Bright flowers and old butts

It was an forlorn inner-city lane, scattered with burger wrappers, broken glass and cigarette butts: a shortcut between a bogan bikers’ bar and a liquor store carpark.

It was the kind of place where people got beaten up on a Friday night, but as I walked through one chilly May afternoon, I got punched in the head by beauty instead.

There, pasted along a concrete wall, stood an outdoor art gallery, celebrating our noisiest compatriots.

May being New Zealand Music Month, Phantom Billstickers has launched a poster campaign called Musicians Of Aotearoa, slapping up huge images of local sonic superheroes throughout the land.

Behold artist/musician Ronnie Van Hout, crawling across the floor in a rumpled suit like a businessman laid low by one too many cocktails.

There’s ‘‘Princess’’ Chelsea Nikkel, head held high, looking suitably regal, while The Perfect Strangers’ luxuriously bearded Bill Vosburgh looks like a cross between Jesus and a woodland nymph, peering out from a halo of foliage.

Four noses, eight eyes, 16 lips: the face of Matthew Bannister from Dunedin’s Sneaky Feelings has been fractured into a trippy geometric abstraction, while The Puddle’s George Henderson is encased in a shroud of glittering sand.

A towering figure in NZ independent music, there’s Chris Knox; now eight years post-stroke, he looks older, thinner, more careworn, but his mischievous spirit remains plainly visible.

Street posters have a long association with musicians, of course, with gig posters as fundamental to the rock’n’roll aesthetic as album covers. I used to creep about putting them up myself, scurrying around Edinburgh with a paste bucket at night, dodging other poster crews, paid in cash by a shadowy creature in my local pub.

And this Music Month campaign is a beauty, with 15 portraits showcased during May and fresh batches due annually for the next three years.

My only criticism: ‘‘The faces behind the music’’ are overwhelmingly male, with only Nikkel and Christchurch duo Purple Pilgrims representing female musicians among a scrum of blokes.

‘‘Yeah, we definitely need more women,’’ agrees photographer Hayley Theyers when I track her down. Theyers shot these portraits for an upcoming book, though there’s also a few by Stuart Page.

‘‘The women I approached were less willing to be photographed, but even so, you can’t have people thinking NZ music is all about white middleaged men.

‘‘We’ll make sure the next lot’s top-heavy with women, eh?’’

Good call. Phantom helped Theyers with funding for her book, then suggested using some of them for Music Month.

‘‘We thought: these are so great; we’ve got to get them seen!’’ says Phantom general manager Jamey Holloway.

‘‘We’re not suggesting these are the only significant NZ musicians. They’re just people we think are interesting, and hopefully these posters might make people curious enough to take a listen to their music,’’ he adds.

Either way, it lifts your spirits to wander past some unlovely lump of local architecture and find portraits like these on the walls.

‘‘Yeah, we call it ‘Flora for the Concrete Jungle’, and of course, flora is functional as well as pretty. Without flowers, plants don’t get laid. And without posters, people don’t go to gigs, and a few babies get made after rock’n’roll gigs, too, right?’’

This Music Month campaign is a beauty, with 15 portraits showcased during May and fresh batches due annually for the next three years.