Top offering from a cultural gem
Bollinger writes with a gentle poetic grace about the dissenters, pioneers, and rowdy eccentrics that were blowing amps and minds.
Calm and thoughtful, unfailingly articulate, with a rich, chocolatey voice, and a mop of steel-grey curls, Nick Bollinger’s presence in the world has always made me feel grateful. Some folks add and some subtract, as the great American songwriter Bill Callahan once noted. And Bollinger has added a great deal to the cultural life of this country, most notably during his 20-year tenure as a music columnist at the NZ Listener and on RNZ National. A fellow music writer of strong opinions and long standing, he feels like a brother of sorts. Over several decades, we’ve both made a crust reviewing albums and live shows, interviewing musicians, pontificating about sound. The chief difference between us is that Bollinger knows what he is talking about. He’s a musician himself. This is a man who knows a waltz from a mambo, a diminished seventh chord from a hole in the ground. When he was just 18, he went on tour in a broken-down bus, playing bass with Wellington reprobates, Rough Justice. I, meanwhile, was merely downing pints and watching bands from the bar. Bollinger is also braver than me. While I remain shackled to my computer, riding out the dark days of a changing media landscape, Bollinger bailed, enrolling at Victoria University to do his MA in creative writing.
That hard graft now bears fruit. Bollinger’s latest book, Goneville (AWA, $39), is a compelling collision of social history and personal memoir, the unifying thread throughout being music, the thing that’s given his own life shape and meaning during good times and bad.
Like me, Bollinger came of age in the 1970s, a time of pot and punch-ups, hairy rebels and HART, rugby thugs and Rob Muldoon, when two very different strands of New Zealand society viewed each other with mutual disdain that frequently boiled over into violence.
That sense of tension, excitement, and unruly transformation can be heard in the era’s best songs, and Bollinger is all ears.
Johnny Devlin, Human Instinct, Blerta, Mammal. The Maori Volcanics, Blam Blam Blam, Toy Love, Space Waltz, The Clean.
He writes with a gentle poetic grace about the dissenters, pioneers, and rowdy eccentrics that were blowing amps and minds back then, weaving together sharp cultural critique and vivid first-person anecdotes, with the music that mattered to him serving as an entry point by which to reconsider turbulent times in 1970s’ Aotearoa and the wider world.
It’s a superb book – so much so that it won an award before it was even published.
In 2015, Bollinger’s raw manuscript won the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing, a gong previously taken out by Eleanor Catton, Ashleigh Young, and Hera Lindsay Bird.
It’s easy to see why the judges chose him. This is very fine journalism, dressed-down but dapper.
Bollinger’s prose is as crisp as a freshly-ironed shirt, the fabric colourful without being flashy, the cut immaculate, the top-stitching stylishly understated, all excess adornment stripped away so that what remains really shines.