$ 183,000 debt shut down studio
Marmalade was a big name in its 1970s and 80s glory days
Marmalade Audio, the music and postproduction studio whose work included the 1986 Dave Dobbyn/ Herbs hit Slice of Heaven and Telecom’s Spot the Dog campaign, failed owing just $ 183,000, the liquidators’ first report shows.
Wellington- based Marmalade ceased trading in 2016 and was put into liquidation last month.
Shareholder and director Sarah Taylor, who took over the business in 2007 after her father Grant Taylor died, told the liquidators the company was unable to pay its debts after the loss of a number of key clients.
One former employee recalls equipment being sold on Trade Me while a swag of framed awards — for music and advertising — went in a skip.
Creditors include Marmalade’s landlord, the Accident Compensation Corp, ASB Bank and the Inland Revenue Department.
The liquidation brings the curtain down on one of New Zealand’s most notable studios.
Set up by DJ Rocky Douche, a former NZ Broadcasting Corporation technician, Marmalade Studios, as it was then known, went on to record music for Shona Laing, Sharon O’Neill, Dave Dobbyn, Shihad, Fur Patrol, Bic Runga, the Bats, Bailter Space, Netherworld Dancing Toys, Greg Johnson Set, the Holidaymakers, Margaret Urlich, Jan Hellriegel and Annie Crummer, mostly during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s.
Less well- known was its work making radio and TV advertisements and picking up film industry work that brought director Peter Jackson and actors including Stephen Fry, James Nesbitt, Richard Armitage and The Hobbit star Martin Freeman through the front door.
Taylor, who now lives in Australia, couldn’t immediately be tracked down for comment.
But Paul Stent, who was senior sound designer at Marmalade between 2010 and 2015, recalls how a number of global trends conspired to erode its business.
“It was a perfect storm of the arrival of the internet and file- sharing companies like Napster — record companies didn’t have any money anymore,” says Stent, who is now at Clemenger BBDO Wellington and is business development manager at its Flare content production unit. Added to that was the rise of the laptoptoting home recording artist, who was able to access what Stent calls “prosumer recording technology”.
Clemenger, a former Marmalade client, built its own studio — another trend in the industry. Stent’s studio at the firm is a fraction of the size of the facilities at Marmalade but with vastly more bandwidth.
The revolution in technology means he can create an MP3 of an ad now and email it to dozens of outlets, whereas in the past the task would have involved a master tape that was then dubbed on to analogue copies that were distributed by courier.
Liquidators Colin Owens and David Vance of Deloitte said they were continuing their investigations into Marmalade’s financial affairs using company records, according to their first report, which was released this week.
Its remaining assets consisted of “out- of- date computers”, now in storage, and microphones, which Taylor took to Australia. That’s a far cry from the early 1980s, when Riot 111 lead singer John Void recalled that Marmalade’s 24- track “was the most expensive studio in Wellington at the time”.
Recalling the making of Slice of Heaven with Herbs, a No 1 hit in 1986, Dobbyn said Marmalade “was a great studio”. He told media in 2012 that he recalled it vividly “because we were getting filmed [ while] recording”. Ashtrays “were scattered around the smoke- filled room, while makeup artists worked around recording”.
As late as 2013, Marmalade still appeared to be putting its best foot forward in the music industry, with recording time “at Wellington’s top studio” among the prizes for the Battle of the Bands that year. But that side of the business appears to have wound down years earlier.
In the 1990s Marmalade built a separate business to service the advertising industry and in its heydey of the 1990s it made such memorable ads as Spot the Dog, the Vince Martin ads for Beaurepaires and campaigns for clients including Lotto and Cadbury.