This episode has its roots in a conversation that broke out online on the Friends of Sombrero Fallout site.
Chris Johnston - who used to write an excellent column in The Age newspaper called “From The Crate” - is a Kiwi journalist who had just composed an Age article remembering Joy Division’s Closer 40 years on. In the comments he mentioned that “all the music from Christchurch back then sounded like Joy Division.” This led me to ask why.
Chris gave a full response:-
“A good radio station, isolation, that landscape. Also, there was a decent band scene - which was very commercial - but also a contrasting underground scene at Christchurch pubs willing to let post-punks play, supported by radio and press, and street press. There was also the small fact of the Flying Nun label, which had just started, and enabled weird bands to record. NZ was an easy country to distribute records through; it's small. In ‘81 Flying Nun released ‘Tally Ho’ by The Clean, and it went Top 20 in the charts, the actual charts. ‘Closer’ itself went to number 3. So there was a real appetite for non-mainstream music, and the infrastructure to support it, in a small country.”
From there I did some more digging and Martin Brown was kind enough to send me an old Guardian article showcasing classic ‘Dunedin Sound’ songs, mostly on the Flying Nun label. David Pisker also sent through his valuable suggestions.
For whatever reason, most of these bands didn’t permeate my consciousness at all up in England back then. But some people were listening. Pavement owe a substantial debt to The Clean for their embryonic sound, as you’ll hear. Early Wedding Present sounded like they had their ears tuned in. And the iconic C86 cassette, which gave birth to ‘indie’ more or less as we know it, can trace a thick strand of its lineage back to the Kiwi music of that time (take, for example, Celestial City by McCarthy, not featured here).
I hope you either bask in the memories or, like me, enjoy sampling this sound for the first time.
Tracklist:-
Made up in blue, The Bats
Cactus cat, Look Blue Go Purple
Destroy the heart, The House of Love
Death and the maiden, The Verlaines
Anything could happen, The Clean
Box elder, Pavement
Down in splendour, Straitjacket Fits
Nothing’s going to happen, The Tall Dwarfs
Nothing comes easy, The Wedding Present
Kaleidoscope world, The Chills
Beautiful things, 3Ds
Ambivalence, Pin Group
Komakino, Joy Division
Money is so sad, Alastair Galbraith