Epic new epoch

The 4EPs bands U-No Juno, Sivle Talk, Vagina Dry and Sogg. Photo: Ethan Montaner

Four young Dunedin bands are drawing on the city’s rock ’n’ roll heritage to create new possibilities, Tom McKinlay writes.

Community halls have played a critical role in the development of Dunedin music.

Take, for example, the storied Beneficiaries Hall, where The Clean first played live. Or Māori Hill’s Coronation Hall, host to The Chills’ first outing.

So, appropriately enough, a meeting called late last year to plot the next chapter in the city’s rock ’n’ roll story played out in one of these significant public spaces.

Organiser Natasha Griffiths convened the occasion at Pioneer Hall, Port Chalmers, already a foundational venue for the bands who assembled.

Arranged in a circle were one-man music industry and industrial-grade polemicist Sivle Talk, preternaturally talented high school noise merchants Sogg, artfully angular indie songsmiths U-No Juno and gale force riot-grrrl punk rockers Vagina Dry. Ten young musicians in all, aged 16-22. Four very different bands, yet all also members of the same cohesive scene turning heads up and down the motu - and further afield.

Griffiths brought doughnuts, but she needn’t have. The bands would have come anyway.

Sogg was going from the moment Griffith’s ‘‘suspiciously vague’’ invitation arrived in the inbox, guitarist and frontman Ollie Kemmett recalls.

The plan and the mission, as Griffiths outlined to the bands, was to take the not inconsiderable buzz they were already generating and amplify it, broadcast it to a bigger, wider audience.

And, in doing so, both remind the listening world of the city’s proud guitar-band history and let it be known that nothing’s changed, Ōtepoti is still killing it.

The strategy finally hatched was for the bands to reimagine the fabled Dunedin Double for a new generation - 44 years on. The original was released by Flying Nun in 1982, capturing some of the early music by then relative unknowns The Chills, The Stones, Sneaky Feelings and The Verlaines. Each contributed a side to the double-EP gatefold release.

‘‘But I don’t want to do a Dunedin Double, because I want it to be something that kind of self-generates, you know, so there are more,’’ Griffiths says in the corner of a cafe courtyard, sketching the way the idea for the 4EPs project took the shape.

Griffiths has long been involved in the Dunedin music scene, in one capacity or another, and she’s seen potential stumble short of success many times.

‘‘It’s really easy for these bands to kind of disappear into what I call the wilderness years and go round in circles playing the same venues,’’ she says.

Some time later they are left with a demo tape and regrets for what might have been.

Not happening this time, she says.

Tane Cotton of Sivle Talk. Photo: Grace Basel

But in championing Ōtepoti’s blisteringly hot new rock ’n’ rollers, why not reference the city’s proud history and that seminal double-EP release.

‘‘Why not pay tribute to that moment?’’

The vibe would be do-it-yourself, the bands remaining in control of the process and reaping the benefits, but also do-it-together, the community elevating each others’ work. And buttressed at key points by the industry expertise - mastering, the vinyl press, etc - required to do the music justice.

The community element is such an important part of our music scene, Griffiths says.

U-No Juno guitarist and singer Stefan Keller confirms it.

‘‘I don’t want to, like, start a new beef, but you wouldn’t see Wellington doing something like this.’’

Timing in music, as elsewhere, is everything.

But for the bands, it seemed their stars had aligned. Over the past couple of years they’ve collectively generated considerable interest across the music press, touring, playing live and scaling student radio’s music charts.

They all had music primed and ready to go. U-No Juno had already recorded an album’s worth, Sivle Talk was building towards a long-player, Vagina Dry had ambitions to eclipse their earlier singles releases and Sogg was itching to update fans on the direction their music had taken since last year’s digital album Kill yr Oppressor.

‘‘It’s all about timing,’’ Tane Cotton, of Sivle Talk, agrees.

‘‘Gaining any kind of traction or audience or any kind of success as an artist is 1% skill, because there’s a million talented artists out there, and then 99% timing and luck.

‘‘Fortunately, it was just the right time for everyone involved.’’

U-No Juno (from left) Stefan Keller, Ramona Mahutte and Jack Ingram. Photo: Ethan Montaner

Doing it together under the umbrella of 4EPs would mean they could employ higher production values, choose vinyl instead of cassettes or burner CDs and follow up with shared gigs. Perhaps most remarkably, there was a very real possibility of doing better than breaking even.

And, yes, everyone releasing their music together does provide extra incentive to put your best foot forward.

‘‘You don’t want to have the worst EP,’’ Cotton says wryly.

‘‘So, it kind of pushes everyone to work really hard.’’

Generations of gigs have come and gone since the Dunedin Double and, quite rightly, there’s a sketchy mix of awareness among the 4EPs bands of those earlier discs. But they get the significance of drawing a connection.

‘‘It’s crazy,’’ Sogg drummer and percussionist Rue Tulloch, says.

‘‘My parents be like, ‘this is the next Dunedin Sound’ ...

‘‘I’ve always been like, this is a really cool thing we’re doing. And then it’s also this whole other story behind it.

‘‘It just seems to be bigger than what you think it is all the time.’’

Even if this new cohort of musicians aren’t all intimately acquainted with the four sides of the Dunedin Double, they’re all fans of that decade’s pioneering bands, the likes of The Clean, The DoubleHappys, The Straitjacket Fits, The 3Ds... Those bands and the ones that followed, Die!Die!Die! and HDU get shout outs.

And it’s not just about dusting off their parents’ old record collections. Sogg this year re-recorded Clean classic Point That Thing to coincide with the release of Richard Langston’s book on the band, layering it with their own hard driving aesthetic. David Kilgour even stepped into the studio to contribute guitar tracks.

Many of the 4EPs crew also took the opportunity to see the OGs, Kilgour and Robert Scott, at the Dunedin launch of Langston’s book. And were impressed.

Keller pays them the ultimate compliment.

‘‘From what we heard of The Clean live, how noisy they were, they sound like they could have fit into the modern Dunedin scene.’’

There was also the occasion, last year, that saw Sogg teaming up with Sivle Talk to play Dimmer track Crystalator at the Regent Theatre premiere of Shayne Carter documentary Life in One Chord.

That was a big ask, for them to step out in front of a knowledgeable film festival audience and pull off a pressure-cooker performance, Griffiths says.

‘‘Those are the most extraordinary circumstances and in front of 1300, 1400 people - I don’t know many adult musicians would be able to pull that off, you know? Like, how brave.

‘‘And that’s what made me realise, like, give these musicians a platform and they’ll do anything.’’

So Griffiths, who has mileage running record labels, set to work.

She dusted off her DUN Records imprint to act as an umbrella entity for the project, pushed back the cover of the Rolodex, so to speak, and approached the industry contacts she needed to make it work.

Murray Cullen at Auckland’s Stebbing Recording Studio vinyl press was in. And at a critical and full-circle moment, the estate of Martin Phillipps, of Chills fame, stepped in to cover the upfront costs of mastering - ultimately performed by Angus McNaughton, at Auralux.

Nick Roughan, at South Link Productions, engineered Sogg’s EP. They got a week off school to record.

All this, and support from other quarters, means the bands will be able to press more vinyl than originally planned, 400 copies, keeping the unit price down and accessible.

‘‘All the goodwill that has come into it is so beautiful,’’ Griffiths says.

Vagina Dry (from left) Bel Martin, Caleb Tulloch and El Checketts. Photo: Ethan Montaner

What all those backers recognised was that a self-generating wave of creativity was about to break.

The members of three-piece Sogg are the youngest of the four bands, all 16, and as such beneficiaries of the momentum the other bands have been building over the past four or five years. In that time, a thriving all-ages scene has built and blossomed in Dunedin, its earliest members inspiring others to pick up an instrument themselves.

U-No Juno’s players were there at the start, then aged just 15 or 16 themselves.

Drummer Jack Ingram recalls a skinny scene back then.

‘‘We were playing with the same three bands,’’ he says.

‘‘But especially in the past two years, it feels like every other week there’s a new band that we need to play with or that we need to see. It definitely feels like the scene has been growing almost exponentially.’’

Sogg bassist Noelle Hill says the only requirements of the scene are to be present, be active and do something unique.

‘‘Which means everyone is doing something completely different to a point where there is no real competition, because we’re all just working towards redefining our own sounds and how they work in the scene together.’’

If there’s something missing from the scene, people will step into that space and make it happen, Vagina Dry guitarist El Checketts says.

‘‘And then everyone else will just be like, ‘hell yeah, this is awesome’. And like line-ups [at a gig], it’s not like one genre, it’ll be like a hardcore band, then like an indie band.’’

Community extends to sharing band members, in various combinations, across the wider jamming network. And gear.

‘‘Like, if you need help with something, you can just post a post . . . and a bunch of people will be like, I’ve got that,’’ Checketts says.

That mutual aid and co-operation has carried over into the production of 4EPs.

Cotton recorded and co-produced both the Vagina Dry and U-No Juno EPs in his War Possum home studio, as well as his own.

‘‘That was my favourite bit, yeah, just working with other people,’’ he says.

The bands all have experience of doing all this stuff the hard way, on their own, unsupported and on the smell of an oily rag. Issuing cheap burner CDs or

homemade cassette tapes, having recorded the music in a weekend in a shed. Paying dues.

Touring in marginally roadworthy transport, eking out the fuel budget.

U-No Juno put themselves through it on a national tour last year.

‘‘We ended up sleeping in campsites for the majority of it,’’ Keller recalls.

‘‘Sneaking half the people in. Paid for half and then the other people would hide in the tents,’’ bassist Ramona Mahutte confesses.

Ingram was challenged by the camp staff on one occasion.

‘‘I told them I just got dropped off by my mum. It was like in Tauranga or something.’’

At the tail end of such experiences, there’s not a lot to show for it.

Vagina Dry have been there too, having crossed the Tasman to play the Loud Women Fest music festival last year.

‘‘Our bank account is so dry at the moment because of the Australia trip that we took,’’ Checketts says.

‘‘We’re used to touring where we play a show and all the money we get from that is spent on petrol to the next city and we just hope we make enough to get to the next place,’’ Tulloch adds.

So 4EPs, which releases in early July, is setting out to operate on a different plane. Creating the conditions where all this looks more like a career than a hobby.

‘‘It’d be awesome to go on tour knowing you won’t be sleeping on the ground for two weeks,’’ Keller says with feeling, as if still trying to remove the kinks from his spine.

‘‘And to be able to afford food as well,’’ Mahutte adds.

Suffering for your art is all very well.

Sogg (from left) Rue Tulloch, Noelle Hill and Ollie Kemmett. Photo: Ethan Montaner

But there’s more going on here, beyond the immediate economics of vinyl and road rubber.

If all of this careful scaffolding does its job, there’ll be a template for others to follow. And indeed there are plans for another six EPs this year.

Beyond that, maybe the four bands, who’ll all come out of this with their own labels and further schooled in the industry’s dark arts, will themselves be in a position to record and promote others.

As part of that vision, a non-negotiable for Griffiths is that the bands remain the owners of their work, the songs on 4EPs. She’s well aware of the fraught experience of some of the Dunedin Sound musicians and the hurt they carried after selling their publishing rights to land record deals.

Her advice and advocacy on that point resonates.

The conventional wisdom is you take any offer a label might make, Mahutte says.

‘‘The label offers you an opportunity - you should probably take it. But then later on, you can’t have access to your own music, which sucks.’’

This generation of musicians come preloaded with a suspicion of suits anyway, a wariness of corporate trappings and authority. It’s the politics of their music, more or less explicitly.

Cotton kicks off Sivle Talk’s EP, Crybaby, with There’s An FBI Office In Wellington, an exercise in apopletic outrage at our state’s abject obeisance to a foreign power’s agenda - before reprising the excoriating, albeit rifftastic, satirical takedown Bottom Feeder.

‘‘Art is inherently political and anybody who says otherwise deserves to be punched in the mouth,’’ Cotton says, before revising the manifesto for public consumption.

‘‘Art is inherently political and anybody who disagrees should not be allowed anywhere near a paintbrush or a pencil or a guitar.’’

‘‘Even if it’s not in the songs lyrically, it’s in the songs sonically,’’ Kemmett says of the 4EPs bands’ output.

With Sogg, it’s often in both.

‘‘Even if somebody’s singing about something completely different, it’s always at the edge,’’ he says.

‘‘Because the political climate is such an overarching thing that controls everybody in their lives, it’s like a lingering tension.’’

U-No Juno reserve the right to represent that consensus in a less direct way - there’s more than one way to skin the hegemony and the edges of their songcraft are razor sharp.

‘‘It’s definitely like, you know, everyone’s talking about the same stuff. I think we just kind of push it back a little bit further. Not for any like particular reason,’’ Keller says.

‘‘I don’t think meaning’s that important in the lyrics. We’re not a folk band.’’

Neither are Vagina Dry, who wear their politics on the cover art of their EP Brutalised - and throughout their set.

‘‘I think it’s really cool to see the different sides of having meaning and messaging in your music. Because you can be blunt and just in your face like we are, or you can be a bit more artsy, a bit more back,’’ Checketts says.

‘‘But you can express the feelings of injustice in very different ways. And that’s basically just art.’’

They’ve experienced both sides of the coin in terms of responses to their forthright posture.

Checketts talks about being part of the Punks for Palestine Aotearoa Bandcamp compilation, all the money from which went to support children there, and playing fundraising gigs for Gaza.

‘‘It’s really awesome to see how it brings a crowd of like-minded people together in order to invoke change and help people as well,’’ they say.

But there are the other reactions too.

‘‘There’s been a couple gigs where El will be saying something on stage and then we’ve had old dudes just walk out and make some throwaway comments towards us, but that’s all right,’’ Tulloch says.

‘‘They like the idea of an angry woman yelling, and then when she’s actually got something to say, they don’t like that part,’’ Checketts observes.

Most, of course, stay for the music.

There’s no new Dunedin Sound here, the bands are too different. And keep in mind that this is just a sample slice of a bigger scene.

However, it’s a good representation of some of the sounds reverberating around the city’s music venues, Cotton says.

‘‘It feels like four interpretations of our own versions of punk and alternative rock with, you know, pieces of hardcore and, you know, stuff in there.

‘‘Yeah, they’re like four different kinds of heavy music.’’

Crybaby is a 15-minute assault on the senses, he says.

‘‘With some catchy hooks and good heavy riffs and drums, and yeah, just hoping that it kind of gives people an idea of where I want to go.

‘‘It’s loud songs I’m really proud of.’’

U-No Juno impressed themselves by the speed with which they were able to assemble all new material for their EP you know?, remembering they parked an album’s worth of material to do this.

‘‘We were quite consumed in it over those few weeks,’’ Keller says.

It meant they had to push pause on their standard modus operandi of arranging each of their songs in myriad ways.

The end result, some of their poppiest stuff to date, he says.

But don’t get too dewy-eyed. Poppy here includes track four deeebeee, which starts fast and builds to a feedback-fuelled chant of ‘‘don’t fix the sickness’’.

For Vagina Dry this has been a long time coming, Checketts says. Endless gigging to get to this point. So, to be able to do it on such a stage with all the attendant quality is a win.

The win very much involves a recording that does their live energy justice.

‘‘It still has, like, the... kind of the clankiness of our band. Still raw. It’s still really raw. It’s still imperfect. But that’s, like, what makes us Vagina Dry.’’

Sogg’s EP Freezer Thaw is a massive step away from previous release Kill yr Oppressor, Hill says.

‘‘Kill yr Oppressor is more like pure rage, but this EP feels more like acknowledging that rage and trying to process it,’’ she says.

‘‘It’s more pretentious,’’ Kemmett deadpans.

‘‘But, you know, it’s pretentious in a good way - where it’s like we’re actually starting to write music that’s like, damn, we can make cool shit,’’ Tulloch adds.

The bands are clearly ready for this. It seems very likely the listening world will learn that they are too.

Kemmett pulls his long rock and roll hair back behind his ears, like drawing back the curtain on a show, and shoots a look at his friends. He’s a long way from done poking holes in convention, including while doing the press rounds and has another zinger to close, delivered only half in jest.

‘‘Let’s say, these kids got aura,’’ he suggests.