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...
Rick Bryant
Mike Walker: gigs, venues, people
To keep the coffers full, a career musician has to be supremely adaptable to changing circumstances, musical genres, gigs, venues and bar owners of...
Les Thomas
Iva Lamkum
Radio With Pictures: history 3
Promotion of New Zealand content Radio With Pictures wasn't just a repository for music videos; it was an active producer of music video conten...
The Stebbing Legacy
Talking with Eldred Stebbing was like being with a living encyclopaedia of New Zealand music history. He had sharp recollections of local musical c...
Zodiac Heritage Series
Nearly 2000 tracks from the archives of Stebbing's are readily available on Spotify, in themed compilations. Digitised by Stebbing's engineer Steve...
Charley Gray
Jazz drummer, groundbreaking manager of Th' Dudes, pioneering café venue proprietor and restaurateur, innovative cinema operator, Charley Gray has ...
The Eastern
Southside of Bombay
Ruia and Ranea Aperahama
Tom Scott
Th' Dudes
All the Young Dudes
Should you ask me to put a date on when Th' Dudes began, I'd point to a Saturday afternoon sometime early in the Auckland summer of 1975. If the pa...
Tali
The Galaxie
In downtown Auckland in the mid-1960s, the Galaxie was the club of a thousand dances. Teenage workers in the CBD would flock to lunchtime gigs ...
Greg Carroll – Tall tales and true
Greg Carroll was a popular figure in the New Zealand music community long before his far too early passing after a motorcycle accident in Dublin in...
Songwriter's Choice: Eve de Castro-Robinson
Delaney Davidson – I Slept Late From my first hearing of Delaney Davidson's unmistakable gritty whine, I was hooked. He kneads and stretches his w...
Janet Roddick
Ten New Zealand deep cuts
In the age of streaming where pretty much every song is instantly accessible, a lot of great music gets lost. That goes double for local artists, w...
Ten NZ venues: now and then
The juxtaposed images below are an attempt to emphasise what has changed (and what has stayed the same) in the musical culture of our cities. In ea...
Colin Morris
On the Ball: New Zealand Rugby Songs part one
1887-1979 Rugby union is entrenched into New Zealand's psyche and is a major part of our collective DNA. A country that can boast three separate v...
Arthur Baysting
New Zealand music in the 1990s: let the airwaves flow
When I started at Apra, radio stations used to be on a roster – a week at a time, usually four weeks in a year, where they had to type out the name...
Kiwi Night, Sydney 1984
"I've learned more about New Zealand in one night than I knew in a lifetime.” So said Australian George Papanicolaou after attending the 4th Annua...
Arthur Baysting: Dreams, Schemes and Themes part 1
Peter Needham: "Mick Jagger bought us a beer!” I first met Arthur while working in Wellington for the NZ Listener. I started there in 1968 as a so...
Arthur Baysting: Dreams, Schemes and Themes part 2
Nick Bollinger: trying out his Elvis moves I met Neville Purvis before I met Arthur Baysting. I was 19 and playing in Rick Bryant's band Rough Jus...
Corben Simpson
Tom Scott
The Gathering
To paraphrase a famous hippie festival homily, if you can remember it you probably weren't there. Despite its relatively small audiences and relati...
Aotearoa Country Timeline - Part One
Aotearoa Country Timeline - Part Two
Pretty Wicked Head & The Desperate Men
Charlie Tumahai: Boot Hill to Be Bop and Back
"Boy is what they call me, but my real name is Charlie.” That was the catch-cry the cousins living in Kitemoana Street, Ōrākei, responded to as Cha...
A E I O U – milestones in Māori music
I unashamedly proclaim my aroha for our fair country Aotearoa and have done so for as long as I can remember. This extends to all areas of ende...
Songwriter's Choice: Greg Johnson
Sierra Leone – Coconut Rough One of the few New Zealand tunes from the 80s that really had that synth sound and a classic structure with it. ...
