Dix Engels, punk scribe, recently hastened out of retirement for financial reasons, late thirty-something, nursing a spooked feeling punk rock in 1994 had become just another genre to be flogged to death by the faithful and resurrected every fifteen years. Cramped up in the back seat of a drab green Holden Belmont, toking down with Auckland punk trio, Nothing At All!, ripped to silence, and wondering hard whether punk could still outrage in the mid-1990s, whether it could still, yeah, yawn, change lives. Churning it over and over as they crashed over the dead grey Desert Road piloted by Nothing At All!'s manager, Johnny B, late or near on for the night’s show at Wellington’s Bar Bodega.
This wasn't the first time Engels’d bin to Wellington with a punk group. There was that violent duo of shows by punk first wavers, The Scavengers and Suburban Reptiles, in August 1977. They’d no sooner hit the city than the headlines beckoned when Scavengers' front man Myk Lezbian’s Austin Riley burst into flames. “They’re trying to kill us because we’re the greatest,” he told a reporter, duly noted, and repeated in ink the next morning under a small headline - Punks Putter To Fiery Halt.
The Scavengers had two shows that night - a pub and a nightclub. They cut from the pub after the first show, ten foot tall and bullet proof, Engels, then just scratching his first fanzine together, Scavengers' bassist Mal Licious, and his girlfriend.
They hit the street to a ragged chorus of insults. A battered Ford Escort packed with guys flew past and Mal took off the down the road after them. The hoons got around the corner and figured, ‘Hey, there’s only two of them.’ When they came back around the block they had hockey sticks and baseball bats.
Mal’s girlfriend started to hurl abuse as he looked around for something to counter the sticks. He saw a heavy wire waste paper bin and grabbed it. Suddenly, another car pulled up, and out spilled four more guys with hockey sticks and baseball bats. Eight guys. Too many. But it turned out they were a rival mob and started laying into the would-be assailants. Mal saw his chance, smashed the bin down on one joker’s knee, and broke his leg. His screaming made the other guys stop so Mal grabbed his girlfriend and they ducked down an alley, and there they were; at the nightclub.
Engels, thinking hard on it, still, glommed on to number after number until his silence freaked NAA! out. A second black mark. Earlier, they’d been the small matter of the other front seat. Engels, man of the people, had assumed it would be his, seniority n’all but Nothing At All! collectedly bristled at that, now he was crammed in the back with a coupla amps and drummer Paul ‘Fostex’ Foster and bassist Dion. Guitarist Tony up front.
We pulled into Bar Bodega up the top of Willis Street, a small venue that looked like a public toilet, around nine thirty. The student pop support act had just played their last song when Nothing At All! piled their amps onstage and checked the diminishing crowd complete with punk promoter and former Flesh D-Vice vocalist Gerald Dwyer, and members of Shihad.
NAA! kicked off their set of Pistols-prodded 1977 style punk. The show went okay, nothing great, and later back at Dwyer’s they eased back with a grainy Misfits video, and a slim chance of sleep before the early morning ferry.
Five am, a round of pick me up bongs, and Engels was gone again. He didn’t see the blue and white cop car until its lights slashed metallic across the road behind them as they eased off the ferry terminal offramp. The bong on the ledge behind him. He didn’t grab it. His probation was still happening. Baker pulled the car over and waited for the worst, but just as the cops pulled up, Tony and Dion spilled out smiling, chatting freely, good kids really, the cops could see that, and soon let them go.
Engels tried to sleep on the pitching boat, but soon gave up, and propped himself up against the window and the gently passing islands and inlets of the sounds above Picton.
They cleared the ferry smoothly, and pulled into the nearest gas station. Cop trouble again, only this time, he wasn’t so cool. He copped the punk clothes and grotty Holden with weary passengers, and said, “get the fuck out of town now.”
They chopped down into the low flat coastal streets of Nelson, early afternoon, and quickly located the run-down Metropolitan Hotel, the night’s venue. As Baker tracked the hotel’s promoter, Engels settled into the public bar and copped the dole day flotsam and raggedy-arse clientele. Now here was a place he’d been before. Nothing At All! disappeared outside into the street. Baker followed them, red of face, an angry hunch of his shoulders the only other betrayal of his argument over the cost of the PA.
The promoter and PA hire guy, who doubled as the soundman (also un-needed by Baker), slumped into a table near Engels, and angrily discussed cutting Nothing At All!'s fee.
Engels found Baker and the boys in a nearby bar, and informed them of the upcoming rort. Baker didn’t seem to care. This wasn’t his first national tour. He’d been the lead singer of garage punk group, The Psycho-Daisies, who’d toured the islands a handful of times.
He disappeared in search of the friend who’d provide that night’s floor for sleeping, and Engels bought the boys a round of Mac’s Gold, and watched as a local poet and solo singer, who’d seen the group last time through, tried to sell them some gold of a different variety. They smiled, checked their funds, and said no, they were already well stocked.
Across the road Engels’ spied a rough clutch of kids propped messily against a wall, a brown paper bagged bottle of booze circulating, talking and looking over at Nothing At All!. An older raincoat-wearing woman detached herself from the group, and approached the Auckland punks. She asked them if they were the band playing at the Metropolitan that evening, and said the kids across the road were also a band, Truck, and asked if they could play tonight. Baker, back again, agreed, provided they played for nothing at all. She nodded her assent and returned to the messy gaggle from where she’d come. They gathered around her as she talked, and looked across the road at NAA!, before moving on.
The band bar turned out to be seedier than the front bar, its beer soaked carpet long since gelled into a sticky plasticy mass like dirty vinyl. The crowd was small and got smaller with the departure of the first local support group, who were, for sure, not a punk act.
Truck, their crappy collection of equipment, tinny amps and Jap guitars, one with the Black Flag logo etched on it, onstage around them, were a four piece with an obnoxious tall blond singer in a raincoat up-front. They had the intense ragged thrust of US hardcore act, Flipper, and a real power born of four kids who wanna make music, but can’t really play. Street punk.
Nothing At All! played a short furious set to the small crowd. The whole time being constantly heckled by Truck’s pissed out blond singer. They pumped out their spiky rock n roll - Grand Central, Nothing At All, TV Generation - Engels was getting used to the songs now. The rumbling Pistols basslines under distorted 1977 punk guitar with Animal-like drumming from Fostex. One song stood out - Busted - a neat in-your-face punker about being busted for dope that had an anger (and humour) the other songs seemed only to reach for. He woke the next morning on the floor of Baker’s mate’s rental house atop an old store in a quiet Nelson suburban street.
One stop in town for food and a chance encounter with a local punk crusty from Dead Centre, a “budcore“ punk group, who’d supported the boys on their previous swing through town. Budcore is a feral punk hybrid of dak smoking-anarchist punks who lived out in the surrounding valleys. Not only did punk life exist in Nelson. It took different forms. Engels was impressed.
They hit the road mid-morning heading due south down the west coast of the island aiming to cut back over to the east coast through the alpine Lewis Pass. Baker telling them of his last encounter with these mountain folk. He was touring Dead Moon, an American garage punk outfit lead by Fred Cole, late of the raucous Lollipop Shoppe, a sixties R & B band who had one late 1960s US hit, I’m A Witch, when Baker remembered Clive Lovelock, ex-guitarist with The Stoners, a Waikato 1960s R & B group with an infamous reputation, now ran a pub in the area. A quick phonecall jacked a show and some accommodation at the pub, but the locals hated the support group, and to Baker’s surprise (Dead Moon are a hot live act), asked that Dead Moon leave the stage after a few songs. Baker was shattered.
They emerged from the mountain pass, shrugging off it’s alpine forests and cool chill grace, descended to the shingle valleys carved out by the icy mountain waters, and arrived in Christchurch with only enough time to pause at the pad of the NORML president, a crusty looking hippie, with paranoid eyes.
Nothing At All! were playing the last show of the mini-tour at a performing arts venue just off Cathedral Square. It was a NORML fundraiser, but being November, dak was in short supply. It was packed despite that, and large groups of Christchurch youth were circulating enjoying the hard rock, reggae and punk sounds on display.
Engels decanted himself from the venue and wandered to the pub across the road, ordered a beer, rolled a ciggy, and realised he was sitting at the top end of Colombo Street, the long road that bisected Christchurch almost to the Port Hills.
A good way down, on a small side street, Christchurch had its first punk venue, the gaudily named Club Da Rox, more commonly known as Mollet Street. It must have been 1978 when he’d been there. After the Wellington Town Hall punk festival of June that year The Scavengers had travelled on to the Garden City for shows at Mollet Street. Engels had tagged along looking to sniff out a story for his fanzine.
He found an active music scene encompassing everything from pub rock through power pop to long-haired punk that would be the root of a thriving late 1970s-early 1980s post-punk scene in the city.
He felt the old excitement flare with the memories, then just as quickly subside. He missed them, he realised that now. His old friends and community, that naive era before the money loomed and the mainstream clamoured for his skill.
It had been a high few years, and he wouldn’t have swapped them either, but his soul was wanting there. And that, he knew more than ever, was where new music and fashion sprung.
Back inside the venue he watched Nothing At All! play a hard set closer to US hardcore in sound than anything. The crowd loved it. Engels did too. He’d begun this tour thinking that punk rock had lost its street vision and threat. That its characters and adventure had been replaced by formula and cant. He’d said it often enough to his old punk mates when their paths would cross. Punk was dead. But it never did die, it retreated to the provinces, to the working class it always claimed it was a part of, but never was.
It remained the first stop on the rock n roll path for many young musicians and scenesters. It returned to the charts in the 1990s. It still had life. It was still his community. He watched Nothing At All! thrash to a close. They were greeted sidestage by the hippy promoter and a handful of fine weed, before retreating outside to the chill street. They decided to go on to a nightclub, but it was dead, the only life had walked in with them. Home to crash.
Engels woke the next morning to the smell of dope and the sight of the NORML president sunning his anaemic body on the verandah outside. There was a Legalise Pot rally in Cathedral Square that day, he said. The boys said they’ll meet him there. Engels inwardly blanched at the thought. Protest rallies were a disappointment these days. They no longer shocked or provoked thought. They’d become part of the furniture. But the sun was shining and he was pleasantly stoned. A day in the Square? Why not.
The protest had formed by time they arrived. A scraggly collection of crusties, punks, hippies, straight looking students, a few bearded weirdies, lots of funky hippy chicks, a bit of a cliché really. The only discordant point was the two foot high dope plant in the middle of the semi-circle of protesters.
The cops had gathered by now as well. They looked fairly low key, the crowd surrounding them, there as much out of curiosity as affinity with the legalise dope theme. The President rose and listed off a well-prepared list of reasons why cannabis should be legalised. Then the joints came out and the smoke-in began. The police rushed the smokers, confiscating the plant, and grabbing the furiously puffing President. He managed to get the joint back to his mouth one last time before it was jerked free. The crowd applauded. He’d pushed the limit and provoked a reaction.
This wasn't the first time Engels’d bin to Wellington with a punk group. There was that violent duo of shows by punk first wavers, The Scavengers and Suburban Reptiles, in August 1977. They’d no sooner hit the city than the headlines beckoned when Scavengers' front man Myk Lezbian’s Austin Riley burst into flames. “They’re trying to kill us because we’re the greatest,” he told a reporter, duly noted, and repeated in ink the next morning under a small headline - Punks Putter To Fiery Halt.
The Scavengers had two shows that night - a pub and a nightclub. They cut from the pub after the first show, ten foot tall and bullet proof, Engels, then just scratching his first fanzine together, Scavengers' bassist Mal Licious, and his girlfriend.
They hit the street to a ragged chorus of insults. A battered Ford Escort packed with guys flew past and Mal took off the down the road after them. The hoons got around the corner and figured, ‘Hey, there’s only two of them.’ When they came back around the block they had hockey sticks and baseball bats.
Mal’s girlfriend started to hurl abuse as he looked around for something to counter the sticks. He saw a heavy wire waste paper bin and grabbed it. Suddenly, another car pulled up, and out spilled four more guys with hockey sticks and baseball bats. Eight guys. Too many. But it turned out they were a rival mob and started laying into the would-be assailants. Mal saw his chance, smashed the bin down on one joker’s knee, and broke his leg. His screaming made the other guys stop so Mal grabbed his girlfriend and they ducked down an alley, and there they were; at the nightclub.
Engels, thinking hard on it, still, glommed on to number after number until his silence freaked NAA! out. A second black mark. Earlier, they’d been the small matter of the other front seat. Engels, man of the people, had assumed it would be his, seniority n’all but Nothing At All! collectedly bristled at that, now he was crammed in the back with a coupla amps and drummer Paul ‘Fostex’ Foster and bassist Dion. Guitarist Tony up front.
We pulled into Bar Bodega up the top of Willis Street, a small venue that looked like a public toilet, around nine thirty. The student pop support act had just played their last song when Nothing At All! piled their amps onstage and checked the diminishing crowd complete with punk promoter and former Flesh D-Vice vocalist Gerald Dwyer, and members of Shihad.
NAA! kicked off their set of Pistols-prodded 1977 style punk. The show went okay, nothing great, and later back at Dwyer’s they eased back with a grainy Misfits video, and a slim chance of sleep before the early morning ferry.
Five am, a round of pick me up bongs, and Engels was gone again. He didn’t see the blue and white cop car until its lights slashed metallic across the road behind them as they eased off the ferry terminal offramp. The bong on the ledge behind him. He didn’t grab it. His probation was still happening. Baker pulled the car over and waited for the worst, but just as the cops pulled up, Tony and Dion spilled out smiling, chatting freely, good kids really, the cops could see that, and soon let them go.
Engels tried to sleep on the pitching boat, but soon gave up, and propped himself up against the window and the gently passing islands and inlets of the sounds above Picton.
They cleared the ferry smoothly, and pulled into the nearest gas station. Cop trouble again, only this time, he wasn’t so cool. He copped the punk clothes and grotty Holden with weary passengers, and said, “get the fuck out of town now.”
They chopped down into the low flat coastal streets of Nelson, early afternoon, and quickly located the run-down Metropolitan Hotel, the night’s venue. As Baker tracked the hotel’s promoter, Engels settled into the public bar and copped the dole day flotsam and raggedy-arse clientele. Now here was a place he’d been before. Nothing At All! disappeared outside into the street. Baker followed them, red of face, an angry hunch of his shoulders the only other betrayal of his argument over the cost of the PA.
The promoter and PA hire guy, who doubled as the soundman (also un-needed by Baker), slumped into a table near Engels, and angrily discussed cutting Nothing At All!'s fee.
Engels found Baker and the boys in a nearby bar, and informed them of the upcoming rort. Baker didn’t seem to care. This wasn’t his first national tour. He’d been the lead singer of garage punk group, The Psycho-Daisies, who’d toured the islands a handful of times.
He disappeared in search of the friend who’d provide that night’s floor for sleeping, and Engels bought the boys a round of Mac’s Gold, and watched as a local poet and solo singer, who’d seen the group last time through, tried to sell them some gold of a different variety. They smiled, checked their funds, and said no, they were already well stocked.
Across the road Engels’ spied a rough clutch of kids propped messily against a wall, a brown paper bagged bottle of booze circulating, talking and looking over at Nothing At All!. An older raincoat-wearing woman detached herself from the group, and approached the Auckland punks. She asked them if they were the band playing at the Metropolitan that evening, and said the kids across the road were also a band, Truck, and asked if they could play tonight. Baker, back again, agreed, provided they played for nothing at all. She nodded her assent and returned to the messy gaggle from where she’d come. They gathered around her as she talked, and looked across the road at NAA!, before moving on.
The band bar turned out to be seedier than the front bar, its beer soaked carpet long since gelled into a sticky plasticy mass like dirty vinyl. The crowd was small and got smaller with the departure of the first local support group, who were, for sure, not a punk act.
Truck, their crappy collection of equipment, tinny amps and Jap guitars, one with the Black Flag logo etched on it, onstage around them, were a four piece with an obnoxious tall blond singer in a raincoat up-front. They had the intense ragged thrust of US hardcore act, Flipper, and a real power born of four kids who wanna make music, but can’t really play. Street punk.
Nothing At All! played a short furious set to the small crowd. The whole time being constantly heckled by Truck’s pissed out blond singer. They pumped out their spiky rock n roll - Grand Central, Nothing At All, TV Generation - Engels was getting used to the songs now. The rumbling Pistols basslines under distorted 1977 punk guitar with Animal-like drumming from Fostex. One song stood out - Busted - a neat in-your-face punker about being busted for dope that had an anger (and humour) the other songs seemed only to reach for. He woke the next morning on the floor of Baker’s mate’s rental house atop an old store in a quiet Nelson suburban street.
One stop in town for food and a chance encounter with a local punk crusty from Dead Centre, a “budcore“ punk group, who’d supported the boys on their previous swing through town. Budcore is a feral punk hybrid of dak smoking-anarchist punks who lived out in the surrounding valleys. Not only did punk life exist in Nelson. It took different forms. Engels was impressed.
They hit the road mid-morning heading due south down the west coast of the island aiming to cut back over to the east coast through the alpine Lewis Pass. Baker telling them of his last encounter with these mountain folk. He was touring Dead Moon, an American garage punk outfit lead by Fred Cole, late of the raucous Lollipop Shoppe, a sixties R & B band who had one late 1960s US hit, I’m A Witch, when Baker remembered Clive Lovelock, ex-guitarist with The Stoners, a Waikato 1960s R & B group with an infamous reputation, now ran a pub in the area. A quick phonecall jacked a show and some accommodation at the pub, but the locals hated the support group, and to Baker’s surprise (Dead Moon are a hot live act), asked that Dead Moon leave the stage after a few songs. Baker was shattered.
They emerged from the mountain pass, shrugging off it’s alpine forests and cool chill grace, descended to the shingle valleys carved out by the icy mountain waters, and arrived in Christchurch with only enough time to pause at the pad of the NORML president, a crusty looking hippie, with paranoid eyes.
Nothing At All! were playing the last show of the mini-tour at a performing arts venue just off Cathedral Square. It was a NORML fundraiser, but being November, dak was in short supply. It was packed despite that, and large groups of Christchurch youth were circulating enjoying the hard rock, reggae and punk sounds on display.
Engels decanted himself from the venue and wandered to the pub across the road, ordered a beer, rolled a ciggy, and realised he was sitting at the top end of Colombo Street, the long road that bisected Christchurch almost to the Port Hills.
A good way down, on a small side street, Christchurch had its first punk venue, the gaudily named Club Da Rox, more commonly known as Mollet Street. It must have been 1978 when he’d been there. After the Wellington Town Hall punk festival of June that year The Scavengers had travelled on to the Garden City for shows at Mollet Street. Engels had tagged along looking to sniff out a story for his fanzine.
He found an active music scene encompassing everything from pub rock through power pop to long-haired punk that would be the root of a thriving late 1970s-early 1980s post-punk scene in the city.
He felt the old excitement flare with the memories, then just as quickly subside. He missed them, he realised that now. His old friends and community, that naive era before the money loomed and the mainstream clamoured for his skill.
It had been a high few years, and he wouldn’t have swapped them either, but his soul was wanting there. And that, he knew more than ever, was where new music and fashion sprung.
Back inside the venue he watched Nothing At All! play a hard set closer to US hardcore in sound than anything. The crowd loved it. Engels did too. He’d begun this tour thinking that punk rock had lost its street vision and threat. That its characters and adventure had been replaced by formula and cant. He’d said it often enough to his old punk mates when their paths would cross. Punk was dead. But it never did die, it retreated to the provinces, to the working class it always claimed it was a part of, but never was.
It remained the first stop on the rock n roll path for many young musicians and scenesters. It returned to the charts in the 1990s. It still had life. It was still his community. He watched Nothing At All! thrash to a close. They were greeted sidestage by the hippy promoter and a handful of fine weed, before retreating outside to the chill street. They decided to go on to a nightclub, but it was dead, the only life had walked in with them. Home to crash.
Engels woke the next morning to the smell of dope and the sight of the NORML president sunning his anaemic body on the verandah outside. There was a Legalise Pot rally in Cathedral Square that day, he said. The boys said they’ll meet him there. Engels inwardly blanched at the thought. Protest rallies were a disappointment these days. They no longer shocked or provoked thought. They’d become part of the furniture. But the sun was shining and he was pleasantly stoned. A day in the Square? Why not.
The protest had formed by time they arrived. A scraggly collection of crusties, punks, hippies, straight looking students, a few bearded weirdies, lots of funky hippy chicks, a bit of a cliché really. The only discordant point was the two foot high dope plant in the middle of the semi-circle of protesters.
The cops had gathered by now as well. They looked fairly low key, the crowd surrounding them, there as much out of curiosity as affinity with the legalise dope theme. The President rose and listed off a well-prepared list of reasons why cannabis should be legalised. Then the joints came out and the smoke-in began. The police rushed the smokers, confiscating the plant, and grabbing the furiously puffing President. He managed to get the joint back to his mouth one last time before it was jerked free. The crowd applauded. He’d pushed the limit and provoked a reaction.
