music

Garth Cartwright

Goneville: A memoir by Nick Bollinger (Awa Press, 2016), 293 pp., $39

The Kiwi music memoir has arrived with a vengeance in recent years. Leading the way was Simon Grigg’s How Bizarre, chronicling his journey with South Auckland Polynesian pop-rap outfit OMC to the top of the world charts and then all the way down through bankruptcy, madness and, finally, death. A wild ride and a fine book. 2016’s In Love With These Times found author Roger Shepherd detailing how, in 1981, he founded the Flying Nun record label in a Christchurch record shop, crashing it in London some 15 years later. Shepherd writes sloppily – no cliché is left unturned – but he observes the rise of the South Island indie scene well and is unsentimental when passing judgement. [Read more…]

James Dignan

How Bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the song that stormed the world by Simon Grigg (Awa Press, 2015), 255 pp., $38; In Love with These Times: My life with Flying Nun Records by Roger Shepherd (Harper Collins, 2016), 295 pp., $36.99

Two fine new books from insiders at the heart of two important chapters in the history of New Zealand popular music that will grace the bookshelves of lovers of home-grown musical talent. It would be only too easy to make facile comparisons between the works, and indeed there are many parallels. Both Simon Grigg and Roger Shepherd had their hands – albeit only nominally at times – on the helm of New Zealand music gold. In both cases, mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and the authors made it out alive, albeit barely, after changing the face of the local music industry and running headlong into the grey bureaucracy of corporate music. Both books tell the story of taking a provincial scene and propelling it to world status. Most importantly, both stories are compelling reads, and both are among the best books on the inside story of the New Zealand music scene ever written. But these parallels only tell a small part of the largely unconnected episodes which lie at the heart of the books, and indeed it shows the strength of New Zealand music that these two tales can co-exist largely without interacting with each other in as small a musical sphere as ours. [Read more…]

Gallons of Beer

Otara Millionaires Club and the Flying Nun Sound