Dunedin Sound

You're asking about a city, not a style. A cold university town of 100,000 at the south end of New Zealand, where a handful of flats and one label produced a decade of guitar pop recorded for almost nothing.

The "sound" is mostly a consequence: four-track machines, cheap rooms, chiming Vox-and-Rickenbacker guitars, singing that doesn't reach for the back wall.

Dunedin had punk by 1978 — The Enemy, then Toy Love. When Toy Love burned out in Auckland in 1980, the lesson taken home was: don't leave.

Roger Shepherd started Flying Nun in Christchurch in 1981 out of a record shop job. The Clean's "Tally Ho!"

charted nationally that year on a budget of almost nothing; the Boodle Boodle Boodle EP followed and sat in the charts for months. The 1982 Dunedin Double EP — The Chills, Sneaky Feelings, The Stones, The Verlaines — gave the city a name it never asked for.

The Verlaines formed in 1981 at the beginning of the movement and became a key part of Flying Nun's early history. By the late 80s the second wave went overseas: Rough Trade and Homestead licensed the catalogue, Slash and Arista signed the bands, and American college radio did the rest.

Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Guided By Voices all took notes.

Who: Roger Shepherd's label; Chris Knox and Doug Hood with a TEAC four-track, recording bands in flats and halls; David Kilgour, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes, Shayne Carter, Look Blue Go Purple.

Venues: the Empire Tavern, the Captain Cook. What: two guitars drilling at the same chord shape, organ or Farfisa if there's one around, drums close and dry, vocals sung flat and conversational, melody carried by the guitars.

How a record gets in: it sounds like the room it was made in. Hiss stays.

Mistakes stay. Downes submitted the first Verlaines album as a composition project for his honours music class and got an A — classical training, same four-track economy.