Published a few years back, In Love With
These Times is Roger Shepherd’s memoir-come-history of the Flying Nun record
label. It’s taken me an age to get around to reading and reviewing it. Never
let it be said that everythingsgonegreen is anything other than current and
relevant …
There’s a sense that Roger Shepherd is
something of an accidental hero in the Flying Nun story. The notion that he
founded the label - on the whiff of an oily rag - primarily to release the
highly original music being made by local bands he was enjoying live, and
regularly networking with as a record shop employee, makes for a wonderful
backstory. It becomes quite clear he did so on little more than a whim, without
much thought, forward planning, or finance. At the outset at least.
All of these things would come back to
haunt Shepherd, and his label, at various junctures over the course of the next
three decades. Yet, in many respects, it was Shepherd’s determination to trust
his instinct, to embrace the DIY ethic, aligned with a fierce sense of
independence, that came to define the label. It was precisely the same modus
operandi employed by the many bands that eventually benefitted from his
risk-taking.
The Clean, The Chills, The Gordons, and the
rest, would all have existed regardless, sure, but it seems doubtful anyone
associated with the conservative major labels of early 1980s New Zealand would
have had the vision to release their music. Shepherd grasped their (collective)
appeal immediately and made sure the rest of the country - and eventually, more
curious or enlightened individuals globally - would get to hear the music.
Shepherd pays credit to the crucial roles
played by the likes of Chris Knox and Doug Hood, among many others, along the
way. He writes extensively about the label’s evolution, the rise, particularly
through the fledgling years of the 1980s, the relocation to Auckland, the fall,
the (forced) financial and artistic compromises, the post-millennium rebirth,
plus his own travels, and his personal battles with addiction and mental
health.
Shepherd writes passionately and candidly
about all of that stuff. He’s a decent writer, an engaging and witty mine of
information throughout.
And while the guts of the Flying Nun story may
have been told (elsewhere) before, it’s never been told with the same level of
insight and colour as provided here by Shepherd. Just as you’d expect from the
man with the most intimate insider knowledge of the label. And it’s this level
of detail, the highs and lows associated with that, alongside the personal
anecdotes and the frequent self-deprecating stories around his own journey as a
man - as opposed to a reluctant businessman - that make In Love With These
Times the definitive account.
Recommended.
Here's Shepherd’s
own account of writing the book, as published by Audioculture:
