Playing favourites

As Flying Nun celebrates it's 30th anniversary, Roger Shepherd chooses his favourite albums from the record label.

[1]
> The Clean: Compilation
This was put together as one of Flying Nun's first CDs in 1988 and collects all The Clean records released up to that date.

While the later Clean Anthology takes in material from the 1989 Vehicle album, as well as other material, this set concisely captures the band in its early 1980s rise to greatness, showcasing the Tally Ho! single along with the Boodle and Great Sounds EPs, and the greatly underappreciated Getting Older, plus a few relevant recordings from the time.

Compilation works because it has the highlight songs, but, more importantly, because it captures the period so completely.

The Clean has continued to produce great music throughout its long intermittent career, but it is this material that catapulted it out of Dunedin and saw it build a long, loyal audience internationally and influenced all who were part of the Dunedin scene around it. It's remarkable music that blew away the cobwebs that shrouded New Zealand music at the time and changed everything forever.

[2]
> The Gordons: The Gordons
I first saw The Gordons in 1980. They cleared Christchurch's old Gladstone venue within seconds, with tables and a notable music journalist pushed over in the process. No-one had heard sheer volume like it before. But it wasn't just very, very loud, it was also very different and new, with no obvious influence. It was a startling example of what was being thrown up by the general feeling of "anything is possible" attitude created by what we now know as post-punk.

What this three-piece achieved was a stripped down sound that revolved around sparse but powerful guitar playing over a powerful rhythm section. This re-release brings together the pre-Nun Future Shock single and the band's first self-titled album and contains all the great songs: Adults and Children, Spik and Span, Machine Song and Future Shock itself. An influence on anyone who has heard it, and still no-one has made anything quite like it.

[3]
> Toy Love: Cuts
Flying Nun released this double-CD package in 2005 and it collects the original 1980 Toy Love album together with a disc of the singles, the AK 79 tracks, plus some educative demos.

The Toy Love album itself was long overdue for a sonic tidy up and sounds much improved for it. At the time there was a huge anticipation for this release and most felt greatly disappointed with its flat sound. It mirrored the rollercoaster ride of the band itself between 1979 and 1980 that crashed to ground with this release and the break-up of the band.

With Cuts, the album itself has been restored to health here. But Toy Love is just part of the story. The band grew out of Dunedin's truly ferocious The Enemy, members of which were a direct influence on their friends, who promptly formed the first incarnation of The Clean. Then, after the Toy Love break-up dust had settled, Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate kept working together as low-tech innovators the Tall Dwarfs.

Toy Love itself grew out of the full-blown punk belligerence that was The Enemy and tempered it with Jane Walker's keyboards and then created a sound that was perhaps more "new wave" and allowed the always-strong songs to glow more colourfully. If you want to know where we come from musically, listen to this.

[4]
> The Chills: Kaleidoscope World
The Chills are Dunedin music royalty, along with Toy Love and The Clean, and the band that came closest to conventional international success.

Kaleidoscope World compiles the best of their early material and showcases Martin Phillipps' strongest songs from the formative period in The Chills' journey.

The material was originally released between 1982 and 1986. All the early gems are here, taken from their side of The Dunedin Double and the subsequent singles; Rolling Moon and Pink Frost, along with the fortunately found Lost EP, the Doledrums single and finishing with the near-perfect I Love My Leather Jacket/The Great Escape double single.

The whole album oozes with talent and inventiveness. All sorts of songs fizzing with an abundance of ideas, thoughts and sentiments, many of which are specific to Dunedin in spirit, if not in the detail, but also incredibly universal in reach. I believe that balance between familiarity and the unknown was a large part of the appeal that propelled the band to within a whisker of international success later in the 1980s.

[5]
> Verlaines: Juvenilia
Juvenilia is a collection of early Verlaines material, so-called because the material there in is the product of an immature or developing mind that has yet to get to grips with the full requirements of his or her art.

Juvenilia is a term that could be used to describe an awful lot of popular music, both good and bad, and is probably a contributory factor in my own enjoyment of so much in this collection. Yes, Graeme Downes went on to craft some absolutely excellent albums after this period, all of which I greatly admire, but these are the songs that get me bopping around the house on a Saturday afternoon (wife and children out of the way, of course).

These are the songs that take me right back to afternoon parties in Dunedin in the early 1980s listening to music, smoking cigarettes (yes, they were legal back then), drinking astonishing amounts of whisky and other things that were also fun. C.D. Jimmy Jazz and Me, Pyromaniac and Death and the Maiden: in my mind these were the songs that were playing there. Like the undeletable turntable hits of the mind that will forever connect me to Dunedin of the 1980s.