A homemade amplifier instrumental to NZ’s first wave of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s remains a favourite of some of our best-loved guitar heroes.
When I found it in the basement, my life changed. I was 15 and it was lying on the dirt floor covered in cobwebs. A little wooden box coated with a speckled baby blue finish and a black metal faceplate inscribed “Contina, made by Concord Musical Industries, Auckland”. A five-watt guitar amplifier.
My grandma had bought it at a Dunedin music shop in 1963 as a gift for my father, part of a cheap guitar and valve amp package. It had moved with him to Clyde in the 1970s and was eventually put in the cellar beneath the floorboards for another 20 years or so.
Central Otago’s dry climate had been kind to it. Plugging it in upstairs it coughed, spluttered, screeched to life. Then that distinctive smell of glass vacuum tubes heating up filled the room, a mixture of decades of dust being incinerated and the pine cabinet warming.
As I played the first chord a sound emerged that I’d only ever heard coming from records made long before I was born. That magical warm grit of a 1960s tube amp played a little too loud – only a little different.
I was besotted. The Concord powered my teenage music career around the pubs of Central Otago. Its modest output compensated for by a microphone to the PA, achieving a volume that led us to nickname our covers band Retrovirus the Crowd Dispersal Unit.
I had no idea that a few of the songs we were covering were by some of the country’s greatest and most influential musicians who also had the same Concord moment.
Although the amp‘s popularity had waned with the easing of import licensing restrictions in the 1960s, the Concord would become the amp that wouldn’t die. It gained a whole new lease of life with the rise of the Dunedin sound in the 1980s – the likes of Shayne Carter, The Chills’ Martin Phillipps, The Clean’s David Kilgour and The Bats’ Robert Scott becoming lifelong fans.
“An amplifier can really dictate your sound, and it’s hard to find a good amp,” says Shayne Carter. “A lot of them sound very generic.
“But the Concord was so warm and creamy. It just sounded fantastic.”
The plywood car
It started with Bennie Gunn. When Gunn moved to Auckland in the 1950s, he drove a car he built himself – out of plywood. He was leaving a steady job to pursue a career as a professional jazz musician after making his name in rock ‘n’ roll. Now 92 and living in a retirement village in Albany, Auckland, Gunn recalls that the Concord amps – and the plywood car – were built out of necessity.
A child of the Great Depression, Gunn began hustling in his youth, delivering groceries, selling pinecones and even grass seed foraged from nearby fields, as his family moved between Wellington, Invercargill and Hutt Valley for work. He started his career in the capital as a technician for the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, the state-owned radio monopoly.
While there, he couldn’t afford to buy a car, so he built a convertible himself. He bought an old clapped-out Triumph, stripped it to the chassis, put in a Ford Anglia engine and gearbox, then crafted the body in the bathtub. “The first one I made out of Formica, but that didn’t work out so well so I used plywood, because I could put it in hot water and bend it, so I was able to create a curved body,” Gunn says.
“It only had one door and no handbrake – it had a handbrake handle but it wasn’t connected to anything – so I could never get a warrant.
“It got me into terrible trouble. I was in court I don’t know how many times for driving without a warrant. I got chased by the cops more than once and sometimes I was able to get away.”
In 1957, at age 24, Gunn drove this contraption to Auckland, planning to eke out a living playing music. He got a room in a notorious boarding house, 57a Symonds St, in the central city. The brick bungalow had become a crash pad for young jazz musicians.
“Auckland was where it was all happening,” Gunn says. “I’d been playing music in Wellington but there just wasn’t enough going on. The number of nightclubs in Auckland, I could play one after another – Back o’ the Moon, the Dutch Kiwi, the Toby Jug …”
As the music got louder, venues began to need better public address systems. At a time of strict import controls, the technically minded Gunn saw a way to make a buck.
He started building PAs on consignment in the basement at 57a. His first was for the trendy new Wellesley St restaurant La Boheme, started by Auckland restaurant pioneer Bob Sell the year before.
At the time, New Zealand’s youth were in the grips of rock ‘n’ roll fever. That year, Johnny Cooper recorded what’s regarded as the country’s first Kiwi rock song, Pie cart rock ‘n’ roll, and a young Johnny Devlin, dubbed New Zealand’s Elvis, was playing town halls around the country. By the end of 1957, the real Elvis’ single Jailhouse Rock reached No 1 in New Zealand.
“Every teenager decided they wanted to be a professional guitarist and wanted to have an amplifier and a guitar,” Gunn recalls.
With strict import controls, however, getting your hands on either wasn’t easy. Some British Selmer amps were imported, but many guitarists made do by modifying old valve radios, with mixed results.
Original design
So, in the basement workshop, Gunn started to manufacture New Zealand’s first commercially produced guitar amplifiers. These weren’t simply copies of the popular amps from overseas, but Gunn’s own unique designs. “I just picked it up as I went along and it became bigger and bigger.”
They were a hit. By about 1958, Gunn had outgrown the basement and Concord moved into a converted garage out the back of his home in Ellerslie.
Gunn was also touring the country playing in jazz bands, building a network of Concord dealers as he went. Later, the company began exporting to Australia.
Over time, the range expanded and in 1964, Concord moved into a new three-storey factory in Northcote. There, roughly a dozen staff would soon churn out about 1000 amps a year.
A Concord catalogue from that year includes 16 amplifiers with innovations such as the “Echomatic 500” delay unit which produces “echo pulses … at any desired speed”. The company was also selling a small range of distinctive guitars, including one advertised with built-in reverb – something unheard of.
Concords were played by some of the country’s top musicians of the day, including NZ Music Hall of Fame inductees Ray Columbus and the Invaders, Peter Posa, who shot to fame with the hit single The White Rabbit in 1963, and the aforementioned Johnny Devlin.
The Concord didn’t have that twangy sound that most people were looking for,” he says. “But they were regarded as a really good, low-cost beginner’s amplifier.
Glyn Tucker began working for Concord in 1963 and recalls that, at a time when every guitarist wanted to sound like Hank Marvin from the Shadows, he wasn’t overly enamoured with the amps.
“The Concord didn’t have that twangy sound that most people were looking for,” he says. “But they were regarded as a really good, low-cost beginner’s amplifier.”
Tucker bought a Concord Contessa in 1960 and started playing regular gigs around Auckland, including a Saturday residency at the Papatoetoe Town Hall dance venue.
His job at Concord mostly involved “screwing amplifier cabinets together”, but he also helped develop Concord’s guitar pickups. “I was looking for a day job that could keep me going before I became a big rock’n’ roll star. It was probably the best job I ever had.”
Denis O’Callahan got a job at Concord in 1965, but he always had other plans. He’d just returned from six months in Rarotonga, where he worked in a radio repair shop after the yacht he sailed there was rendered unseaworthy for the return trip.
He was lured back to New Zealand by the prospect of starting the country’s first pirate radio station, Radio Hauraki. He and a group of friends planned to broadcast from a ship in international waters in the Hauraki Gulf, breaking the monopoly the conservative New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, which succeeded the NZ Broadcasting Service, held over the airwaves.
“I was at Concord to get a bit of money together,” O’Callahan recalls. “Bennie was actually very sympathetic to our cause and he donated an old oscilloscope which we used.”
A Concord colleague, Steve Hilliar, also became inspired by the pirate radio project and left to become a technician at Radio Hauraki.
Tucker, meanwhile, left Concord in 1966 as his new band, The Gremlins, surged in popularity. He also sold his Concord after buying a Fender Concert amp that Keith Richards had left in the country after a Rolling Stones tour the year before.
“We couldn’t import these amplifiers into New Zealand, so what started happening was the promoter of international bands would say, as part of the deal, you bring all of your gear with you and leave it here and we’ll sell it off.
“It still had a bit of egg on it from when the Stones got pelted with eggs in the South Island on that tour.”
The Gremlins broke up in 1968 and Tucker sold Richards’ amp to help get together enough money to buy his first house ‒ at a time when the price of a second-hand guitar amp could make a material difference to a house deposit in Auckland.
The following decade, Tucker founded Mandrill Studios, producing and engineering hundreds of Kiwi singles and albums.
Flood of imports
The late 1960s weren’t good for Concord amps. Import restrictions were relaxed and Gunn says the country was flooded with cheaper gear from overseas. “Everything changed as soon as import licensing ceased,” he says.
Concord also seems to have been superseded by Jansen amplifiers, which started producing amps in the Methodist Central Mission building in Auckland in 1959.
“Jansen used to distribute my amplifiers but they decided to stop doing that and started making their own.”
Often modelled on popular Fender amps from overseas with higher output, Jansens appear to have gained favour among gigging musicians.
“Jansen had kind of taken over the semi-pro market,” Tucker says. “Whereas Concord was generally regarded as a beginner’s or practice amp.”
Rock ‘n’ roll fever also began to fade and Gunn says a lot of Concord guitars and amps ended up stored away in closets – and basements – around the country. In the mid-to-late 1960s, the company moved into other audio equipment, including intercoms and even marine depth sounders.
When you turn them up full and go anywhere near them with a guitar they feedback wildly - that’s all I want it to do.
Times were changing. Gunn himself got a job designing communications systems for English electronics company Plessey. Concord was put into hibernation.
Coincidentally, a New Zealand company called Gunn Industries later started making amplifiers in the 1970s – founded by musician Gray Bartlett and his brother Barry – but this was entirely unrelated to Bennie Gunn.
In the following decades, however, a new generation would discover Concord amplifiers, finding them in those closets and basements and in student flats and small-town op shops. This generation didn’t want to sound anything like Hank Marvin.
Dimmer devotee
When Shayne Carter first played a Concord, his life changed, too. “I plugged into it and played one chord – I believe it was a G,” Carter recalls. “And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s actually the amp I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”
At the time, Carter was starting to record his band Dimmer’s third album, There My Dear, when he plugged into a Cloud 7, a 25-watt, top of the line Concord model. Dunedin engineer and producer Nick Roughan had borrowed it from a Concord collector in Auckland for Carter to try ‒ and now the company had a new devotee.
There My Dear was recorded entirely with the Concord in 2006, and he played the amp live for years. However, while recording for Don McGlashan in 2021, the amp “fizzled out”.
“I took it to an electronics person,” says Carter, “and he said, ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t die.’ It was so old all of the wires had become exposed and it was basically a deathtrap at that point. But that’s not to cast any aspersions on the amp.”
Roughan had it repaired and it’s now in his Dunedin community recording studio, South Link Productions, being used by a range of up-and-coming bands. “It just sounds freaking awesome,” he says.
Concords have found favour with many Flying Nun Dunedin bands. David Kilgour started out playing a Gunn amp in The Clean, but after they disbanded he bought his first Concord, another five-watt Contina, for $15 from a friend.
“I took it home, plugged it in and went ‘woah’,” Kilgour says. “It just sounds fantastic on full volume. That’s my favourite setting.”
The Contina was later stolen, but he replaced it with a five-watt Concord Allegro 2. He now has two of the amps after The Chills’ Martin Phillipps left him his when he died last year.
“It’s actually the best Concord I’ve played through. What I’ve found is they’re really great to record with. They have a really light, nasty kind of sound that cuts through.”
The amps feature on a number of Kilgour’s albums and his Facebook profile picture is actually a partly disassembled Concord.
Fellow Clean member and founder of The Bats Robert Scott is also a Concord fan. Bats’ bassist Paul Kean played a Concord in the 1980s and Scott says he spent years trying to find one of his own. He finally spotted one while driving through Mataura, Southland, in the late 1990s.
“I drove past an op shop and of course it was closed, but in the window was a Concord. I think it had a price tag saying $80, so I slipped a note under the door that said, ‘I’m buying this, please ship it to me,’ and wrote down my address and put the money under the door. Four days later, it arrived on my doorstep. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it.
“Part of the appeal is that they’re not in the normal second-hand music shops so it’s a bit of a holy grail to find one. The hunt of tracking one down is part of the excitement.”
‘Feral’ distortion
When I cold-call Bruce Russell and tell him I’m writing about Concord amplifiers, his voice shoots up an octave. “Oooh.”
Russell co-founded the Dead C, the country’s most highly regarded noise band (US artists such as Sonic Youth and Pavement cited their influence). Though some may expect the band’s sound – often a wall of screeching guitars – to come from a huge stack of guitar amps, Russell has exclusively played Concords, some little bigger than a shoe box. He bought his first from his flatmate and fellow musician Alastair Galbraith, in 1984.
“He had a Concord Contessa and he sold it to me for $60,” Russell says. “It was literally in pieces. The speaker was in a cardboard box and the whole thing was quite dangerous and took a while to put together and get going.”
He’s become something of a Concord fanatic and even named an album Concord as a tribute, with the liner notes stating: “In praise of Concord amplification. Amen.”
“I don’t know anyone else who’s actually made a career out of only gigging and recording with Concord,” Russell says. “I’ve made in excess of 70 albums all using a Concord. I just love them.”
He’s toured internationally with the Contessa, but has since bought a Concord Allegro II, small enough to take on a plane as carry-on luggage. “I’ve been touring with that for the last 20 years or so.”
While Glyn Tucker was looking for a bright, clean sound to emulate the Shadows, for Russell, the amps screeching, “feral” natural distortion was the attraction.
“It’s everything an amp should be but hardly ever is. They’re the most gritty, feral-sounding amp and they’re really reactive. When you turn them up full and go anywhere near them with a guitar they feedback wildly. Some people see that as a problem. That’s actually all I want it to do.”
Legacy lives on
For Gunn, who once described rock ‘n’ roll music as “loud and pointless, ludicrous”, Concord’s following is “a bit of a surprise”. He was even asked to autograph a Concord recently. “It’s quite amazing meeting these people,” he says.
I haven’t been a good steward of the Concord. When I started playing the amp, I foolishly painted over its speckled blue finish with black acrylic in a vain attempt to make it look more like the Marshall amps I’d seen on TV (I still haven’t forgiven myself).
It remains a treasured possession, however. Whenever I plug in, strum a few chords, I feel that same rush I felt 20 years ago – the indescribable joy of a Concord amp played a little too loud.