A college city in New Zealand and the punk sound it cultivated
The New Noise | May 4, 2016
By the late 1970s, punk’s influence had spread from England and America all around the globe. On New Zealand’s South Island, in the college city of Dunedin, only the second largest city on that island and the seventh largest city in New Zealand, several punk bands emerged. The Same, The Clean, and The Enemy all formed in the late 70s in Dunedin, and would later join the newly established Flying Nun label. Together they would produce a genre called Dunedin Sound, a combination of punk, psychedelic and jangle-pop.
In the 70s, New Zealand had one cultural community based in Aukland, their largest city by population, located in the North Island. The South Island’s largest city is Christchurch, and in 1981 a local record store owner named Roger Shepherd, inspired by Aukland’s successful post-punk label Propeller Records, decided to start his own label to capture Christchurch’s best music. Instead, he discovered the brilliant, inventive music of Dunedin, which hadn’t been known for anything more than their university in the past.
The city of Dunedin (Wikimedia)
Dunedin Sound is a fusion of 60s jangle-pop like The Byrds and the energy and attitude of punk, but more influenced by Velvet Underground and The Stooges than the Sex Pistols and Ramones. R.E.M. cite Dunedin Sound as an influence, which can be clearly heard on their jangly first album Murmur.
One of Flying Nun’s earliest releases, The Clean’s “Tally Ho,” became an unexpected hit, reaching 19 in New Zealand. This, followed by the release of the Dunedin Double EP, which compiled songs by four different Dunedin Sound bands: The Chills (who had previously been called The Same), Sneaky Feelings, The Stones, and The Verlaines. Dunedin soon became a center of musical experimentation, and widely regarded around New Zealand as the place for new music.
None of this would have been possible without Chris Knox, the lo-fi pioneer who founded the seminal Dunedin bands the Enemy, Toy Love, and Tall Dwarfs. His 4-track was used to record most of Flying Nun’s early releases. His first group, The Enemy, was a punk-inspired foursome who took influence from the older, glam and proto-punk stylings of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. They were together for only a year before splitting. They never released anything officially, but they did record all twenty of their songs during October of 1978, and these recordings have been bootlegged extensively.
Most of The Enemy, Knox, drummer Mike Dooley and guitarist Alec Bathgate, went on to form Toy Love. They continued to perform songs they had written as The Enemy, albeit in an altered form most of the time. They broke up after two years, and Knox and Bathgate formed Tall Dwarfs, and in this form they would stay together until 2002. They produced the first lo-fi music in New Zealand, meaning music that is intentionally recorded with certain technical flaws that produce distortion and background noise. The name comes from the tern “low fidelity,” as opposed to the audiophile’s preferred “high fidelity”, which was seen as snobbish because of the expensive equipment required to record and reproduce high fidelity music.
Similarly to The Enemy, The Same began as a punk band before breaking up, its members reforming into Dunedin Sound band The Chills, who would score some of the movement’s biggest hits following a brief hiatus after the death of drummer Martyn Bull. After Bull’s death, singer-songwriter Martin Phillipps continued the band with an ever-changing lineup to back him. As basically a solo act, The Chills scored an unexpected hit with their second album Submarine Bells, their international debut on Warner Bros. owned Slash Records. Bolstered by the aptly titled single “Heavenly Pop Hit,” which managed to crack the top 100 on the UK chart, and reached 17 on the US Alternative chart, the album would go on to win Best Album at the 1990 New Zealand Music Awards. Last year the Chills released a new album, Silver Bullets, their first album in 19 years, which reached 12 in New Zealand, showing that the Dunedin Sound is still fondly remembered decades after its heyday.
Jimmy McPhee and Teddy Bunker
Jimmy McPhee is a former sound engineer for SiriusXM Radio and the former engineering director for WNYU, where he presented the radio shows Unknown Pleasures and Throwing Bricks. Teddy Bunker is a writer whose work has been featured in Structo Magazine, The Harvard Press and the Hofstra Chronicle. Together, they are The New Noise.
