Music obsessive happy to be back on home turf

Grant Smithies has a collection of 20,000 vinyl records.

"I left Wanganui at 17 ... I was desperate to get out of there.

"Now when I come back I am nicely disposed to the place - the weather is good, it is very pretty and it has those lovely old villas."

Grant Smithies, now 52 and arguably New Zealand's premier music writer, is back on his home turf seeing his mum ... and doing a guest spot at the Whanganui Literary Festival.

He's happy to have a few days back in his old Wanganui East stomping ground but slightly bemused to be invited to a literary festival - as he points out, he's only written one book.

That was Soundtrack: 118 Great NZ Albums in 2007 which was "really just me ranting about music I loved".

Actually, it wasn't just him - he enlisted a few others to contribute essays on their fave sounds. Among the contributors was poet Gregory O'Brien, who is also at the literary festival with a session this morning (11.30am), and a certain Hamish McDouall who extolled the virtues of Bird Dog by The Verlaines and a "noisy thrash New Zealand band called The 3 Ds" before becoming a district councillor.

If Smithies feels a bit of an interloper among the literati, he shouldn't worry - his entertaining music columns over the past 10 years have earned him a deserved following and he's a good talker. His gig today at the War Memorial Centre concert chamber at 3pm should be fun.

He will probably skip tales of frosty mornings delivering the Chronicle as a paper boy and reminiscences of under-age drinking by Lake Wiritoa. He may even gloss over his time as a nude model for art classes in Edinburgh - "I was slender and gorgeous then".

Instead, this music obsessive will probably concentrate on his radio career - first with Radio New Zealand and then with a host of provincial stations - and his sidestep into journalism.

That happened when a music magazine advertised for readers to send in their own reviews. He took up the challenge and was soon penning his purple prose fulltime.

When the Sunday Star-Times wanted someone to interview fabled Jamaican producer Lee Perry and no one on the paper had heard of Perry, they called upon the former Wanganui High School boy who knew Jamaican music inside out. Smithies' effort saw him get regular work and his column is still a Star-Times staple.

He now lives in Nelson and, as a "fiendish" collector of records, has 20,000 vinyl albums whose weight is such that he has had to have his house re-piled. Now that's dedication.