18

IN WHICH… WE GO KIWI

My son and his family live in a small but historic New Zealand town called Petone, just outside of the capital, Wellington. It is where horses were first raced in this beautiful land, on the beach, which still looks much as it would have done back in the day, as, wisely, virtually no commercialism of the seafront is permitted. In several visits to Petone’s Lo Cost second-hand record shop, which increasingly stocks new ones as well, I have acquired – admittedly after lengthy, dogged delving as this is not the best laid out of shops I’ve been in – such hidden gems as Mother Earth’s Living With The Animals from 1968 (£25 in Rare Record Price Guide); Plainsong’s In Search of Amelia Earhart (1972, £25); and Asylum Choir II from 1969, which features one of my offbeat favourites, Leon Russell.

During my 2019 visit I found LPs by Keith Christmas, whose work I knew, as well as The Motions, a Dutch group of the late 1960s, and Jake Jones, a group which I didn’t know at all. The three came to a total of 80 dollars (a dollar was worth about 56 pence at the time) so I decided to try for a discount.

‘Well, I’m already offering cheap prices, said the shop owner, who, minutes earlier had been slumbering in a chair despite the reggae music blaring out, as I entered his premises.

‘But I’ve come 12,000 miles to get here – and travelling that far isn’t cheap.’

‘I suppose I could give you 10 off – 70 for the three.’

I gave him what I hoped was a steely gaze: ‘65?’

‘Go on, then.’ He almost smiled. ‘So, you’re on a visit – do you want a bag for them?’

‘Thanks.’ I handed him a 100 dollar note.

‘Hey, you’ve got plenty of money… ’

He did smile when he said that, but added:

‘Had a guy in recently who bought a few records, so I asked if he wanted a bag as it was raining outside and he had to reach his car without getting the records wet. He accepted, and nipped off in the rain. Once he’d gone, another customer – in his 40s, I’d say – came over to the counter, glared at me and said, almost spitting it out, “It’s people like you with your plastic bags who have fucked the world”, then walked straight out of the door.’

‘Should have told him you protect the environment by making sure thousands of vinyl records aren’t just dumped into landfill.’

Wonderland is another New Zealand establishment, with erratic opening hours – and even more erratic in-store behaviour. Probably – no, definitely – the most untidy and disorganised shop I’ve ever come across. It is not that far from Petone, in the suburb of Wainuiomata, but it is always a gamble whether the eccentric chap who runs it – apparently the brother of the only marginally eccentric Lo-Cost owner – has bothered to open that day. The first clues to its modus operandi can be gathered from its website, which quirkily declares that it has ‘been in the business of selling records since 1994… built up a large range of titles by a vast array of artists as diverse as Barbara (sic) Streisand; Elvis; Metalica (sic); Nina & Fredick (sic) and Joan Sutherland.’ Elsewhere on the site ‘Gerry and the Placemakers’ get a mention.

Even if you’ve found the shop open – I have an under 50 per cent record of doing so – got in, made your way around the toppling, towering, scattered, dumped, piled-up heaps of thousands of records, tapes, CDs, DVDs, left higgledy-piggledy all over the shop, with no apparent rhyme nor reason to what is where, finding something is tricky, and buying it extremely difficult, frequently impossible. Requests to the friendly enough gent behind the desk, who is quite hefty and of advancing years – what some might refer to these days as a ‘large unit’ – usually elicits the confident confirmation that, ‘Yes, we’ve got that’. A gentle hint that more information might be necessary to manage to find the record in question, however, produces scant encouragement vis-a-vis specific directions to its location.

On my first visit to the shop, back in 2014, I tried to buy OK Ken? by Chicken Shack. There was no price on it. When I asked how much it was, back came vague murmurings along the lines of ‘I’m not really sure I want to sell it, but if I did, I’m not sure you’d want to pay that much.’ ‘Try me’ produced nothing more concrete than ‘It’s a great record.’ When I persisted, again enquiring as to the price, I was gently told I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. I suggested that perhaps I could – if only he would tell me what the asking price was. ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe 80 bucks.’

‘Maybe?’

‘Yes, why don’t you look around to see what else you might like?’

‘But I like this one.’

‘Really, the records in the shop are here so that I can sell them online.’

I rather thought this must be a unique experience. After all, why run a shop and not even try to sell the records? He did eventually, reluctantly, let me buy a Chicken Shack LP – not the OK Ken? I wanted but a lesser, later title which featured just Stan Webb from the early line-up, and which, to be honest I shouldn’t have bothered with.

In 2019 my first trip out to the shop proved fruitless. Shut. My son rang one afternoon to ask whether the shop would open at all that day. He was told it would be open until 9pm as the owner was in the shop cataloguing titles for the website. A little sceptical, three of us drove out to the shop at about 7.30pm.

‘I stayed open for you three guys from England,’ he greeted us.

Little had changed. All enquiries about buying records were countered with: ‘That’s about 40 bucks, that one’s about 80 bucks’, seemingly the only two prices he bothered to use – the equivalent at the time of around about £22.50 or £45. Most were shabby, scuffed, creased copies. He was, though, enjoying our company. Welcoming and chatty. We talked about the likes of Frank Zappa, Edgar Broughton, Human Instinct and many more. ‘I’m really enjoying listening to you knowledgeable Brits,’ he told us.

He recounted an odd personal encounter with Jimmy Page. ‘He was once about 6ft 2ins tall,’ he claimed, adding that the Led Zep axeman had since mysteriously shrunk by several inches as the result of a back problem. He may have been right. A check on Google brought up the stat that Page is 5ft 11ins tall but didn’t reveal whether, and, if so, how, he had recently lost three inches.

The shop had been open for some years, the owner told us. ‘I primarily trade online so don’t need to price up the records in-store. For one thing, putting prices on the covers can damage them.’ I wondered how you’d notice in most instances. During this visit I was not remotely surprised to note that the copy of OK Ken? I’d tried to buy on the previous visit, was still present and correct – in a box, on the floor, with no price on it. I didn’t bother asking whether he’d be willing to part with it now. We left him at about 9pm, still animatedly chatting to us. He had allowed us to buy only a 20 dollar DVD of Megadeth, which my son’s heavy metal pal, Simon, purchased. We shook hands and he waved us off happily. Once back home I endeavoured to buy something via his website, one of the most difficult to navigate I’ve ever come across. I failed dismally. So, that’s Wonderland – difficult to get to, difficult to look around, difficult to buy from, but a great experience!

Part of the enjoyment of the whole experience of acquiring records for many of us has been and always will be the physical effort involved in getting to the place where you are going to carry out that transaction. However, my ‘I’ve come 12,000 miles’ schtick failed dismally in Mint Music in the Wellington suburb of Upper Hutt, which I visited to buy a Forever More LP, Yours, that I’d spotted on their website for a tempting 16 Kiwi bucks. The chap behind the counter just stared at me with an unchanging, unimpressed countenance:

‘I’ve sold it.’

‘So why is it still up on your website?’

No response. Just a come-on, I reckoned.

Instead, I bought a 1973 Scaffold LP, Fresh Liver, (£20), for 16 dollars. Well, it did have Zoot Money, Neil Innes and Pete Halsall on it. The Forever More LP was still being advertised on his website when I left the country after a couple of weeks. On a later trip I bought two LPs here and asked for a bag to put them in: ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have a bag… of that size.’ Er, what OTHER size would you need in a record shop?

I didn’t get off on the right foot with Death Ray Records in Newtown, a Wellington suburb. It’s not a huge shop, apparently always teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and it was probably ill-advised of me to try for a discount on my first visit. However, we made up on subsequent jaunts. A place with a vibrant atmosphere, enough new cutting-edge material to suit my eldest son, and enough elderly stuff to keep me quiet for a while. I bought competitively priced vinyl reissues of obscure US and Kiwi bands from here. During my 2019 visit I noticed the probably unique message on the door: ‘Shop closes most midweek days between 2.55 – 3.10pm for school pick-up. Sorry for messing you around.’ I’d arrived at 2.52pm, so I had three minutes of browsing before being slung out.

‘But I’ve come 12,000 miles.’

‘Sorry, bro.’

I couldn’t hold a grudge, and returned a week later. This time I was able to browse contentedly until I found four records to buy. When I took them to the counter, ‘Boss Dude’ as I later discovered he was known, told me that he didn’t supply bags for purchases. His website elaborates: ‘Do the right thing, please bring your own bag – help save the world. Reduce and reuse.’ Fine sentiments, which don’t quite explain why he put each of my records in a new plastic cover before handing them to me. Well, which of us is entirely consistent in our beliefs?

However, spotting that I’d bought a reissue of a 1971 self-titled Kiwi psych album by Space Farm, described as ‘one of the rarest psychedelic blues LPs from NZ’, Boss Dude told me:

‘Originals of this are hugely expensive, I found one once and paid a lot of money for it. But when I looked closely there was a small, round hole in the front cover which had not only gone through the cover but also right through the vinyl itself, affecting at least one of the tracks on each side. I complained to the seller, but it was a case of buyer beware – a tough lesson to learn.’

I enjoyed my time in this wonderfully right-on shop, in whose window I saw as I departed, another message:

‘If Death Ray is closed during the opening times below, go to the shop Facebook page – Boss Dude posts up any shit regarding closure.’

In Napier, an atmospheric, art-deco NZ seaside town, lives Just For The Record, a joint vinyl/audio equipment shop with an excellent stock, not that many of them at bargain prices, though. I have bought plenty from here, despite the well-meaning, if a little pushy, boss.

Another Kiwi vinyl memory occurred in Martinborough – where we visited a little touristy gift shop and got talking with the owner who, it transpired, used to live in the same town in the UK as my wife and I. Further chat revealed that he too was something of a record collector – and a musician as well. A guitarist. We began talking favourite albums and the Zombies’ 1968 LP masterpiece Odessey and Oracle was mentioned. ‘I have a claim to fame as a result of that record,’ he told me. ‘I knew Chris White from the band and one day I loaned him my guitar while he was writing tracks for Odessey. Not only did he write the song ‘Friends Of Mine’ on that guitar, but he included in it the names of various pairs of married friends of his – and my wife and I were duly immortalised as a result.’ Inevitably, the sting in his tale was that he and his wife are no longer together.

New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, boasts a couple of splendid record shops, in one of the city’s best known thoroughfares, Cuba Street. I was browsing through Slow Boat’s huge stock, which covers virtually every area of vinyl and CD, ancient and modern, when I heard what sounded very much like a familiar voice, singing an unfamiliar song. It was Tony Joe White. I own almost all of his recorded output. This was his 2016 album, Rain Crow, which had somehow escaped my notice up to that point, so I snapped up the CD version in the absence of a vinyl one, to take home as a musical souvenir.

One of the quirkiest record shops I’ve been fortunate enough to frequent, the tiny Vanishing Point, just up the road from Slow Boat, had lived up to its name and, sadly, disappeared, leaving me thinking back to its friendly, if somewhat battered, proprietor and his small but always interestingly eccentric stock of offbeat records. I’d found Edwards Hand’s second LP from 1970, Stranded, there, which was produced by George Martin and boasted cover art – a black and white drawing of a US sheriff’s rotund stomach – by Klaus Voorman, designer of the cover of The Beatles’ album Revolver.

Back in the UK I decided to listen to the Tony Joe White CD to bring back a few memories of killing time in Slow Boat. Unfortunately, when I opened the CD’s sealed cover there was no CD inside. I was not best pleased. Couldn’t really pop back to complain, could I? But modern technology does have its occasional benefits, so I emailed the shop, and was thoroughly impressed to receive a message back very quickly: ‘What a coincidence – we’ve just discovered that we have a CD of Tony Joe White’s new album – but with no cover!’ They posted the CD to me, despite the postage probably costing more than the CD did originally.

I’ve also since bought original Yardbirds and Barry Ryan LPs there, and a slew of CDs featuring great Kiwi bands from the 1960s, but pride of place for me of the purchases I’ve made here goes to the oddly named Dutch band, Cuby + Blizzards’ 1969 little-known blues-rock classic, Appleknockers Flophouse. Sample lyric:

‘Appleknockers flophouse that’s where we live in Such a good place for you and for me If you come to our Appleknockers flophouse You don’t know what you’re bound to see’

Slow Boat, which I understand is a favourite haunt of Martin Freeman and Noel Gallagher when they’re in town, is not the only record shop in Cuba Street. A few doors down is Rough Peel where I found a bargain price, good quality original 1973 Derek & The Dominos In Concert double album, as well as a pretty poor quality bootleg featuring the Stones and The Who.

Just over the ‘ditch’ from New Zealand is an odd island where most of the inhabitants cluster nervously around the edge of the place, seldom venturing towards the middle. The locals call it Oz…