The man who gave Kiwi singers a voice
Obituaries
For 30 years Tony Vercoe, who has just died, aged 98, was in charge of KiwiPacific Records, developing it from a small label into the flagship company for the recording of New Zealand music of all kinds.
Vercoe had been working for the New Zealand Broadcasting Service after returning from post-war Britain, where he had been studying as a singer, firstly at the Trinity College of Music, and then with a scholarship for opera and drama at the Royal College of Music.
A promising, if financially precarious, singing career was developed with organisations such as the Old Vic Company, with Vercoe landing a couple of prestigious roles in productions in the Festival of Britain, and in the Edinburgh Festival. He had by this time been joined by his future wife Mary Withers, who had gone to England in 1950, where they were married.
Despite being subsequently invited to join Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, Vercoe decided he and Mary should make the break and return to New Zealand. Expecting their first child and recognising the difficulty of trying to make ends meet throughout a projected ‘‘apprentice’’ period at the Wells, they left London and arrived back in New Zealand late in 1953. Shortly afterwards, Vercoe took up a position with the Broadcasting Service in Wellington.
In due course he was approached by the publishers AH and AW Reed as someone who had been recommended to them (by the legendary broadcaster and music scholar John A Gray) to help develop their small ‘‘Kiwi’’ record label. He eventually took over as owner and manager until his retirement in 1989.
Vercoe grew up in Nelson, in a household where his parents encouraged an interest in music and his enjoyment of singing – both his mother and one of his sisters played the piano, and the latter would regularly accompany her singer-brother in any number of the ballads that were in vogue at the time. He became Stanley Oliver’s pupil in Wellington and performed in competitions with reasonable success.
After working as a clerk in the Department of Lands and Survey, he enlisted first with the Wellington Territorials, and then with the 5th Reinforcement, which was eventually mobilised to North Africa, joining the 2nd NZEF. There, his singing abilities became known and valued by his fellowservicemen, and further encouraged by his encounter with Terry Vaughan’s famous Kiwi Concert Party.
Fate then decreed that Vercoe was among those New Zealand troops captured in action against the Germans in Egypt in 1942. Handed over to the Italians, he was interned on the Italian mainland, managing with a couple of others to escape, but being recaptured when trying to cross the Swiss border.
He was then relocated in Germany for the rest of the war – these experiences are vividly recreated by Vercoe in two books, Yesterday’s Drums (Steele Roberts Aotearoa 2001) and Survival at Stalag IV B (Macfarland 2006).
His repatriation, subsequent singing studies in London, performing experiences, marriage, impending parenthood and return to New Zealand led his career to an unexpected pathway, that of joining Reed Publishers full-time, to devote his energies entirely to running Kiwi Records.
With his recent NZBS production experiences working alongside local musicians and composers, Vercoe saw it as a remarkable opportunity, and recalled being given ‘‘a pretty free hand’’ to develop a catalogue that reflected the best of home-grown musical activities, though he confessed that he initially didn’t envisage the true extent to which things would grow and flourish.
Under his stewardship the fledgling operation blossomed, through its stages as the subsidiary Reed Pacific Records, and then as the independent company KiwiPacific Records.
In the wake of other recent artistic developments during the 1950s in New Zealand, the efforts of Tony Vercoe and Kiwi Records represented for musicians and composers a kind of fruition that hadn’t previously been available to the same extent locally.
Douglas Lilburn, New Zealand’s best-known composer, aptly summed up the feelings of many when he declared, ‘‘My own early isolated musical circumstances here would have remained arid without the support given me by Tony Vercoe.’’ Naturally, Vercoe was greatly encouraged by this imprimatur of sorts, which would undoubtedly have attracted the interest and efforts of other New Zealand composers.
Appropriately enough, the first classical music project Kiwi Records issued was of Douglas Lilburn’s song-cycle Sings Harry (a setting of several of Denis Glover’s iconic verses), though it wasn’t actually a Kiwi recording, being originally made from a radio broadcast by the NZBS. Other, Kiwi-made, landmark recordings followed, such as David Farquhar’s Ring Round the Moon, Lilburn’s Landfall in Unknown Seas (with poet Alan Curnow), and Lilburn’s The Return, an electronic setting of Alistair Campbell’s evocative poetry.
These and many others represent but one aspect of Tony Vercoe’s achievement in capturing New Zealand’s own voice in music – a glance at the recently published book The Kiwi-Pacific Records Story (Steele-Roberts Aotearoa 2017), which contains a series of interviews Vercoe recently gave to his nephew, Tony Martin, reveals the staggering range and scope of his company’s achievement in recording not only the music and sounds of Aotearoa, but also that of a number of surrounding Pacific Island nations.
Vercoe himself summed up his career at the helm of Kiwi-Pacific Records as ‘‘a challenging, stimulating and entirely rewarding life’’.
He will also be remembered as an author, thanks to his invaluable reminiscences in the two books recounting his war experiences, excerpts from which were movingly read at his funeral by his New Zealand publisher, Roger Steele.
Tony Vercoe is survived by his two children, Ross and Janey, and grandchildren Kelly, Chris, Chelsea, Matt, Daniel and Sarah, and a great-grandchild, Tessa. – By Peter Mechen