Review: Songs From the Shaky Isles, by Gareth Shute

Until recently I lectured in the University of Auckland's School of Music. One of my most crowded classes was for a paper on the history, context and sociological impact of New Zealand popular music in our developing culture.

Students enjoyed it, it was mostly new to them and came with a mostly great soundtrack.

No set text could cover the ground but I recommended the final chapters of Chris Bourke's excellent Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964, John Dix's Stranded in Paradise (which moved the needle on from Bourke) and the website for AudioCulture/Iwi Waiata, which bills itself as 'The noisy library of New Zealand music/Te pātaka korihi o ngā puoro o Aotearoa'. One of the most prolific contributors to www.audioculture.co.nz has been Gareth Shute.

He wrote about bands, seminal solo artists, important venues and scenes, and articles across the genres from early rock'n'roll to the emergence of hip-hop and little-known alternative artists. Shute has also written five books on our music scene.

Who better then to undertake a short history of popular music from waiata and early colonial folk songs to the rise of hip-hop and the recent politicised music – a blend of rap and jazz -- of Avantdale Bowling Club?

Songs From the Shaky Isles is admittedly a surface skim; careers and genres go by at the turn of a page.  Hello Sailor, for example, get imploded into a few pages alongside fellow travellers Th'Dudes, Citizen Band and Mi-Sex. But the distillation sometimes makes for racy reading where brief references (Sailor's Blue Lady referring to a brand of syringe) carry weight beyond the words.

You admire Shute for getting Split Enz down to little more than a page.

His scope is full of fascinating characters and ever-changing music, so these pages have been a labour of ruthless editing, exclusion and whittling. But the well-illustrated book (excellent live shots, a few telling album covers, portraits of artists) concedes as much in the subtitle: this is a short history.

That said, Shute – briefly of course – accommodates the importance of television in the creation of pop stars like Dinah Lee, Mr Lee Grant and others in 1960s; the culture of festivals, programmes like the Smokefreerockquest to assist emerging talent and the troubled business and growth of Flying Nun as a little local label which took on the world and sometimes won. Other record labels like Deep Grooves, Loop, Li'l Chief (a quietly successful label Shute is associated with) and Pagan get their due in passing also.

He writes of the sometimes controversial role of NZ On Air, and how streaming changed the game in the past decades. It's a lot in just 200 pages.

From the empowered soulful singer Aaradhna to Zwines punk club in the 1980s, this is an alphabet of New Zealand popular music in a century or so. Much will be familiar and this will book criticised for its lack of detail, but we should remember for young readers everything before Benee and Lorde is mostly unknown territory and ancient history. For them, and others who disconnected after the pop excitement of their youth in whatever decade, Songs From The Shaky Isles could be a useful if short introduction to our popular music.

Every library and school – and homes where there are early teens – should have a copy.

Reviewed by Graham Reid