You think you are but we know you're not

The things you find in old boxes:

July, 1977

I feel watched and unwanted / but I am alive

A lifetime ago, in very early 1977, when a few of decided to dip our toes into the just bubbling punk thing we were reading about in our three month old NMEs it seemed like a fairly slight thing to do, a thing without any momentous import. With Brett Salter and Bill Pendergrast I formed The Suburban Reptiles for no other reason beyond the idea that it sounded like a fun thing to do, and it raised a finger to the dross that was coming out of the bars and clubs. Across town The 1B Darlings, an ATI band playing lots of r'n'b and glam covers mutated into the more punk,  The Scavengers, about the same time and I guess for the same reasons.

We soon became a fairly close knit grouping of mates.

Over the next few years the thing we started took on a life of it's own and dozens, maybe hundreds, of bands were formed in the style of the genre and it's mutated offspring, post punk, and the more brutal oi!

But even when, ZM Dj, Bryan Staff formed Ripper Records, and AK79 was released at the end of 1979 (but in real terms early in 1980) it was still just a thing of it's time, We all loved it for that, despite the fact that we knew then that that time was passing,  but I'm thinking Bryan saw the run of 500 as covering the demand.

Eventually, hooking up with CBS he sold many times that number but by the time it was deleted in 1983 we all thought it had run it's course.

By 1993 when I put together the extended version it was obvious it's legacy went beyond the initial release. It had become more than an album, it had become the definitive document of an era which had, without question, kick started the explosion of New Zealand music, both on record and live to the place it was then, and even more so now.

Bryan's album has become the most important New Zealand release of the past forty years. Without it, no indie labels, no live explosion of the 80s onwards, no creative splurge. It was the record that began the New Zealand recording industry as we know it now.

So, when I decided on a re-release it was essential to do it justice and not only did I carefully remaster the original, but I extended it from 10 tracks to 26 to cover every important NZ recording of the era. I'm happy with the result and it's gone around the world in this form.

So, in 2008, almost 32 years after it all began in Auckland, in The Scavengers' practice room in Customs St and the basement of a house in Ponsonby Terrace where the earliest Suburban Reptiles noise was made, John Baker, after a huge amount of work has managed to put together quite a lineup of bands, including a version of The Scavengers, Proud Scum, The Spelling Mistakes, The Features, and The Terrorways, (the links before I'm pulled up are from an article I wrote in 1980 and not updated at all from then, but I though oddly appropriate since we're looking back) three of whom haven't played since 1981. It's at the Montecristo Room on November 22..and around the same time the unreleased Features album we recorded for Propeller in late 1980 will also get it's debut release.

I'm not going to be there as geography precludes it, but the thought of missing the faces I know are going to be there (but not the almighty hangover that is a given) is making me a bit misty eyed. But that's tempered with the fact that I'm still pretty close to so many people from that era, many I talk to on a daily basis. We were a gang, and there was something about just being there.

Hell..it would be fun though...

PS..the top photo is from the lens of Sara Leigh Lewis...for more go here

The bottom image is a postcard, drawn by Johnny Volume / Scavenger and sent to me in 1978..I don't think it's appeared anywhere before.

Technorati Tags: NZ Punk,Ak79

well don't look now / but here comes Johnny Cool

The sound is rough as guts and even the visuals are shaky but this is another fucking cool few minutes of retro guitar pop. How cool is Brendan, and Des looks as wonderfully un-flusterable as he did the hundreds of times I saw him play. But the obvious question is, how did Johnny get a sticking plaster on his head. I have a fair idea. Oh...this is The Marching Girls, ex-Scavengers..First in Line, a single I released back in 1980 on Propeller.

Simon says you gotta do this / Simon says you gotta do that

Went to the Rising Sun in K Rd last night (I love that way, year in year out K Rd is the one reliable never changing Auckland vista....thankfully annual reports of its impending gentrification are always proven incorrect) to see The Scavengers do the reunion thing. Well kind of....

The Scavengers mutated over a few litres of bourbon into the poppier Marching Girls late 79 but this was hailed as the first Auckland Scavs gig for 26 years. That in itself was a stretch: firstly the endless Scavs farewell gig routine went well into 79; secondly The Scavengers, as The Marching Girls, toured these Isles several times in the eighties including quite an extensive jaunt in late 1980 to support the "True Love" / "First In Line" single I'd just released on Propeller; thirdly, the later day Scavengers were a trio of equal parts and Brendan "Ronnie Recent" Perry had other commitments and wasn't able to travel, understandably, the several thousand kilometers from Ireland for a one off gig in a pub in Ak's sleazy side.

So his shoes were filled by Dion from New Zealand's best rock'n'roll band, The D-4, and (almost..it wasn't quite the same) adequately filled with accomplishment by a guy who admits his band owes sooo much to these guys. After the show someone asked him if it was as good as singing with the MC5...Dion said the Scavengers meant far more as this was his history, the MC5 were just an American band he was heavily influenced by, and he's right.

The show itself...short (12 3 minute songs), anthem filled (I was touched to be the only person to get a song dedicated to them), and loud (vastly better sound than I've ever heard the Scavs...we used to throw the vocals thru the guitar amp back then), but Mike "Lesbian" Simons' duet with Dion on "Mysterex", a song written in spite about Mike after he left the band to pursue a globally very successful advertising career (someone asked him if he regreted leaving.........) made the show something more than just an old rock'n'roll band reuniting and just about compensated for Brendan's absence.

Thing is though, it wasn't just an old rock'n'roll band reuniting, it goes so much beyond that. When The Scavs came together out of the Ib Darlings at ATI, and Jimmy, Billy, Zero & I formed the Suburban Reptiles at the tail end of 76, it wasn't with any great vision in mind, that part of it was accidental, it was simply an inadvertent part of a global desire to de-bloat popular music. None of us, when we formed these bands had heard much of this stuff (I had a Ramones album but you simply couldn't buy any punk in NZ until mid 77), I guess we knew things simply had to change. For me I wasn't as offended by the British prog rock thing, at least it had some sense of its own style, as I was by the post Warner-Elektra-Asylum-Little Feat-Steely Dan mush. Beautifully played, emotionally devoid, FM rawk.

That's why we existed, it wasn't to ape the Sex Pistols, who we really hadn't heard but to knock down this status quo. Which is why the first gigs we sought out for the Reps and the Scavs was supporting these sorts of bands and taking our 20 or so supporters in to cause a little mayhem at clubs like Moody Richards in Airedale St.

And you know, I'm more than a little proud of our legacy. And more than a little grateful to John Baker and Simon Kay for being so passionate about preserving the legacy.

S'funny though, looking at the crowd last night...about 60% young and 40% older...how fucking polite they all were, with the young posse trying to do the pogo thang they'd seen on the DVDs ( don't think I'd really seen pogo-ing in NZ until after AK79, a record which opened the punk floodgates here but really was the obituary of the original scene...it's release signaled punk's demise, in Auckland at least). The only abuse the band got... and 25 years ago they would have been mercilessly heckled, and would have expected it.. came from the Reptiles' bassist, Billy Planet, standing next to me.

Someone had to do it......

But the real action last night was the extended after show in the public Casino bar next door. After parties are sometimes better than the gig. A mix of relaxed and aging faces who haven't really seen each other for well over twenty years, and gobsmacked twenty somethings with records to sign.

It was, more or less, a class reunion, a private members club, the punk elite RSA, gathering for one last time, because it won't happen again. We know things that others will never know and we did things that made a difference. Comrades in arms. There were missing faces, a few dead of course, but not many, surprisingly, considering the hedonism of the times. And cameras everywhere.

Fuck me, I had a great time, and fittingly the last to leave were John Baker, Simon Kay, Johnny, Des, Billy Planet and myself.