple of days before that they did a signing for their newest album “Daydream Nation” at the opening of the second shop (in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden) for cool London record label Rough Trade (I practically lived at their Ladbroke Grove store).
The new Rough Trade store was in the basement, below Slam City Skates, so no windows or real ventilation – the store was jam-packed for this signing, very hot, and full of cigarette smoke. But worth it to get the album, and have it signed by all four band members.
In November 1989 I went to see a band that I had heard John Peel play on his show, that I liked the sound of, and I had bought their album “Bleach”. Nirvana played (a double-bill with Tad) at the London School of Oriental & African Studies, a venue roughly the size of our studio – the pink piece of paper was the gig ticket.
As a Hüsker Dü fan I followed Bob Mould, and we went to see him play a solo gig, and then later to see his new band Sugar whenever they came to town.
It took a few years of living in London before I finally got my chance to see Einstürzende Neubauten live. I’d listened to them for years and couldn’t wait to see them, after all the reviews I had read – I was not disappointed.
The stage set-up was elaborate, with scaffolding erected for all the industrial equipment to create the noises and sounds they were famous for, even the pouring of molten steel down a chute was mic’d up.
After returning to London from a holiday back to NZ, we went to see a girl-pop band called Magnapop, that was rated by NME. Support was from a new band called Radiohead – they stole the show.
Posters on the wall in our Finchley bedsit, around 1989-90.
Another corner had a selection of NME covers proudly displayed.