How Flying Nun Records Built An International Indie-rock Legacy On Their Own Terms

Back in the early ’80s, a quiet musical revolution took place in the South Island of New Zealand, based around the hub of indie tastemakers Flying Nun Records.

The label — home to a slew of influential bands such as The Clean, The Verlaines, The Chills, 3Ds, Tall Dwarfs and countless more — was formed by record store clerk Roger Shepherd, and this slew of often weird, off-kilter music he curated would reverberate though the musical world for decades to come.

Shepherd recently revisited his tenure at the indie-rock coalface in his 2016 autobiography, In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records, and is also hitting Melbourne for the first time in 25 years to participate in a talk called Roger Shepherd On Life & Flying Nun Records, which he’s conducting in conjunction with The School Of Life.

“I don’t mind looking back, I’ve always felt I did good work. I guess the regret is that we never got one or more of the bands away in a bigger international commercial sort of sense, which would have kind of made everything easier. Or harder,” the affable Shepherd laughs from his current abode in Wellington. “Just a new set of hard, I guess. I think we really got really close with a number of the bands, but I’ve always felt really proud of the music that all those bands played. I couldn’t have written a book about a whole lot of crap music.”

The musical revolution that Flying Nun caused back in the day wasn’t a massive tumultuous change like the grunge movement, for instance, more a subtle shift in aesthetics that happened slowly over a number of years, coming to the fore in the mid ’90s when revered bands such as Pavement and Guided By Voices started admitting the influence of Flying Nun bands on their music.

It’s not a big, loud, boastful influence; it’s more of a subtle, ripple effect.

“Yeah, I think it’s just a subtle influence that rippled out, but it was definitely there,” Shepherd concurs. “It’s funny, when I did a talk in Auckland recently and took questions from the crowd — typically the guy who was supposed to interview me was so drunk he couldn’t do it, so he just handed me the microphone and I threw to the audience after about two minutes — and someone put their hand up who I knew vaguely and told about how he’d been away in the early ’80s and come back to New Zealand in the late ’80s after having stayed with all these musicians he knew in San Francisco, and he was flicking through their record collection and there was all these Flying Nun records from New Zealand that he didn’t know anything about but that they were all really, really into: it was the Pavement flat. They were just in the process of starting a band and that was partly what they were into.

“But the influence really is there. The UK comedian Stewart Lee is a fan and he talks about that, about how it’s not a big, loud, boastful influence; it’s more of a subtle, ripple effect, and how all of the music that we like these days was probably somewhere along the line informed by something that happened in Dunedin the early 1980s. I quite like that.”

The Flying Nun story predominantly took place on New Zealand’s South Island, which in the ’80s was just about as far-flung a locale you could get in terms of Western civilization, and it’s commonly espoused that this remoteness played a large part in the Flying Nun scene establishing their own sound and aesthetic unfettered by trends and external influences. As Shepherd recalls, even the North Island seemed positively exotic by comparison.

“All of the main centres — as we still refer to them even though Dunedin is the eighth-biggest city in New Zealand now — are all distinctly different, in the same way that London and Manchester used to be distinctly different, and I think a big part of it was the isolation,” he ponders. “And Dunedin was the most isolated, so influences might have seeped in in the form of imported records and whatever, but not much for a long, long time managed to get out.

I could have moved to Dunedin but we would have been going the wrong way, because the interest by that stage internationally was really getting quite marked, and we need to be closer to the rest of the world.

“Then I’d go to Auckland and it was like everyone was in Spandau Ballet, which was slightly alarming — if you look at a whole lot of people who are dressed as the members of Spandau Ballet, you know it’s not sustainable. Or meaningful. And Christchurch was different again, but Auckland was definitely miles ahead musically and in fashion and food. It was nowhere near as connected as, say, Sydney or Melbourne, but in the sense of New Zealand, it just had a bigger international airport and was slightly closer to the rest of the world.

“Which was something we were aware of when we moved the [Flying Nun] offices to Auckland in ’87 or ’88: I could have moved to Dunedin but we would have been going the wrong way, because the interest by that stage internationally was really getting quite marked, and we need to be closer to the rest of the world, so even just that small move to Auckland seemed significant.”

The remoteness of the scene and their music — which universally came to be known as the “Dunedin Sound” — still only partly explains the amazing convergence of talent which occurred, with so many amazing artists seeming to congregate in the one place at the one time.

“Well, people talk about the Dunedin Sound, and I don’t really think there’s any such thing, really,” Shepherd says, somewhat doubtfully. “Or perhaps there is. No, not really. This is actually the tricky bit — this is the part of the book that I wrote and re-wrote so many times, the bit about the Dunedin Sound, and veering from, ‘Of course it exists!’ to ‘No, it doesn’t!’ This went on for a long time, right until the final editing stages when they were going, ‘Roger, you have to make up your mind!’

“I just wasn’t sure, but I gave it a lot of thought and I’m still not sure. I can see another book coming up. It’s hard when you get down to the nitty gritty, but talking about the Dunedin Sound is avoiding the reality — what there was a ‘Dunedin music scene’, and that’s what was strong, and out of that came all of this different, quite disparate music. There was the creative environment that allowed all of these different people to make this fantastic music. None of those bands really have much in common: they might occasionally sound similar because they shared a soundman or they recorded in the same crappy studio, but essentially they were making quite distinctly different music, despite sharing members and all sorts of things.

“So I think it’s about the scene and it’s about the environment and it’s about Dunedin itself: that quirky, weird Dunedin thing. It’s pretty Scottish, and it is isolated. Isolated and insular, I think. I spent a lot of time going down there in the ’80s because I used to love it and they had good parties, which was good, and I felt that there was something happening — there was a scene — and I felt a part of that.

There was a general environment that kind of encouraged people to do their own creative thing ... That doesn’t really exist in other New Zealand towns of a similar size.

“I actually thought at one stage of moving the label to Dunedin, and then realised that it was actually about selling the music internationally, so we ended up moving the office to Auckland. But it’s a wonderful town and I went back a few years ago for the first time in yonks because I was in the UK for ages, and it really was a little bit like a step back in time.

“It’s tiny, just 120,000 people, and I think about 20,000 are students who come and go. Through writing the book, I’ve become quite fascinated with it, the bit that I could really explain was ‘Why? Why did it all happen there?’ The musicians and people down there themselves, no one’s been able to accurately explain it. I think punk rock had a lot to do with it, and perhaps the impact of that on a small, isolated city. The thing that makes it different to other towns is that it does have a university — it is a big university city — so there is a big intellectual aspect that doesn’t exist in other small towns.

“And say Robert Scott [of The Clean and The Bats]’s father was a maths lecturer at the university — a lot of people had connections [to the uni], although I wouldn’t necessarily say they were studying philosophy, although some of them were, but there was a general environment that kind of encouraged people to do their own creative thing and be thoughtful and think about it. That doesn’t really exist in other New Zealand towns of a similar size, which are usually just ordinary towns and farming reliant, just big farming service towns, which Dunedin isn’t. You can even say that about Christchurch, which is a large service town.”

One of the aspects of running an independent label that Shepherd covers wonderfully in In Love With These Times is the difficulty of finding a balance between art and commerce (especially when things begin to go well on a commercial level).

“I guess I always liked a sale,” he admits. “I’d had enough of a background in music retail to know that the wheels moved and you could sell a record or a hundred. But, on the other hand, I guess I was possibly slightly too realistic about having a record label based in the South Island of New Zealand about ever being able to make any money, so I guess I was pushed in the direction of, ‘Let’s just try and make some great music and everything will look after itself.’ It will sell on the basis of being good music rather than trying to pander to any trend.

“There’s no way we could have afforded putting any of the bands into proper studios — which they would have hated — and expose them to proper sort of record production, like producers and people who would have naturally hated the music that those bands were making, with the idea of making something that radio was ever going to play.

“From very early on, I knew that wasn’t an option, so it was, like, ‘We’re making art,’ and people have to respond to that. We can’t try and be dishonest with ourselves thinking that we can generate music that’s going to be played on the radio, and if we did go down that route that it would be disastrous financially and psychically. It would have been the end.”

There was this kind of grassroots audience that was suddenly there and were really happy with that, and willing to buy it in big numbers.

Did this approach give Flying Nun a sheen of integrity because they were doing it for pure reasons?

“Yeah, but I think there was a pragmatic aspect to that as well, which perhaps wasn’t necessarily understood at the time,” he reflects. “Really I’d go and see a band play live and luckily early on one of them was The Clean, and I thought, ‘Shit, they’re really good,’ and I just wanted to record them. It was like the best thing I’d ever, ever seen and I just wanted to record them. The best connection was hooking up with Doug Hood and Chris Knox and the four-track, and finding a manageable way of capturing their sound and being happy with that.

“And there was this kind of grassroots audience that was suddenly there and were really happy with that, and willing to buy it in big numbers. I guess that audience developed out of that post-punk boom as well — a timing thing. But that audience was important — if The Clean had gone and recorded some super-slick, rearranged and recorded one of their songs and got some session musicians to play on it because they weren’t very good at playing, and not that AutoTune existed but they’d used the primitive technology which existed at the time to fix any imperfections, and made the band spend days working on the drum sound just to get it right, that audience which did buy [1981 EP] Boodle Boodle Boodle would have been horrified. And the band would have been suicidal and that would have been the end of it.

“But it happened the right way — there weren’t any big major philosophical decisions, it was just, ‘Let’s do this. Do you want to make a record? This seems like the viable way to go without creating too much stress and it should work out okay.’”

There was a certain amount of originality in the air, really, a sense that anything’s possible.

Once the Flying Nun brand had been established globally with the first wave of bands, was it important to foster the next generation like Garageland and Bailterspace which carried the torch for the label in the ’90s?

“Bailterspace came out of The Gordons, and Garageland were sort of younger, but they were all there because that other stuff had happened — that Dunedin thing with The Clean and The Chills and The Verlaines,” Shepherd offers. “Everyone could see that there was a way of getting your records reviewed overseas, there was a way of selling your records overseas, there’s a way to start a career internationally perhaps, although we weren’t 100% sure how that was going to happen.

“So there were a whole lot of bands who were making interesting music that just got given that encouragement, I guess, to play and be active but also creatively to do their own thing. They could see that people were responding to originality rather than a local covers band. There was a certain amount of originality in the air, really, a sense that anything’s possible, and people were really energised by it.”

TALLY HO!

We asked Shepherd to select his favourite three bands from the entire Flying Nun era and he happily obliged, even if one does get the impression that we’re making him choose favourites from amongst this children.

“God, there’s so many,” he laughs. “I have to be careful, but here goes...”

THE CLEAN

“The Clean have to be on top because they’re such a special band. They were the ones that kicked everything off for the label and they were phenomenally good. They made some great records, and David Kilgour is such a fantastic, brilliant guitar player.”

TALL DWARFS

“They kind of showed a way forward and a different way of recording. The Tall Dwarfs is Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate from The Enemy and Toy Love. They came back from making the big record company album dissatisfied and found another way of making music — on Chris’s four-track — and starting from quite a basic level and building up from that, then eventually going into studios and making a lot of curious, inventive, quirky, poppy music.”

THE CHILLS

“I’ll say The Chills. Martin [Phillips] really gave it a good shot at international success and got so, so close with [1990 album] Submarine Bells and [its single from the same year] Heavenly Pop Hit — they were so, so close. Again, it was a lesson for all of us in terms of how much work was involved to try and achieve some level of mainstream success, and how exhausting and how much hard work it is really. But Martin and The Chills wrote, recorded and performed so much great music, and he’s still going strong.”