His master's voice

Sending Coldplay in as the cavalry may not be the answer required for EMI’s woes, but I’m no auditor looking at the global balance sheets. EMI NZ is about to turn into a branch office of Australia, with only sales reps here. Being the second-cousin to Tasmania has never benefited any New Zealand operation that has found itself answering to Sydney. Staff start to enjoy leaving work around 5.00pm, knowing it frustrates those in head office who want to make bullying phone calls. Now we have mobile phones of course, though there are so many places over here in the bush where the coverage is poor.

When EMI first started in New Zealand, it was called HMV, and mobile phones were pigeons. Among the products HMV was assembling here before the war were toasters, radios, radiograms, irons and even bicycles. All this happened at their Wakefield Street premises in Wellington, a block away from Te Papa. And in the 1950s, if you wanted a new radio put in your car, HMV was the place to go. (There is a great array of photos showing behind-the-scenes 1950s action at HMV at the National Library’s excellent Timeframes site.)

HMV formed its New Zealand branch in 1926, emerging out of a Wellington-based firm called EJ Hyams who since 1910 had been distributing HMV recordings and gramophones here. When Hyams retired in 1931, HMV in England bought all the shares, and the accountant Alfred Wyness became the managing director.

Wyness ran a tight ship, taking all instructions from the UK, and when he retired in 1951 he was succeeded by his son AJ (insert Sopranos joke here). The Wyness dynasty lasted until February 1973, when AJ retired; Shona Laing’s ‘1905’ was in the Top 10, but through Phonogram.

HMV's cricket club, Wellington, 1938. Managing director Alfred Wyness is, of course, the man in the suit.

Curiously, HMV was involved in the first music recording here to be released on disc. In 1927 Parlophone of Australia came over to record Dean Waretini (senior) and Ano Hato, using a mobile unit brought over for the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York (the parents of the current Queen). The label above is of one of those early Ano Hato recordings, which were pressed in Australia.

But after that, HMV did nothing to nurture New Zealand music until the 1950s. They didn’t need to: they dominated distribution here so effectively that in the late 1930s, HMV could claim that every record played on radio in New Zealand was released through HMV. If your image of the multi-national record executive is from the 1970s – business trips to Burbank, long lunches, tennis, sessions in the spa – it may be hard to comprehend the Wyness approach.

The company may have enjoyed its monopoly to the fullest, and taken ruthless steps to maintain it, but Wyness was staunchly religious. In the 1950s his son came into the Wakefield Street studio on a Sunday to find a recording session was booked. A grand piano had been hired, transported and tuned. Musicians were waiting. No matter; it was a Sunday: the session was cancelled.

1944: HMV staff assemble army radio sets for the war in the Pacific.

During the Second World War, HMV turned its production plant over to defence needs. They changed from producing fridges and gramophones to assembling army equipment. HMV didn’t set up an Auckland office until 1946, and the man in charge of it had been working for the firm since 1919. Because of import restrictions, a pressing factory was set up in Kilbirnie in 1949, using masters from overseas. The first New Zealand record pressed was Les Wilson singing ‘The Yodelling Cowboy’ in 1953. This was four years after ‘Blue Smoke’ came out on Tanza, HMV’s new local rival (Les’s brother Cole was in the Tumbleweeds, then Tanza’s top sellers).

The departure of EMI NZ’s managing director later this month mirrors what is happening overseas as the company’s new global owner – Terra Firma, the investment vehicle of merchant banker Guy Hands – looks for a new way to make money out of recordings. The end of June will also see the departure of the president of EMI’s legendary US label Capitol, and perhaps Virgin’s president soon after.

Left: possibly the last managing director of EMI (NZ), in a former life.

Neither will be replaced; the latest idea is to have a “president of A&R” overseeing all EMI’s labels. It will be interesting to see which big overseas names will remain with EMI for the local reps to sell, once their contracts come up for renewal. Here on the other side of the music galaxy, New Zealand acts hoping to sell their music don’t have to look far for their new business model: Fat Freddy’s Drop.

Speaking of New Zealand music, the foreign-owned C4 channel is currently showing the taxpayer-funded TVNZ how to bring it to our screens. The 100 magic moments show Rock the Nation has been excellent: well-researched, wide ranging and full of surprises. During the series they have been promoting Making Tracks, of which already three episodes have screened. I’m annoyed I wasn’t watching from the start. It’s a brilliant, simple idea – taking New Zealand hits overseas for other cultures to reinterpret – but probably far more complex to achieve than it looks. The hyperactive host Nick Dwyer is perfect for it; he (lovingly) describes himself as a “cheeky scamp” and I’m sure there is always a future for him endorsing Ritalin. It was very impressive watching him wow dancers in India with his “old-school techno” moves on the dance-floor, and of course the former New Zealander who became Miss India was also very telegenic. If ever NZ On Air money has been well spent on music, it’s with this show.

I looked up to the sky

Continuing the EMI NZ theme, 18 months ago I interviewed Shane Hales when writing a veterans-on-the-road story for North & South (Oct 2006)*.
I asked him about his time at HMV.

“I recorded in the old studios in Wakefield Street, before they were unceremoniously demolished,” he said, “I loved that studio, we had a lot of hits out of it, along with everybody else.”

Could you fit all 36 of the musicians for ‘St Paul’ in there?

“Everyone, it was a huge studio, in the old fashioned way, they don’t build ‘em like that anymore, you just need the gear at home. The EMI technicians from Abbey Road came out and set it up.”

Was Wellington a happening music town then?

“It was, there were a lot of musicians around. Mike Farrell was here, he worked part time in the EMI storeroom. On ‘St Paul’ we got all the staff out of the EMI offices: we needed a choir. ‘Right, get the staff down, the office girls, the guys in storeroom’ ... everyone came down and they were all told what they were going to sing. They all sang the la la las. We didn’t have the multi-tracking then, we only had about eight-track, so we couldn’t put any more orchestration on it. You had to do the whole thing in one go.”

Looking back at it, I’m amazed ‘St Paul’ came out so quickly after ‘Hey Jude’ ...

“Did I tell you about Terry Knight, who wrote it? He’s dead now – but ‘St Paul’ has been released on a Beatles tribute album in the States with a lot of Beatle tribute songs.

“We all stayed at the Royal Oak, the old hotel [on the corner of Cuba and Manners Streets]. I always said I want to be there – it was such a fun place – the drag queens, people up the stairs, the bars were rocking, the house bar stayed open till all hours, all sorts of women were found leaving the hotel at various hours of the morning. A great place, a real rock’n’roll pub.

“And I’d have all the musicians up there to eat, all on the EMI tab, they paid the bills. They called me to the offices one day and said, ‘We’ve been looking at these accounts, they’ve been getting higher and higher’ ... I’d get the wine list and say, Whaddaya want?

“EMI would say it was only supposed to be me in the hotel. So EMI paid their way in that department: social activities. And of course it was great, the Quincys, they were all part of it, the guys who backed me. Bruno Lawrence ... until he was barred, from the EMI studios.

Left: the Quincy Conserve keep Bruno Lawrence surrounded.

“I had come down to do a new album, and I thought well Bruno will be playing drums again, on the Straight Straight Straight album and Richard Burgess turned up. They said ‘No, Bruno’s not allowed in the studios anymore. We had a gold disc reception down in Wellington in 1970 for the Loxene Golden Discs. And Bruno’s band were in it, Quincy Conserve, and we had a big luncheon with Loxene, the managing director and his wife and everyone standing around.

“And we all turned up in jeans, it was getting to that era, the long hair and stuff ... and they were put out about that, and of course Bruno had something wrong with his foot, so he was on crutches, and he stuck his crutch in the managing director’s wife’s face and said, ‘Do you wanna bite my crutch?’

“She was like ‘Aah! Disgusting!’ She complained, and said to her husband, I want that man thrown out. And they tried to tell him to go, and he didn’t want to go. And in the end, he jumped on the table, and they had this big buffet, and they tried to say, ‘Out. Leave. Now.’ ”

“Bruno – having had a few drinks – wouldn’t go. He jumped on the table, on the buffet, as we were about to have lunch, and he kicked the food everywhere . ‘You’re nothing but a bunch of phonies, wankers!’ Screamed his head off at everyone. And the band, the Quincy Conserve, you could see them thinking their careers were coming to a fast end here. They tried to drag him off the table, which made it worse. He’s rolling in the food. He was taken out and he was up in the foyer of the theatre up the road, and they dragged him down the stairs still screaming and covered in food.

“So he was barred, and next day we were supposed to be starting on the new album. I’d just come back from the UK. And they said, Bruno’s not allowed in the studio, he’s been barred. Richard Burgess is drumming.” [Burgess, from Christchurch, went on to produce Kim Wilde and Spandau Ballet, and he was in a British group called Landscape that released the unforgettably titled album From the Tea-Rooms of Mars ...To the Hell-Holes of Uranus.]

At the time of ‘St Paul’ you were very much in that tuxedo jacket pop scene, with the velvet bow tie. But by the 70s you could ditch that for jeans.

“Yeah I went into that rapidly,” Shane said, sighing with relief. “I always had a little bit of a complex with [Nilsson’s] ‘Cuddly Toy’, and stuff like that. Because my friends were cool musos. And I couldn’t be, I had to go on TV every week. You were groomed to be a little pop singer. And I’d been in the Pleazers, who were wild and woolly, and all that stuff. Then I was groomed for this nice boy image.

“EMI said to me, no way, you do ‘Cuddly Toy’. You want a hit? I said yeah, they said well you’re doing it. That’s what Peter Dawkins said to me, the very words. And it was a hit. It got me off the ground, got me off to a good start. But they always moulded the songs. It evolved into a sort of 70s image, where the hair got longer, a slight beard grew mainly because I couldn’t grow one anyway. Denims came in vogue, that George Harrison hairy look.

“The 70s changed everything. Then of course I went off to England and I came back totally different. I didn’t even do my songs for a while. For about three, four months I said I don’t sing those anymore, I’m doing my stuff. Of course people would come and they’d go ‘You didn’t do “St Paul”, you didn’t do “Natural Man” ... I love those songs.’

“I thought I’m doing this wrong, so I went back to them and didn’t bother about it again. You grow up quick.”

Soon, EMI: the days of cultural imperialism, 1926-60.

* The rock’n’roll veterans story is here: Devlin on the Road: It's a Long Way to the Shop if You Want a Sausage Roll.

Studio One

It was only in 1973 that HMV changed its name in New Zealand to EMI. This was right in the middle of its heyday as a company recording local music, as opposed to just selling overseas artists. Their local efforts had begun back in 1955 with the recording of Johnny Cooper’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and in the 1960s and 1970s the HMV studios in Wakefield Street, Wellington, hummed with activity.

Maria Dallas listens to the playback of ‘Tumblin Down’, 1966. Above, Mark Williams at just the beginning of his life.

It was here – for its own label, and independents such as Viking – that Allison Durbin recorded ‘I Have Loved Me a Man’, Mr Lee Grant ‘Thanks to You’, the Fourmyula their minimalist ‘Nature’ and Shane his epic ‘St Paul’. Peter Dawkins gets a lot of well-deserved credit as a producer, but to everyone who ever recorded at HMV – Maria Dallas, Blerta, Nash Chase, the Kal-Q-Lated Risk, Fred Dagg, Daggy & the Dickheads, the NZSO, and countless others – one man was HMV.

That was Frank Douglas, the engineer at the studio from its inception, when it evolved out of Lotus Studios. He stayed on during the studio’s ill-fated move to Lower Hutt in 1976, right to its closing in 1987. In 1992 Nick Bollinger interviewed him for William Dart’s quarterly Music in New Zealand. The article is probably the most thorough technical account of the HMV/EMI recording period. Douglas spoke of building the equipment, the arrival of stereo, the adding of more and more tracks. He discussed how they achieved effects like phasing, and the big productions of Durbin and the Avengers.

Other names that should be mentioned are the arrangers such as Don Richardson and Brian Hands – both of whom died recently – and Garth Young. HMV started to employ in-house producers; besides Dawkins there was Howard Gable (who produced and later married Durbin) and Alan Galbraith.

At left, Rockinghorse debates whose turn it is to get the Kentucky Fried. From left: Wayne Mason, Kevin Bayley and Clinton Brown.

Galbraith had the idea of employing a house band for all recordings: Rockinghorse. This band featured, among others, Wayne Mason (ex-Fourmyula) and Clinton Brown, both of whom were later in the Warratahs. Kevin Bayley was regarded as Wellington's leading guitarist at the time. Keith Norris was the drummer. They backed everyone from the Yandalls to Jon Stevens to Mark Williams, and their work stands up. However there is a big difference in the sound achieved at the old studio (think of the presence in Durbin’s big hit) and the new one, which was a much bigger room and had a new desk. There’s a thinness to the later albums, despite the playing.

Douglas said the shift out to the Hutt ruined everything. Advertising agencies didn’t want to come out and record. “We had beautiful new studios out there but lost 80 percent of our clients in the shift. The management of EMI in England said it would make no difference. ... EMI at the Hutt became basically a manufacturing unit. We did cassette mastering, disc cutting and the odd recording.” Richardson told me that the Rowling Labour government's imposition of a sales tax also had a big effect on local recording (Muldoon later lifted it to 40 percent), but for a few years HMV eclipsed the efforts of Stebbings and Astor and other studios in Auckland.

Next: Shane tells tales. The B&W photos are by Frank Douglas, courtesy Music in New Zealand. Colour photos EMI.

Electrical musical industries

The down-scaling of EMI in New Zealand has been commented on by several bloggers, and the reaction to it is an indication of how much part of the music community it has been. Often this has been almost in spite of itself or, at least, in spite of the very multi-national approach of its head office in London. Over the years in various “territories” (such a term of economic imperialism) there has been an attitude of plunder the colonies of their leisure dollar and give nothing back to their culture, but that hasn’t always been the case in New Zealand.

The original news item to it was linked by Peter McLennan who now includes today’s item from the NZ Herald media column; Simon Grigg has commented with insight on the news, and both he and Graham Reid rue the departure of EMI NZ managing-director Chris Caddick. Why? Because, while still being a good businessman (a real “record man” – ie, he is passionate about the record business) he also genuinely loves music. (Thanks for introducing me to Richard Thompson, Chris!)

For a long while EMI was based in my home town, perched among some very unsalubrious light-industrial buildings in Petone. And of course there were EMI record stores in most New Zealand towns in the 1970s and 80s. I thought I’d share some images from EMI’s heyday, the 1970s. I remember reading in NME in 1981 that the success of the Beatles was so massive that their sales alone brought this massive international corporation a profit all the way until 1975. Plus, of course, there were the enormous sales of Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits.

So turn off your mind, relax and float downstream ... perch yourself in a vinyl beanbag in the “sound lounge” of EMI’s Lower Hutt corporate headquarters.

Break out the buddha, we’ve got Cliff’s Devil Woman to audition ...

Outside on the Hutt Road, the corporate fleet awaits. As you’d expect from the greatest recording company of the Empire, every vehicle is the Best of British, c1975.

It’s all glamour working at EMI. At the front desk the receptionist wonders how she can turn down yet another lunch invitation from the guy with the comb-over in despatch. She wasn’t impressed by the free promo copy of Strapps, a self-titled debut album, even if it was produced by Deep Purple’s Roger Glover. The opening track ‘School Girl Funk’ was naff – give me Alice Cooper – and what self-respecting band writes a song called ‘Rock Critic’?

Meanwhile, in the nerve centre – sales – the “girl” in the cowl-neck jumper from Carters and Kiki Dee hair-do is hiding it well that the fellow looming over her has splashed on too much Brut.

For EMI men it’s been Mo-vember ever since the legendary 1973 staff conference held at the Chateau. Cold Duck flowed like water, but it wasn’t a good leg opener as the girls all turned up in dungarees. Blame Linda McCartney ...

Things got so out of hand that EMI head office sent out their apprentice career manager to prove himself. Here he is on the phone back to Britain, worrying about the fruit-and-flowers expenditure (nudge nudge, wink wink) of hot New Zealand recording act Rockinghorse. Mr MS Wells – “Mike” to the ladies – had just arrived on the corporate jet from EMI Argentina. He’d had plenty of experience sorting out men who wore medallions.

Coming up, Lower Hutt as Muscle Shoals: EMI’s recording heyday.