Bill Lake: Mammals and Pelicans
Acoustic or electric: Bill Lake's music has worked on alternate currents in the decades since he first appeared on the Wellington blues scene in th...
Auckland Tonight, November 1980
"A lot of people in town are saying that Saturday Night is dead,” writes Mark Phillips in this feature from November 1980. After a flurry of ba...
Techtones
Eelman
The Hulamen
The Rodents
Eddie Rayner on True Colours
Perhaps the most surprising facet of Split Enz' 1980 album True Colours is the way it manages to incorporate several major diversions from the ...
Split Enz and True Colours
Sport and culture often seem at odds with each other in New Zealand life. Those whose lives revolve around the arts often lament at the compara...
Kora
Linn Lorkin
Popco
Back when sparkly-eyed Bunny Walters was top of the pops, the Chicks were shimmying in Mary Quant minis and white patent-leather boots, and Mr Le...
Housequake!
The summer of 1988-89 began misty and dismal in Auckland – or maybe it was just that I'd arrived direct from the Second Summer of Love. At any rat...
Coco Solid
Vision
Lisa Crawley
Sons of Zion
Marlene Tong
Ready to Roll
TVNZ's news hour at 6pm has always rated big, but from the late 1970s it had a rival. At its height, TV2 pop chart show Ready to Roll was reaching ...
Merv Thomas
Goldenhorse
Kimbra
NZ Acts in the US Charts 2: Lorde and beyond
This is the second part of our story on New Zealand acts who have appeared on the Hot 100 (US singles chart) and Billboard 200 (US album chart). Pa...
NZ Acts in the US Charts 1: the road to How Bizarre
It is hard to say who the first New Zealander was to make it onto the United States charts. Local chart historian Dean Scapolo points to at least o...
George Tumahai
The Crystal Palace Ballroom
When, in the late 1950s, impresario Phil Warren took over Auckland's Crystal Palace Ballroom, he used his customary flair and promotional skills...
Broods
Records Records Records
Written for Mushroom magazine, 1981. The most intriguing thing about Dunedin's second-hand record shop is that it doesn't have a name. No name at...
Phil Judd in Schnell Fenster, 1989: Antipobeat
In January 1989 early Split Enz champion – and Hot Licks editor – Roger Jarrett interviewed his friend Phil Judd during Schnell Fenster's summer Ne...
New Zealand Rare Record Prices: digging for gold
Long before New Zealand had record fairs and online auction houses, we had hundreds of cluttered, dark and dusty opportunity shops, affectionately ...
The Hi-Brows
Grant Gillanders
Russell Crowe’s rock’n’roll hunger, 1981
In the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collection is a treasure trove of photographs of Russell Crowe from July 1981, in his rock'n'roll persona, Russ ...
Ngāruawāhia: the David Stone album
David Stone was living in Rotorua and about to be married at the time of the Great Ngāruawāhia Music Festival. Having worked in the record industry...
The Great Ngāruawāhia Music Festival
"Woodstock Planned In Waikato” ran the headline in the New Zealand Herald. It had been a long time coming. Three years after the epochal Woodstock ...
Ngāruawāhia group line-up
The acts planned for the Great Ngāruawāhia Music Festival, as described in the festival newspaper the Ngāruawāhia Chronicle on 6 January 1973, th...
Aaron Tokona
Kemp Tuirirangi
Carol Davies
Flight of the Conchords: the second decade and solo years
2018: It's a sweltering mid-summer evening on a Monday in London. I've just picked up tickets from the Eventim Apollo, the rock and comedy mecca pr...
