NZ Rock 1987-2007

By Gareth Shute

Random House New Zealand, 2008

ISBN 978-1-86979-000-4

45 South in Concert

By Neil McKelvie

Southland Musicians Club, Invercargill, New Zealand, 2006

Reviewed by Tony Mitchell

Books on New Zealand popular music seem to proliferate, a number of them covering similar territory. This volume, the third book by Gareth Shute, a music journalist whose Hip Hop Music in Aotearoa/New Zealand won the Montana NZ Award in 2005 – and which I reviewed at the time in Music Forum – is conceived as a follow-up to John Dix’s justly celebrated Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand Rock and Roll 1955 to 1988, a rather raggedly-updated version of which I reviewed in Music Forum Vol 12, No 3 in July 2006. Shute is himself a musician, having played in cult pop bands the Tokey Tones, the Brunettes and Ryan McPhun and the Ruby Suns, and his 2005 book Making Music in New Zealand, also published by Random House, is a supposedly self-help guide which compiles quotes from a wide range of local musicians who have achieved profiles in the local industry and internationally. That there is a ready market for such books in a country as small as New Zealand indicates the importance that local music making assumes there, as well as the support it receives from various government funding bodies. This may contain lessons for the Australian music industry, which has a relatively low profile when it comes to book-length accounts.

The value of Stranded in Paradise was its range of reference and wealth of anecdotal details about what were often relatively small pockets of musical activity, while it also managed to maintain an overview of the big picture both in terms of historical developments and the internationalisation of “Kiwi music” which took place in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of Split Enz, Crowded House and the Flying Nun label. The title of NZ Rock 1987-2007 is indicative of its decidedly basic approach, a very lean meat and potatoes-style narrative that begins with Crowded House reaching No 2 on the US charts in 1987, and ends with a brief concluding paragraph stating “And so the list goes on”, prefacing a very pat generalisation about how far local music has come in the past 20 years. It’s very much a history by numbers, a bland statement of individual facts and achievements which covering all the expected bases, complete with quotations from musicians and a series of rather dull mugshots of musicians and bands, but, unlike David Eaglteon’s much livelier 2003 book Ready To Fly: The Story of New Zealand Rock Music, there is little attempt at describing the music in any other than a straightforward, perfunctory way. Given that much of the material has already been covered in other books such as Eagleton’s, Shute has little to add, mainly sticking to the received narratives which seemed to be cobbled from press releases and previous writings. Bands, musicians, labels, events and releases are duly documented and grouped together by association, but any depth of analysis of the music, or how it relates to its localities, are noticeably absent. Statements such as “the hardcore scene tends not to attract female musicians, but Foamy Ed were an all-girl group that bucked this trend. They formed in 1996 at Green bay High school” (page 287) are indicative of the no-frills approach, exacerbated by placing the first word of every new paragraph in bold type, as if to arrest the eye of the skimmer looking for some respite from the relentlessly cliché-ridden documentation (“A more unusual act to come out of the Flying Nun stables was the Shocking Pinks” …). For anyone unfamiliar with the music, there is little to be gleaned from this book, while anyone familiar with the depth and diversity of music production in New Zealand will be surprised at the cursory treatment given any music which lies outside the rather amorphous category of “rock” and is all the more distinctive for doing so.

45 South in Concert is a far more localised encyclopedia of New Zealand music, being a compendium of bands and performers emanating from Invercargill, a town on the southernmost and westernmost tip of the South Island with a current population of around 48,000. (Its Maori name Murihuku means “the last part of the tail”, following the myth of Maui, who fished the South island from the sea. It was famously described by Keith Richard during the Rolling Stones’ 1965 tour there as “the arsehole of the world”.) But Invercargill was put on the global map by Australian-born Roger Donaldson’s 2004 film The World’s Fastest Indian, in which Anthony Hopkins played local motorcycle hero Burt Munro, whose rickety home-made 1920 Indian motorcycle set the land-speed world record in Utah in 1967. The film includes a scene, documented here, in which veteran local musician Craig Hubber, of local groups Detour and Hubba Bubba, was asked to assemble a 1960s rock and roll group to play at a re-creation of Munro’s birthday party at the Tisbury Hall on the outskirts of the town. In the film they are seen performing Hubber’s skiffle-style composition The Kiss Twist. Local details such as these make this book a delight, and an example for any local accounts of music making in small towns. Funded by the local Southland Musicians Club, the Invercargill Licensing Trust, the Community Trust of Southland and the local newspaper, the Southland Times, 45 South in Concert (the longitude of Invercargill) was compiled by Neil “Mouse” McKelvie, a local drummer and motorcyclist who has filled more than 200 pages with biographical accounts and photos of musicians and bands involved in all denominations of music making from classical to folk to punk rock, either based in or emanating from Invercargill over the past 150 years (or at least since the dance bands of the 1920s). One of Invercargill’s most notorious sons was Chris Knox, known as “the godfather of New Zealand punk” and a prime mover in the early recording of the Flying Nun label in Dunedin and Christchurch before becoming a leading figure in the Auckland punk and post-punk scenes. Knox was reputedly influenced by the riotous, unruly local 1960s blues-rock band Unknown Blues, led by the now Melbourne-based blues harmonica player Dave Hogan, inspired by the 1965 NZ tour by British band the Pretty Things. Such migatory patterns are typical of the exit routes taken by the more prominent local musicians, but the range of local musical activity, Maori and pakeha, chronicled in this book about one of the most remote towns in the world is little short of astonishing. Last year I visited its Southern Institute of Technology, which runs a number of well-attended and well-equipped music courses in Invercargill and contributes a great deal to the local music community (students there, who come from all over the country, benefit from a no fees policy instituted by the mayor of the town, former Auckland student radical Tim Shadbolt). 45 South in Concert sets a benchmark for chronicling music making in remote parts of the world, where isolation is always a great stimulus for musical activity.