Auckland went mad in the 1980s with a flood of bubbly, stupid hair, gauche glass towers and an overheated stock market. As the sequel to Wall Street - the 80s movie which defined the 'greed is good' decade - arrives in cinemas, Alan Perrott talks to those who attend Auckland's longest, maddest party ever ...
It got so that I couldn't stand champagne anymore, I'd just had enough. So yeah, we kind of knew that they were the best of times, like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire ..."
Such were the pre-crash 80s, and, as singer Peter Urlich suggests, a lot
of people had a very good time indeed - bubbles, waterbeds, stupid hair and Italian wallets stuffed with ill-gotten gains.
As a central player in the re-invention of Auckland's nightlife at the time, he got closer than most to the action. "There were times when I'd get a knock on the door at 5.30am. I'd go down and find [certain rich business-types] standing there with some beautiful women. Then we'd all jump in the back of a huge car and drive off the Westhaven Marina, climb in a [Miami Vice-style] Scarab and go out to the Barrier. We'd have a diver on board, so when we got there he'd go over the side and bring up a few crays for breakfast ... when we were done we'd turn around and go home. I mean that was fantastic, amazing, but how long can you keep it up? ... Looking back, I think you can reach a certain level of sophistication and then all that's left is to explode."
But nobody was worried at the time. As Don McGlashan's Front Lawn put it: "They're making money out of money."
The decade had a slow, dour start. But by the end of 1984 Muldoon was gone, along with his stagnation and mega-regulation. It was liberating. Our televisions had switched to colour 10 years previously, but our lifestyle had been monochrome. So when the sharemarket began to fountain money all hell broke loose with a bullet-proof optimism that was heightened only by a heady cocktail of luxury intoxicants.
For starters, the country was flooded with cheap champagne - Moet at $15 a bottle? I'll take a dozen, thanks - then the newbie rich became an eager market for cocaine and, eventually, Ecstasy. No sleep till Christmas indeed.
Of course, not everyone was invited to the party. For every formerly starving artist elevated to celebrity status, untold others with traditionally lifelong careers found themselves on the dole.
But for the lucky few, life became fast times and faster cars along with long lunches and even longer dinners ... the brickphone-toting, BMW-driving Jafa was now in the house. Businessmen became celebrities even as they set about demolishing inner-city Auckland.
"No one had any understanding of where the money was coming from," says Ngila Dickson, "and nobody cared. Everyone was just having a very fine time of it ... It was one of the moments when even the craziest ideas seemed possible because somehow, someone was going to pay for it."
At the time, the now Oscar-winning costume designer was running her own clothing label from a studio in Kitchener St and editing Murray Cammick's new fashion magazine, Cha-Cha. It was a title for its time and immediately became the brash style bible, where the hippest designers showcased their frocks. Advertisers flocked to it.
For the likes of Dickson, this newfound status meant all-area-access to the best do's.
"I remember going to all these dinner parties, the most extraordinary events, just over-the-top, with champagne everywhere and the most unusual mixture of people. You'd look around the table and it'd be like worlds colliding, people sitting next to each other who you would never imagine coming together in any other circumstance ... and they were happening all the time. I remember driving from Auckland to Wellington just to go to a party and then driving back the next day. There was a very different headspace back then. In many ways life has became so much more serious now."
This headspace had been brewing for a few years, says Dickson's now-husband Hamish Keith. To his mind, this explosion of consumption was connected to the urban-rural divide exposed by the 1981 Springbok tour. The townies were over playing support act to entitled farmers; New Zealand was growing up, even if it led to ugly outcomes like glass towers.
"I'd liken it to adolescent eczema," says Keith. "The outward signs aren't nice to look at, but the changes occurring underneath were profound ... it was like a sudden burst of confidence and a growing sense of who we were and not what other people said we were."
Like Dickson, he was also doing well from the consumption boom. If he wasn't sourcing art for personal and corporate collections, he was being seen at the swishest social events. He was sufficiently immersed to become a contributor to Metro magazine's Felicity Ferret gossip column, a role he's kept quiet about until now.
Among his particular favourites were the lavish evenings at the former Regent Hotel. Every party featured a huge, iced bowl of premium caviar, surrounded by a fan of tiny spoons for dipping. Not for Keith though, he always arrived with an extra-large spoon tucked inside the pocket of his suit jacket - if a little caviar is great, a lot is greater.
But he was far from alone in overindulgence: "I was living in Parnell and I remember being woken one night by a scratching sound. I peered out the window and saw this well-dressed man trying to get into a brand new Audi. It really was a lovely car. But he was drunk as, so I started to think about what I should do. Then he got the door open and threw up in the front seat. He just shook his head and staggered away, so it was a self-correcting moment. I was living near the Exchange Hotel, so that sort of thing wasn't all that unusual."
Such stories only reinforce Auckland property developer David Henderson's belief that the boom era was all bravado and artifice.
"It makes me laugh that people think business now is the Wild West. By comparison the 80s were the Wild, Wild West. Money seemed so easy to get and it flowed through your hands like water. I mean guys would go to work just to follow their shares because they could make more money in a day's trading than they could working. And everyone was at it, there were housewives paying for shares with their Visa cards and you'd get off a plane and the taxi driver would start giving you stock tips because he'd had [Chase chairman] Colin Reynolds in his back seat the day before. Then the next time you saw him, he'd have a new car. They were crazy days, actually naively stupid would be a better description. Everyone was gambling, and borrowing to do it. It made my job bloody difficult because if you had a fundamental business you were considered a joke. Stuff like carpeting or plumbing wasn't part of the buzz."
Still, some of the buzz came his way whenever a customer from Christchurch was in town.
"He'd get out this chequebook that was bigger than Turkey and write out a cheque for some amount I couldn't even dream of before we'd even finished whatever we were working on. People like that pushed rents sky-high. It got so bad that there are still buildings in Auckland that haven't had a rent increase since they were built.
"But when everything went bad, they went bad fast. Take one of my companies, it supposedly had $24 million in equity and no debt at all. Great. Six months later I was using the share certificates to wallpaper the toilet because they were f****** worthless ... but no one was worried until it was too late. While their [corporate] heroes were still around everyone was sure they would find something else to make money with and they'd start a company that would be around for another 100 years."
So, yeah, business was sport for adrenalin junkies. And as such, they needed flash toys to strut around in, toys like Scarab powerboats and imported cars. Chasing them became a game in itself.
In the days of regulation, government officials set the price for luxury cars. Saleyards had to submit their prices to grey-shoed officials who ran them through an arcane calculator. If they decided a punter had been overcharged a tenner, they would demand that amount be refunded.
Take Porsche. The system pegged the cost of a new model at $50,000, which was low enough to create a stampede of buyers. But the kicker was that the government also controlled how many came into the country. Which wasn't many. So the queue became long and very slow-moving.
The madness of this was that the moment a buyer drove his new car off the lot, its value leapt upwards. The car was now free of price controls and, knowing he had keen buyers in his pocket, the salesman could get on the phone to invite the new owner to sell the car back to him for more than he had paid for it in return for another new one.
The original car, now secondhand, would then be flicked to someone further down the waiting list for $65,000. Then it could be bought back again and onsold for a third time. And so on, until within the space of a year its value might jump from $50,000 to around $130,000.
According to one salesman working at the time, some customers were buying 10 new cars a year. His record month was January 1986 when he sold 40 new cars as well as a healthy set of secondhand deals. He was earning nigh on $110,000 per annum.
It was a great way to meet share-brokers. "One would come in and buy a car, then word would get round his office and it would become flavour of the month so all his co-workers would be in here as well. They were like kids in a lolly shop with money to burn. It was crazy."
A similar story was being played out at the exclusive late-night venues and restaurants, places where the money came out to play. And it wasn't just the customers enjoying the fruits of the times. There is a great story in Stephen Stratford's book The Dirty Decade of a member of rock group Kiss starting a squabble when one of the waiters at Antoine's dripped water on his boots. Just as he was grandstanding about how the boots had cost him $700, restaurant owner Tony Astle stormed over, thrust out one of his shoes and let him know they cost $1200 and that he worked in them.
The nightclub scene quickly fell into two streams - the hip, urban set, lead by the likes of Peter Urlich, Mark Phillips and Simon Grigg who got into the club business after returning from British OEs and the monied set, which was more about excess and big-noting.
Being seen at the right venue was as important as wearing the right fashion. One of Urlich and Phillips' early clubs, Zanzibar on Fort St, practically became a late-night catwalk for designers like Adrienne Winkelmann to parade their wares in front of their target dance floors.
"We almost had to widen the door to get the shoulderpads through," says Urlich. When they opened Roma, Tattinger Champagne sold for $39 a bottle, and that included a very healthy mark-up.
"That's also when we started having to deal with E, first-timers and overusers. People were working hard, they wanted to party hard as well."
But for the wide boys of the business world it was all about Club Mirage on High St, where the waitresses were dressed by (fashion designer) Patrick Steel and a pre-Sir Michael Fay was guaranteed to be flashing the cash most nights and mornings.
In 1985, Roger Perry became one of its DJs. He was a fresh-faced, 18-year-old straight out of Whakatane. When he wasn't trying to sneak new tracks into the mix of mainstream fodder, he got to watch the biggest players in Auckland doing their thing.
"These days you'd probably call them thieves, liars and sharks. They were all there and they were definitely there to party. I remember [Goldcorp founder] Ray Smith would arrive in his Bentley and park it on the footpath right outside ... until someone coined it. It was very glamorous, a real money scene, new and old. It was all Dom Perignon and that, but it was a beautiful place and really professional. I'd say the service there would still set the standard for Auckland."
It took a while for the wallets to join the hipsters.
"For a long time we stopped those people coming in," says Urlich. "It wasn't that we didn't like them, they just weren't right for our clubs and, to be honest, they didn't dance very well. But from about '85 we started to notice more and more of them turning up - about 25 to 35, obviously with a lot of money and no shame about trying to buy their way in."
It was an approach doomed to failure. This was the era of the "door bitch", cutting arbiters of cool like Rosetta and Geeling Ng who decided who made the grade with a curled lip.
The scene peaked with the restaurant Le Bom - actually a multi-level affair on Nelson St with The Brat dance club downstairs and an art gallery and cocktail bar squeezed in between - it was the arena where money and hipness met.
"It was mad, everyone was overdressed and fabulous," says Urlich.
"They'd be running up bills of about $2000 per table and we'd have people coming up to the bar, paying with $100 bills and not wanting change. The business types wore their expensive suits and when they'd drunk enough they'd take their ties off, go downstairs and dance, badly ... that never changed ... so, from where we had started with A Certain Bar in '81, you could say that everything became completely different. Our first place cost 100 bucks to set up, Le Bom cost hundreds of thousands. I guess you could say it was a reflection of the time. I don't think we'll see the likes of it again."
But as everyone now knows, our version of Imperial Rome had been slowly rotting and it came crashing down in October 1987.
Le Bom swiftly and acrimoniously fell to bits, Dickson's Cha-Cha folded, and the car salesman's income dropped overnight from $110,000 to $40,000.
As for Henderson, he was on an operating table.
"The surgeon was halfway through when the collapse happened. Someone came in and told him his share portfolio had just disappeared. He just got up and left and never came back. Someone else had to close me up ... so yeah, they were dramatic times."
