#roger shepherd

[ominous-synths-records]

Elvin Bishop - Juke Joint Jump

Designer: Roger Shepherd

Release: 1975

[fantasmicprincess]

Holy crap, Rodger Corser from NBC Camp has a really nice ass.

[littleotterconfessions]

[littleotterconfessions]

[reddingtons-fedora]

I have a feeling, I'm the only one who is upset over the Cole&Mack kiss..

...How are Roger&Mack ever suppose to get together..if Cole is in the way?! >_<

[fantasmicprincess]

Oops I already ship Mackenzie and Roger?

[pantograph-punch-blog]

Hold On The Rail, Part Two: A Conversation with Roger Shepherd

Last week, I published the first part of my interview with Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd for 1972. In the final part, we talk about those rough n' ready early days of Flying Nun, how close at least one of the bands came to being the next My Bloody Valentine (or at least, a big deal on the same UK label) - and a tough question has to be posed - did Roger know what he was doing half the time?...

PP: Even by the standards of this DIY movement flourishing all over the world, Flying Nun must still be an early adapter. I mean, we’re talking 1980, 1981. If it was in the air, you weren’t exactly chasing anything that had happened elsewhere years earlier.

RS: I think we were fortunate to all have access to tap into the same common influences and ethos – it was almost a seeding process. I just felt very strongly that there was some great music being made and it just needed to be documented. I certainly wasn’t like, ‘There’s a real business opportunity here, we could sell 5000 singles by this band and make a killing.’ It was more like, ‘I love this band and I love these songs and maybe we can make a record and sell a pressing of 300 and maybe cover our costs, and I’d be really happy with that.’ But there was that really strong anxiety, that maybe this would come and go and never be seen again – that it needed to be documented.

PP: Did you know what you were doing, though?

RS: I probably had the confidence to make people think I knew exactly what I was doing, but the whole initial Flying Nun progression was very much about finding out how to do things by doing them wrong, making horrific mistakes and then trying to stumble and recover my steps. My mistakes were mainly around...the kind of stuff they probably teach in high school accounting now. How to balance your books, how to keep track of ingoings and outgoings…how to keep track of which shops were stocking your record.  It sounds appalling now, because probably no child could go through school without learning the basics in, let’s say…debit/credit. Just the concept of that initially eluded me.

But I think we had really good people involved, like Chris and Doug (Hood), who became an integral part of it really early – I mean, with The Clean – Doug was the original singer of that band, with Peter Gutteridge in there as well. Robert Scott joined much later. So they sort of stumbled around, Doug left the band and slipped into his preferred role as soundman. I talked to Chris (Knox) a couple of years ago, before the stroke, and one of the things we’re still really excited about is The Clean. What they get up to, whether there’s a new album on the way. In retrospect, I realize that that was the connecting thing for us and the thing that was why Flying Nun…even was.

PP: So it pretty much coalesced around The Clean?

RS: Pretty much! Although we never nescessarily…realized it? Chris eventually came up here, and with everyone else being stuck in Christchurch, we had an ‘Auckland branch’ and just kind of developed.

PP: Did a band like The Clean, before Flying Nun was born…did they field offers from other existing labels?

RS: Oh, they were shambolic. I was there at the first gig, with The Enemy at the Beneficiaries’ Hall and they played three or four songs over and over because they were the only songs they had. And you couldn’t make out a hook, or a lyric, but it didn’t really matter. Because they had a little bit of a spark. And then Doug left and Peter left and they went through a brief but endless cycle of having various different people play with them, until I think Bob turned into someone quite solid that the brothers could work around? The way it works traditionally in The Clean of course is that: they argue for a while, and then they make Robert decide…or mediate. So it’s always the old “The Clean are back together! But for how long this time?” I mean, that’s only…a casual observation on my part.”

PP: I guess working in a record store in Christchurch at the time you encountered buyers going up and down the country from actual record labels. What kind of response did guys like that, and the people who worked in commercial radio give to Flying Nun at this point, or any of those bands?

RS: Well, they’d be dealing with middle-of-the-road kind of artists and releases. I’m just trying to think…they weren’t interested in anything that was going on that we were interested in, really. I mean, and The Clean were successful. They were the biggest band there for a period. But that was absolutely grassroots – not buyer’s supporting it, or anything. We sold a lot of that record (Boodle Boodle Boodle) and I remember at least one guy from a major record company being like: “You sold how many?!” Then they said how many time more they would have been able to shift, though it’s hard to see how in New Zealand in 1981.

Print media was really important. So journalists like Colin Hogg or Rob White…any journalists in proper newspapers who chose to review things, you’d be lucky. On the other hand, you got responses like “That’s not a proper album!” And then when proper albums…LP’s, as late as Bailterspace, came along, there was still resistance. The ODT, funnily enough, were dead opposed. Other print were good – Rip It Up, obviously, was really good. Student radio was really good.  Mainstream radio…(pauses)

PP: Yes?

RS: Quite often bands would have an expectation that those commercial stations should play them. And when that didn’t come to fruition, they’d get pretty angry – which I always thought was wasting your breath, really. They sell advertising. They have no obligations to any one artist, or band, or anything. I didn’t really see the point of lengthy toll calls from the South Island to these Auckland offices trying to get them to play things. It seemed pretty…dispiriting.

PP: That’d be like cold calling.

RS: Yeah, you wanna keep a focus on the people you like, basically. And, you know, sometimes there are opportunities to push stuff out. It’s got to be there, though. You can’t just get on the phone and ring everyone.

PP: But you actually got two number 1 singles in the charts, was that right? And one number one album.

RS: Headless Chooks- George, and The Chills – Heavenly Pop Hit? Hmm, or was the album – (Submarine Bells) number 1 and the single number 2?  But something like The Clean, Boodle was…I think that got as high as number 3. Now, that was in the chart for half a year, and it would dip, and then come back as and when they toured.

PP: With Boodle, were you caught short? RS: Always – some of the record shops would get wise to the fact that it took us longer to turn repressings around than a major record company. Our stuff was always bottom priority – it’d get pressed at the end of the month, when  they had some spare capacity. So we’d always run out of stuff. And so it’d be a lot of kudos for the band, you know – to be able to say that they’d ‘sold out’. So some places started buying multiples of a hundred, up to 500 copies of everything.

You’d have to wait for some older rocker guy to decide he needed twenty dollars, and you’d keep an eye out and he’d sell it to you. You couldn’t buy it for love nor money otherwise.

PP: Then, gradually, Flying Nun started making some of those things available. Flying In became the import wing for several years, and of course, you released that live Fall album (Fall In A Hole) – though the band - and by the band, I mean, I guess I mean Mark E. Smith - weren’t fans of it.

RS: Well, it was quite a chaotic time…I’ve read that book, that Mark E. Smith book – well, it’s not a book so much as a rant. I enjoyed the whole thing, but I disagree without about 90% of what he says, and I’m sure I’d probably disagree with about 90 % of his account of the recording of that performance. I think it was brokered between Chris and Doug, and they would have been the ones who tried to talk to The Fall or their people before recording it, but it didn’t seem very clean-cut…I’d like to look at getting it repressed, actually.

But then later on we did clean-cut deals with the likes of Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth – and maybe made those available a little sooner. I felt as though it was just good to be connected to the rest of the world in what we were doing? We live in quite a funny little insular place, you know, and there’s not very many of us. Even Australia is a long, long away.

I guess I started to realize quite early on in the label’s existence that the bands were all developing and evolving rapidly, and so for some of them looking outside this place was going to become important. And that started to show up limitations too: because they wanted, say studio time, and back then as now, studio time was expensive. The economics of it were always going to be exhausting when it came to selling our music overseas.

PP: So who was asking for this music from overseas first? Hardcore fans?

RS: We started off being mail order only, and that caused frissions of excitement where those people got jobs in little record stores, and then in other little labels overseas, and that created things like licensing opportunities, and a little more buzz. Tuatara, the first compilation we did, might have been the first time we really appreciated and became aware of that. It made up for the hours we spent around the table trying to decide on the name.

PP: Did Tuatara do what you expected it to do?

RS: More, actually. It helped to set low expectations.

PP: The other thing which was legendary in Rip It Up was Russell Brown’s coverage of a long, exhausting tour with the Chills around Northern Europe and the UK. Was that the first great push outwards?

RS: Yes, but I have to concede it was very much driven by the band. They were really ambitious at that stage. And we tried to help them in every way along the line.

PP: Had they put out Brave Words yet at that stage?

RS: No, Brave Words got recorded in London, when that tour eventually ground to a halt. We’d get intermittent faxes saying: ‘MORE MONEY NEEDED’. Still: how many bands in history have tried and do a tour like that having not even released a full-length album in their home country?

I often feel like I need someone on hand to produce a timeline for interviews like these: I could rifle through a document under the table, and say ‘Oh yes, May 1986, when the Chills were in Brussels!’”

 PP: There’s actually probably more than a few luminaries around the world who would have timelines that exact and would love to present them to you, Roger.

RS: There are…there are.

PP: You should hire one of those people at some point. They could just hover at the next seat over.

RS: Yeah. But I mean, Martin (Phillips) was really ambitious and he wanted to get out there and do it, and god…they gave it a real crack. And at the time…I mean, people in the industry almost laughed at them. To the publicists and the promoters who were very much embedded in that way of doing things, the idea of them trying to take England like that was just laughable. It was still incredibly expensive to travel to the UK – I mean now we all try to browse websites at 5 in the morning to get cheap deals. But for the time, those people were right. It was outrageous.

PP: Did it pay off, though? I mean, by the release of Submarine Bells, they’d built up a sizeable cult following. Relatively speaking.

RS: They got really close. So close. The band was hungry, Martin was still keen…and lucid. They had good, dedicated management. They were so close to ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’ being enormous in the UK. And I think that Martin saw that that could happen. I feel as if he saw it could happen, and ran away completely…that’s the tragedy.

Today, Roger Shepherd, after 15 years away from the label he started, is back in management and joint ownership of Flying Nun after it spent the better part of a decade in cold storage at Warners NZ (yes, the same label that blew a cap at Shepherd and co when they made a Stooges-and-cricket din at Sweetwaters back in the early eighties). The reborn Flying Nun has made a very deliberate habit of keeping to new releases by young artists (Die!Die!Die!, Grayson Gilmour) and new work by original members of the roster (Robert Scott) rather than becoming a 'nostalgia' label (in Shepherd's words). However, reissues remain on the cards - the near-inaudible mastering of The Chills' Brave Words has haunted Shepherd and all involved since the day they heard it, and it's a loop he'd finally like to go back and close. Remasters of New Plymouth's extraordinary industrial pioneers Skeptics, who Shepherd and others have made a strong case for as the single greatest act the label ever had, are also in the wings.

The Clean, who started this all, still record and perform intermittently. Both events are greeted with rapture by an international cult following.

The Chills never quite regained their stature after Phillips fled home, their early head of steam dispersing into lineup crises, drug addiction, and finally, inertia. They remain the interviewer's favourite NZ pop band of all time. He still holds a candle, in hope.

[pantograph-punch-blog]

Hold on to the rail: A conversation with Roger Shepherd of Flying Nun (Part One)

Back in February I had a chance to sit down and catch up with Roger Shepherd for a feature in Barkers' new lifestyle mag/look book 1972. The rest of the publication is well worth picking up too, with original writing from Steve Kilgallon, Gavin Bertram, Aaron Yap and Shayne Carter. Shepherd, for those who don't know, is the founder of Flying Nun Records, whose musical and visual aesthetic became one of our main exports to a number of other fertile cultural undergrounds in the 1980s. I've been looking at Flying Nun's product and hearing well-worn pressings of some of their key releases since I was able to crawl. So as usual, I found myself piledriving too much idle chat into a word limit, and with 1972 editor Duncan Grieve's kind permission, I've reproduced the first part of my unexpurgated chat with him (NB: the 'on the record' bits) here.

PP: This week you've been at Laneway, and then the next night you went and saw Holy Fuck and Les Savy Fav play at the Kings' Arms. Tired, much?

RS: I’m not very good at being out in the sun. But I didn’t have a choice, since it was Children’s Hour – a band not suited to the daylight either, really. Since it was early there was hardly anyone there, and so I pushed my way to the front.

PP: Yeah – still, this year’s Laneway improved immeasurably on last year’s. I remember the sight of grumpy people sipping beer and wine in pens while the bands were playing over on the other side. Kinda heartbreaking.

RS: Doesn’t work. I remember the old Sweetwaters actually, where you’d have to drink in a certain area, and you’d be patted down going in and out.

PP: This isn’t the ’99 one with the gang members doing security and drinking what they confiscated?

RS: Nah, nah – this was back in the eighties. We had a caravan there that we shared with Rip It Up. On the first day we took enough booze – whiskey and beer, for some stupid reason – to last us the whole of the three days. It ran out after one day. But Murray Cammick was having to drive back into the city every day to write up and cover the stuff. So, he immediately became the designated booze run. So we’d be hanging out for Murray to get back with the supplies, and then we got…well, Doug Hood was very much involved and he’d helped to bring the lights down, helped the festival with the audio and visual stuff and he’d set up a mini-PA outside of the caravan. And so we played what we wanted to. And at that time, your Sweetwaters audience wasn’t really interested in The Stooges. And we were playing Fun House out of this giant sound system. One time I went out the front and all the way up the hill, to the perimeter of the festival, and you could hear it just as loudly between songs of the bands playing on the main stage.

PP: Was the stuff playing on the main stage very much…hippie sort of stuff?

RS: Nah, absolutely new wave by that stage, haha. I remember The Narcs complained about the volume of noise we were making and threatened to push our caravan over into the neighbouring ditch. Then…Warners got really angry, because we’d apparently been audible during the Talking Heads set, or something? And then we decided to have a game of cricket in…well this small, open space in between all these caravans and this PA. And the sound of a cricket ball hitting the side of a metal caravan made quite a….”

PP: Reverberated for miles?

RS: Yep. For some reason, the ball didn’t come back.

PP: What did you do then?

RS: We decided to play with vegetables instead. Somewhere, there’s a great photo of me batting up defensively to a cabbage. I think possibly bowled by Harry Ratbag. I’ve been looking for the pic for a few years, so hopefully it comes to light now. It was jolly good fun.

PP: You mentioned The Stooges before, which, again, circa-1980 anywhere in New Zealand, wouldn’t have been something that prevalent. And prior to 1980, you were working in a record store. How easy was it for someone in that position, who’d maybe heard of The Stooges or The Velvet Underground, to track that stuff down?

RS: Not a show. Impossible.

PP: Out of print everywhere?

RS: Not necessarily internationally, but essentially you’d have to go overseas. Someone you know would, and come back with a crate of the stuff. Then when punk started, there was a group of us who would chip in together and buy new releases by mail order? And then one of the things that did help a little was the way major labels started touching some of these bands and making these bizarre decisions to actually release them. I was talking to Kody (Nielson) just recently and saying how one of the big things was that first Wire album, and that was kind of the way forward. I mean, I liked the Clash, but they were, really, another rock ‘n roll band.

PP: And they’d been a pub rock band six months earlier.

RS: Yep. And I mean, we loved the Sex Pistols, who had two fantastic singles, that changed the world, and were ultimately an incredibly significant band, but you looked at the rest of their output and wondered…where would that lead? A few years later, of course, you got Public Image Limited who were incredible, but for me, it was Wire. Because that record turned up really, really early on. It was like, “Shit. This is what’s next. This is what’s going to come out of it.”

PP: Wire were older than the others though, and they’d done their time as art students.

RS: Yeah, and I mean, I hear the influence of early Roxy Music really strongly in them. Because if you watch…there’s that DVD/CD release of them…it’s in Germany, it’s between the second and third album. They look glam. And it’s something that never really came across in the music.

PP: Even a band like Wire, though – sure, they had a lot of creative license that very few other bands had , but they were still under a major which ultimately frustrated them. So what actually planted the seeds of being able to do it yourself?

RS: That was a big part of the whole post-punk thing, do it yourself. There were those bands that signed to majors, and they probably got away with blue murder because the big labels didn’t know what the parameters were. It was that whole period where they were like – how is this going to work? Can we try and make money out of this? 

PP: And that led to Public Image, who you mentioned before, being able to do things like Metal Box- 

RS: Exactly. ‘We haven’t done this before, maybe if we throw a whole bunch of money at it until we get an idea of what the model is!’ (pauses) Sounds familiar, eh. But there were these models that were coming to us as a mail-order, word-of-mouth sort of thing, like Desperate Bicycles in London. This message that you can do it yourself. And in America, that whole thing of starting your own company to be a band and make your own records. It was happening there too. 

That was an international feeling that you’d read about from week to week in NME, read about in handprinted fanzines…you couldn’t read about them in any timely sort of way because these things were being shipped to you. Much later on, I did this outrageous and cutting-edge thing by getting a paid email subscription to NME just to get it quicker, which seems strange now because what you’d read in there is so appalling. It’s an appalling rag now. But then, it was very much the bible. Great writers, writing about good stuff. And you’d be able to track that stuff down yourself just by looking at the ads. Though of course, you’d be reading about these great records that had just come out – six months later.

Flying Nun was very much a part of that whole culture. These people said – oh well, no one else will put it out, let’s make it available – and so my idea with Flying Nun was …I mean, in Christchurch, it was localized to a point. But the Flying Nun idea was about breaking down some of that because it was so localized, trying to reach down to Dunedin. The idea of Dunedin just being self-sufficient for them – I mean, those ‘Dunedin Sound’ bands had to go to Christchurch and farther afield to find their audiences. That in turn gave them the sort of confidence that gave them the natural urge to make more music. So to me, it always seems like a bit of an oversimplification to say – oh, these wonderful things suddenly happened in Dunedin in isolation, because they didn’t.

PP: It’s interesting to read Rip It Up articles from 1981, 1982…that’s an Auckland-based editor and writers were doing what could be considered quite trad ‘There’s something in the water down South!’ hype articles after the Dunedin Double came out. So what was the relationship with Auckland like for you guys? It seems like it was full of more typically trendy bands, as the big smoke.

RS: Well fashion always was – is, still is a more significant thing here. So to be honest, the sense down south was that people in Auckland tended to be a bit more…’in tune with international developments’. In Dunedin, I mean, you didn’t know what ‘international developments’ were! But, you know, it’s interesting seeing Children’s Hour on Monday, because I think they were our first Auckland band, one of the first that we started working with. Chris Matthews I would have met when his first band, Prime Movers, that he drummed in, supported the Clean at the upstairs of the Edinburgh Castle. Which, for us, coming up, was the scariest place in the entire world. You walked up some open stairs above the public bar. It was terrifying. You had to make sure you didn’t leave at the same time they were emptying out downstairs, or you didn’t have a shit show of making it out in one piece.

PP: So, basically there were a bunch of guys looking to pick fights with students and punks?

RS: It’s like that in Dunedin to this day, actually. But I guess in being Dunedin, I missed out this whole clash Auckland had between, say punk and disco people. It wasn’t a musical thing, necessarily. There were always just awful student-bashings in Dunedin…but Auckland was bit more vicious.

PP: Would you have gone to see a band at the Kings Arms 30 years ago?

RS: <laughs>. I made the mistake of going into the public bar once. I needed change, something stupid like that. I didn’t have any cash, the doorperson wouldn’t let me in to get money out in the concert venue part, I wasn’t allowed to and had to go to the public bar! I thought: what are you trying to do to me? I snuck in, and luckily they were so drunk that I wasn’t even registered. No idea. I still got in and out, quick.

Next time: how one record store geek started a label to document his new favourite band, pissed off Mark E. Smith, and almost scored a worldwide heavenly pop hit...