New Zealanders have always been great songsmiths. But songs are more than just hits that wax then wane. They reflect and help define who we are and who we want to be.
There are many claims to Now is the Hour. On one hand, it is – unlike pavlova, Phar Lap and Split Enz – undeniably Australian. The listed composer of a tune called the Swiss Cradle Song, Clement Scott, is a pseudonym for Albert Saunders, who worked for the Sydney company that published the sheet music in 1913.
But it was New Zealanders who made it a song. There are competing claims over who exactly set the tune in waltz time and added the lyrics that made it the waiata Pō Atarau – let’s call it a group effort – but we were singing it to departing soldiers by 1915.
We can be more certain that it was Maewa Kaihau, a gifted musician and poet from Ngāpuhi, who gave Pō Atarau its first English verses, in 1920. The British singer Gracie Fields heard it as Haere Ra on her 1945 tour of New Zealand and adapted Kaihau’s verses, making it Now Is the Hour.
A lifetime or two before Don’t Dream it’s Over, How Bizarre or Royals, Now Is the Hour became our first global smash, not only for Fields but for Bing Crosby, who took it to No 1 on the US Billboard chart. When rock darlings The 1975 released a version last year, Rolling Stone announced it as “a cover of an early 20th century song with Māori origins”.
Over the decades, Now is the Hour has been both the literal last waltz at dances and a song for both sides to sing after battle is done on the rugby field.
“We sang Now is the Hour with tears in our eyes,” Tony O’Reilly wrote of his experience on the British and Irish Lions rugby tour of 1959, “and we left New Zealand, but New Zealand never left us.”
O’Reilly wrote his recollections ahead of the 2005 Lions tour. But in the stands at that tour’s most memorable match, the All Blacks’ symphonic 48-18 victory in Wellington, there were other melodies.
We are not always great singers in public, we New Zealanders – it doesn’t help that our anthem is a chore to deliver – and the red-clad Lions fans in the stands were putting us to shame. We might have been on course for a great rugby victory, but we were barely in the match for song.
But then, during an extended break on field, the DJ played The Exponents’ Why Does Love Do This To Me? Not only did we find our voices, but the northern fans put aside their songs and took up ours. They’d never heard it before, but they sang that “whoa-oh-oh!” chorus alongside us for the sheer joy of it. It seemed like a cultural moment.
There was another moment later, as the stadium slowly emptied out and Dave Dobbyn’s Welcome Home, released only months before, echoed around the stands. It felt exquisitely meaningful as an evocation of national identity and of our better selves.
So many songs
We have never had so many of our own songs. We hear them while we wait to talk about our taxes with Inland Revenue, after our Air New Zealand flights land, and sometimes, when something terrible has happened and we need songs as cultural tools.
Weeks after the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre, then prime minister Jacinda Ardern told an audience at the Taite Music Prize that her first thought in planning the national remembrance service for victims was for the music it would need (Teeks, Marlon Williams, Hollie Smith). Two weeks after the service, Six60, Bic Runga, Shapeshifter and The Exponents played to thousands at the Aroha Nui concert in Christchurch. Kids sang along to Victoria, a song from when their grandparents were young.
Two hours after the atrocity itself, the music heritage website AudioCulture posted a link on Facebook to its 2013 article about Sisters Underground’s In the Neighbourhood. It remains AudioCulture’s most popular post. People seemed to hear something in the song that comforted them at a bad time. They found it on the same platform that was still delivering the terrorist’s snuff video.
How did we come to have all these songs? Let’s drop in on 1983, when Ngoi Pēwhairangi famously recoiled at her co-composer Dalvanius Prime’s recording of what would become the Pātea Māori Club’s Poi E, believing it would upset people to hear a waiata this way. The single’s funky drum machine production was supposed to appeal to commercial radio, which didn’t like it either. Yet it spent a month at No 1 in the charts and carries its sense of joy to this day.
In 1991, when Moana and the Moahunters released the infectious AEIOU – a call to speak te reo Māori, whose chorus is a mnemonic for the vowel sounds of the language – the song was frozen out by radio. The message was clear enough: eight years after Poi E topped the charts, Māori language, even in a bilingual song, had no place on the radio.
But some things were changing. The Broadcasting Act 1989 established the Broadcasting Commission, better known today as NZ On Air. Its mandate was to fund broadcast content from the proceeds of the Broadcasting Fee. Moana’s A.E.I.O.U. was the first song to receive an NZ On Air music video grant, helping it into the top 40. By 1993, NZ On Air was bundling up New Zealand songs by the dozen and sending them to radio programmers on the Kiwi Hit Disc CDs.
There were other currents stirring. In 1992, Mike Chunn, formerly of Split Enz and Citizen Band, was appointed CEO of the Australasian Performing Right Association (Apra), the agency that collects rights fees and distributes them to composers and music publishers (It’s full and formal name is APRA AMCOS NZ: the second part is the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society). Apra’s New Zealand office had recently moved to Auckland from Wellington, where it had changed little through decades under the eye of its great champion, the classical composer Douglas Lilburn.
Chunn made many changes, but most of all he reinvented the Silver Scroll Award, which since 1965 had been conferred in small gatherings at restaurants or hotel function rooms. In 1993, Chunn put the Silver Scroll ceremony in the Powerstation, a rock ‘n’ roll venue, and introduced the now-familiar format in which the finalists’ songs are reinterpreted by other performers. He turned the awards event into an annual rally – with our songs at the heart of its politics.
Song, which had been all but ignored by the cultural nationalists of the mid-20th century, with their homegrown art and literature, began to move to the centre of our national identity.
In 2001, Apra members even established their own canon, voting for a list of the “Top 100 New Zealand Songs of All Time,” which was adopted as the basis of the five-times-platinum Nature’s Best CD and continues to inform the playlists of supermarkets, rugby matches and government department hold music.
Like any canon, it has its problems. Is the Fourmyula’s Nature, which tops the table, really our greatest song? Is No 3, Loyal, a haunted song about a relationship breakup that got hitched to a yacht race, actually Dave Dobbyn’s best? How many songs current at the time of the vote would fall out of the Top 100 if (as Chunn has suggested) the exercise was conducted again today?
Apra’s voting members of songwriters, composers and publishers have made some interesting choices over the years. In 1982, Graham Brazier’s beloved Billy Bold (No 72 on the list) was beaten to the Silver Scroll by Mother Goose’s I Can’t Sing Very Well, and in 1990, the members passed over The Chills’ Heavenly Pop Hit (No 85) in favour of Guy Wishart’s Don’t Take Me for Granted, whose chorus you probably can’t hum.
History has its way, though. To celebrate the Silver Scroll’s 50th anniversary in 2015, Apra chose five finalists for the “Lost Scroll” of 1981, the year that, for hazy reasons, no award was made. They were The Swingers’ Counting the Beat, The Clean’s Tally Ho!, Neil Finn’s One Step Ahead for Split Enz, Blam Blam Blam’s There is No Depression in New Zealand and The Screaming Meemees’ See Me Go.
With the possible exception of One Step Ahead, none would have seemed likely finalists in 1981 (See Me Go didn’t even make the 2001 Top 100). But now they sum up an exciting, emergent year in New Zealand music. Notably, four of the five emerged on the independent labels – Ripper, Propeller and Flying Nun – that made New Zealand music more emphatically our own.
Away from the mainstream
As the 80s unfolded, student radio gave us a place to hear that music in its new variety. The first place we heard Bic Runga sing Drive was on 95bFM. Voom’s Buzz Moller never intended to release Beth until someone at bFM put a demo version on the playlist and he realised his aching, personal song now belonged to everybody. On the two occasions bFM listeners have been invited to vote on an all-time Top 95, the same tune has come top of the poll: D’Arcy Clay’s ragged, noisy Jesus I Was Evil (an unlikely 15th on the Apra 100).
See Me Go, on Propeller, became the first New Zealand song to debut at No 1 in the charts in 1981 (even though the 500 copies pressed sold out on the day of release, they almost all went to record stores that filed chart returns). There Is No Depression in New Zealand, a noisily ironic anthem of the Muldoon years, is still cited in political commentary.
No Depression is a protest song, part of a slim but notable heritage led, undoubtedly, by Herbs’ sunny anti-nuclear tune French Letter and taking in John Hanlon’s Damn the Dam, which was adopted by the Save Manapouri campaign in the 1970s (it was actually written as a radio jingle for the company producing Pink Batts, which was lobbying the government to regulate in favour of home insulation). In more recent years, we could probably count Anthonie Tonnon’s Water Underground and certainly Home Brew’s caustic, profane Listen to Us.
But in the same year they launched No Depression, Blam Blam Blam also delivered the beautiful, measured Don’t Fight it Marsha, It’s Bigger Than Both of Us. That was the work of Don McGlashan, who would go on to win the Silver Scroll with the Mutton Birds’ Anchor Me (1994) and again in 2006 for Bathe in the River, the gospel song he wrote for Hollie Smith to sing. (The Mutton Birds’ 1992 cover of Nature also doubtless helped that song’s fortunes in the Top 100.)
It’s McGlashan’s ability to haunt the listener, to draw on something not quite resolved, that marks his most affecting songs: Marsha; Andy, the Front Lawn’s desolate ballad of loss in a changing world; and the Mutton Birds’ unnerving White Valiant, a meditation on the missing-person stories that hung in the air in the 1970s.
The independent labels also launched an era within which my favourite songs may not be yours. The music in my head, for example, is The Clean’s Point That Thing Somewhere Else on Flying Nun, which music academic Graeme Downes of The Verlaines characterised as “more a procedure than a fixed song”). But it somehow conjures the land, its physical contours, as much as a McCahon painting might. I’m not expecting to hear it at the supermarket.
Another Clean song, the shimmering Stars, was licensed by the Labour Party as the theme for its 2005 election campaign. Chris Knox, a lifelong outsider, recorded Not Given Lightly to see if he could contrive a commercial chart hit – the business plan failed, but people still play that song at their weddings.
Other songs from the Nun catalogue have meaning within their community: Shayne Carter’s astonishing Randolph’s Going Home and The Chills’ I Love My Leather Jacket are both the product of grief over lost musical companions.
When Martin Phillipps himself died last year, it was his songs we talked about. It seemed necessary to declare an emotional favourite: the haunting Pink Frost (14th on the Apra list) or a deep cut like The Oncoming Day?
The polynesian experience
In 1981, the year Flying Nun launched, something else was brewing in the north. It was when Herbs released What’s Be Happen? on Hugh Lynn’s Warrior Records. That wasn’t the start of the Pasifika pop story: Tongan Bill Sevesi lived long enough to see his 1950s island swing lauded in the 21st century (although, awkwardly, Haere Mai, a version of which he recorded with Daphne Walker in 1961, became a hit in 2000 after it was licensed not by Air New Zealand but Qantas). But Herbs’ songs offered an account of the Polynesian experience, from dawn raids to the mixed blessings of hire purchase, that had not been heard before.
That would prove to be an extraordinarily fertile experience, one lived and expressed by the Fuemana brothers, Phil and Pauly. As kids, they were settled by their Niuean father in Parnell slum housing, near where he worked on the wharves, before they all moved out to Ōtara and the promise of a better life – while Parnell gentrified.
When Phil produced southside soul album New Urban Polynesian, a family affair, in 1994, it was as much a statement of identity as a record – an answer to the question Herbs asked on the title track of What’s Be Happen? He was also a key player that year in the Proud compilation, which contained In the Neighbourhood and the Ōtara Millionaires Club’s booming We R the OMC. OMC, slimmed down to just Pauly, would go on to have the biggest hit of all: How Bizarre.
Two palagi were part of that story: erstwhile Blam Blam Blam bassist Tim Mahon, who made the Ōtara Music Arts Centre into a cultural hub, and Alan Jansson, formerly of The Body Electric (you may recall Pulsing), the producer who crafted a new pop sound out of the talent he found.
“In 1999, Nesian Mystik, the kids of brown families who had stayed in Auckland’s inner-western suburbs as they gentrified, became a group at Western Springs College, going on to release the sparkling It’s On and Nesian Style, from the album Polysaturated, which went four times platinum. Brent Hansen, the New Zealander in charge of MTV Europe, once told me about playing those songs to his programmers, who, ears attuned to American hip-hop, could not understand their Pacific sweetness.
In 2000, three Christchurch teenagers calling themselves Sheelaroc realeased If I Gave You th’ Mic, still a delight 25 years later. Karoline Tamati, one of the trio became the artful soul queen Ladi6. Her cousin, Malo Luafutu, was moved by Sheelaroc to record as Scribe, and had a triple platinum album three years later.
A kid called Savage, born Demetrius C Savelio a month before What’s Be Happen? was released, signed to another Auckland label, Dawn Raid, guested on Scribe’s iconic remix of Not Many, and went on to have chart hits in Australia, France and Sweden. Nothing says the party has started like Savage bawling out Swing or Freaks.
Wellington had its story, too. Shihad brought great songs to a genre that hadn’t had much use for them, and on their farewell tour this year, tens of thousands of people shouted defiantly to My Mind’s Sedate and waved their phones to Pacifier. Home Again, their anthem, still serves the peculiarly New Zealand job of reminding us which way around daylight saving goes.
As the millennium turned, Wellington also nurtured a very different sound, even if we had trouble naming it (“barbecue reggae” is too unkind, “Aotea Roots” is odd): Fat Freddy’s Drop, Trinity Roots and the Loop Recordings label, now the home of streaming chart champs L.A.B.
Going it alone
If the commercial boom years of the noughties – when Helen Clark’s cultural recovery money flowed freely – have ebbed, the rise of the singer-songwriter as the standard-bearer for our song continues.
The 90s had Bic Runga and the 21st century has given us Nadia Reid, Marlon Williams, Aldous Harding, Reb Fountain, Anthonie Tonnon, James Milne and Erny Belle. It’s partly economic necessity; a solo career is simply more sustainable than a band in today’s music economy. It’s harder to make a dollar amid the global hubbub of Spotify, where a million streams equate to about $5000, and relatively few New Zealand songs reach that mark.
A fresh template was set when Lorde and Joel Little sat in a tiny studio in 2012-13 and made Pure Heroine together. We can debate whether Royals is actually the best Lorde song (that would be Team, or Writer in the Dark, or Supercut), but it was revolutionary at a time when it was common for pop hits to have a dozen writing credits – and it rang up the equivalent of 22 million sales.
Lorde achieved fame without public funding, but she did nonetheless benefit from the industry competence that developed in the years before her arrival. Music publishing in particular was a mystery to most artists in the 1980s, but it’s foundational for today’s songwriters, who get paid when you hear hold music on the phone, or choose an airline playlist.
Kids now can count songwriting as part of their study at secondary school, or benefit from Apra’s SongHub workshops, or even take Massey University’s Bachelor of Commercial Music course. The Beths, those modern masters of songcraft, learnt their chops at the University of Auckland’s jazz school.
But it’s ferment that delivers culture. Any number of Tom Scott’s songs for Avantdale Bowling Club or Home Brew mark him as a major New Zealand writer, one who will be taught in schools some day. His experience is inseparable from growing up palagi in Samoan Avondale.
JY Lee, the multi-instrumentalist at the centre of the Avantdale band and The Circling Sun, is ethnically Korean; CHAII, who announced herself in 2020 with the sizzling Light Switch, was born in Iran; fellow rapper Who Shot Scott came here from Iraq.
Amid all this diversity, a new age of waiata has declared itself. Industry events embrace te ao Māori and the biggest local acts – Six60 and L.A.B. – wear their whakapapa proudly. Marlon Williams’ personal adventure in te reo Māori, Te Whare Tīwekaweka, feels like a landmark.
When Dame Hinewehi Mohi, who single-handedly made a bilingual national anthem the standard, was honoured at last year’s Aotearoa Music Awards (formerly the New Zealand Music Awards), there was a performance of Kotahitanga, her 1990s dance banger, lately rediscovered by a new generation.
But the final, closing singalong couldn’t have been anything else but the waiata every kid learns at school – the one we’d sung at the end of a rugby match, when the Black Ferns won the Rugby World Cup in 2022.
“Tūtira mai ngā iwi!” Ruby Tūī had proclaimed at the end of her post-match interview.
“AUE!” the Eden Park crowd roared back.And the waiata, with its message of unity, filled the stadium.
For more about Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa – New Zealand Music Month 2025, visit nzmusicmonth.co.nz, and for information about NZMM’s charity partner, MusicHelps, go to musichelps.org.nz
