NZ on Screen: Silver Scroll classics

Photos / NZ on Screen

Opinion

In the lead up to next week’s APRA Silver Scroll songwriting awards, NZ On Screen Content Director Irene Gardiner looks back at some classic Kiwi songs that have won the prestigious award in years gone by.

The Silver Scroll songwriting awards began in 1965, and a distinguished array of New Zealand songwriters have taken home the annual prize. The music videos for many of the winning songs feature on NZ On Screen. Here are six favourites, starting with a 1985 release and moving through to one from 2006.

The Netherworld Dancing Toys' song For Today has become one of our Kiwi anthems, but it is also a previous Silver Scroll winner (1985). Band member Nick Sampson wrote the song during a summer spent working at the freezing works, and backing singer Annie Crummer's soaring vocal break helped take it to its legendary status. The music video was directed by one-time Radio with Pictures producer turned MTV Europe head Brent Hansen.

You can see For Today here:

1987's Silver Scroll winner was Dave Dobbyn, for

Oughta be in Love

, written for the Footrot Flats soundtrack. Inspired by Dobbyn's love of 50s crooners,

Oughta be in Love

accompanied Wal Footrot's wooing of Cheeky Hobson in the movie. The song has gone on to become a perennial wedding favourite, even gracing Hayden and Loretta's nuptials in

Outrageous Fortune

. And Dobbyn has gone on to win the Silver Scroll a record two more times.

Watch Oughta be in Love here:

One of our most respected female singer-songwriters, Shona Laing, was 1988's Silver Scroll winner, with her song Soviet Snow. The fall of the Iron Curtain was still several years away when Laing wrote the song, but the world had been teasing at war over the decades of the arms race and Cold War brinksmanship, and the threat of nuclear winter was very real. The video is a suitably chilly but dizzying montage that marries Russian iconography and Soviet imagery to the song's urgent synthesised 1980s beats.

View Soviet Snow here:

Along with Shona Laing and a handful of others, Don McGlashan is a two-time Silver Scroll winner. The first of his awards was in 1994 for this song written for his band the Mutton Birds - Anchor Me. The song has become a Kiwi classic. It was used in the soundtrack of a short film (Boy), a feature (Perfect Strangers) and given the all star treatment by Greenpeace. The music video was directed by Fane Flaws.

You can see Anchor Me here:

Another of our most accomplished female singer-songwriters, Bic Runga, was 1996's award-winner, with Drive. Directed by Justin Pemberton, the music video must be one of the few clips to feature the artist brushing their teeth.

View Drive here:

And, last but not least in this selection, Don McGlashan's second Silver Scroll winner, from 2006, the rousing Bathe in the River, written for a key scene in the Toa Fraser film No. 2, and sung by Hollie Smith. The music video was also directed by Fraser.

Watch Bathe in the River here:

To see a more comprehensive selection of past Silver Scroll award-winners, take a look at this collection on NZ On Screen.