It’s 40 years this week since For Today left the music singles chart. Nick Sampson, co-writer and former guitarist with The Netherworld Dancing Toys, talks to Kim Knight about the song’s staying power and why he (eventually) agreed to play it again with a brand new band.
“It’s not that I want to feel like I’m 22 again,” explains Nick Sampson carefully. “But it’s like, this song, just does something to people.”
Four decades after The Netherworld Dancing Toys released For Today, the musician who co-wrote the hit single has been convinced to put it back on a live set list.
Same song, entirely new band – and quite a bit of soul searching.
“I thought it would be bad taste and try-hard,” says Sampson. “Would it just sound like a bad cover?”
Sampson was a guitarist and vocalist with the Dunedin-based student band when he worked out the chorus to For Today at the Hotel Ashburton. In 1984, the “Flash Ash” was a coveted stop on the touring band circuit – rooms arranged in a horseshoe around a swimming pool, a smorgasbord where musicians ate for free.
“Maybe we had a day off,” says Sampson. “Maybe we were waiting for soundcheck? Some of the guys were having a swim and sitting around the pool and I was just in my little room, one of those white curtains flapping across the door, and I had the acoustic guitar out ... It just dropped out of the sky. As they do.”
The song was released in July the following year and exited the official New Zealand singles charts exactly 40 years ago this week – but For Today has never really left the national song book.
The co-write between Sampson and The Netherworld’s frontman Malcolm Black became a rugby stadium anthem and a school hall staple. It featured on the soundtracks of television’s Westside and the film Sione’s Wedding, was used in a driving safety campaign, a New Zealand Post commercial and, in 2015, was the song Pak’nSave supermarket chose to celebrate its own 30th.
“Weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs,” Sampson deadpans. “Why does this song resonate through generations? Mal and I were always ‘let’s not be precious about it’. If people want to use it, let them use it.”
The Netherworlds last performed For Today in 2018. The musicians who hadn’t shared a big stage for decades closed out the Australasian Performing Right Association (Apra) Silver Scrolls with a surprise reunion – their last before Black’s death.
Band personnel flew in from Singapore, Australia, London and around New Zealand, finally coming together just one day before the Apras. Sampson says they did three run-throughs: “Some of us hadn’t seen each other for 20 years ... We played it, and of course, it just sounded like the band. Everyone knew their parts and nothing had changed and everyone could still do what they did.”
But it was bittersweet. Black was ill – a year earlier, he’d been diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer.
Watch: Netherworld Dancing Toys perform at the 2018 Silver Scrolls
On the night: “Full concert rig at Spark Arena. For some reason, there was a delay. We were side of stage for 20 minutes. I remember Mal walking in circles, and he didn’t want to talk. I never get nervous playing, but I was actually really tense.
“We go on stage, we launch into it and then it was over. I vaguely remember it! Vaguely remember seeing [Prime Minister] Jacinda Ardern dancing down there, and my family dancing over there. As soon as we played it, everyone jumped up and rushed to the front, because it was a surprise – and it was For Today.”
Imagine writing a song with a chorus the whole country can sing; picking out an arpeggio that gets a crowd to its feet in three seconds flat. Then you grow up and get old. Births, deaths and marriages. Weddings, funerals and divorces. In the background, all the time, that song that reminds you who you were – and what you might have been.
“There was a melancholy,” says Sampson. “A joy and a melancholy, playing at the Apras.”
Malcolm James Prentice Black, ONZM, died, aged 58, seven months later.
“I used to call it a four-chord nursery rhyme,” says Sampson. “One day Mal said to me, not long before he died actually, ‘for ****’s sake Sampson, it’s five chords!’
“People ask sometimes, what’s it like having a one-hit wonder? No one’s more surprised than me that it seems to have become part of the national fabric. As far as I’m concerned, it’s better to have a song that people remember than not.”
In 1985, For Today earned Sampson and Black a Silver Scroll, and The Netherworld Dancing Toys took out five categories at the New Zealand Music Awards. It turned Annie Crummer, who was just 19 when she first sang her distinctive backing vocals alongside Kim Willoughby, into a household name.
The evolving brass line-up now routinely included the Newton Hoons (Chris Green and Mike Russell on saxophone and trumpet, respectively), both on stage and in the studio. But by the end of the 1980s, the core of the band – Black, Sampson, Graham Cockroft and Brent Alexander – the musicians who had first come together as University of Otago students, had bills to pay and careers to pursue.
An unsigned offer from Columbia Records that might have taken the band to the United States was lost when the label sold to Sony. Sampson and Cockroft (who’s clocked up 30 years-plus in senior executive roles in the international energy industry) went to Britain. Black became New Zealand’s first specialist music industry lawyer, a record company executive and an artist manager, and Alexander became a designer and a builder.
Sampson would eventually come back to New Zealand as a brand strategist and writer – and he never stopped making music.
“I wanted it to be a career,” he says. “And that was absolute pie in the sky before we started the Netherworlds. You have to remember, the Netherworlds completely, unexpectedly, just got really successful.
“That song unexpectedly changed our lives. It’s a genie in the bottle I can’t define. I think I’ve written better songs, but people like that one. There are people that don’t like it as well. People who tell me it’s terrible, it’s just pop rubbish, but ... ”
He recently counted up the bands he’s been in post-Netherworlds. He made an album with The Lure of Shoes. More recently, he formed Dirt alongside Black and Barry Blackler (who drummed for The Jesus and Mary Chain in the early 1990s), releasing a 10-track debut, Bloom, after Black’s death.
Forty years, at least 23 bands, and he never once thought about bringing For Today back?
“I’d have never done it while Malcolm was alive,” says Sampson. “I would never do it without him.”
Parāoa Brewing Co, 2025: “As the opening lines filled the bar, people raised their phones, arms, and beers in reverence,” writes reviewer Paul Marshall on the music and culture website RedRaven. “The lyrics weren’t just sung, they were shouted, etched into the collective memory of every over-30 in the crowd. It was pure joy. Pure release.”
The reviewer is at The Black Flames, and the band have just played For Today.
Sampson’s new band had their genesis at Black’s wake, with a random conversation with musician friends Tim Robinson (drums) and Steven Shaw (bass).
“And I think I just had a rush of enthusiasm and said, ‘We should put a band together that plays that old soul stuff’,” says Sampson.
“And the funny old thing is naming a band is one of the hardest things you ever do, and you always hate the name that you choose. It wasn’t an homage to Malcolm as such, but, in retrospect, obviously the subconscious was working.”
A three-page bio-pack introduces The Black Flames as an “11-piece rockin’ soul powerhouse”. The lineup runs the gamut from young, complete unknown (Moana Richardson) who solos on the likes of Knock on Wood and is “gently exploring” the Crummer solo on For Today, to a super band’s worth of musicians with too much collective curriculum vitae for this story’s word count.
The set list includes soul classics, some lesser-known Netherworld’s tracks, a handful of new Sampson originals and THAT Kiwi classic.
Flames’ frontman Aaron Gascoigne pushed hard for its inclusion on the set list.
“I do recall, at the Hillcrest Tavern, as a 16- or 17-year-old on the dance floor, just screaming out the lyrics ... I absolutely adored that song as did, as do, most New Zealanders ... young love, boy-girl-summer ... ‘I’ll remember your smile’.
“I think it came with a bit of reluctance. A feeling of, you know, do we want to be a Netherworld’s tribute act?”
Sampson: “I said ‘no’ for two months.
“When we first did it, and I thought about Malcolm, it was a bit of a ‘single manly tear’ kind of thing.
“I suppose when we play it, everyone in the band is smiling and the audience response is not like we’re playing a cover and, well, how can I be covering my own song? And the band is good and we do a really appropriate, and worthy – a really worthy – version of it.”
Back in the day, Sampson grabbed a chorus from thin air and worked up some verses at his grandmother’s in Waitara, where he had a seasonal job at the freezing works (lungs down one chute, trachea down another, et al). He came back to the Dunedin practice room with the song’s basic structure, but there were too many words, and the verses weren’t quite working.
“Mal said, ‘Do you mind if I take it home and have a look ... ‘”
Black came back the next day with the verses and a revised melody (years later, he would tell Sampson he had been inspired by a night of listening to Van Morrison), and the song got its first outings at 1985’s university orientation gigs.
That was a lifetime ago, and also, says Sampson wryly, “about two years ago”.
Sampson’s mother was a choral singer, his father and grandfather were brass band stalwarts. Born and mostly raised in Taranaki, he grew up playing the cornet, the flugelhorn and was “precociously interested” in jazz.
“I was an 11-year-old getting books out of the library on Charles Mingus and Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, whilst not actually knowing who David Bowie was when he was mentioned at school.”
At 14, he found The Beatles and a cheap acoustic guitar and New Plymouth’s Nocturnal Projections. He bought their cassette. He was definitely moving to Auckland to become a second guitarist in a punk band – a plan he outlined to his parents as they cooked the traditional Friday night steak and red wine dinner.
“I was expecting World War III. They went, ‘Oh, that’s a pity, we thought you’d go to university. Oh well, how’s the steak doing?’ Which was exactly what they should have done – I was a late enrolment and unbelievably could get into the university and a college hall.”
The Netherworld’s origin story is well-worn territory – a big, bright, happy dance-band blip on a 1980s local music landscape that was, at least down south, dominated by the dark and experimental.
What’s more interesting, perhaps, is what drives some musicians to keep coming back for more. To write new songs, form new bands and do the back exercises that allow you to lug an amplifier into your 60s.
“A lot of people did hang up their guitar straps and picks at a certain time,” says Sampson.
“It’s not the only thing in my life, but I do see myself as a musician and a songwriter, and it’s a craft. Writing songs is something you also get better at. Ironically, the one thing that I will be remembered for is something I did when I was in my 20s. But that’s all right.
“I love playing. I find it very therapeutic, and I’m enjoying the challenge of continuing to try and get better. Oh, it’s a really complicated question – I don’t see why people should stop?”
It’s midwinter when the New Zealand Herald takes a camera to The Lab in Auckland’s Mt Eden to catch a handful of The Black Flames at the tail end of a two-day recording marathon.
They’re working on three Sampson originals – High Hopes, Still Crazy and Just for You.
“I didn’t need much cajoling,” said Malcom Larsen (keyboards). “It was a tiring day, but I’m not complaining. To be back in this space ... I like tripping over drum kits in a hallway. I love all that s***.”
Simon Berry (tenor): “I started playing in bands in maybe 2002 and have all the way through until Covid stuffed everything up. This has saved my bacon, really. I was going nuts without a band.”
Ed Geddes (tenor sax): “I found it was really good for my melancholia.”
Break over, Sampson stands behind the mixing desk, directing traffic.
“That sounds great. There were two slight wobbles that we can probably fix. Let’s do the whole thing again and play it with a bit of vim.”
The studio fills with sound. Sampson grins.
“All right. Solved! Shall we do the same thing again?”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.