The phone rings and, because it’s Tuesday, it’s Jones, from The Crown, with the weekend’s gigs for the ODT’s What’s On column.
Saturday night it’s Bruce Harold Blucher’s Seething Mass, he says, supported by OHM, which sounds rowdy.
That would be Bruce Bluchers of The Alpaca Brothers. Remember them? No?
Well, that can probably be forgiven. Matthew Goody describes The Alpaca Brothers as a "one and done" band. Good though.
He’s not alone in that latter assessment. Back in the day, 1986, the Alpaca’s "one and done" recording, the five-song EP Legless, was warmly reviewed by Tony Green in The Christchurch Press. Particularly the song Zither, which according to Green set the pace "with a frenetic instrumental workout as good as anything I have heard all year". They were good enough to support The Cramps in Auckland with a set described by Craccum as "earth-shuddering".
But whatever else they might have been, or not — frenetic or fleeting — they were a Flying Nun band.
Therefore, Craccum and Green’s assessments sit alongside countless other nerdy, obsessive, evocative, nostalgic, illuminating and ultimately engrossing facts, opinions and recountings in Matthew Goody’s new book, Needles & Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988. It’s a beautiful big full-colour, richly illustrated celebration of the record label’s early years, working its way through each and every piece of vinyl label founder Roger Shepherd and his crew spun out into the world, chronologically.
The book’s also a festival of essential trivia.
Shortly after Jones rings off, Goody’s on the Zoom, from Canada, where he lives — The Clean and The Terminals posters on the wall behind him. It’s from there, remarkably enough, that he put together his book on the label and the bands from a far distance corner of the Pacific, researching his topic on and off across eight long years.
Among the obvious questions is, why? There he is in the Pacific northwest, where a long list of hugely influential bands played the soundtrack to his own formative years (he’s 42), many recorded on the storied indie label Sub Pop.
As in so many of these things, the answer involves a story of serendipity with the hand of fate all over it.
Goody, already a collector of post-punk DIY music and a fan of The Clean and free-rock merchants The Dead C, was scouring yet another London record shop in 2008 when he came across a copy of The Clean’s ground-breaking EP Boodle, Boodle, Boodle, the first time he’d seen the original record.
He grabbed it. But right behind it was a whole stack of other Flying Nun music, including This Kind of Punishment. Goody snaffled that one too, and the rest, as they say, is a 400-plus-page history of Te Waipounamu’s most famous record label, named for a disco-excoriating lyric by Dunedin songsmith Shayne Carter (see page 219).
"I bought This Kind of Punishment, not really knowing anything about them at all. It just opened up this world to me, it just blew my mind, and from there I just had to find more and more and it became an obsession quite quickly."
That, then, is how Goody, Canadian, found Flying Nun.
But in explaining the enduring interest in the label, and particularly it’s early output (the 1988 cut off for the book is when HQ moved from Christchurch to Tamaki Makaurau), Goody switches the question around.
"From a personal level, and as an outsider as well, I have always been curious, ‘how did Flying Nun find me?’. Flying Nun was able to build this huge fan base internationally and I had a real curiosity about how that happened, because for the most part I think, particularly in coverage in New Zealand, there is not a lot of curiosity about Flying Nun abroad. Which is for me, I think, objectively, an essential part of the story," he says.
"Flying Nun would never have survived if it hadn’t been successful overseas. If The Chills hadn’t made it in the UK and all these fans started ordering the record in 1985, going forward, Flying Nun would have been gone before the ’90s. And Roger [Shepherd] has admitted as much. I was very curious about how that happened. It’s a very key part of the book."
A central part of that story doubles as the moment when the whole enterprise very nearly foundered.
It’s 1984 and the opportunity arises for Flying Nun to stretch its wings by releasing an album by leading UK post-punkers The Fall, a band with an outsized following in Aotearoa at the time.
But it quickly goes pear-shaped, significantly, in Goody’s telling, because of the difficult personality of band frontman Mark E. Smith.
"Releasing this record from The Fall almost bankrupted the company but also ironically became in some ways its saviour, because British DJ John Peel is a massive Fall fan, finds the record, starts playing it on his show in 1984," Goody says.
Within a month, Peel’s deep into the Flying Nun catalogue, playing The Chills, Children’s Hour, Great Unwashed.
"And his programme is also broadcast in Germany on British forces radio and suddenly a record label in Germany is curious about Flying Nun, signs a distribution deal, starts releasing Flying Nun records in Germany — The Chills and Foetus Productions and all these bands are suddenly having their records come out in Germany."
Shortly thereafter, The Chills are in London themselves with real momentum.
"Then the North American story as well," Goody continues, "because ultimately Flying Nun’s survival is less about Europe and more about America in a lot of ways, because in the ’90s it is all about the US and bands are less interested in going to London and more interested in going to Los Angeles."
So, that meant Goody grew up around North American DIY Sub Pop-type bands who were covering Flying Nun songs; outfits and artists such as Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Cat Power.
"They were all covering and influenced in a massive way by Flying Nun bands. Pavement was covering The Clean, Cat Power was covering This Kind of Punishment, Yo La Tengo was covering Tall Dwarfs."
So, one thing led to another and Goody launched on his book project, deciding early on it should be structured around the records Flying Nun released and, because of his distance from the topic in space and time, knowing he wanted to use contemporary sources. There would be interviews for background and to check details, but archives would be the primary sources.
Key to the success of the approach was work by Dead C guitarist Bruce Russell to digitise the Garage fanzine by contemporary scene chronicler Richard Langston, to mark Flying Nun’s 30th anniversary in 2011. They all went online as PDFs.
"I discovered those and I was just, like, ‘oh, my God’. There is just this wealth of amazing interviews with bands, scene coverage, reviews. It was just an amazing fanzine. A lot of fanzines are very quirky and ironic but there’s not a lot of information in them, but these were just packed with crucial stuff that could be used to help tell the story."
"And then, because I was working in publishing, I was travelling a fair amount, particularly to the London Book Fair and I discovered that The British Library had a full microfilm archive of The Press newspaper, from Christchurch. And The New Zealand Herald. And when I started digging into The Press, that just opened up everything for the book in a massive way, because I was astonished by how much coverage Flying Nun was getting in the daily papers," Goody recalls.
"You had two newspapers in Christchurch both writing about Flying Nun every week and you had David Swift at The Press, who was in a Flying Nun band, Mainly Spaniards — Flying Nun has these insiders helping them out, writing about these bands and it blew my mind.
"Because Vancouver at that time had a very vibrant underground rock scene but if I went into the archives here and looked at the newspapers here, there would absolutely be no coverage of the bands that were coming out of here.
"So to pick up the newspaper in Christchurch and have quite obscure bands have stuff written about them is astonishing to me."
Without really needing to, Goody confirms what has become clear from the above: "I just have a voracious appetite for doing that kind of research. I have tubs and tubs that I have amassed."
Needles & Plastic is both a myth reinforcing kind of book — expect more cruise ship boomers to disembark at Port in coming years convinced they’ll immediately hear jangling guitar hooks floating down George St to meet them — and an exercise in challenging received wisdom.
Take the "Dunedin Sound" for example, the reductive descriptor applied liberally to the city’s Flying Nun output.
Goody also sees international influences behind the durability of the Dunedin Sound wrapper.
He points out, for a start, that as early as the late ‘80s, Dunedin’s "sound" was starting to change, in the hands of bands such as the hypnotic Snapper and angular 3Ds. And even the bands it was originally attached to, The Verlaines et al, were over it.
But as journalists in Europe or the States discovered the Flying Nun catalogue for the first time, the Dunedin Sound framing would be trotted out.
"It is inescapable, and now retrospectively with Flying Nun having its 30th anniversary and its 40th anniversary, there is this constant going back to that moment and reliving it," Goody says.
"But what I also want to say, one of the reasons I did the book as I did, and really covering the entire catalogue of the label, was to show people that Flying Nun, and the artists on the label, was much more diverse than has often been presented, particularly outside New Zealand. It wasn’t all the Dunedin Sound, it wasn’t all those kind of big bands that get trotted out every time we talk about the history of Flying Nun. It’s a Christchurch label, there are all these amazing Christchurch bands, Chris Knox and Doug Hood were up in Auckland recording all these amazing Auckland bands, there was much more diversity of styles than is often thought about when we think about Flying Nun."
It’s what struck Goody when he began to investigate the label’s output in earnest, following his lucky find in the London record store bin.
"The music obviously was the primary thing, just the wealth of amazing music. You know, it is one thing to listen to the bands that everyone holds up as the amazing bands on the label, like The Verlaines and The Chills and The Clean — particularly the Dunedin bands — but you dig deeper and there were all these, what I call, one and done bands. A band that would put out a single EP, like The Alpaca Brothers or Exploding Budgies. Who the heck is the Exploding Budgies? This record, and like, ‘oh, my God’, this is stunning stuff. And this is continually happening."
Good songs, good sounds, but also, because of the DIY approach in those early years and the freedom afforded the artists to do it their way, an absence of artifice.
"There wasn’t a schtick. There was just this kind of real ... I daren’t use the word authenticity, but there was a real sincerity to it."
The book
Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981–1988, by Matthew Goody, published by Auckland University Press, is out on November 10.
More sounds
AudioCulture has recently published a musical story map of Dunedin, put together by Amanda Mills: www.audioculture.co.nz/articles/dunedin-story-map
It takes in the Dunedin Sound/Flying Nun haunts but also goes right back to the founding of Begg’s music store, and ticks off Joe Brown’s dances and Six60.
