We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. “We spent long journeys in a Leyland bus, smoking pot and having a hilarious and happy time.” Back then NZ was repressive and patriarchal – abortion was illegal.” Today, she looks back on those days fondly. “Certainly there was an emphasis on new ways of thinking and creating throughout our culture. “Those stoner days were hugely liberating for me,” says Julie Needham, Mammal’s electric violinist and harmony vocalist. Poet Sam Hunt featured on their lone album, Beware the Man (the title track is a paranoid classic), and they toured from Invercargill, the country’s southernmost city, to Kaitaia, in the far north of the North Island, playing to enthusiastic hippies and threatening biker gangs. And Mammal were celebrated for epic live workouts in which the band might travel from country into surf rock then Sun Ra spaciness before ending with guitar wig-outs. From 1971, Highway’s only album is enjoyable if nothing compared with their live shows, where the quintet would jam out Allman Brothers-worthy improvisations. Space Farm’s eponymous 1972 debut album found the quartet cranking out primal, mescaline-flavoured anthems that could now be considered Krautrock’s South Pacific sibling. The Human Instinct were a power trio featuring guitarist Billy TK (AKA Billy Te Kahika), who was often billed as “the Māori Hendrix”: their 1970 album Stoned Guitar is storming, sulphuric acid rock. Through invention and sheer bloodymindedness, Kiwi psych bands helped lay the groundwork for the local film industry, Flying Nun Records and the foregrounding of Māori and Polynesian voices. Murphy’s films (often starring Lawrence) were praised by esteemed New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, while Jack Nicholson once called Lawrence his favourite actor. Broadcaster Television New Zealand (TVNZ) commissioned Blerta to make short films and, in doing so, launched the collective as pioneers of independent Kiwi cinema. Formed in 1971 as an improvised music and theatre cooperative led by Lawrence, an extrovert jazz drummer, Blerta’s anarchic performances featured homemade 8mm films directed by trumpeter Geoff Murphy with Lawrence in leading roles. The band who made the biggest impact were Blerta (Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition). “They’d read about it and decided they could do it – very much a product of the drip feed of information mixed with Kiwi ingenuity.” “These bands were a local simulation of what might have been happening at the Avalon Ballroom,” says Bollinger, citing San Francisco’s countercultural ground zero. Psych folk (Tamburlaine) and boogie (Highway) rounded out the scene. Photograph: Geoff Studd/Private Collectionįew of them recorded, but those who did loosely divide into two camps: the likes of Space Farm, the Human Instinct and Doug Jerebine were inspired by the acid-blues firepower of Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Rory Gallagher while Mammal and Blerta used jazz and R&B to create a more freeform, improvised sound. A new book, Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand, details how, inspired by the Beats and the Beatles, an array of maverick personalities began shaking the nation out of its somnolence.įresh Air playing at Jumping Sundays, Albert Park, 1969. But cracks in a conformist society began to appear towards the end of that decade, as a homegrown counterculture sprang up thanks to the government’s support for the US war in Vietnam and rock music developing into a vehicle for dissent.įor a nation now attuned to reevaluating its post-colonial history, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to this period when youthful energy disrupted Kiwi society via protest, humour, poetry and music. It’s a far cry from the 1960s when the conservative National Party government maintained “rule Britannia”: little television – and zero film – was homemade, local brewery DB’s tasteless beers were the nation’s tipple and popular musicians tended to faithfully replicate British stars. In the 21st century, New Zealand is widely hailed as home to a progressive Labour government, a hi-tech film and TV industry, formidable wineries and sagacious singers Lorde and Aldous Harding, alongside much else.
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