The great Barry Jenkin once wrote a liner note for an album I released in which he said he had “never much been interested in where music has been, only where it is going”.
If you step back in time to the distant pre-internet era – the 1970s to the mid-1980s – New Zealanders inquisitive or hungry for new music had limited options for discovery. The record companies were both slow to release things and very selective in what they did – it could take a year or two sometimes for interesting new acts from the UK and US to hit our stores, if ever. Strict import licensing meant the shops couldn’t import their own stock unless they had a prized and very limited import licence, usually used by shops for classical and jazz. Even the master tapes used to manufacture records, being oil-based, were restricted.
What was released locally had limited exposure unless it was mainstream pop. Student radio was banned and later restricted; radio playlists were decidedly lightweight; and at any given time there was only one late-night TV video show which would, if you were lucky, show an interesting video just once. Mostly, we relied on switched-on record-shop staff, three-month-old music magazines (until Rip It Up arrived) and the odd brave radio DJ to point us in the right direction.
Enter Barry Jenkin. Barry was what was once termed a “tastemaker”. The need for tastemakers has largely passed but that’s exactly what this young Aucklander became in the 1970s, and despite his relatively few years actively exposing the nation to new music, his influence is such that the local independent music scene still benefits from the pathways and changes in mindset the good doctor offered us.
Jenkin came out of NZBC training schools designed to create monochromatic radio hosts who could innocuously back-announce in their best BBC tones inoffensive pop songs for the nation.
In 1969, he was somehow hijacked by the rogue NZBC outpost that was 2ZA in Palmerston North. The station allowed spirited DJs a much freer rein than the normal provincial station, and there, while playing Sunday requests, he was also allowed to host a folk show and record local bands.
Jenkin’s career path – from 2ZA to Auckland’s 1ZM then to Radio Hauraki, where he was given the freedom to programme his own nightly shows (“You would never get me stuck playing Top 40, I’d rather be driving trucks,” he once told Rip It Up) – and his punk epiphany in late 1977 have been well covered elsewhere. By then, he was also hosting TV2′s new video show Radio With Pictures, targeted at the more adventurous sector of the popular music market. Jenkin was perfect for the show, with an already-established Auckland reputation as the radio DJ who knew where to find the album tracks that mattered.
Radio With Pictures turned the recently tagged Dr Rock into a national name. Working with sympathetic producers and directors, both Jenkin and New Zealand were fortunate that his arrival coincided with the punk explosion. Kids and adults nationwide gathered around their screens every Sunday to await his trademark “Good evening, citizens” and a weekly serving of cutting-edge rock, punk and post-punk videos enthused over as only Jenkin could – with a glint in his eye, a mischievous, knowing grin and a sometimes-acidic comment for the old-school rockers who didn’t match up to his new pied-piper standards.
The result was immediate: every garage in New Zealand, big city or provincial, had an aspiring three-chord band practising in it. Our rock’n roll revolution really had been televised.
In 1981, head-hunted again by the new ZM nationwide network for an all-nighter, Jenkin pushed the boat a little further out. Funded and encouraged by then-Radio NZ director-general Geoffrey Whitehead, as well as playing the international acts, his show became an outlet for the raft of local indie record labels that naturally followed the explosion of new bands that either couldn’t get recorded by the major record companies or didn’t have any desire to compromise their art for “the man”.
Often broadcasting from a studio filled with eager young men and women who had a single they wanted to play (or simply just felt the urge to be in the presence of the great man), Jenkin gave us The Mekons, Herco Pilots, Newmatics, The Fall, Fatal Microbes, Danse Macabre, The Gordons, Magazine, Young Marble Giants, Steroids and thousands of other just terrific records. They opened the minds of literally thousands of young people – a quick look at our sales charts of the era supports that, filled as they soon were by uncompromising singles and albums that daytime commercial radio not only didn’t play but had no real awareness of.
More than anyone, Jenkin did that. In turn, it encouraged our young musicians to expand their creative horizons and allowed that new wave of local record labels to viably release to a hungry and accepting audience. It unleashed a golden age in New Zealand music creativity that was the foundation of the industry as we know it now in Aotearoa. We never really looked back. That’s some legacy.
When Jenkin died last month aged 75, people – me among them – remarked that he was our John Peel. Until somebody quietly replied that he wasn’t, he was our Barry Jenkin, who set us well along the way towards a time when we no longer needed to compare ourselves to somebody somewhere else to matter.
Simon Grigg founded the Propeller, Furtive and later the Huh! labels and established the NZ pop history website Audioculture in 2012.
