When Wanganui band The Pussywhippers stumbled across a 90s Croatian surf-rock song called Wanganui, it sounded too bizarre to be true. The Chronicle tracked down the story.
In the mid-90s a band called The Bambi Molesters formed in Sisak, Croatia. Part of the surf-rock revival, they recorded their debut album Dumb Loud Hollow Twang in three hours and released it in 1997.
But it's the title of the opening track that 17 years later has captured the imagination of a pair of local musicians and has them hoping to bring the Bambi Molesters to Wanganui.
It turns out Bambi Molesters guitarist Dalibor Pavicic's best friends had moved to Wanganui about the time the album was being recorded. "I think they had some business connections there," Pavicic told the Chronicle.
"At that time the name sounded as though it could be a surf hot-spot kind of place so we wrote an instrumental song and named it Wanganui. They lived there (for a) couple of years," he said.
About five years later The Bambi Molesters played the New Zealand Festival. And a trip to see the city their song was named after could not be missed. "After the festival we visited Wanganui. Nice city but obviously no connection to surfing," Pavicic said.
The Bambi Molesters are still an active band and though Pavicic's friends ended up leaving the River City, he still has friends in Auckland and Australia.
The band have since toured with American rockers REM and have had music featured on hit TV series Breaking Bad. But as far as anyone knows, no one in Wanganui had heard of the song until last month, almost 20 years after it was recorded, when Pussywhippers' guitarist Jack Mitchell-Anyon was searching surf bands on the internet.
"He came to me absolutely frothing," Mitchell-Anyon's bandmate, Matt Edmonds, said.
The pair originally thought it was a Wanganui band due to the similarities in sound.
"It's almost like a mirror on the other side of the world.
"They'd have to play with the Pussywhippers, if only for crazy name vs crazy name," Edmonds said.
Mitchell-Anyon and Edmonds would love to play a gig at Space Monster with the Croatians.
"We can do it, we can get them here. Croatia to Wanganui," Mitchell-Anyon said.
Pavicic hinted Wanganui was somewhere they wanted to play: "It would be great to play in NZ again, looking forward to playing in Wanganui."
-Listen to Wanganui, by the Bambi Molesters