This interview feature is part of a new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the series here.
Music books don’t come much more definitive than The Dunedin Sound: Some Disenchanted Evening.
One of the best catalogues of the ‘Dunedin Sound’, the book was put together by Ian Chapman, who collected photographs and memorabilia previously unseen by the public, including old gig posters and newspaper clippings, to create a must-have for any indie music diehard.
Chapman also collated essays on 17 bands closely associated with the city’s famous sound, including The Clean, The Chills, and The Verlaines.
But the man behind the book isn’t even from the city.
“I’m actually a wicked Aucklander originally by birth!” Chapman tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “I moved down here in 1990. So you know, I’m just about naturalised now.”
When it came time to put together Some Disenchanted Evening, however, Chapman realised that it was actually “a bonus” that he was an ‘outsider’ as it meant he “had no skin in the game.”
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“The Dunedin Sound thing, you know, brilliant as it was, it was quite incestuous, there was lots of jealousies and all sorts of things,” he says, “but because I came in with a complete blank page and I was teaching at the uni I got to know some of these musicians before I started making noises about doing the book and there was no baggage there for me.”
Chapman “felt welcome straight away” in his adopted hometown, where he still remains to this day.
“Dunedin is a fantastic place to make music, really brilliant place, really supportive. And it’s still just the case today, you know. Dunedin loves music and loves the musicians.”
After studying classical music in the ’90s, Chapman, alongside The Verlaines’ Graeme Downes and Professor John Drummond, helped to start a rock music degree at the University of Otago in 2000. As “the only contemporary music degree program” in the Southern Hemisphere at that time, according to Chapman, it was a historic development.
By the third year, “the numbers were just going like crazy.”
“Even though I only had an undergraduate music degree at that stage, they got me in to teach it and they told me that if you want a career in this, you’ve really got to go ahead and do your masters and your PhD,” Chapman continues. “And I was sort of got an academic bent anyway, so I was delighted about that.
Dunedin Sound legends like The Clean’s David Kilgour and The Chills’ Martin Phillipps came to speak to the students, which helped foster a “great, supportive atmosphere.”
His years in academia eventually led to Some Disenchanted Evening.
“I was amazed that there had never been a standalone book on the Dunedin Sound,” Chapman notes. He knew there would be great interest in a book on the Dunedin Sound.
“I used to go off to musicology conferences around the world. As an academic, I’d usually be talking about David Bowie, but people would come up to me when they saw in the conference program that I was [from] Dunedin and they’d say, ‘What about The Clean?’ The debate [about] whether [the] Dunedin Sound was a thing back here in New Zealand was kind of pointless. It was already out there.
“[T]o my knowledge at that time, there was only Matthew Bannister’s very personal take, Positively George Street, which was a great book. And there was [other] little bits and pieces, like John Dix had written a book called Stranded in Paradise, which you might be familiar with, and there was a chapter on [the] Dunedin Sound.
“There were bits and pieces [but] no standalone book celebrating it. And so I put it to the publisher that we do it and they jumped on it straight away.”
Image: Ian Chapman Credit: Mark McGuire
Chapman researched and put together the book over the course of 18 busy months. Some Disenchanted Evening features a whole host of excellent writers, and Chapman says “it really was easy” to get them to provide essays for the book.
“People were so supportive and so keen to be involved,” adding that Downes was his “primary sounding board.”
The Bats’ Robert Scott was also “super generous”, giving Chapman permission to reprint an incredible Dunedin Sound band chart.
The hardest part, he says, was that “so many musicians and bands” were involved in the project and the Dunedin Sound.
“I mean, a book has physical limitations. I didn’t want to do a book that tried to acknowledge everybody, every act, every musician. I wanted to make it so that every band I featured, every artist got a really decent-sized chapter and that meant I had to make some hard decisions.”
In the end, Chapman settled on 17 main acts, but thankfully he says “there wasn’t too much pushback” from the community.
Was there anyone really upset about being left out? Chapman’s not telling. “Yeah, but I don’t want to tell you who!”
Reflecting on the book now, Chapman says he’s “still thrilled with it.”
“I don’t think it could have come out much better. I was thrilled with the publisher’s production values. [It’s] a coffee table kind of book in a sense of the production values, but it’s got real depth to it. It’s not a throwaway coffee table book like you see [elsewhere].
“I’ve always been very into iconography, my PhD was on David Bowie’s iconography, how [he] used music and images and so forth, and I was delighted that we were able to get so much imagery and pictures and ephemera and stuff into the book. I firmly believe the picture tells a thousand words.”
Read an exclusive excerpt from Chapman’s book, in which Downes reflects on the enduring appeal of bands associated with the Dunedin Sound, here.
The Dunedin Sound: Some Disenchanted Evening is available to purchase via Relics. Follow Ian Chapman’s work here.
