Remembering New Zealand’s swinging sixties

New Zealand’s short-lived counterculture scene threw off conservative constraints and laid foundations for the nation’s modern identity

Modern New Zealand is widely hailed as home to a progressive government, a hi-tech film and TV industry and formidable wineries, alongside much else. It’s a far cry from the 1960s when a conservative government ruled, entertainment was imported and popular musicians tended to replicate stars of the British charts. But towards the end of that decade a homegrown counterculture sprang up thanks to the government’s support for the US war in Vietnam. Rock music developed into a vehicle for dissent.

For a nation attuned to re-evaluating its postcolonial history, there has been little attention paid to this period when youthful energy disrupted society via protest, humour, poetry and music. A new book, Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand, documents the first stirrings of an underground rock scene, and has spurred interest in the musicians who soundtracked the era.

At the turn of the 70s, said author Nick Bollinger, bands on the lucrative brewery circuit were forced to play Top 40 hits. Meanwhile, “the psych bands played on campus or at a few clubs dedicated to hippies, or in backyards at parties. They were largely ignored by media and record labels … but, for a few years, they captured something fresh and exciting.”

Few of them recorded, but those who did loosely divided 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. Psych folk (Tamburlaine) and boogie (Highway) rounded out the scene.

“These bands were a local simulation of what might have been happening at the Avalon Ballroom,” said Bollinger, citing San Francisco’s countercultural ground zero. “They’d read about it and decided they could do it.”

Blerta (Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition) formed in 1971 as an improvised music and theatre cooperative led by Lawrence, an extrovert jazz drummer. Blerta’s anarchic performances featured 8mm films directed by trumpeter Geoff Murphy with Lawrence in leading roles. Broadcaster Television New Zealand (TVNZ) commissioned Blerta to make short films and, in doing so, launched the collective as pioneers of independent cinema in the country. Jack Nicholson once called Lawrence his favourite actor.

Psych bands also helped lay the groundwork for the foregrounding of Māori and Polynesian voices. 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 acid rock. On Space Farm’s eponymous 1972 debut album, the quartet cranks out primal, mescalineflavoured anthems that could be considered Krautrock’s South Pacific sibling.

Other acts thrived live. 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. 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. Poet Sam Hunt featured on their lone album, Beware the Man.

“Those stoner days were hugely liberating for me,” said Julie Needham, Mammal’s electric violinist and harmony vocalist. “Certainly

there was an emphasis on new ways of thinking and creating throughout our culture.”

Though it wasn’t to last long: vocalist Rick Bryant and band manager Graeme Nesbitt were jailed for marijuana possession, rendering Mammal extinct. But none of the members retired from music – the drummer and guitarist joined Dragon, soon to become the biggest and wildest band in Australasia – while Sam Hunt is Aotearoa’s most popular poet.

In fact, none of these bands lasted long – Highway migrated to Australia then split, Billy TK left to lead communal Māori tribal band Powerhouse and Space Farm joined the Hare Krishnas, transforming into Krishna rock band Living Force. Doug Jerebine, having set foot in London’s music scene and found it wanting, retired to an Indian ashram for the next 30 years.

By the early 1970s the New Zealand counterculture began eating itself. Marty Johnstone and Terry Clark – later infamous as the Mr Asia drug cartel – imported large quantities of marijuana, then heroin, into New Zealand, initially using their contacts on the rock scene.

Some 50 years on from the summer of New Zealand’s psych rock zenith, the scene is viewed with affection. Chris Knox of Toy Love and the late Hamish Kilgour of The Clean, both stalwarts of independent record label Flying Nun, formed in Christchurch in 1981, recalled being inspired by the likes of Highway, while labels in Germany, Spain and the US have reissued recordings by The Human Instinct, Space Farm and Doug Jerebine.

“I like to think of that era as one that broke down barriers and got Kiwis creating in a way that expressed the culture of this country,” said Bollinger. Having Labour and the Greens in power here could be seen as the counterculture’s positive legacy.”

Meanwhile Stoned Guitar still sounds like the soundtrack to an uprising. And, in many ways, it was.