This Kane Strang interview is part of a new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the series here.
Kane Strange finds himself back in Ōtepoti — for now.
[I’m] a little bit all over the place between the two, but I’ve mainly been in Dunedin the last, maybe, two or three years,” he says. “I was in Auckland for about five years before that and just got a little burned out.”
After Office Dog, the indie rock trio Strang formed with Rassani Tolovaa and Mitchell Innes, released their acclaimed debut album, Spiel, he realised he needed “a break from all this and to get back home, see the fam.”
The Dunedin music scene ebbs and flows, moving through purple patches and relatively fallow years — university towns tend to be transient places — and Strang was part of a strong collection of bands and artists that emerged from the city around the middle of the 2010s.
His first two solo albums, Blue Cheese (2016) and Two Hearts and No Brain (2017), led to Pitchfork reviews and RNZ interviews for the unassuming Dunedinite. They still remain, almost 10 years later, richly rewarding collections of off-kilter DIY indie rock — we even included a standout track from Blue Cheese in our Best Australian & New Zealand Songs of the 21st Century So Far list.
Strang looks back on those early career years in Dunedin with great fondness.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
“I just feel so lucky to have come into the music world that I came into there,” he tells me. “I sort of kept to myself a lot during high school… I think I didn’t really realise exactly what was going on outside of my little suburb by the beach. And then I realised there were so many people my age making really unique music… I was kind of in shock for a little bit [at] how many good songwriters were around.
“[T]here were just so many bands… it really felt like music for music[‘s] sake at that point… It was more thinking about [a] gig that’s in two days’ time and just playing for your friends, and the industry and the business and all that stuff [was] just about a million miles away.
Strang has too many favourite local musicians from that era to count.
He lists Lucy Hunter of experimental pop trio Opposite Sex and Death and the Maiden’s Lucinda King (the latter hailed as one of Aotearoa’s “most delightfully unique and exciting bands” by Flying Out), while he has particular praise for Adrian Ng of indie-pop trio Trick Mammoth. “He didn’t really give a shit about how it was released or anything like that. He was just sort of pumping out these great songs… he’s just a really special songwriter… at that time we were both sort of doing a lot of home DIY recordings and bouncing off each other. And he was also very, very connected to The Attic.”
The Attic was the recording site for the first and only album by Strang’s pre-solo band, Dinosaur Sanctuary. The drolly-titled A Public Toilet Told Me Nothing Gets Better is ramshackle and raw, but the record contains signs of the lo-fi guitar-pop melodies and enjoyably peculiar lyrics that would come to define Strange’s later output.
He sounds genuinely surprised to hear that my partner, who studied at the University of Otago in the previous decade, loves Dinosaur Sanctuary’s album.
“It’s a good record, it holds up!” I tell him.
“Fuck, I haven’t listened to it in so long,” he replies. “We were just such a live band as well.”
It helped Strang and Dinosaur Sanctuary that Dunedin had “so many places to play” back then. “At [the] end of the day, just playing live is worth a million practices,” he contends.
Another seminal venue: Port Chalmers’ beloved Chick’s Hotel, formerly a gig space that hosted everyone from The Clean to Pavement which now functions as a much-needed recording space.
Strang recalls the bus journeys to Chick’s Hotel gigs out in Port Chalmers, which consisted of “half an hour of sculling your bottle, talking to your friends who you haven’t seen since the last gig which was probably the night before, and then you’re there and you’re stuck there.”
“But it’s like the best place to be stuck because there’s gonna be three or four great bands and you’re in it. Everyone’s so present,” he adds. (That’s something you quickly notice at Dunedin gigs: the crowds are so attentive and nobody’s there simply to get fucked up — they’re there to see good music.)
Strang met so many friends and collaborators at Chick’s Hotel, including Peter McCall, the musician behind Fazed on a Pony. “I remember talking to him out back at Chick’s and he[‘d] just released his first song and I was working on Blue Cheese… we started talking and wound up living together and he wound up drumming in my first solo [band]. Yeah, I’m so relieved I had all that.”
Dunedin has always been a comforting place for Strang: after Office Dog’s aforementioned debut album, after any hectic overseas tour, the city’s music community was always there for him.
“[Being] overseas, you know, being a little bit out of our depth, [it] was just super comforting to come back… especially coming from the States,” he says.
It helps that Dunedin is still home to probably Strang’s “favourite place on earth,” the Crown Hotel. Apartments being constructed right next to the live music institution may be threatening the venue’s future, but Strang isn’t (too) worried.
“On a personal note, it would make me very sad if the Crown were to go, but I honestly think you’d have to deal with a hundred Dunedin musicians chaining themselves to it before that thing went!”
The Strang surname is synonymous with Dunedin music. Kane’s grandfather, Harry, played in big bands in the ’50s and ’60s.
“[W]hen I was a kid some of my teachers had been to his dances and that always made me feel kind of cool…” he recalls. “So my grandma and granddad had three sons — one uncle played drums, one played guitar, my dad played bass, so that’s a pretty good setup.”
His father played in several bands in the city, including one with the punk-as-fuck name Runt. “My dad just loves playing, I don’t think he really cares too much about exactly what kind of music it is.”
The Strang family have operated a piano store in Dunedin for decades now, and it’s where Joel Field, one of the leading musicians in the exciting new generation of local bands, works. Field is a key part of both the Flying Nun-signed Pearly* and Dale Kerrigan, who could reasonably claim to be the best band in the country this year.
“[Field is] very confident in what he’s doing… I just love what those guys are doing,” Strang says.
“Have any of these younger bands talked about your music inspired them?” I ask.
“People like Joel definitely have… I know Joel in particular, he’s just so open about it, I really like that. That’s quite different for a Dunedinite, [to] just sort of openly say, ‘Yeah, I really like what you’re doing.'”
“It’s very anti-Kiwi in general.”
“I think I’m the last person that these people should be looking up to so deeply… I still feel like I personally have a lot to learn and there’s a lot of growing I can do both musically and on the more business-y side of things. But obviously at the same time, it means a lot.”
He agrees that Pearly* and Dale Kerrigan are making “some of the most interesting music” in New Zealand right now.
“[There’s] some really great stuff happening at the moment… it almost reminds me of when I first came to high school and started going to gigs for the first time and things like that… [it’s] so cool because I’ve been watching people like [Dale Kerrigan’s] Josh Nichols drum for freaking 10-plus years now… that’s just quite special to me.”
Strang knows he’ll have to eventually leave Dunedin again.
“I’m at a point where two thirds of Office Dog are in Auckland and I do miss being able to sort of walk down the street or drive down the road and play [with them]… we’ve just recorded a new album and I know there’ll come a time where I’ll need to be back up in Auckland and we’ll need to be in the same place rehearsing and doing all the stuff you gotta do when you put out an album,” he says. “I guess for now, I’m just enjoying my time [in Dunedin].”
