This feature is part of a new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the series here.
If you’ve been to an Ōtepoti gig anytime in the last decade, you’ve probably seen Fraser Thompson.
When the beloved experimental festival Lines of Flight recently celebrated its 25th birthday, the photographer was there, finding time to play music too; when local legend Shayne P. Carter played a show inside Port Chalmers’ stunning Iona Church, he was everywhere, snapping shots from the aisle, the second floor, and the altar’s edge; he was right in the thick of it when Dankfest came to the Crown Hotel, still managing to photograph the night amidst the mayhem. Even when Office Dog put on a surprise show just two days after Christmas, he was there.
“I’m on 70, or almost 70,” he says over the phone from his hometown, tallying up the number of local gigs he’s been to this year alone. Even to a Rolling Stone writer, that’s a frankly astounding number.
The Fraser Thompsons of the world play a pivotal, oft-unsung role in any strong DIY music community. He’s the person behind dunedinsound.com, an impressive media archive of Dunedin’s live music scene.
A web developer by trade, he built an endearingly old-school website to host all of his photographs and videos, which are searchable by gig, artist, and venue. It’s a labour of love which has proven fruitful for Thompson just as much as it has for the city’s music scene.
“I had an interest in bootlegging and that sort of tradition of recording live shows, and I built a little thing where I have microphones and earplugs so I could record shows just by being there,” he says of the rudimentary early days of the project.
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After he acquired a proper camera, he started taking photos and videos of each gig, posting them on both the archive’s website and dedicated social media accounts.
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Befitting a city like Dunedin, Thompson quickly realised that the “tiny local shows are much better than the hundred-dollar stadium stuff.” (I had the same realisation very early into working at Rolling Stone.)
“[B]y their nature, [they] have less interest and less people experiencing them, so I was like, ‘This stuff is possibly important and maybe I could catalogue it,'” he says. “And then it sort of grew into the idea of the website, and I started adding photos as well.”
Are people grateful for Thompson’s work?
“Yeah, I think so,” he answers. “I hope so! I always expect someone to be like, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and it’s only happened once or twice. Most of the time everyone’s appreciative.”
His fellow musos do appreciate the hell out of Thompson and dunedinsound.com.
“[H]e’s awesome and I fucking love what he does,” Tane Cotton of post-punk band Sivle Talk, who’s also keenly aware of the importance of permanently documenting live music, told me. “He’s been recording all these gigs for like 10 years or something, and I consider live concerts that aren’t recorded like basically lost media, you know?”
“You are an inspiration! And so many Artists and fans love the work you do more than you realise!!!” commented Pearly* and Dale Kerrigan member Joel Field on Instagram.
Dunedinsound.com is purely a passion project for Thompson — he’s attending 70-odd shows per year on top of going to his day job.
“[O]bviously I need to make a living… this doesn’t make money,” he says. “At the same time, it would be nice if there was a way to do it [make money].”
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As he outlined in an Instagram post, “it’s not a business… it isn’t concerned with generating revue… it won’t go away once it stops making money (it has never made money)… it doesn’t want you to sign up for anything or track you.”
For the man who’s been to over 400 shows in 11 years, surely it’s impossible to pick out a favourite?
“I usually write a yearly summary thing… I mean, Koizilla’s final show was pretty amazing. It felt like everyone was really united, which is what a community and a city [is] all about,” he says after a moment’s hesitation.
His favourite venue, meanwhile, is likely unsurprising: the Crown Hotel, the ramshackle old pub beloved by every Dunedinite — Kane Strang told me it was probably his “favourite place on earth.”
The Crown, however, is battling an “existential threat,” Thompson says: apartments are being constructed right next to the live music institution.
“I’m worried about the Crown because the Crown is literally the cornerstone of all local music,” Thompson sighs.
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A sobering sidebar on dunedinsound.com features a map of the city’s live music venues, past and present; haunting wee crosses mark the defunct spots, which almost equal the number of venues still standing.
Thompson, however, knows there are behind-the-scenes figures just like him putting in hours of work to improve the situation.
Save Dunedin Music, for example, is “doing really great stuff. They’re like lobbying — well, I don’t know if you call it lobbying, but [they’re] working with the council. There’s an action plan now [so it’s] just whether the council actually does the stuff they need to do.” Within the council, too, there are now people he says “are very supportive of local music.”
It’s hard, though, to get too downcast about the future of the city’s live music scene, not when volunteers like Thompson remain. When so much of our online world is now ephemeral and downright worthless, dunedinsound.com should be treasured. Here’s to 70 more shows for Thompson in 2026, and countless more beyond that.
Check out Thompson’s project here and here. Support the project here.
