A Brief History Of New Zealand Guitar Pop

BOOK EXCERPT: James Harding of Best Bets

We are hard at work on Remember The Lightning: A Guitar Pop Journal, Volume 4, which should be available in October 2024. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to share an exclusive excerpt from RTL:AGPJ, Volume 3, written by James Harding of excellent New Zealand indie/power pop band Best Bets. Get ready to (re)discover a lot of great music. You can also hear five of my favorite Best Bets songs at the bottom of this book excerpt.—S.W. Lauden

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“Welcome To Nowhere”

By James Harding

“I would like to spend some time in isolation with you. I come from nowhere, welcome to nowhere…”

If I had to name one band who altered the musical landscape of our country—at least in my lifetime—it would have to be the Mint Chicks. 

Many reading this will know Ruban and Kody Nielson through their work in the hugely successful psychedelic rock band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, but before they conquered the world, they conquered New Zealand. 

The Mint Chicks was the first bar show I ever attended. They played The Dux, a tiny venue in my hometown of Ōtautahi Christchurch, shortly after I turned 18 (the legal drinking age here). It was their first tour of the country, in support of the release of their debut EP in 2003.

I stood nervously in anticipation at the side of the room along with 30 or so people.

I’d first heard of the band when I saw them perform at an awards show on TV and I knew it was going to be confrontational, but they hit the stage and proceeded to deliver what is, to this day, one of the most explosive sets I’ve ever seen.

Musically, they were like nothing I’d ever heard, somehow simultaneously abrasive and impossibly catchy. As their career progressed they leaned into the power pop side of their sound, culminating in their 2006 magnum opus Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! 

For a brief moment, they were the biggest band in the country, and they did it without ever losing the essence of what made them unique. Fans wanted to see them, bands wanted to be them. For people like me starting out in bands, they were proof positive you could do it.

I probably need to back up here.

I may be getting ahead of myself in assuming everyone reading this knows where New Zealand is. I was once asked by someone overseas if you can drive from New Zealand to Australia (it’s not advisable). 

Aotearoa New Zealand is a small Pacific country at the bottom of the globe. We have a population of just over five million people, and just over 25 million sheep. The country is made up of two main islands, the imaginatively named North Island and South Island. Aotearoa is the generally accepted te reo Māori (Māori language) name for New Zealand, the most commonly used translation being “land of the long white cloud.” 

I think our guitar music has always been on the slightly disaffected end of things. In 1966 the Bluestars released their now classic single “Social End Product,” which included the infamous line: “I don't stand for the Queen, and I'll ask what those traditions mean.” A young band from a commonwealth country issuing this kind of challenge way back in the mid-‘60s is pretty wild to consider, and it certainly set the tone for much of the rock and roll music that was to follow.

For a small, isolated and relatively young country, we’ve always seemed to punch above our weight on the global stage when it comes to the creative arts. Of most relevance here (not to mention importance, obviously!) is the seemingly never-ending stream of great NZ guitar pop bands that have emerged from various garages, practice rooms, living rooms and garden sheds over the past six or so decades. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland exports the Beths have already featured here (Remember The Lightning: A Guitar Pop Journal, Vol. 1), and alongside UMO, they’d have to be the best example of a New Zealand guitar pop band currently taking on the world and winning.

There are a bunch of other amazing New Zealand guitar pop bands you’ll likely know as well, like Crowded House, Split Enz, the Clean, and the Chills; and plenty you almost certainly won’t, such as Shaft, the Situations, Street Chant, and the Reduction Agents.

But I can tell you that some of the most memorable and life changing live shows I’ve ever seen were when rock and roll revelators Shaft turned an upscale bar in Ponsonby, Auckland into a non-stop party. 

Or when my power-pomping personal heroes the Situations played to 30 people at a community hall in the remote Coromandel. Or the time Street Chant played an unbelievable set at a Halloween party in Devonport, Auckland which ended with frontwoman Emily Littler falling off a drum kit and nearly exiting through a second story window. Luckily, she impaled her jeans on the hi-hat stand or the band’s career could have been very different. (Side note—you must check out her solo stuff as Emily Edrosa.) Or when I happened to be having lunch in the Canterbury University student union cafeteria and witnessed James Milne (aka Lawrence Arabia of the Reduction Agents) play an awe-inspiring solo set to me and about seven other people. 

As with any country worth its salt, the ‘70s saw the emergence of a healthily unhealthy punk scene in New Zealand.

A crop of bands emerged, including Auckland’s Scavengers, Spelling Mistakes, Proud Scum, Terrorways and Suburban Reptiles, who each produced classic singles. Some of them even hinted at something poppier, like the Spelling Mistakes’ “Feel So Good,” and the Scavengers’ “True Love.” 

Further south punk was a happening thing too, with Christchurch’s the Androidss releasing their classic single “Auckland Tonight,” and the genesis of the Dunedin sound being cooked up by bands like teenage sensations Bored Games and my personal favorite NZ punk band, Toy Love. Most of these bands were immortalized on the compilation AK79 on Ripper Records, now a much sought-after collector’s item.

As the punk bubble burst, many of the bands were already looking in new directions. The Scavengers moved to Melbourne and became Marching Girls, issuing the power pop single “First In Line” before disbanding. (Singer Brendan Perry would go on to form goth pioneers Dead Can Dance.) Bored Games members Shayne Carter and Wayne Elsey formed Double Happys, and Carter later started Straitjacket Fits following Elsey’s untimely death. 

Importantly, Toy Love included three people who would soon be key figures in cementing NZ’s reputation as a stronghold of bloody good independent music, not that they knew it at the time. Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate reemerged as Tall Dwarfs, pioneers of lo-fi indie experimental music, and Knox was instrumental in the birth of Flying Nun Records when he recorded “Tally Ho,” the debut single by an emerging Dunedin band called the Clean on his Teac four track tape machine. Meanwhile, bassist Paul Kean showed up in the short-lived cult band Playthings, before forming the beloved and still very active Bats. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

When I was growing up during the cultural wasteland of the early 2000s in rural North Canterbury—about 25 kilometers out of Christchurch by motorway—the music of Flying Nun, at least for me, was reserved for rare appearances on late night music television. Around this time the bands that were sparking my musical fire were the Beatles, Ramones, the Clash, the Kinks and the Jam. 

Like most bedroom guitarists my age I had honed my rudimentary chops by learning Green Day and Nirvana songs, and together with my friends Olly Crawford Ellis on drums and Colin Roxburgh on bass, I soon did what any bored 15 year old in a backwater town is wont to do—I started a garage band. We were called the Transistors—we had no idea what we were doing and we just went for it. 

In between performing bad covers and writing even worse originals, we were always on the lookout for inspiration as we tried to find “our sound.” The garage rock explosion of the early 2000s provided us with plenty, including two bands from right here in NZ who were blowing up globally: the Datsuns and the D4. 

Like us, the Datsuns were from a small town (Cambridge, in the upper North Island), but unlike us they were musically proficient, schooled in Zeppelin, AC/DC and Cheap Trick. 

The D4 meanwhile took their cues from Dead Boys, DMZ, the Stooges and the Heartbreakers. They were the brainchild of Dion Palmer, who had previously played in two of my all-time favorite NZ bands, the Rainy Days (one of the many projects of mercurial songwriting genius Dave Graham) and Nothing At All! (a bratty garage punk three-piece from Auckland’s North Shore). 

Tragically, NAA!’s promising career was cut short by singer/guitarist Tony Brockwell's death from cancer in 1998 at just 21. Dion collected himself and formed his own band the D4 that same year, and their rise to international success was seemingly meteoric (or at least it was from our obscured view down south).

After we left high school we relocated to the “big smoke” of Ōtautahi Christchurch for university and we decided to make a go of being a real gigging band. We played often and anywhere (once even five times in one day), opening for reggae bands, folk artists, twee pop combos, electro bands, and once and never again, a fantasy metal act who played for four hours, and did a dreadful Black Sabbath medley that was longer than our set. 

At one of these shows we met Adam McGrath, a guy who would have a big impact on us.

At the time, Adam’s musical journey had seen him veer off towards country and folk and he would soon form the Eastern, one of the country’s hardest working bands. But like so many musicians, Adam had come up through punk and quickly schooled us in some of the bands we had been missing out on, such as Black Flag and Fugazi. 

Adam’s old band the Bains also became an influence via their impossible to find self-titled album. Outside of NZ their name will seem innocuous, but any true crime fanatics out there will know that Bain is the surname of the family at the center of the most infamous mass murder in our country’s history, and calling your band that name just a few years removed from the grisly crime certainly courted controversy. When we raved about our love of the D4, it was Adam who handed us a burned copy of the Nothing At All! album by Dion’s previous band, who the Bains had played shows with. 

The opportunity to open for our heroes the Mint Chicks came up in 2006 and that led us to John Baker, and to Bob Frisbee, both important figures in our rock and roll history. Bob produced our first two albums. He had previously produced Nothing At All!, the D4, the Rainy Days, Shaft, and the Situations. John opened the door for us to tour overseas, and more importantly gave us the belief that we could do it. 

In the time I’ve been in bands, there were two distinct periods of music in Christchurch—everything before February 22, 2011, and everything since.

That’s because at 12:51 pm on that fateful day a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the heart of the city. The force of the quake, and its arrival during the busy lunchtime rush, meant that 185 people lost their lives and countless homes and buildings were destroyed. 

It seems trivial and in the scheme of things it is, but a knock-on effect of the quakes was that the city’s few music venues were either damaged beyond repair or permanently closed, which meant live music was no longer an option. International acts canceled and stopped coming to town altogether, and everything went very quiet. 

House parties ensued as a temporary but unsustainable measure and soon we were desperate for something new to be established. Respite came, first with the opening of the small labor of love venue Darkroom six months after the quakes, and then the establishment of Space Academy across the road a few years later. Other venues came and went in the decade since, but those two remain steadfast as the beating heart of the scene.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. Some truly amazing bands emerged from that period, like Salad Boys and Wurld Series, both of whom have received much international recognition. 

Salad Boys were the brainchild of Joe Sampson, a local producer, songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire. He’d previously played in louder, rockier bands like T54 and Charlie Bones, but Salad Boys marked a shift towards jangle pop purity, reflecting his love of New Zealand guitar music, as well as bands such as REM, Wire, the Soft Boys and the Feelies. Their self-titled and self-released demo from 2013 caught the ear of Chicago label Trouble in Mind, who released their superb albums Metalmania in 2015 and This is Glue in 2018.

Wurld Series started as a lo-fi bedroom recording vehicle for Luke Towart’s wonderfully weird songs. The band has since expanded their pallet from GBV-style guitar pop into pastoral psychedelia and even hints of the Canterbury Sound championed by the likes of Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt. This is best exemplified on their epic album from last year The Giant’s Lawn.

By 2016, the Transistors had come to an end. Colin, who by now had a young family, was ready for a break from music.

Olly and I weren’t done playing together and looked at what to do next. During the course of our time in the Transistors we had become power pop fanatics, obsessing over bands like the Nerves, Big Star, Shoes and the Real Kids. 

This had crept through a little bit in our songs (and certainly into our choice of covers), but now we wanted to embrace it fully, so we formed a new band called Best Bets to do just that. After releasing an EP we joined up with Brian Feary, manager of local record label Melted Ice Cream, and drummer/producer for Wurld Series, to produce our debut album On An Unhistoric Night in 2022. 

Like many scenes, ours is incestuous, so much so that I’d need a complex family tree style diagram to illustrate just how entangled and deep the roots really go: Every member of Best Bets has played in Salad Boys at one time or another; Joe plays in Best Bets; Joe and Brian have produced Best Bets; Brian has drummed in pretty much every band in town, and on it goes…and I guess that’s really what makes a scene isn’t it?

It’s always dangerous when you start listing bands and artists, because there’s the risk you’ll forget someone.

There are so many names I could mention from Ōtautahi Christchurch who are doing their own version of guitar pop: Pickle Darling, Imperial April, the Sundae Painters, HÖG, Violet French and the Horrible, and Ben Woods Group, to name just a handful. 

Things are good in our town now. It’s been mostly rebuilt and the scene feels as strong as it's ever been. Come on down some time, I’ll be happy to show you around. And take you to a few shows.

James Harding is a singer-songwriter, occasional writer and general music obsessive from Ōtautahi Christchurch. Two of his bands—Best Bets and Transistors—are set to release new albums in 2024, which is very exciting indeed if he does say so himself.

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Five Best Bets Songs You Need To Hear

by S.W. Lauden

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