How the Shaky Isles got rockin

By GREG DIXON

"We weren't expected to have careers… the girls just sort of waited to get engaged and married, hopefully by the time they were 21 … the boys went into apprenticeships and got their first pair of grey strides when they turned 15, just like dad …and all of a sudden, one day out of America came rock'n'roll."

It must have been a visceral moment. A jaw-popping, heart-stopping, the-Martians-have-landed sort of moment when New Zealand's world - cautious, hidebound and black'n'white - turned colour, turned rock'n'roll.

The year was 1955. Grumpy old Sid Holland was Prime Minister. Pubs closed at 6 o'clock sharp. Aunt Daisy was on the wireless and 40s-style bands still ruled the dance halls.

It was Squaresville, daddy-o. Like a one-horse town where they'd shot the horse. And then, as 50s singer Carol Davies remembers in a quote taken from the opening moments of a new television history of New Zealand music, Give It A Whirl - the big beat arrived out of nowhere and nothing was ever quite the same again.

Nearly half a century on, in a world capable of downloading itself in an instant, it's hard to imagine what it might be like to make such an arcane, exciting discovery. Or, for that matter, how that New Zealand might react to the arrival of beings so obviously and ostentatiously different as Little Richard or Elvis.

Another quaint, instructive example, then. In All Shook Up, an account of the rise of the New Zealand teenager, author Redmer Yska recounts the story of a group of teenage girls standing around a Symonds St record store screaming and squealing.

Was it Elvis in person? Was it Johnny Devlin, Wanganui's Elvis knock-off?

Well, no. On closer inspection these young things were going wild over a magazine-cover sized photograph of Elvis in the window.

And the boys hanging around the girls, were busily trying to comb their hair just like his, trying to give it a whirl.

Local boys - and girls - have been doing the same since. And across its six hours, Give It A Whirl charts that cycle of overseas trends arriving in our country far, far away from anywhere else and being turned into indigenous rock'n'roll: from Devlin's Elvis to the Fourmyula's 60s rock to Space Waltz's Bowie impressions to The Enemy's punk to The Datsuns' 70s revivalism.

"The same thing happened time and time again," says Whirl researcher and associate producer, Michael Higgins. "The music comes from overseas - but then it's not a New Zealand medium. We can take it, we can add to it and interpret it, but we can't say we invented it.

"It may not be all our own work, but Kiwi rock - from Ray [Columbus] to Zed as the Whirl promos put it - has a rich, extensive history and telling it on screen was an immense, ambitious undertaking for Higgins, producer Richard Driver, director Mark Everton and their team.

"It was a year in the making. It took more than 80 interviews. The risk of making a hash of it was there and on their minds every single day."

"We realised that there was only one chance at this," Everton says. The money was only going to be there once and if we [expletive] it up, then we might as well leave the country. That was my attitude: 'no pressure, just don't [expletive] it up'."

Then again, Driver giggles, they couldn't let anybody else do it.

"We knew that we all cared. It was one of those once-in-every-decade type gigs and it's not for your own ego, it's because you care about it."

The trio are ancient rock'n'roll disciples. They're all punks who lived past 21 only to encounter their 40s, paunches and careers in television.

And just like in the 50s, there was little TV or radio coverage of their new music when it came from overseas in the 70s. The first time we knew about punk, Everton says, "was Dylan Taite's interview with the Sex Pistols on TV".

Driver, a Cantab who rode the Punk-New Wave in bands like the Hip Singles (they don't appear), says that interview kicked Christchurch alive, too.

"It was like Elvis. It started a whole new generation. It was like 'yeah, I'll take that, get me out of here'."

The trio really wanted that Taite interview for Whirl. As it turned out the tape was borrowed from the TVNZ archive by Taite some years ago and never taken back.

Everton, an old friend, talked to the idiosyncratic journalist for a year in an attempt to get hold of it. In the end its whereabouts went to the grave when Taite died suddenly, of mysterious causes, in January.

There were other interviews they didn't get, too. Like one with the Garbo-like Phil Judd (of Split Enz and the Swingers) and, oddly, Che Fu.

The latter, arguably one of the most important musicians in New Zealand now, played so hard to get - repeatedly cancelled interviews, though he nts obviously nte had time to make that TV ad - they decided not to bother.

But these were rare misses, they say, though their philosophy of approach to the subject - the checklist for who was in and who was out - might have some thinking otherwise.

It came down to the artists who had the biggest hits, the highest quality of creativity and those who had the most interesting stories.

We've tried to have people who were at the vanguard of something, Driver offers.

They're expecting flak. Few things are as personal as music - and opinions on what rocks and what does not are like haircuts, everyone's got one.

"We will be pilloried, there's no doubt about it," deadpans Everton to shotguns of laughter from Driver and Higgins.

The trio underline that Whirl is not intended as a definitive history. Its subtitle "New Zealand Rock'n'Roll Stories" reflects its mission: good yarns told chronologically for as many viewers as possible.

Television, Higgins says, can't tell the complete history of rock'n'roll in New Zealand in six, one-hour episodes.

"So we had a lot of grappling with how much to put in, how much to leave out. And people are going to be horrified that their favourite band isn't in there and some band they don't rate is."

"There were people who had to be in there because they're so important. But we didn't want it to be all the usual suspects. So there are a few people in there, who nobody's ever heard of, that are fascinating stories in themselves."

Telling some of those stories proved problematic. We take care of our pop culture these days, but it wasn't always so, so footage of some late, great bands that they'd liked to have included just wasn't in existence.

"A lot more stuff is kept now," says Higgins. "But there is very little footage from the 50s. Even finding extra stuff from the 60s, footage we're not used to seeing, was difficult. Television threw out a lot. In the 70s videotape was expensive and was recycled."

Indeed, there was no film of New Zealand's first real rock idol, Devlin, until Whirl's public request for footage unearthed, in Rotorua, one reel of an abortive rock'n'roll movie.

"There are a lot collectors out there and nobody seemed to know about it," Higgins says.

Driver: "What was the Peter Jackson doco? Forgotten Silver? That's what it is".

They also collected more than 1500 still photographs some of which were cleverly restored then animated using digital technology.

"We now have this amazing archive," says Everton.

But all that - like the social history which washes through each episode - is a happy by-product.

Whirl is, as it should be, mostly good yarns - and more importantly good music.

And, as Higgins says, rock'n'roll and television aren't always easy bedfellows.

"Quite often these things can come across as patronising. But we wanted to do something that stood up in terms of the music as well as a television programme. We wanted to make something that stood up in 50 years."

Driver says there will be a double CD of tracks from the documentary and a DVD is a possibility - he'd hate the show to just disappear after one screening. And certainly that would be one terrible shame for a document chronicling significant, if pop cultural, events.

"It was just amazing, our lives changed overnight," Davies goes on to say in Give It A Whirl's first episode. "It felt as if I'd been plugged into a power socket. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

Rock'n'roll, as Give It A Whirl will remind you from Monday, can be like that.