The life of a music man
He was in the room when a young Noel Gallagher played an acoustic Wonderwall publicly for the first time, and has shared an office with Ricky Gervais. Classic Rock online editor Fraser Lewry talks to North Otago reporter
about what got him there, and how he came to be living in Oamaru.
FRASER Lewry may just be the most interesting person you did not know lived in Oamaru.
The New Zealandborn exLondoner has a long list of achievements on his CV, not least of which is featuring in the documentary Kick Out The Jams: The Story of XFM, about the early days of a groundbreaking British radio station, released in the UK last week.
He is online editor for Classic Rock magazine — which at last check had more than 1.7 million social media followers.
Mr Lewry was born in Wellington to ‘‘£10 Pom’’ parents who moved to New Zealand in the 1950s, met, got married, had two children and moved the family back to London in 1979, when he was 12.
He had always wanted to work in the music industry, and even based his choice of university around being ‘‘where the music was’’.
‘‘I applied to five different schools in London . . . I wanted to be somewhere where I could go out every night and watch bands play, and so I got into a college, and then left after a year, to go and work in a record shop, because that seemed like a more sensible career move.’’
From there, Mr Lewry landed a job as a roadie for a band, which had some success — playing at Glastonbury and Reading music festivals and garnering television and radio airtime.
‘‘For a while they had a sound man, who went on and started a radio station — it was a station that was based in the offices of the band The Cure, and so for a while he employed me as a kind of a station lackey, for want of a better word.’’
That station was XFM, and it started off with twoweek trial broadcasts, a couple of times a year between 1992 and 1996, before gaining a broadcasting licence.
‘‘During those trials I would literally live at the station. I would sleep overnight on the sofa, I would get up at 6am to greet the first DJ in and I would work through till 2am the following morning, sleep for four hours on the sofa, and get up and do it all over again, not showering, seven days a week.
‘‘I’d go home once a week for a break, and then come back to the station again.’’
The station started up just before Britpop bands like Blur, Oasis, Radiohead and Supergrass were household names.
‘‘We were the first radio station to playlist Radiohead, we were the first radio station to playlist Oasis.
‘‘When Noel Gallagher played on acoustic guitar Wonderwall for the first time publicly, I was sitting in the same room. Lots of stuff like that.’’
Mr Lewry said XFM as had been in the right place at the right time in its early days, but by the time it was able to broadcast permanently, it was 1997.
‘‘We kind of missed the boat a little bit, in the sense that all the exciting part of Britpop had kind of been and gone by that point.’’
A year later the owners decided to sell it to a much bigger radio group, and he walked away in disgust.
During that year, though, Mr Lewry was head of music and shared an office with head of words, a preThe Office Ricky Gervais, who then hired his assistant, Stephen Merchant.
‘‘I loved working with Ricky. What you see on TV is exactly what he’s like in real life. That laugh is a permanent fixture.
‘‘I think quite a lot of the people in XFM may have informed characters in The Office. So, for instance, one of the assistants at the radio station was David Keenan, and there was Gareth Keenan in The Office.
By the time he walked away from XFM, it was 1999, and Mr Lewry decided the internet was the next exciting place to be.
He ended up building a website and writing for a music magazine called The Word, which in turn landed him at Classic Rock.
‘‘I’m the online editor, which basically means I am responsible for making sure lots of content goes up every day. So that’s either commissioning people to write stuff, or it’s writing stuff myself. Or it’s taking stuff directly from the magazine and putting it online.
‘‘I start every day and I have no idea what I’ll be writing about or doing. Yesterday, I wrote a story about the fact that Ozzy Osbourne stopped taking LSD after he spent an hour conversing with a horse.’’
The job also occasionally involved interviewing musicians — including members of Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Deep Purple, Guns N’ Roses, the Sex Pistols, Thin Lizzy and Genesis.
Then how did he land in Oamaru in August, 2020?
A return to New Zealand for the 2011 Rugby World Cup was ‘‘an absolute ball’’, and then in 2013 and again 2017, he explored a bit further, eventually with a view to moving back longterm.
Oamaru ticked a lot of boxes.
‘‘I knew I wanted to be on the South Island, because I hadn’t been there before; I knew I wanted to be by the sea; I knew I wanted to be in a town that was small enough to walk around, while I learnt to drive — because in London noone drives.’’
The town was also not the ‘‘cultural deadspot’’ he thought it might be.
He enjoyed the rhythms of smalltown life, that you didn’t notice in a big city.
‘‘I like the fact the paper arrives, and I look through it and there’s people that I know in it, and I like the fact, in a town this small, someone can actually move here and make a difference.
‘‘Like, I think, for instance, with the Business Hive, that’s there, and it’s improved the town, and that’s not something you can do in London unless you’re the mayor, you know.
‘‘I like the fact I can look up at night and see the stars.
‘‘So, although I miss going to gigs all the time, I’ve swapped it for other things I appreciate.’’
Mr Lewry still works full time — two days from home, and three days at the Business Hive’s communal office space in Oamaru, which he said kept him sane.
Being in Oamaru had its disadvantages, but the time difference was not one of them.
‘‘When Taylor Hawkins dies in the middle of the night, I’m able to write a story and get something out in 20 minutes, while the UK is still asleep.’’
He could also clear his emails every morning and then not be bothered for the rest of the day.
He had a ‘‘very, very wide taste’’ in music, and most evenings would sit down with a glass of wine and listen to an album.
‘‘Or I’m watching music documentaries on the TV. It doesn’t feel like an obsession, but it probably is.’’