‘In love with those times’
The Christchurch of punk and Flying Nun resurfaces It took a Canadian to tell one of New Zealand music’s greatest stories. Philip Matthews reports.
Does Matthew Goody have a time machine? If not, how does he do it? The question comes up near the end of a lively event in a crowded Lyttelton cafe on Wednesday night. This is the last stop on Goody’s four-city New Zealand tour, promoting his longawaited and enormously impressive book about the first seven years of Flying Nun Records, Needles & Plastic, which is largely set over the hill in Christchurch between 1981 and 1988.
The man with the question is astonished. He was in Dunedin during some of those years and says every page of Needles & Plastic has a resonating memory for him.
But Goody? The Vancouverbased author and editor admits he was just a year old in 1981 and nowhere near New Zealand.
‘‘I don’t get it, how from a different time and country, you managed to capture it,’’ the questioner says. Applause follows.
Goody has been encountering reactions like this at every stop, but Christchurch has drawn the biggest crowd and made him more nervous than any other centre. No surprise. There are some original band members in the audience. Stephen Cogle, singer for the Christchurch band The Terminals, asks a question. He is followed by Rob White, famous as the Christchurch Star’s rock journalist during that important era.
A day earlier, in central Christchurch, Goody meets to talk about the book. He is immediately recognisable in a white The Fall T-shirt. He is affable, sincere and clearly extremely dedicated. How has the tour been? ‘‘It’s been wild,’’ he says. ‘‘I putzed around with the book for so long and to be able to share it with people, talk about it and find people being so excited about it, it’s been really fun and heartwarming.
‘‘As an outsider, there was always a fear of how it would be received. One of the reasons it took about 10 years is I wanted to get it as right as possible. There are some people who are very strident custodians of Flying Nun history. I didn’t want to run afoul of them.’’
Being an outsider also had its advantages, as people told him in Dunedin. It meant he wasn’t invested in the ancient feuds and grievances that still fester among some musicians who feel they were wronged in the distant past.
Nor was he caught up in geographic rivalries. Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland emerge as equally important centres. Wellington less so.
Several written histories of the label have been floated, started and abandoned over the years. But label founder Roger Shepherd and musicians Matthew Bannister, Shayne Carter and Graeme Jefferies have written their own accounts, and a biography of the enormously influential musician, writer and cartoonist Chris Knox is said to be on its way. With the no less influential soundman Doug Hood, Knox was responsible for the label’s growth in Auckland.
Journalist Richard Langston’s Garage fanzine from the 1980s will soon be published in book form in the US. There have been documentaries, art gallery exhibitions, radio series, anniversary tours and compilations galore. It is not exactly an unexamined era of New Zealand music, and you might sympathise with
Carter’s complaint, in his memoir Dead
People I Have
Known, that he gets bored telling the Flying Nun story.
But the appeal of Goody’s book is that he has gone off the beaten track of The Clean, The Chills, Straitjacket Fits and others, and told us about the lesser-known acts that are either lost to history or were barely known at the time. Who recalls The Jessels or The Vibraslaps or The Moas? Who remembers who was in Not Really Anything or The Fold?
It is a kind of democratic approach. Goody describes every record released during the Christchurch years. The book ends with two catastrophes, which are the closure of the last record pressing plant in New Zealand and a shift of the office to Auckland. And while plenty of great records appeared in the five or so more corporate years that followed – see Snapper, The 3Ds, JPS Experience, Chris Knox, Skeptics, Headless Chickens, Bailter Space – much of the improvisatory, roughand-ready magic had gone.
There is an extra bittersweet quality for Christchurch readers. Goody’s archival dive turned up plenty of rare photos and posters, depicting a city that is long gone. The Bats are photographed on top of the old Press building. Mainly Spaniards are outside and inside the Catholic Basilica. Pub venues like the Gladstone and the Star and Garter have disappeared, along with the record shop that employed Shepherd and the office buildings that once housed Flying Nun.
But some landmarks remain. One of the nicest photos in the book is of David and Hamish Kilgour, of The Clean and The Great Unwashed, shot in 1983 in front of the modernist lines of what is now the Distinction Hotel in Cathedral Square.
Back in time and underground
Goody is a living embodiment of the stories told about Flying Nun from the mid-1980s onwards, which is that there were pockets of cultish fans, especially in Germany and North America, with encyclopaedic knowledge of fairly obscure New Zealand music.
Like many North American fans, Goody found the label through The Clean. Then he heard the noisier and more abrasive Dead C. One day in London, he discovered a cache of second-hand vinyl and his mind was blown by This Kind of Punishment, a band Flying Nun itself never properly appreciated.
‘‘They are the band I cite as leading me to write the book.’’
As a collector and a historian, he wanted to know more about the label. To adapt a Bailter Space song, he was in love with those times. Who was Peter Arnold? Who were The Alpaca Brothers?
He searched old newspapers and was amazed that White in The Star and David Swift and Tony Green in The Press were writing about these bands every week. While some musicians remember an unappreciative media, Goody found that the Flying Nun scene was remarkably well covered in New Zealand, compared to coverage of similar bands in newspapers in North America.
Goody now owns about 95% of the records he writes about in Needles & Plastic, but some remain stubbornly hard to find. A New Zealand pressing of a certain Verlaines album eluded him until he mentioned it in an interview and a fan turned up at the Auckland event and sold him a copy. He refuses to pay the absurd prices asked for The Pin Group’s very rare single Ambivalence, which is either the label’s first or second release.
‘‘There’s one down here for $1000. No, thank you.’’
Two Christchurch musicians on the panel with Goody exemplify that cult status. One is Roy Montgomery, who fronted The Pin Group. The other is Bruce Russell, whose band The Dead C has a surprisingly wide following in North America.
An outspoken critic of Flying Nun’s direction, Russell formed his own label, Xpressway, to release some bands Shepherd dropped after the move to Auckland. Yet that too is ancient history and part of the larger legend.
Musician Paul Kean had to cancel his appearance because of illness, but he could have provided insight on the transition from prepunk to punk to Flying Nun. Before he was in Christchurch’s enduring The Bats, Kean played in groups like The Detroit Hemroids and The Basket Cases and, later, Chris Knox’s Toy Love.
As Russell says, Flying Nun did not create this scene but documented music that was already in the air but threatening to vanish without trace.
Yet White points out that it took Shepherd to step up and do something about it, inspired by independent labels in the UK. The
Christchurch-Dunedin link formed by the release of The Clean’s Tally Ho! was crucial. The single charted in September 1981 and the rest is history.
And as Goody stresses, the history includes the global spread of the music. He is publishing Needles & Plastic with Auckland University Press, but he is also publishing it in the US through Third Man Books, owned by musician Jack White.
Bob Nastanovich, of Flying Nun-influenced US band Pavement, supplied Goody with an excellent blurb for the back cover. Other US acts continue to be big fans. When Sharon Van Etten announced her upcoming New Zealand tour she wrote ‘‘New Zealand is one of my favourite places to visit in the world. The music of The Clean, The Chills, The Bats, Flying Nun Records and the music scene of New Zealand has influenced me greatly throughout the years.’’
Some pointed out it was therefore strange that Van Etten is only playing North Island venues.
While Flying Nun now has some younger signings, old hands are still at it. The Bats are celebrating 40 years with an unchanged lineup. The Puddle’s George Henderson just released The Last Days of the Internet with his latest band, The New Existentialists. Members of The Clean, The Bats and Tall Dwarfs are in The Sundae Painters.
Lyttelton’s MEDal is made up of members of JPS Experience, Dark Matter and Into the Void. And Roy Montgomery has become a prolific producer of shimmering, dreamlike ambient guitar records. But of those, only The Bats are still on Flying Nun.
One last thing. If Goody really did have a time machine, where
would he take it? That’s easy. He has an answer prepared.
He would go to the Rumba Bar in Auckland on a night in 1982, when the lineup was The Clean, The Chills, Tall Dwarfs and This Sporting Life. He has seen footage but imagine really being there.
‘‘The Clean were at the top of their game. It’s probably my favourite period of The Chills, when they were still a little rough. Tall Dwarfs, what can you say about them? Fantastic. This Sporting Life were okay.’’
Hippies and punks on a school night
Before Flying Nun, there was Mollett St. That was the site of an old warehouse building where, according to legend, punk rock was born in Christchurch on Sunday nights in 1977 and 1978. Future TV presenter Richard Driver used to perform under the punk name Johnny Abort with his long-haired band, The Doomed.
For two days this week, Mollett St was carefully recreated inside one of the historic brewery buildings at the corner of Fitzgerald Ave and Kilmore St for a feature film.
Film crew trucks are lined up outside. Precise replicas of punkera posters advertising Proud Scum, Spelling Mistakes and The Enemy are plastered on a brick wall. Step inside the entrance and go up the stairs where a young punk band called The Cursed perform a fast song about teenage boredom.
‘‘I think what we’re doing is kind of an origin story for Flying Nun,’’ says film-maker Jonathan Ogilvie, as he takes The Press on a tour of the set. ‘‘It’s showing the world before Roger did it.’’
Ogilvie is a veteran of this era, although he confesses he was never quite courageous enough to set foot inside Mollett St. It didn’t help that it was on a school night. Inspired by punk and especially the post-punk of Public Image Ltd (PiL) and the Gang of Four, he formed the Christchurch trio YFC in the early 1980s.
YFC were said to be Nick Cave’s favourite Christchurch band, as Cave spotted them when they opened for his group The Birthday Party at the Gladstone in 1983. After YFC dissolved, Ogilvie pursued a career as a film-maker. He directed one of the best-known Flying Nun videos – the Straitjacket Fits clip for She Speeds in which the band played on the back of a truck that went through the Lyttelton tunnel. The shoot was freezing and difficult, but worth it for the art.
Ogilvie has been based in Sydney for years but is back for Head South, a coming of age story set against the backdrop of punk rock Christchurch.
Australian actor Edward Oxenbould plays the teenage hero Angus. Roxie Mohebbi plays Holly, the femme fatale. Marton Csokas plays Angus’ dad, not Hugo Weaving as in early reports.
On this day, the crew is filming Oxenbould’s Angus as he dares to step inside Mollett St. The punk band is raging. Some of the young extras who play the audience look like lost members of the Doobie Brothers or the Eagles in their long
hair and flares. Have they not got the memo?
‘‘The story about Mollett St is it wasn’t all punks,’’ Oglivie says. ‘‘There were still hippies. Not everybody has made that jump. Short hair was shocking.’’
Musician and entrepreneur Al Park, who launched the gigs at Mollett St and played in the new wave band Vapour and the Trails, visited the set the day before and was impressed by its authenticity.
Why did this happen in Christchurch when it did? Was there something about music as a political kick against conformism?
It was a grey world then, Ogilvie agrees. In the film, the framing changes when the first PiL song comes on, and ‘‘the whole world goes to widescreen. That’s what it was like for us.’’
There is also the politics of being amateurs against the status quo of the music business, especially when post-punk succeeded punk and musical skill became even less important.
‘‘Three chords was a lot. You could play a song with one chord.’’
But how easy is it to recreate the lost city? Ogilvie has opted not to use Cathedral Square but the Town Hall will be a backdrop. ‘‘Actually, the Town Hall means more to me than the Cathedral ever did. The Town Hall’s a place where you saw bands.’’
As for YFC, the story goes that they were supposed to have a record on Flying Nun, but the label took ages. So it appeared on a different label, meaning YFC are not part of the official Nun canon. But Ogilvie recognises the power of Flying Nun’s enduring legend.
‘‘At the end of it, there is no other record label in New Zealand or Australia that managed to get that international profile. There’s something about the simplicity of it. For me, it comes back to the Velvet Underground.’’
It’s a generalisation, he admits, but just as Iggy Pop and the Stooges were the starting point for Australian bands, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were a starting point in New Zealand.
‘‘Iggy’s more rock, and Lou’s much more edgy and low-key. The idea of turning your back on an audience appeals to New Zealanders.’’
That Reed-like edge was especially obvious in the doomier Christchurch bands.
‘‘I also think there’s such a thing as southern gothic. There’s something I’m trying to catch in the screenplay. Although it’s comedic, there’s an underlying sense of darkness. That’s applicable to the South Island.’’
So it’s entirely apt that one of the people who started it all in Christchurch, Roy Montgomery, has a small but crucial part in the movie. ‘‘Roy may have a new string to his bow,’’ Ogilvie says and smiles. ‘‘He plays ‘Suave Man’ in the film, driving a beautiful red Alfa Romeo Spider when Angus’ mum zooms off with another man.’’
The Christchurch underground persists in strange ways.
Needles & Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988 by Matthew Goody is published by Auckland University Press, $69.99.