BACK IN THE DAY
The man behind Dame Kiri's early recordings
When Tony Martin sat down with his uncle to talk about a little record company, he knew he would be there for a while.
The red light of the recorder would go on and a long while would feel like a short while because the story of Kiwi Pacific Records is a good one.
Tony Vercoe is 98 years old. He might forget a few things here and there, but the story of his 30-year involvement with the small Kiwi enterprise is fresh and clear in his memory.
Tangents were taken in these long and lively conversations, but shortcuts were not.
His nephew thought it was time to get it all down four years ago, not necessarily as a book, but as an ‘‘oral archive’’.
The result of those chats was 30 hours of recordings, many coffees drunk and lively moments passed.
There was a map of sorts, a handwritten list from Vercoe of all the categories he had recorded. The list is wonderfully varied, from Ma¯ ori language and legend, to bird song, opera and spoken word. Martin worked his way through that, sitting down, seeing where they were up to and ‘‘off he would go’’.
He started at the beginning, a long-ago beginning, that in the broad scheme of things, says Martin, ‘‘was a good enough place to start’’. Vercoe found himself in England in 1946, where he was to study at the Trinity College of Music, learning ‘‘harmony and form’’.
He went on to audition and then gain a scholarship place at the Royal College of Music, which stretched him into a job at the Old Vic Theatre Company.
He found a lifelong love of music while he ‘‘tread the boards’’ in London and he says ‘‘it was to prove very important’’ when he became involved with Kiwi Records in 1959.
It wasn’t necessarily a dream job at the time, more one that he stumbled upon, says Martin.
‘‘He had come back from the war and done a few years with the Broadcasting Service. At the same time, he did a bit of moonlighting with AH and AW Reed. They were a publishing firm and had started to do some educational recordings.’’
When he was told he had to stop the extra work by his main employers, AH and AW Reed offered him a full-time job.
He stepped into the recording department in Wellington and Kiwi Records became a division of the Reed company that Vercoe later established as the independent company, Kiwi Pacific Records. Over three decades, he made about 1000 recordings and pure and beautiful sound, no matter the genre, became his passion.
And that was the thing, says Martin, that sets his uncle apart – ‘‘his ear for sound, any kind of sound’’.
‘‘Someone would just come into his office and say: ‘Oh, I have been down to the West Coast photographing in the bush and I heard these beautiful bird sounds and I have made a recording’.’’
Vercoe would listen. What would transpire was a large parabolic reflector centred with a microphone that captured the birdsong in a new and groundbreaking way.
A box set of 30 New Zealand birds on 7-inch EPS was the end result of excursions back into the hills and with an illustrated booklet documenting every bird, the recordings sold well. Vercoe was capturing the sounds of New Zealand in a way that hadn’t been done before.
Ma¯ ori language, legend and song were high up on Vercoe’s must-tick-off memory list and along with historically important field recordings from as early as 1919, he recorded haka, poi, tı¯ ra¯ kau, te reo for schools, waiata and Ma¯ ori concert party groups.
‘‘It really was incredible,’’ says Martin, ‘‘the range that he was covering.’’
Interesting people walked through the door daily, bringing with them sounds from the South Pacific, bluegrass tunes, popular music of the time, brass bands, pipe bands and every other band in between.
Composers such as Douglas Lilburn had a long association with the company, as did the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Kiri Te Kanawa. She was only 18 when Vercoe first recorded her and with her the company won two gold disc awards.
The more obscure recordings also made for an interesting day in the office. Train sounds are among the archives and in one of Martin’s interviews with his uncle, Vercoe says a man called at his office and rather tentatively said: ‘‘I’ve got some recordings I made of steam locomotives’’.
‘‘I considered this and though it seemed somewhat offbeat, I was prepared to experiment.’’
Vercoe got a few sideways looks when train sounds emerged from his office, but when an LP was released named Swan Song of
Steam, it proved popular with locomotive fans and still stands as a piece of archival history.
Nothing was too niche for Vercoe and spoken word and poetry were also recorded. Lyrical treasures from Hone Tuwhare, Denis Glover, Eileen Duggan, Allen Curnow and James K Baxter resonated with what Vercoe held close to the core of what Kiwi Pacific Records represented: ‘‘Projecting a New Zealand feeling and something of our character.’’
Vercoe sold the company in 1989 to John Ruffell, who still owns it in partnership with Desmond Park, Kiri Te Kanawa’s exhusband. He says that every year of the 30 involved in Kiwi Pacific Records was special.
‘‘Getting to know and work with all those performers and composers of every persuasion, with recording technicians in a variety of situations, with poets, writers, photographers, visual artists and more ensured a challenging, stimulating and entirely rewarding life.’’
The recordings Martin made while sitting down with his uncle have become Vercoe’s own spoken archive. They were transcribed by Vercoe’s granddaughter in hours of painstaking work and placed in a book, which now resonates with the depth of it all. And at the centre of it is sound, the sound of our country, noticed by a man who took time to listen.
‘‘Getting to know and work with all those performers and composers of every persuasion . . . ensured a challenging, stimulating and entirely rewarding life.’’