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NZ Rock 1987-2007 by Gareth Shute

Dominic Blaazer

Despite New Zealand’s richly textured rock history there was a paucity of books on the subject until about ten years ago. These books can rarely be definitive, despite what publishers would have us believe and the best will always by somebody who was there. So hurrah for Gareth Shute for this excellent contribution; I am extremely pleased to welcome it to my bookshelf.

Creating a work like this is a huge task when you consider the number of interviewees and the time it takes to transcribe their words, but books full of quotations tire quickly and usually end up in the “smallest room”. I can see myself reading this many, many times over the coming years because Shute has expertly carved a great narrative from his raw materials thus helping to preserve so many golden and not-so-golden moments that would have been lost to hearsay. He has consolidated real people and events into something very easy to identify with, even if you only vaguely know the names. (There is, however, one story left untold, but more about that later.) His enthusiasm evokes the freshness of these stories being told for the first time and with the benefit of hindsight quite a few are told in a new, more relevant context.

Many of Shute’s interviewees live in the corners of our “dark little rainy island” (to quote Voom’s Californi) with contributions every bit as interesting and often equally as strange as the familiar tales of our old guard. As well as the famous – Finns, Nuns, Chickens, Rungas and various Tadpoles – the obscure enjoys equal coverage and is neatly explored in a kind of regional tiki-tour. Of course, the main musical centres feature heavily throughout, but so does Wellington’s late-’90s garage-rock scene that saw bands like The Hasselhof Experiment and Baconfoot releasing 45s on Andrew Tolley’s Kato Records; Auckland’s Frisbee Studio, where the D4 and the Brunettes first called home; Brain Wafer’s Herculean efforts in drawing attention to New Plymouth’s hardcore scene and the activities taking place through Palmerston North’s oft-unsung arts centre, The Stomach.

The telling of Weta’s meteoric rise and rather sad fall (which was almost as fast) had me grinning with nostalgia and rushing to find “Got the Ju” on YouTube and the story of Bruce Russell’s Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum labels was pure gold thanks to his pithy quotes and detailed descriptions of parasitic empire-building while working at Flying Nun. I also belly-laughed reading about the feelers’ original second guitarist, who left early on stating he’d rather join a band that was going somewhere. In playing a shepherd’s role Shute has managed to extract some great stories from his subjects.

As well as being a damned good read, NZ Rock 1987-2007 excels as a reference book by cataloguing the movements and joining the dots of so many musicians across pubs, cities, countries and continents. Trivialists and fact-heads will delight in following the sub and super-structures of entire scenes: for example, the traffic between Pumpkinhead, JPSE, Dimmer, Stereo Bus, The Mutton Birds, Superette, Lanky and Opshop. But really, I’m only hinting at the content.

The book is well-paced and towards the end covers the rise of government funding and the stories of The D4, Mint Chicks, Blindspott, The Brunettes and The Datsuns. But as Shute approached 2007 you have to sympathise about how hard it would have been deciding what will be seen in the future as history. He has naturally covered scenes and bands he knows well including The Veils, The Checks, The Sneaks and Lil Chief Records.

The photographic content is rich without being in your face, the majority of superb shots coming from Blink or the author. And there are a couple from the fabulous “how can she be at so many gigs?” Petra Jane. (www.petrajane.com).

Finishing this book really did leave me feeling like Shute had shone a torch under every possible carpet of his subject material but for one; perhaps he or someone else will cover it in the future. In the mid-’90s Kane Massey (like Murray Cammick and Trevor Reekie) had a foot in the urban soul and rock camps with his Festival-distributed Deepgrooves label. He released CDs by Grace, Breaks Co-op and Greg Fleming among others and was among the first to voice an interest in Bic Runga’s post-Christchurch, pre-Sony demos before he assumed the role of New Zealand music’s Mary Celeste. To be fair, this story’s rock-ness is a grey area but other genre-crossovers are mentioned, albeit briefly. Perhaps it is fitting that the Deepgrooves story remains as elusive today as the man.

Dominic Blaazer