Tales of a Young Terrorway
The period 1977-78 has become clouded in myth … the first stirrings of that beast called "Punk Rock” … At that point the Auckland scene was less t...
Adeaze
Howard Morrison Quartet
New Zealand Women in the NZ Top 10
Kirk Harding
Music World
Dennis Marsh
Gerry Merito
Max Cryer
Five wāhine toa of the industry
For New Zealand Music Month in 2019, arts website The Big Idea asked me to discover the string pullers, the influencers, the legends and the gritty...
Kim Paterson
Master
Blue Smoke
If there is a "big bang” moment in New Zealand's music history, it was made by the gentlest of melodies. For a delicate song, ';Blue Smoke' carries...
Hegan Entertainments
At dawn on the first day of the year 2000, a fleet of 2000 sea craft led by a flotilla of waka taua followed the convergence of the Sun's rays to A...
Sandy Mill
Ross France
Graeme Allwright
Mapping Auckland's venues: the 1970s
These maps provide a window into Auckland night life across the decades. For each venue, we've endeavoured to provide an image and a "Read More” l...
David Gapes
Nash Chase
Rod MacKinnon
Hallelujah Picassos
Rip It Up 101: the New Zealand covers
The first 101 issues of legendary music magazine Rip It Up are now on line at Papers Past, digitally scanned to ensure the photos are well reproduc...
Auckland, 1980s: the Brian Murphy archives
For years, Brian Murphy was the guy who carried a camera everywhere, capturing his musician and artist friends as they performed, practised and par...
The Poles Apart
"The Poles Apart is not the most impressive venue in Auckland,” Playdate reporter Tom McWilliams noted in 1967, reviewing the club's opening night....
Rip It Up at 10, 1987
On the 10th anniversary of Rip It Up the magazine looked through its back pages for its coverage of New Zealand music. The first 101 issues – from ...
Auckland Tonight, 1960
Auckland, 1960: There are over 20 night clubs in the city and many of them feature floor shows. Playdate's after-dark prowler visited some of them ...
Women in New Zealand music, 1980s
In 2010 Debbie Harwood considered the status of New Zealand women songwriters in the 1980s, and how that had changed. For me, the music industry ...
Songwriter's Choice: Samuel Flynn Scott
With these types of lists I often choose my friends and contemporaries, because I truly, deeply love their music, but also because I don't want...
Malcolm Black
Debbie Harwood
Wellington alternative music venues 1978-82
In Roger Watkins' book on the Wellington bands of the 60s and early 70s, When Rock Got Rolling, there's a map showing the locations of all the club...
Psychedelic Id
It was 1967, the Summer of Love, LSD and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. For the Fourth Form at Onslow College in Wellington, it was the...
Rick Bryant’s glory days at the Gluepot
For musicians, playing the Gluepot meant you'd made the grade. When you actually live in pubs for a period of years, moving every couple of days, w...
The Captain Cook Hotel
The Captain Cook Hotel did not impress the great New Zealand writer Maurice Duggan in 1960. Duggan, spending the year in Dunedin as Burns Fell...
The Gladstone Hotel
Some venues just find their time and place. And for Christchurch's Gladstone Hotel, that only took a century. The site on the south-east corne...
Shayne Carter on Bored Games
The following story first appeared in Mysterex magazine No. 3, February 2004. –– At the tail end of the seventies, The Enemy played at our school...
TrueBliss revisited
Before "Our image is kind of like naughty but nice.” Once upon a time in 1999 Peter Urlich sat sipping wine in one of Auckland's "better esta...
