I had a won­der­ful lunch with my friend Chris Bourke a week or two back, sit­ting in his grand liv­ing room up in the hills above Welling­ton. The day was blue and gor­geous as only the cap­i­tal can turn on –on those days, not as rare as we Auck­lan­ders would like to think, when it sup­plies the sort of weather it loves to boast about when it repeat­edly says ‘you should see me on a beau­ti­ful day’.

Chris has a mag­nif­i­cent view, almost beyond words. I’d love to post a shot of the man stand­ing in his bal­cony — over­look­ing the har­bour and the rugged undu­la­tions of the hills that roll down to it — but he made me promise faith­fully when I took sev­eral not to put any online, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Before, over and after lunch Chris pulled out books and boxes of items, many of which were used by him when research­ing his ground­break­ing book, the Book of The Year win­ner, Blue Smoke, an incred­i­ble, inclu­sive, his­tory of pre-Beatles New Zealand pop­u­lar culture.

They included a box of old 78s which he’d been gifted — includ­ing the first record­ing ever made New Zealand, and a bunch of those Aus­tralian pressed Par­lophone issues from the 30s with the fab­u­lous New Zealand labels:

A national treasure.

Not Chris, that is — he is too young and still has far too much to con­tribute to be lum­bered with such an oner­ous tag — but the book itself.

It is, of course, a book about music, or at least that is the rai­son d’être it hangs itself around, and I guess it prob­a­bly needed one, not least to con­vince pub­lish­ers who, in New Zealand, are rarely adven­tur­ous folk (this is pub­lished by the Uni­ver­sity Of Auck­land). It’s sub­ti­tled ‘The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Pop­u­lar Music 1918–1964′ and it method­i­cally and joy­ously tells that story in a way that not only draws the reader inescapably in, but also takes you to the world that sur­rounded the music and those that made it. It talks exten­sively and details, but never bor­ingly — quite the oppo­site —  the peo­ple who made it pos­si­ble for oth­ers to make music or were piv­otal in the dis­sem­i­na­tion of the sounds that shaped what we lis­ten to now.

I’m think­ing of peo­ple like Arthur Pearce, who, via his radio shows based in Welling­ton but broad­cast much fur­ther afield — across years when radio showed active dis­in­ter­est in any­thing con­tem­po­rary - edu­cated, informed and enter­tained gen­er­a­tions of eager ears. His (as linked) biog­ra­phy on Te Ara, well writ­ten by Chris, is very thor­ough but it is hardly likely to excite any­one given that it sits in a gen­eral online ency­clopae­dia of New Zealand bibliography.

It takes Chris’ book to do just that. I think it’s one of the most impor­tant New Zealand works to be printed since… well, since I don’t know when. Let’s use the word ‘ever’.

I’ve read Blue Smoke twice, and given a copy away to some­body I knew needed to own a copy but was unlikely to ever buy one (he did and said so repeat­edly after he’d fin­ished it).

How­ever, what makes this cru­cial work so dif­fer­ent to the vast bulk of the many, many New Zealand non-fiction works I have on my shelves is that it doesn’t just tell us the fac­tual para­me­ters of our past. It doesn’t just doc­u­ment and record the music made and the music mak­ers, it instead broadly opens up for us, excit­ingly in both visual and writ­ten ways, how we enter­tained our­selves for the best part of three quar­ters of a century.

Blue Smoke is an extra­or­di­nary work and we’ve never seen the like of it in print before — that I know of at least. The words, the lay­out, the imagery and the the over­all style all con­tribute to its uniqueness.

The pages on Johnny Devlin — never before doc­u­mented or writ­ten this way with such life — not only tell the story of one of the most astound­ing fren­zied phe­nom­ena ever in New Zealand, but — more — what it felt like to be a 15 year old in big town and smaller town NZ at the time.

You feel as if you are one step away from the stage at The Jive Cen­tre when Devlin first arrived in Jan­u­ary 1958.

How we enter­tained our­selves and — more — how we inter­acted with and those being enter­tained drove that enter­tain­ment, because we did — Devlin was a pub­lic phe­nom­ena long before Phil War­ren and Graeme Dent took that to the next level, and kids were scream­ing at him sim­ply because he was Devlin — is as much who we are as any sto­ries of war (they’re in here too but in a way they’ve never been told before — the war sto­ries alone make this book worth the admis­sion price), social demo­graph­ics, pol­i­tics or the nation’s trau­matic upheavals.

All of which are included here as well of course, as our enter­tain­ment reflects, reacts and then influences.

The story of the Maori Com­mu­nity Cen­tre in Freeman’s Bay (extant until a few years ago — in most of the world it would’ve earned a plaque on the wall, in ours it’s now a glass block unmarked) says more to me of the Maori exo­dus from the coun­try into the ‘smoke than any num­ber of words on paper or screen full of sta­tis­tics. Kiri Te Kanawa used to share a rick­ety stage with Char­lie Tuma­hai once upon a time.  That, to me, is fab­u­lous in so many ways, but until now, until Blue Smoke, who that wasn’t of that era knew?

Hell, you even begin to like Sir Howard Mor­ri­son as a per­son. Almost.

I get in huge trou­ble some­times because I’m not tra­di­tion­ally patri­otic. I hate national anthems (who exactly is defend­ing New Zealand and from what. Given the last twelve months or so the end­less request seems to have fallen on deaf ears, besides it’s an awful minute or two of stodgy music). Flags turn me off. All these things cause wars. They kill people.

If we lose on the week­end it may take more than a faux-deity to save the nation, at least in the short term.

That said, I’m very cul­tur­ally patri­otic. I love and am com­pletely enthralled by where I come from, and by the places that the sto­ries in this book will indi­rectly take those who come after even if they don’t know it at the time or ever — because all on a per­sonal and national level that is dri­ven by the cul­tural sto­ries we have cre­ated in our islands. And no mat­ter where I am in the world that stays with me.

It’s why expats away for decades still call New Zealand home. It is. It is who we are.

Chris’ book tells me so much of that and I love it.

Have you read it yet?

I’m writ­ing a lot at the moment. I’m writ­ing stuff that prob­a­bly won’t appear for a long time. Hell it might not even appear at all. But I’m writ­ing, and get­ting things off my chest which sat­isfy me and scratch an itch, if you will.

But I think I need diver­sion, so I’ll tell a story. It’s a story I’ve long wanted to tell but to be hon­est it was only after a bit of prod­ding from Brigid that I decided to put pen to screen. I guess its been long enough now.

It was a wed­ding. A huge wed­ding and really, to toss an overused turn of phrase in the air, not just any wed­ding. A celebrity wed­ding. And not just any celebrity wed­ding but a wed­ding between an All Black (for any­one not liv­ing in New Zealand, France, sev­eral small Pacific nations, the honky bits of South Africa, small parts of New South Wales and smaller parts of sev­eral other Euro­pean nations, that’s a male who plays a game a lit­tle like a bas­tardised mutant fus­ing of Amer­i­can and non-American football..you won’t have heard of it but it’s huge in New Zealand in the way that Basque Pelota is huge in Cen­tral Amer­ica) and a mem­ber of a man­u­fac­tured pop quin­tet who, for a very brief moment were big­ger than Bar­bie with ado­les­cent females and house­wives across New Zealand (and who’s exis­tence directly paved the way for the global Pop Stars and Idol franchises).

They were called True­B­liss and I some­how found myself in the mid­dle of the whole thing.

I’ll try to explain although the whole thing, the pop thing, not the wed­ding which I’ll get to, was an incred­i­ble haze and would take more than a few para­graphs in a blog to cover.

I man­aged Anthony Ioasa, song­writer extra­or­di­naire, music pro­ducer and a man who now, for his own rea­sons, calls him­self Anthony Gold.

Ant was approached by Jonathan Dowl­ing, a film­maker, to work on a con­cept he had. He wanted to cre­ate a pop group, five girls, and film the process from audi­tion to group to record­ing stu­dio to record label to video shoots to gigs and their lives in between. It was a new con­cept, called real­ity TV.

Jonathan didn’t invent the for­mat or invent man­u­fac­tured bands. What he did do first was to meld the two things together and it was a stroke of bril­liance that should, when one con­sid­ers how far the con­cept has been taken, have made him rich beyond his dreams. But some­where along the way he lost con­trol of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty in the con­cept and, for want of a bet­ter word, was screwed.

And yes, that’s another story.

Yep, True­b­liss (the art­work spelled it tRue­B­liss but this far out I’ll pass) were mas­sive. Jonathan and his part­ners took it from a rough con­cept through to a TV series that dom­i­nated the nation’s TV screens for two and a half months in 1999, then filled New Zealand’s town halls and the­atres for the next two months with sell-out dates.

The album, quickly pro­duced, writ­ten and mostly recorded by Anthony, with a select bunch of musi­cians, includ­ing Joost Langveld, did rather well sell­ing some 40,000 copies in just over a month, with a num­ber one sin­gle that went plat­inum two times over.

And then it all fell to bits. Inevitably. The con­cept was the TV show and the band was always going to have a brief life.

I really liked all five girls and got on with them all pretty well, most espe­cially Jo and Carly but the end loomed, even if it wasn’t obvi­ous to the five at the cen­tre of it.

After the num­ber ones and the sell-out tour it stopped like a maglev train hit­ting a brick wall. Sin­gle three didn’t even chart and the money, which was always tight, ran out.

And the recrim­i­na­tions began.

There were sorts of media reports that these poor girls had been screwed by the TV show’s pro­duc­ers, one of whom, Jonathan, not Peter Urlich who was scripted into the show as man­ager but never had the role out­side that, was also the band’s manager.

In Novem­ber 1999 they fired Jonathan as man­ager, although he still con­trolled just about every­thing, and I was asked by the girls to act as man­ager, which all par­ties agreed to.

Time went by and in the nicest pos­si­ble way we tried to ease them into a quiet under­stand­ing that it was, unless a mir­a­cle hap­pened, over. We tried to engi­neer that mir­a­cle via their Sony deal and indeed we worked towards that with a new album full of Carly Bind­ing authored songs, and an Amer­i­can pro­ducer. Then Sony pulled out and Carly decided to leave the band, for her brief solo career.

We sat in their lawyer’s office one after­noon and tried to tell them, the audits had been done, Jonathan was squeaky clean and it was over. One, Jo Cot­ton, looked at us and asked “Can’t we just do it again?” (Iron­i­cally some years later Jo got her wish when she won some TVNZ tal­ent con­test, now forgotten).

But in early 2000 one of the five decided to get married.

Megan Cassie decided to marry her long-time boyfriend and father to her daugh­ter, Pita Ala­tini, who was, I’m reli­ably informed, an All Black (not that I would know one if, as seems to be the case as often as not, one ran­domly punched out some­one in the street in front of me).

The invites, for Brigid, our daugh­ter and myself, arrived in Jan­u­ary for a wed­ding in Feb­ru­ary with a ser­vice in Otara and a recep­tion at the For­mosa Coun­try Club out on the east­ern perime­ter of Auck­land and a place I’d never heard of.

Carly wasn’t invited.

We were offered an option to rent a chalet at the club for the night and duly did exactly that. It was, I guessed, going to be the celeb wed­ding to end all celeb wed­dings in that nether-land par­tially occu­pied these days by truly bizarre sites like this grue­some odd­ity (why would you want to be any­where near it…) but in 2000 was the exclu­sive domain of the weekly gos­sip rags.

And so, we suited up and packed our­selves into the car, and headed off to the church.

Some­body, I’m unsure whether it was Pita’s agents, or Megan’s fam­ily, had done an exclu­sive deal with The Woman’s Day for pics, for, and this may be an incor­rect mem­ory this far out, but it was a big wad, $40k cash plus a fair slice of the cost of the wed­ding, and there they were there, snap­ping away at famous guests as they arrived (famous peo­ple like to hang with other famous peo­ple I dis­cov­ered and you only have to be famous for a Woman’s mag cover or two to be one of them).

And they were, I guess, bemused and increas­ingly pissed off at the other lot, from the Woman’s Weekly, doing exactly the same thing.

Whichever party had sold the rights to WD hadn’t told the other party (and no-one at all had both­ered to tell me) who had then sold the same rights, both exclu­sive of course, to the other magazine.

It was frac­tious but the bride arrived and looked duly fab, The groom looked sharp and another of those All Blacks (don’t ask me which, but he seemed to have an aura of desir­abil­ity about him, given the looks and drools from both sexes that fol­lowed him) was best man.

The wed­ding went off with­out a hitch, all tears and that, it was quite lovely, and the best man looked bemused by it all.

Out­side there were hun­dreds. A smat­ter­ing of True­b­liss fans and lit­er­ally hun­dreds of mostly Ton­gan (the groom was Ton­gan) folks who, in what I was told was a very Ton­gan way, were openly invited to the ceremony.

Cool. The folks out­side seemed to be lov­ing it and proved to be pretty colour­ful sub­jects for the com­pet­ing cam­era crews.

After the wed­ding we jumped in the car. I had Jonathan and Anthony in mine and we headed east. And east and east. Even­tu­ally we found the venue, after ask­ing at a shop or two, and found our­selves dri­ving up the long wind­ing approach to the grand be-pillared reception.

And it was odd. Very.

I’ve not been to Palm Springs but I’m guess­ing that it’s full of these sorts of mutant pri­vate clubs where the riff raff are kept out and the rich old folk go to drink far too many cock­tails, and even­tu­ally die. Except this one was tar­geted at the rich old Chi­nese folks, as the name sug­gested, and looked like it came in a kitset..build your own coun­try club box com­plete with dozens of fully mature palms, twee lit­tle bridges over twee man-made ponds, and a beau­ti­fully preened golf course for the stink­ing rich to wan­der around on the plen­ti­ful golf carts whilst the less priv­i­leged watched from outside.

Hey, it’s their money, but it did feel a lit­tle like we were sit­ting in some tacky priv­i­leged zone on the edge of the outerworlds.

I was, I have to say, impressed by the chalet. Not really the chalet as such, but the mas­sive bath­room which was about the size of our whole house back in South Herne. And we were given our very own own golf cart.

It was, when we checked in, early after­noon, about 1 I think, and we took a cou­ple of pic­tures of the pri­vate golf cart (I don’t play so it was a nov­elty) then, leav­ing it parked out­side, wan­dered over to the gath­er­ing storm.

Peo­ple had begun arrive, the sun was beat­ing down and the kids were all ush­ered away to a sep­a­rate zone where they would be enter­tained by clowns and fed vast amounts of coca cola and McDon­alds. As a respon­si­ble par­ent I wan­dered off to get a drink myself.

A beer. There were a range but I took a Stella. And the sun beat down. We wan­dered around look­ing for shel­ter but there was lit­tle so we had another drink and the sun beat down so I moved on to the Pinot Gris.

An organ­iser of sorts told us that the main event would begin around five in the big mar­quee, a huge mar­quee actu­ally, and we all con­ve­niently had names on tables. Handy, since it was get­ting blurry.

Inside the tent was a huge table run­ning down the west side (I think) set up for the offi­cial party, who now, I was told, included big parts of the All Black squad, par­ents, and guests from South Africa (Megan’s fam­ily is Zulu).

And there were lots of fab and famous peo­ple wan­der­ing around..TV folks, the odd Short­land Street bod and All Blacks.

So we all had another drink and the sun got stronger.

I looked around for food. There was none. Just aggres­sive wine wait­ers offer­ing top ups. The few pack­ets of crisps that were out when we arrived were long gone, so I went into the kids room and stole two cheese­burg­ers from the dis­trib­ut­ing Ronald, hand­ing one to Brigid. It was something.

It’s incred­i­ble what hunger, mixed with Pinot Gris and Stella will push you to do.

Around 4, we were stag­ger­ing a bit under the weight of all this and I watched the kitchen folks putting out the suck­ing pigs. Along the front of the offi­cial table they were laid out, with one per two peo­ple. Lit­tle fat ones (this far out I can’t recall through the blur if they had an apple per mouth or not) that sat in the heat and starred blankly out en-mass. So we had another drink and the musos puffed on some green stuff (I don’t do that, and haven’t for many years: I start think­ing my friends are policemen/women so it’s best to pass).

It was start­ing to fill up. The guest list was, I was told, offi­cially about 300 peo­ple, but many of those who’d arrived unin­vited at the church had made their first foray out to the For­mosa Coun­try Club and had parked their vans and cars in a large, pretty, grassed area behind the tent where they were pulling out the pub pets.

Their num­bers had grown to about 400 I guess.

The secu­rity guards looked itchy but they were unsure what to do.

Around five, as the sun still pum­melled us, and we were almost crawl­ing, the announce­ment came to enter the tent.

And we did. Brigid and I found our­selves seated with Jonathan, Mal­colm Black from Sony, and three Ton­gan fa’afafine from Syd­ney. A prime table right in front of the happy cou­ple. We started to chat to the trio from New South Wales. You’re with the Ala­tini fam­ily? Oh, no dear. Oh, you must be with Megan then? No, we’ve never met either of them. So who invited you? No-one. We just thought we had to be here so we booked a flight and here we are. But you’re seated on one of the best tables in the house. Oh god..we just waited until every­one sat down and were pointed by an usher to these seats.

We actu­ally hit it off rather well with these three, as we dis­cov­ered, dress­mak­ers, from Syd­ney who had no con­nec­tion to the wed­ding but had the best seats in the house.

Okay, we were seated but the speeches began..and we had a new batch of wines..red this time for me, deliv­ered to the tables.

The talk­ing car­ried on, and in a very Island, and I found out shortly, Zulu way, every speech demanded sev­eral extended responses.

There was no food. There was no ven­ti­la­tion and the tem­per­a­ture was rising.

Three hun­dred com­pletely ine­bri­ated, leg­less, guests, at least a dozen now froth­ing dead pigs that had been in the Feb­ru­ary heat for about 3 hours and ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and noise were head­ing to a climax.

I went for a wan­der to check on daugh­ter and found the hun­dreds of unin­vited guests behind the tent had started dig­ging up one of the gor­geous golf greens for umus to cook the bas­ket loads of food that were now being unloaded from vans. Pub pets (they’re the plas­tic beer con­tain­ers that brew­eries sell their cheaper brands in, in bulk) were being tossed around the course and all over the beau­ti­fully man­i­cured gar­dens where they were now stick­ing out like mutant gnomes from the New Zealand hinterland.

Isabella was fine and it was head­ing towards 8pm. The whole place was com­pletely shit­faced. The two sets of pho­tog­ra­phers were glar­ing at each other across a divide of angry, hun­gry, loud peo­ple. The odd scrap was break­ing out and nobody was pay­ing the slight­est bit of atten­tion to the bride, groom or whichever offi­cial guest was mak­ing the umpteenth response to what­ever response. All Blacks were chat­ting with girls who lined up to be chat­ted to, and every now and then one or two would wan­der outside..for a breath of fresh air of course.

And then they announced the din­ner would be served table by table as they were called.

Imme­di­ately there was, from every table, a mad demented rush to towards the food. The cater­ing man­ager leapt at the claw­ing mass of com­pletely oblit­er­ated guests, abus­ing them and phys­i­cally push­ing them back.

And then the power went off and a table full of food col­lapsed as 100 starv­ing drunk peo­ple forced their way to it in the pitch black.

After about 20 min­utes of claw­ing and scrap­ing, the power came on and peo­ple forced them­selves back up and found their way through the mess and con­fu­sion to their tables.

The tent slowly wound down as food calmed the masses and the tap on the free-flow booze was, smartly, turned off by some­one. And of course a few peo­ple sim­ply passed out, drunk in the over­pow­er­ing heat.

I went out­side to see how the umus were going and the secu­rity guards were doing their very best to get the old Corti­nas and the rest off the golf course before they set­tled in. As I watched two golf carts, with peo­ple hang­ing off the roof and sides, wheeled past and onto the next green where, as much as you can with over­laden carts, they tried to do wheel­ies and drifts.

It was time to leave and we crawled back to our wee chalet and promptly passed out.

The next morn­ing I wan­dered down to the recep­tion past the tent. There were bod­ies every­where, mostly the unin­vited masses who pitched their own pup tents or sim­ply slept where they fell. A golf cart was in the garden.

We paid and left as quickly as pos­si­ble. I’ve not been back, although Isabella was keen.

The next day Woman’s Day tried to demand their money back, but, caveat emp­tor, it was done and gone.

Both mags ran sto­ries about the gor­geous celebrity filled wed­ding and printed end­less shots of famous peo­ple and Peter Urlich.

I read some­where that they, in 2009, renewed their vows.

It’s been a project I’ve spent more than few leisure hours engrossed in and on.

I’m not sure that it will change the world but I’m well aware of the woe­ful state of the online doc­u­men­ta­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of so much of New Zealand’s music his­tory. There is of course the won­der­ful 50s and 60s ency­clo­pe­dia of New Zealand rock’n’roll pre­sented online by Bruce Ser­gent, but it hasn’t been updated in many years and remains unfinished.

There are other bits and pieces and the NZ His­tory site has some won­der­ful stuff. But it’s all very patchy out there and if the intent of my web­site is nar­rowed down to one thing it’s to try and doc­u­ment parts of our pop­u­lar his­tory that has largely remained undoc­u­mented in detail.

With that in mind I decided, a cou­ple of years back, to put together a sin­gles discog­ra­phy of what may be NZ’s most impor­tant record label, Eldred Stebbing’s leg­endary and ground­break­ing Zodiac, and it’s asso­ci­ated bits and pieces.

With Eldred’s pass­ing last year it seemed timely to finally fin­ish this, or at least take it to a pub­lish­able stan­dard, and post it, which I did a few days ago. This does how­ever remain a work in progress and I’ll add more images and data as it and they become avail­able.  The work of Chris Bourke, who’s forth­com­ing book on NZ music pre-rock, is one that I’m gag­ging to get my hands on, and Chris and his­to­rian John Baker have helped immensely.

There are some acts that defy my research and I’ve been espe­cially ham­pered by the fact that I’ve mostly done it from Asia, with a brief burst in the Auck­land library over Jan­u­ary. Hope­fully these come to light as this page goes live and peo­ple email me data.

All of these records pre-date my active involve­ment in mak­ing music and records in NZ but I both remem­ber many of these tunes as anthems when I was a kid grow­ing up lis­ten­ing to the ZMs and Hau­raki, and was aware of the huge legacy that shad­owed us when we began our labels in the early 1980s. These were the peo­ple that inspired us, and when I first met Eldred, in 1975, I was a kid in awe.

In other words, I’ve done this as a fan, and when I emailed Chris Parfitt of the Hi-Revving Tongues, who I loved as a kid, I gushed embar­rass­ingly and self con­sciously when I started the email.

I own about half these records, but made the deci­sion not to scan every label as it would swamp the page, which goes on enough as it is. And I’m aware that it’s mostly a trainspotter’s world here, but I hope the less nerdy amongst us can jump in and take a bit of his­tory away.

It’s scary how organic all these bands were..people went from group to group and grew with the label..the likes of Glyn Tucker, another one of my heroes, who recorded for Zodiac first in 1960 and last in 1968, with at least three acts. And it’s also very obvi­ous how much of an impact The Bea­t­les changed the pop world. Sim­ply put, there was Zodiac pre Fab 4 and Zodiac post Fab 4. They changed every­thing overnight and opened the door to the thing we now call Rock.

So, here it is, The Zodiac 45 list­ing, a rather silly thing to do but it’s been an obses­sive bit of fun and there is more to come at some stage.

PS. The image on the above left is only loosely Zodiac related. It’s a pri­vate image taken in Lon­don of two mem­bers of The Human Instinct before they returned to Zodiac and recorded two of the label’s finest albums. Its shows Mau­rice Greer and Dave Hur­ley in Regent’s Park dur­ing the heights of Pep­perism and is, I think, quite fab.