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Dunedin, punk energy, classical bones

The Verlaines

Graeme Downes formed the Verlaines in Dunedin at the end of 1980 and wrote songs that put punk-era guitar together with real classical training, working cello, clarinet and horn into the mix well before he became a university music professor. By 1984 their 10 O'Clock in the Afternoon EP had climbed to number twenty-three on the national charts. In 2021 New Zealand made his contribution to music and music education official by naming him a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Auckland, an inherited 4-track

Tall Dwarfs

Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate had already been through one broken-up band together, Toy Love, when they regrouped as Tall Dwarfs. They recorded almost everything on a TEAC four-track reel-to-reel Knox had inherited, looping his voice and pitching it down instead of waiting around for a proper studio. Their 1981 debut EP, Three Songs, set the template for a whole label's worth of lo-fi records. Knox went on to produce dozens of other Flying Nun bands himself, so the label's sound came out of his home setup at least as much as out of anyone's office.

A bedroom four-track, 1997

Darcy Clay

Daniel Bolton, recording as Darcy Clay, worked alone in his bedroom on a four-track, writing, playing and producing every part himself. In 1997 he entered the New Zealand singles chart at eighteen and climbed to five the following week. That October he opened for Blur on their New Zealand tour, the biggest show of his short career. Within months he was dead, at twenty-five. New Zealand's music awards named him Most Promising Male Vocalist the following year, an honour he never got to collect in person.

Discovered busking in Christchurch

Aldous Harding

Hannah Sian Topp made her first recording at thirteen, singing on her mother Lorina Harding's own folk album. In 2008 she was discovered busking on a Christchurch street, and as Aldous Harding she built a gothic-folk sound distinctive enough to win the 2018 Taite Music Prize for her second album, Party. The follow-up, Designer, got her New Zealand's top songwriting honour, the APRA Silver Scroll, in 2019. By 2022's Warm Chris, recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales and released through Flying Nun at home, critics from the Guardian to the New York Times were treating the former busker as one of the more original songwriters of her generation.

Dunedin, noise over songs, 1987

The Dead C

Bruce Russell, Michael Morley and drummer Robbie Yeats formed the Dead C in 1987, out of the noisier, rougher edge of the Dunedin scene. They made side-long drones and free-rock wreckage out of guitars that most of their peers were still using to write actual songs. Trapdoor Fucking Exit was recorded that winter and first came out on cassette in 1990 on the small New Zealand label Precious Metal. It found a proper international audience three years later, when the Philadelphia label Siltbreeze reissued it on CD, and it went on to shape noise bands from Pavement's early b-sides to Bardo Pond.

Dunedin, violin at six, then noise

Alastair Galbraith

Alastair Galbraith started violin lessons at six and never lost the fascination with raw sound that came with them. As a kid, neighbours remember, he'd ask to listen to their washing machines. He played in the Rip in the mid-1980s, then started building his own instruments: glass "fire organs" driven by a piano keyboard, and an armonica modelled on Benjamin Franklin's eighteenth-century design. With the Dead C's Bruce Russell he co-led an improvising string ensemble called A Handful of Dust, and he put out his solo records through Russell's labels. The Dunedin scene was that small. Its guitarist and its violinist kept building each other's instruments and pressing each other's records.

Christchurch, 1986 — ex-Gordons

Bailter Space

Alister Parker and Hamish Kilgour of the Clean formed Bailter Space in Christchurch in 1986. When Kilgour left for the United States two years later, fellow ex-Gordons member Brent McLachlan came in, and with Parker and guitarist John Halvorsen that made the classic trio. They took the Dunedin scene's fuzz somewhere noisier and more hypnotic, with odd guitar tunings over a steady krautrock pulse. A 1991 European tour got them a five-album deal with New York's Matador Records, which put a band that started in a Christchurch flat on the same roster as Pavement and Yo La Tengo.

From art-school noise to No. 1

Headless Chickens

Chris Matthews and Johnny Pierce started the project in Auckland in 1982 as Children's Hour, broke up, and relaunched it in 1985 as the Headless Chickens. Their 1988 debut album, Stunt Clown, was abrasive art-school noise-pop, and it later won a Classic Record Award at the 2018 Taite Music Prize. It sounds nothing like the band that would top the national charts by 1994. With Fiona McDonald singing, 1991's Body Blow was the point where the cult favourites turned into one of the decade's less likely mainstream New Zealand pop acts.

Dunedin, 1978 — the Dunedin Sound

The Clean

Brothers Hamish and David Kilgour formed the Clean in Dunedin in 1978. By the time Robert Scott joined on bass in 1980, the band was making the sound the whole scene would later be named after. They recorded on a shoestring for the brand-new Flying Nun label and reached number nineteen on the national charts in 1981 on word of mouth alone, since commercial radio wouldn't touch them. The Boodle Boodle Boodle EP followed that November. Chris Knox produced it on a four-track, and it held a spot in the national top twenty for ten weeks straight, which showed early on that Flying Nun's shoestring model could actually work.

Dunedin, in and out of four bands

Peter Gutteridge

Peter Gutteridge helped start the Clean in 1978 on bass, then left before Robert Scott joined and before the band recorded any of the songs people remember. He co-founded the Chills in 1980 and only lasted a few months there too. After that he rejoined David and Hamish Kilgour for the Great Unwashed, and eventually started his own band, Snapper, whose 1990 debut Shotgun Blossom made the UK independent chart. Obituaries later credited him as one of the architects of the fuzzy "Dunedin Sound" guitar tone. He put it more modestly: "I just got tired of a guitar sound that wasn't thought about. I had my own personal style."

The Collection