My First New Zealand Pop CD.



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Sleevenotes:

The odd and beguiling sounds emanating from New Zealand, from the birth of the legendary Flying Nun label at dawn of the ‘80s onwards, have exerted a huge influence on the world of underground guitar pop and weirdo music in general over the past twenty five years. To see that, you only need look at the impressive rollcall of indie troops marshaled for the recent benefit concerts and album for scene mainstay/Tall Dwarfs member/venerable four-track wizard Chris Knox, who has sadly suffered a stroke.

Due to poor distribution, a lack of overseas publicity and the virtual invisibility of many of the scene’s key recording though, the NZ music has remained a pretty ‘cult’ concern over the years – the sole province of those nerdy enough to actually seek out scattered background info and pay inflated prices and international shipping for weird records by scrappy bands, sound unheard.

For the rest of us, the internet has helped a hell of a lot of course, with most of the key Flying Nun bands being widely featured on assorted shady and not-so-shady download blogs, allowing instant access to those of us who’ve heard the hallowed names of The Clean and The Verlaines being tossed around for years, but have never actually heard the music. Long story short: the record nerds were right, IT’S GREAT, and I’ve been consuming as much as I can get my hands on over the past couple of years.

Mentioning this to otherwise well-informed people now and then, I’ve sometimes had response like “wow, there are bands in New Zealand..?”, and this makes me sad. Frankly, anyone who enjoys the work of all the classic American/British indie-rock bands from the ‘80s/’90s really deserves the chance to hear this music, and will almost certainly get a real kick out of it, I hope.

So obviously this is a mix CD I’ve thrown together of some of my favourite Flying Nun/NZ tracks. Even though I’ve started with a few of the scene-defining hits, the emphasis is definitely on “my favourite”, as opposed to “the best/most representative”, so if you like what you hear here there are still whole (kaleidoscope) worlds left to explore.

I’ve started out with some of the defining moments from most of the essential early Flying Nun bands, but things get a bit weirder in the second half of the disc where I’ve included a bunch of my favourite tracks that originated on the Xpressway label (largely pulled from their excellent “Making Losers Happy” singles anthology). The early Xpressway stuff I think presents a useful bridge between the more pop-orientated Flying Nun sound and New Zealand’s equally fertile loner/noise underground… but that’s another story that some of these cuts will hopefully give you a taste of.

I’d imagine any, er, Kiwi-heads (if you will) stumbling upon this post will be pretty outraged by the limited scope of my selections (Wot, no Gordons? No Bailterspace? Straightjacket Fits? 3Ds? Sneaky Feelings? Birds Nest Roys? Three Bats tracks and only one by Tall Dwarfs? etc), but again, I’ve gone for the stuff I like the best – make yr own comp and I’ll be glad to put up a link.

For the record, tunes reluctantly nixed for running time reasons included “Joe 90” by Bored Games, “ Venus Fly Trap” by Goblin Mix, Marie & The Atom, “Life Is Strange” by Tall Dwarfs, “Oncoming Day” by The Chills and something off the Toy Love album. I can’t really defend pushing that lot out in favour of squeezing in six Clean tracks… what can I tell you? I just really like The Clean. If you’ve not heard them before, hopefully you will too.

And if you do, why not show some love by doing the decent thing and buying their excellent “Mister Pop” album from last year, or the Chris Knox tribute comp, or that last Bats record, or whatever?

Images on the cover are taken from the pop video I still want to live in:



I can’t stress enough how brilliant and magical the songs on this CD are – please give them a listen.

Labels: Chris Knox, mixtapes, New Zealand, The Clean, The Verlaines

Six Reasons Why I Want To Live In New Zealand in the Early 1980s

After all that marathon record-writin' over the past month or so, I think I’ve earned myself the right to do a post full of videos, so here it is. Actually though, I’ve had this one up my sleeve for a while now.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently listening to some of the ‘classic-era’ New Zealand / Flying Nun bands. Some would say this is simply the next natural stopping off point for the discerning indie-geek who’s already plundered the vaults of British and American esoteric guitar pop for all they’re worth. Others rather further down that same woeful path may gasp in feigned disbelief that I, who call myself a music fan, previously used to make it through the day WITHOUT an intimate knowledge of the career of David Kilgour or whoever. Myself, I would simply point to off-the-scale levels of creativity, talent, originality and humour of these groups, the impeccably DIY/punk spirit underpinning all of their work, their consistently great songs and smart refashioning of underground rock influences, together with the somewhat eerie, eccentric atmosphere imposed on the scene by – I’m assuming – the sheer geographical isolation of life in NZ, and I would ask how anyone who’s taken the time to investigate it can possibly STOP listening to this wonderfully out of space / out of time music.

One of the joys of discovering the early Flying Nun bands in the internet age is that they all seem to have put a lot of effort into making great, imaginative homemade videos to accompany their great, imaginative homemade songs, and many of these have now been faithfully youtubed. Watching them can provide a perfect introduction to the scene for those who are unfamiliar with it, as well as a whole truckload of low budget pop video fun… assuming your idea of fun includes watching antipodean geeks hop about with guitars in the early 1980s. Needless to say, mine does, and these videos make me very happy indeed.

So to get straight down to business, here’s The Verlaines ‘Death And The Maiden’, perhaps my favourite music video of all time, and I can’t even explain why. I must have watched it about thirty times. The song, the lyrics, the aesthetic, the imagery, the spirit, the curious people who slowly appear and the weird way they dance to the song's peculiar middle section, the bare house and the landscape shots, the bunny rabbits, the bass player's sweater, the girl holding the rabbit and looking lost at 4:12 – everything about it. I want to MAKE THE WORLD more like this video.



Now here’s ‘Anything Can Happen’ and ‘Beatnik’ by The Clean. The more I listen to The Clean’s early stuff, the more of an inspiration it becomes on every level. Need I say more? Watch, watch and all will be clear.





Next up: The Chills. Now I know a lot of people really flip for their Submarine Bells / Heavenly Pop Hit era, and yeah, that stuff’s alright, but for me it’s all about their first few Flying Nun singles. Here for instance is the video for ‘Pink Frost’, which I think was their second, third single..? Something like that. The song is beautiful anyway – as artful a bit of spine-tingling ‘80s moodiness as you’ll ever encounter, fusing lyrics reminiscent of Husker Du’s ‘Pink Turns To Blue’ to the band’s trademark sorta-otherworldly guitar/synth tones. It's possibly not the most exciting video ever shot, but the song itself will have you sold within 90 seconds, and shortly after that the thoroughly misguided singing scarecrow turns up, and you're home safe.



Somewhat lower on the international pop radar than the big names I’ve posted above are the excellently named Look Blue Go Purple, one of the only (the only?) all-female bands to sign to Flying Nun, a few years after the initial heyday of the bands I’ve mentioned above. I’ve been listening to the compilation album of their various EPs/singles a lot recently, and it’s really, really wonderful – smart, spaced out, understated pop of the best possible kind, all centred on some wondrous post-VU guitar strumming of the kind I could happily listen to forever. More people should be aware of this band, I feel. So I typed their name into Youtube, not expecting much, and lo and behold, here’s the charming video for their song ‘Cactus Cat’, along with some brief interview clips. Fantastic stuff – god bless you, internet. (There’s a great live video out there of them covering Buffy St. Marie’s ‘Codine’ in their own unique style too if you’re interested; and you should be interested, cos it's great.)



Dragged even further out to sea by the tides of obscurity, here’s another great, lost video by a NZ artist called Jay Clarkson, of whom I know nothing except that she used to be in bands such as The Playthings and The Expendables. Of whom I also know nothing at the time of writing. ‘The Boy With The Sad Hands’ is a pretty sweet song though, so let's hope she did some more. What I really love though is the brilliant ‘animated band’ conceit of the video… so simple, so weird, so effective – an example of homemade genius that on some level exemplifies everything I love about the Flying Nun aesthetic. Look at the attention the guys behind the screen are putting into trying to fit in with the song, look at the ‘drummer’s cigarette, and somewhere out of the corner of your eye, you’ll see it.



If you’d like to learn more….

Watch a feature length TV documentary on the Flying Nun label here.

Say hello to them here.

Much of the label’s best stuff is out of print and difficult to track down though, so, mum’s the word you understand, but you could do worse than have a look at Kiwi Tapes and The Doledrums if you want to hear some of this stuff. Happy hunting!

Labels: 1980s, Flying Nun, Jay Clarkson, Look Blue Go Purple, New Zealand, The Chills, The Clean, The Verlaines, videos