biography

As a kid I never really liked listening to music. I would sometimes listen to the local radio station on my little transister radio the my parents gave me as a bithday or Christmas present when I was about ten years old, around 1975 or so. The music they played never realyy did anything for me, mostly top twenty crap, which I thought was just that - crap! Mind you - you couldn't really expect a hell of a lot more. At the time, Nelson only had the one radio station, which played typical middle of the road music for conservative 1970's Nelsonians. In retrospect there was good music out there, I just wasn't going to get to hear it on Radio Nelson. My Dad had a record collection, a hundred or so records of classical and opera music which I thought was just way too serious. I was definately one kid who wasn't going to follow in my Dad's footsteps! I did however, make my own music. At school I was forced to learn the recorder. At first I wasn't exactly enthusiastic about playing the recorder, but after a couple of lessons I found that I actually quite enjoyed it. I learnt to read music fluently, and would spend hours playing songs from piano sheet music books. I had to teach myself new chords all the time, as the piano music had far more difficult chords to play than what I was been taught at school. I could pick up just about any music and play it straight off by simply reading the music and doing what it said. The teachers were quite impressed, but there was just one problem - I played far too fast! When I was playing in group sessions, I would always be out of time and flying ahead of everyone else. The teachers wanted me to slow down. I didn't want to slow down, so I stopped playing the recorder at school and would only play at home.

Fast forward to 1979, and I found myself skateboarding. ("Why can't you play rugby like everbody else?" I can remember my Mum moaning.) There was a small group of us who had built a half-pipe on a friends small farm. We would go to the local car factory on our bikes and score sheets of plywood from car cases which the unassembled cars were delivered in. We could score large sheets of plywood for very cheap, or if we were lucky, for free. We would tie these sheets of plywood on to our bikes and wheel them back to the farm, about five kilometres away. We ended up with a good sized halfpipe, about eight feet high and about twenty feet wide. There we would spend all day, everyday, skating and collecting scabs and broken bones. We were doing tricks such as one wheelers, grinds, small airs, rock n rolls, and one of us could do inverts. Our skateboards (which we had to send away for) consisted of Edwards Vert Machine, (pictured) or Caster decks, (I had a Chris Strople model, after the Vert Machine) Tracker, Lazer and Gullwing trucks with Edwards Pinkies, Sims Snakes or Wings wheels. We were the Richmond contengent, but there was also another small group with a half-pipe in Nelson, about thirteen kilometres away. Sometimes we would bike or skate into Nelson and ride their half-pipe with them. they were a bit older than us and better skaters, so it was quite cool to hang out with them and watch them skate. One day when I was there, there was music been played on a tape deck. Now, this music sounded fuckin' great. I'd never heard anything like it before (I had been listening to Devo up until now though). It was loud and aggressive and I liked it instantly. It was fuckin' great to skate to too! There were two bands that I particulary liked - the Sex Pistols and 999. There was also the Buzzcocks and the Members. Yay, I'd finally discovered some music that I really liked! (One of these Nelson skaters, a.k.a Harry played drums and a couple of years or so later ended up playing drums in well New Zealand band the Dance Exponents.)

HOME PHOTOS DISCOGRAPHY SOUNDS LYRICS REVIEWS

MOTHERTRUCKER RECORDS GIGS ARTWORK OTHERSHIT CONTACT LINKS

Me skating on our half-pipe, back in 1979.

I actually started collecting records after that. A couple of days later I went into a record shop and found "Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols" and the Buzzcock's "Singles Going Steady", which I bought and became the first two records in my record collection.The next album was 999 and shortly after that a brand new release of American band the Dead Kennedy's "Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables". (I knew about the Dead kennedys after reading an article in "Skateboarder" magazine.) My Olds really loved my new growing record collection, NOT! (Turn that fuckin' NOISE down!)

For the next couple of years I would scour the local record shops looking for punk records. They were generally few and far between! One day, it must have been 1982 or so, I found a record of a band I had never heard of, but was called "Punks Not Dead" (which I agreed with) by a band called The Exploited, so I bought it. The second wave had arrived. Yay! Shortly after that we started getting a magazine from England called "Punk Lives", which was fuckin' great for discovering new punk bands. I discovered the likes of Discharge, GBH, Vice Squad, 4 Skins, The Business, Subhumans, Crass, Conflict, Disorder etc etc.The magazine always portrayed an Anarchic Punk/Oi divisionism but I just loved the fuckin' lot. (I did prefer the politics of the anarchist bands though, I was never really into kicking peoples faces in, as some bands would sing about.) With the magazine came some Music World releases, with those Punk And Disorderly albums, Blitz, Peter And The Test Tube Babies and other compilations (That was about it, though.) For anything else I had to either go to Christchurch, which sold punk imports, or order them from England, which was fuckin' expensive, thanks to Customs charging me 75% what I had already spent on the price of the records and postage!

Up until this time I had never seen a punk band live in the flesh, (I was seventeen by now) until one night me and some friends were in town on the piss. We heard some punk music coming from a place above a shop on the main street, which I didn't recognize, so we went up to check it out. The first thing I saw when we walked through the door was some guy who was completely naked except for a studded leather jockstrap. The place was filled with all kinds of deviants and bikies, with a shitload of pot going around. To our surprise the music was a live band. They were called Boner and they fuckin' rocked. I must have gone to all of their gigs after that until they broke up. Their gigs were usually pretty wild with hundreds of people turning up. Two gigs I particulary remember was one where someone drove their four wheel drive through the front doors of the venue and an outdoor gig where bikies threw a constant barrage of bottles at them until they were forced to stop. The guitarist smashed his guitar up. Just before the gig a bikie smashed a full can of beer into the bassists face! They also played at parties at their house, an infamous, windowless place called "The Pit". This house once got flooded out during some flood and they were hooning around inside in canoes. They also had a TV which worked great apart from the fact that it played upside down, after it got knocked over due to a scrap between Mark and a guy called Malcolm. The T.V sat upside down on a beer crate after that!

Boner playing up the Maitai around 1982 and a photo I took in Havelock of Andy, Malcolm and Jon while coming back from a piss trip to Blenheim, 1982 - 83.

Clockwise from top left - on my Triumph 2000, on a flying fox up the Maitai, playing silly buggers in a shopping trolley, playing on a slide at the Richmond Mall, at Blenheim and looking for food in Blenheim.
All photos from around 1983.

In 1985 I quit my job and lived in my car, a beaten up 1968 Valiant Regal, which was purple, but slowly morphed into matt black, with a mohican skull on the bonnet. (Eventually ending its life as the South Island's stockcar champ, with "OUTLAW" and a spiders web added to the bonnet skull.) It was a fuckin' great life-style, living wild and free, drinking lots of piss, taking lots of drugs and generally annoying hell out of the local businesses, the cops and council. There was a good street kid scene going down at the time and there was always a party going on. We hung out at the Church Steps, at the top of the main street, opposite the council buildings. I would annoy the mayor (The Slasher Malone) by parking my car in his special carpark right outside the Council Buildings and party up and play loud music such as Discharge or Antisect. Any requests for the car to be moved or the music turned off resulted in a guaranteed FUCK OFF! We also managed to fuck off old "El Cheezo", the owner of the cafe on the other side of the street, the oldest cafe in New Zealand and also the filthiest. "You a Smella like a deada horsa", he would say to us, quite untrue, we smelled like several dead horses! We used to have parties in his cafe (we'd take in a keg of beer) when it rained. Once he tried to kick me and a friend (Triggs, his parents gave him a one way ticket to England, to "become a junkie", I haven't heard of him since) out by saying we couldn't drink in there unless we bought a meal. We went through our money and we had seventy cents between us. We asked for a menu and found we could afford a fried egg, at exactly seventy cents, so we ordered one. He came back with two plates, with half a fried egg on each plate, with a bit of a tomato and parsley. He let us drink in there after that. The old Bugger actually had a sense of humour!

Clockwise from left - the church steps. The council buildings were on the left and the Chez Eelco was on the right. And me sitting on the church steps, getting my hair bleached, on the church steps with Steve and having a feed at Spewbag Mel's house. Photos from 1985.

After the Valiant had all but died I moved to Christchurch for a year or so. I would go to some gigs, the most memorable being Holocaust and No Idea. I moved back to Nelson and rented out a warehouse with a friend. It was just a large room with electricity but no toilet, shower or running water. I won't say where we crapped, you can probably guess! There was, however, a fire hose outside which served as our shower and place to do dishes. I had been playing guitar for about two months (it was now 1988 and I was twenty three) and decided to form a band. I got the usual encouragement from people such as "you can't play guitar" and "you'll never form a band". Luckily, I don't really give a shit what people have to say, and started jamming with Rik, who would play drums with pots and pans, forty four gallon drums and other bits of metal we found lying around the industrial wastelands of what I called home. Shortly afterwards Rik bought a Premier drumkit for $90. Luxury! Nath bought a plastic microphone from Dick Smiths for about $20, so now we had a singer. Jon bought some shitty Vesta bass and Dead Centre was born. Our first gig was at the Dovetail Hall with Fast Food At Eight, Basta (later, Waltermitty) and Bloedmann. We were allowed to play right at the end, which suited us, as we and everyone else would be too pissed to care what we sounded like. The PA crapped itself with the band before us, so we just played through the amps, vocals and all. It was our first time on stage for all of us, we were crap and we thought we may get lynched. Surprise surprise, the punters really dug us. (Fools, it's a warped world!) People wanted us to come and play at their parties. "We've only got six songs", we would say. "Doesn't matter, just play them over and over".

Performing with Dead Centre in Dunedin, sometime around the early to mid 90's.

Dead Centre continued practicing and playing gigs. We used to do lots of gigs at the Nelson Musicians Club, a club formed by this German guy who had just moved from Germany. The expressions on some of these musicians faces as we played our racket was priceless. I think we used to really piss them off, as people always seemed to enjoy us the most. They just couldn't understand why people dug us. (Neither could we!) This German guy was utterly confused. he must have wondered where the fuck he had landed. There was one incident where he lent us the keys to the clubrooms, for a practice. He didn't trust us with the keys at all, and he said over and over again, "vot ever view do, don't looze ze keyz". We jumped into the car and Rik threw the keys onto the dashboard. It was a hot day and I had my window wound down. We went flying around a corner, the keys slid across the dashboard, and went flying out the window and into a patch of long grass. FUCK! We stopped the car and looked for ages for the keys, but couldn't find them. They had gone to Lostrailia! We had to go back to him and say, "aah, I'm afraid we've lost the keys". I actually think he wasn't at all surprised! Once, a noise control officer came round when we were practicing, and told us we were too loud. We said to the noise control officer, "how do you know we're too loud, you ain't got no decibal metre?" She said, "strangely, the council buildings got broken into last night and all the decibal metres were stolen". If she had looked on top of one of the amps, she would have seen one of them lying on top of it, in plain view! Ha ha! Dead Centre continued in said fashion until 1990, doing our last gig at the Foxhill Hall, the same night that the Bolger National Party got voted in as Government.

I formed another band, called Dratsabeciloptihs (spell backwards to find out what it means). Nath decided he'd like to play bass, I played guitar, Bronwyn did the vocals and Bonnie played drums. We did a few gigs around the place, mainly parties, for a few months, until Bonnie had to call it a day. We got Richard on Drums and Brent joined up playing lead guitar. Bronwyn still did the vocals, along with Nath, who was starting to be able to sing while playing bass. We changed the name of the band to Boris. Boris did quite a few gigs, as we were in quite high demand and were getting lots of gigs thrown our way. One memorable gig was one in the Pohara Hall, over in Golden Bay with Invercargill band Moral Fibre, whom we were supporting for their Nelson gigs. We had to drive over the Takaka Hill and it was snowing. We had two vehicles, Moral Fibre's van and Bronwyn's flat deck ute. When we got to the Takaka Hill the road was closed, but we thought, "fuck it, we'll give it a go!" Moral Fibre were ahead of us and we hadn't seen them coming back the other way, so we presumed that they were giving it a go as well. Both vehicles had to make it over to the gig, as the P.A was split between the two vehicles. It was not easy going and in places we had to get out of the ute and push it up the hill. We finally got to the top (the Takaka Hill is about 25 kilometres, up and down) and inched our way down to the bottom, all the time hoping that the other van had made it. We drove into Takaka and straight away saw the other van. They had made it too, the show would go on. We played to a good hall full of people and it was a good gig. The effort had been worthwhile. Boris had been going for only about three months, when one member had to leave, which resulted in the whole band falling apart. A bit of a shame really. Oh well!

Bonnie's 21st birthday party, around 1990.

After Boris broke up I moved to a bach in Riwaka, a small farming community just outside of Motueka, fifty something kilometres from Nelson. It was fuckin' great, no neighbours and right by the Riwaka River. I bought a drum kit, the idea being to learn drums, and record my own shit by layering the tracks one by one. It never happened, as Rik started coming out and jamming with me. We re-hashed some of the old Dead Centre songs, along with some songs I had written for Boris, but a lot of it was new material. I was doing a lot of writing at the time, so there was no shortage of new songs. So there was me and Rik jamming away, with both of us doing the vocals. Eventually, Jon would come out as well, so we reformed Dead Centre as a three piece. We played our first gig at a party up Sunday Creek, in 1993. With Dead Centre reformed, we started to spread our wings and play gigs away from Nelson. We played in Christchurch quite a lot, the gigs there were always good with enthusiastic and large crowds of people. We played in Dunedin a few times as well, but never got large crowds there. We did play one gig there though, that became a bit infamous, when we played non stop from 11:30PM until 5:30AM. We kept getting joints thrown up on stage and told to "keep going!". So we did. We also toured the North Island a few times. We were all quite surprised to get up north and find that people had actually heard of us (as well as the Dunedin "marathon gig"). Some of our best gigs though were the house truck parties, usually in the middle of nowhere playing to house truckers (Obviously). For some strange reason these house trucking hippies actually dug us. It's surprising where you can find your audiences! There was one gig we did, in an old railway tunnel, which was fuckin' awesome. It was quite a long tunnel, about twenty kilometres before Murchison, heading towards Christchurch. Country Calender, a rural TV show, came out to film us, as they were doing a double episode on house trucking. I can tell you one thing, they didn't get what they expected. When we finally saw the show, we were on for about half a second. And that's probably an over estimation of time! The Country Calender crew must have thought we were all totally mad. It was the middle of winter, bitterly cold, with the wind blowing straight into the tunnel, and all anybody seemed to talk about was drugs!

I finally talked the guys into releasing a Dead Centre CD. They weren't very keen on it, they wanted to stick to just vinyl. Anyway, I put up the money and we compiled a DAT using the best of our recordings along with some live stuff. I sent the DAT to a CD manufacturer along with a bromide for the CD label. They refused to press the CD's for us, saying that the workers were offended by the label and that they didn't want to look at it. (The label was just a big "FUCK OFF!") Conservative fuckheads! I told them to send back the DAT, but they never did. WANKERS! We gave up on the CD. A bit of a shame, I think.

By 1997, I was living in a small house truck / caravan combo. The truck was the main living area with the caravan used as the bedroom. It was on the same farm as the bach but in a different place, still by the river, powered with solar power.

Riwaka, around 1997. Clockwise from top left - the truck/caravan unit, Kez's GTO (I had a white one), truck/caravan again and Kvackers the duck.

With a renewed interest in the idea of doing my own recordings, I started to collect the gear to enable me to do some basic recordings. I had never done any sound engineering before, but hey, I'll just teach myself as I go. How hard can it be? To me, it made more sense to spend money on the gear and teach myself, rather than spend the same (or more) money on some course and not have the gear afterwards. The idea was to get a listenable sound, and not get bogged down with technicalites, or tying to become some sort of fuckin' professional. D.I.Y punk rock will do for me! Anyway, I always did, and still do, hate schools of any kind. Because of a lack of space, and simplicity, I got a drum machine to do the drums. I think I insulted some punks sensibilities by using a drum machine, ("mutter mutter drum machine, mutter mutter mutter") but real punks do what they fuckin' well like and don't follow anarchist rules (?) or conventions! I got the same thing with CD's (save the vinyl and all that! Nothing wrong with vinyl, but hey, there's nothing wrong with CD's either, they're just different and you can do different things with them!) and CD's were a lot cheaper than lathe cut vinyl, and unlike lathe cut vinyl, you could actually play the damn things! And fit more songs on! And record them themself! I personally don't really give a fuck what format I release songs on, as long as it's cheap and I can do most of it myself!

I would do some of the recording in the truck, but had to do the guitars in the farmers kiwifruit packing shed, as the invertor couldn't handle the guitar amp. I did the mixing in the shed too, using headphones! I recorded three albums this way (Adipocere, Xarg and Jenny's Revolting Peasants). To cut down on CD recording, I decided to take the best songs from these albums and compile them onto one CD. I called that album "Puke - It's Adipocere, Xarg And Jenny's Revolting Peasants", which effectively ended up being my first album. I ended up calling myself "Puke" after this.

About midway through 1998, after almost ten years together, personalities within the band were getting a bit strained, so Dead Centre called it a day. We played one last gig together, at "The Grovelling", on New Years Eve. That gig took Dead Centre past the ten year old mark. My last gigs in Nelson were with me playing guitar and doing vocals, Kez Bizarre doing additional vocals and Xanataph playing bass, with a drum machine, under the name of "Puke And The Revolting Peasants. The songs were live versions of some of the recordings I had been doing.

I moved to Dunedin in 2001, mainly for cheaper living, and moved into a house. There I could set up my recording gear in my bedroom, and spend more time on songs. I also aquired a bit more gear, such as a compressor, mike stand, pop guard and reverb unit, to help make the vocals sound a bit better. The first album I recorded in Dunedin, "The Sound Of Puke", consistered of songs that I had recorded in the truck, in Riwaka, that didn't fit onto the first "Puke" album, remixed with new vocals, or re-recorded, along with some new songs. I did some gigs with the drum machine, and two additional vocalists, Kez Bizarre and Gaylene. We called ourselves "Puke And The High Chords" (T.H.C). After a few gigs everyone referred to us as "The Pukes", so we changed our name to that. One night, Garth, who usually plays in covers bands, did the sound for us, and he ended up joining up on bass. We did a few gigs with that line up, but had to say goodbye to Gaylene. We advertised for a drummer, and quickly got Sam, who was Garths first choice even before we advertised, so that was pretty cool. This line-up of me, Kez, Sam and Garth lasted until May 2005. Then Garth left so we got Dan on bass and Alice doing more vocals alongside Kez. Then Dan and Alice left, so we got Liam on bass. We haven't done any studio recordings yet, but have released (November 2003) a DVD, of live songs, called "Oh Shit! It's The Pukes Video DVD". I started recording my third album in November 2002. It was basically an experiment, making up my own drumbeats on the drum machine. Up until then all recordings had been done basically with the preset drum patterns that came with the machine. Since about 1991, I've been writing "The Nightmayor Of Nelson", songs using the mayors of Nelson as the main characters, written as time goes by and as events happen (Boris and Dead Centre performed Part I, and Dead Centre also performed and co-wrote parts II - IV). The songs were based on events that actually happened, but twisted into some sort of horror story. It was fitting to wrap it up, once and for all, as I no longer live in Nelson. The album ended up in thirteen parts, and I completed it in March 2003. I went really hard on it, to get it out of the way, to end an era, and it just about drove me insane (or more insane, a bit like this biography) at times. I have just started recording my fourth album, as well as The Pukes album.