By Jim Wilson, as published in Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader Vol. 10, Winter 2016.

I was fourteen when my parents moved from Dunedin to Christchurch in 1966. We rented a house at 384 Wilsons Road down by the railway tracks. It was during the summer when we shifted north, and Christchurch felt as hot as Burma compared to Dunedin. There were flies everywhere and dust on the streets. My mum got a job at Melhuish’s pickle factory two doors down from us, and my dad worked in the store for a steel company. This is all how I came to relate so very closely to those early songs by the Kinks. Wilsons Road was in many respects just another ‘Dead End Street’. There is another part of Wilsons Road down under the hills that is more ‘well to do’ and I always wanted to get down that end. I always wanted to be at the good end of the street and I’m still trying.

Over the road from us and right next door to the railway tracks there was a small dairy/takeaway, owned and operated by “Mrs Jones”. I don’t believe Phyllis Jones had ever been married, but she wore a very slight wedding ring on one of her bony, hard-working fingers. I think she added the ‘Mrs’ to her name to ward off unwelcome advances. She was a very lonely woman of about 55 years of age and she was always talking about ‘dirty old men.’ She wore her grey hair tied back in a bun and she had thin, severe lips that hid a huge heart. I don’t think she had ever trusted anyone in her life, so that heart was mostly kept locked up. She was shaped like a pumpkin.

Mrs Jones got up before 5am each day to make sandwiches for the shop, which she opened at 6am and kept open, by herself, until 9 pm. She had two small pug dogs that were always at her feet. The dogs were called Minnie and Mickey and they had bad breath in the extreme.

She also had a son called Michael, who fast became my best new friend. Looking back, it is amazing to me how fast you can make good mates when you are that young. Nowadays, people send each other nude pictures on their cell phones so that they can keep space between them, and it seems Facebook has been invented so that people can hoik at each other in the dark. The internet has made us all extremely wary of each other and I have ‘friends’ on Facebook, and the first time I meet them I am actually going to bash them. Donald Trump has never been the problem. The problem is people who scream and rant and rave.

On Wilsons Road there was no father present in the Jones family and the story which was told was that ‘Mr Jones’ had fallen into a giant vat of boiling whale oil in Picton and had therefore perished. The real Moby Dick shit! But this seemed such an unlikely tale that, to save embarrassment, it was never openly discussed. Decades later it was discovered that Mike’s dad was a Māori from the North Island and eventually the father and son met up and it was good. But back when Mike was born in the 1950s, it wasn’t always the accepted thing for a Pākehā woman to fall in love with a Māori man. It is to Mrs Jones’ credit that she actually kept Mike and brought him up and she did a very good job of this too. Mrs Jones would sometimes call out to her son across the floor of a packed shop where twenty working men would be waiting to buy their pies: “Michael, did you put on a clean pair of underpants today?” Mike might have been 18 when this happened.

Mike had a truly beautiful singing voice and played guitar really well too. He was a naturally gregarious, friendly person with an acne-ridden face and black, thick-framed glasses. He was quite a bit overweight and had a bad hip, so that he walked with a pronounced limp. My recollection is that the limp was the result of Mike having childhood polio but I could be wrong.

The very best thing about Mike was that he was just plain lazy. He didn’t give a rat’s arse about what anyone else thought. He spent most of his time wagging school, laughing, smoking cigarettes, playing cards with his mates, strumming his guitar, singing yearningly, having sex with his girlfriend, and eating his mum’s mince pies. Yes, it was an idyllic life. Either his mum or his girlfriend bought his pies through from the shop for him.

There was a small table in his bedroom between two single beds—I was later to occupy the second bed. Mike would put his cigarettes out by placing them standing up on their filters and letting them burn down, whilst his girlfriend lit him another one or got him a sandwich. Mike liked his tucker.

When we were sixteen, in 1968, Mike and I started promoting bands at various halls all around Christchurch. This was during that evil and quiet time when all pubs in New Zealand closed at 6pm. Back then, violence happened at home, whereas these days a lot of it happens in the bars or outside on the streets. These are a few of the many ‘gifts’ of late closing and ‘freedom’.

Before long, Mike and I were bringing bands up from Dunedin to play locally, and sending Christchurch bands southwards. We’d borrow Mrs Jones’s old Morris Eight Series E, then drive around late at night putting up posters for our gigs, or placing fliers under windscreen wipers. Later that year I got my first Volkswagen. 

Whenever we went to paste a poster upon a decrepit old wall, invariably, someone would yell out at us, “Hey, you can’t put that there!” That is the theme song of my life.

…But we did put it there, and since then, as I’ve built a poster company, I’ve run up against 4500 bureaucrats, 2000 petty politicians, and been stopped by what feels like the entire police force of this country. That’s how I know the amphetamine epidemic can never be halted…The police waste far too much time doing pointless things, wherein they make more enemies than they do friends. You have to try very hard in this country to be arrested, and the police uniforms are getting blacker and blacker whilst the guns get bigger and bigger. I believe cannabis will be legalised within five years and I think reparations should be paid to everyone who got caught up in the ‘drug wars’.

I think all policemen and bureaucrats should be made to wear dresses to soften them up a bit. We are your brothers.

Mike and I called ourselves “Speakeasy Promotions”, and over the next two or three years we were involved in promoting visits to Christchurch by the Underdogs, The Human Instinct, The Hi-Revving Tongues, The Kal-Q-Lated Risk (I think I remember this correctly) and many others. “Success” came to us very quickly, and before a year or two was up we were able to afford an old 1951 Vanguard Station Wagon. It’s a long way to the top, particularly when you are dealing with bands. I loved push starting that Vanguard, full of band gear, somewhere on the Kilmog. 

At the Mount Pleasant Community Centre hall gigs, which we ran almost every Saturday for more than two years during 1969 and 1970, depending on whether the hall was booked or not, we’d get 800 people through the door at 50 cents cover charge. In one half of the hall there would be 770 teenagers, and in the other half 30 Epitaph Riders (the local bike gang). The bikers would be snarling, because the good-looking girls would never pick them, as without their clothes they were ugly and with them they were worse. They were born to be bad and they felt they had to prove it.

We’d have ten bouncers working for us at $10 a night each, and they did as best as they could to control the crowd, but it was never easy. Headlining bands usually got $40 or $50 a night, and support bands got about $10 or $20. Sometimes a top band would get $100 for two 45 minute brackets.

After the gigs finished at 11pm or midnight, we’d spend hours cleaning and mopping the floors. We’d also do our best to fix the busted toilets. They always got busted because when people are frustrated they often get destructive. Every woman in the audience wanted to sleep with Wayne Beecroft, who was one of the greatest front-men Christchurch ever produced, but I think it’s fair to say that he wasn’t the greatest singer in the world. In later years Wayne switched to drums and he was really quite good at it. It’s never too late to make a career change.

When we’d finished cleaning the hall, Mike and I and ten of our best mates would climb into the old Vanguard and we’d go down to the Silver Grill on Manchester Street for a late night steak. It was the kind of place where you just got normal bread and butter on a plate with your meal. No one had to take twenty-five minutes to interpret the menu for you. As far as I know, no Italians lived in New Zealand at all at that stage. Kiwis had not yet discovered pizza and food had not been elevated to being some kind of a god.

After the Silver Grill, we’d sometimes drive back to Mt Pleasant in the wee smallhours and swing by Iris Craddock’s house. She was a famous old prostitute who slept with all comers including sailors from the Port of Lyttelton. We’d stop outside her house and yell out at the top of our voices: “Iris Craddock! Iris Craddock! Iris Craddock!” It was a sex thing.

This yelling made us all laugh. Today, you’d go to jail for doing that or you’d end up standing before a human rights tribunal. Currently in this world you have billions of people looking for the next big thing to make illegal and to humiliate their fellow man.

I think the best band Christchurch ever produced was The Secrets. The Secrets played five nights a week at The Plainsman nightclub down Lichfield Street during this time and a little after. The bass guitarist/vocalist had one of the biggest egos I’ve ever seen but this worked for him in admirable fashion. He was a mighty big pop star in a mighty small country. Women were admitted free on both Wednesday and Sunday nights. Every night the room was filled to the brim and the walls were moist.

When I was nineteen, in 1970, I opened a nightclub on Tuam Street called “The Joint”. Mike and I split up and went our separate ways with no hard feelings. I was beginning to meet people like Trevor Spitz, Phil Warren, Benny Levin and Hugh Lynn (a few years later). I had already met Eddie Chin in Dunedin, and as far as Kiwi Music goes I think he contributed a lot. New Zealand music is largely written up by music critics or onlookers (about ten people in all), yet it seems to me that most of them were never actually “there”. I remember conversations with Eddie Chin out the back of his Rattray Street, Dunedin nightclub, that would help set the tone for my life. Once he paid me $10 for a band that had travelled all the way from Christchurch to Dunedin to play in his club. That was $10 for the whole weekend. “Beer and cigarettes money, Jim!” he exclaimed loudly and warmly. Then we went across the road to the Dragon Café for a steak and chips. He had brilliantly sparkling eyes, and if he’d won at Wingatui that day he’d be in a great mood.

I think the best Christchurch guitarist I ever saw was Mike Davison. Following him would be Foof, Arab, and Steve Apirana. In there also would be Eddie Hansen, Phil Jones, Jimmy Taylor, Ronnie Harris and a whole bunch others. It all depends on what you like of course. The Christchurch guitarist who talked the most was Ken Akroyd; he started yapping in the mid 1950s and hasn’t stopped yet. But he’s a very, very good player as well. Most of these guitarists are unknown north of Amberley because we didn’t write the history.

I think the nicest Christchurch promoter was Robin “Oz” Armstrong. Being a “nice promoter” will land you in prison trying to make ends meet. From what I can make out, the top five Christchurch promoters in the 1970s all went to jail. They served their time in the “music industry”.

The Gresham was a great gig, but no better than the United Services. The Velvet Glove was a good room. Moby Dick’s was huge. Odyssey was a great band. Not everything in Christchurch revolved around Punk Rock music and what happened between 1978 and 1985 and onwards, but you could be forgiven for thinking that there was no other life to be had. There was actually a lot of substance to music in Christchurch between 1970 and 1977. Punk Rock has been largely and boringly overwritten. Give me Ragnarok any day. Give me Prometheus.

Back to Mike Jones: he made a major contribution to Kiwi Music, but is largely unheard of. He is not one of the “darlings” of the “music industry” you see, those people who typically get written about or rewarded at the glitzy shows. The highest rung he climbed was that his band, Lord, came second at the national Battle of the Bands in around 1972. Mike probably didn’t blow the right guy and he wasn’t from the North Island.

Mike died of liver cancer in 2008. He remained a very decent man until the end. He was laughing and he was humble.

The last time I saw him play was in his band Dead Men Walking in about 2003. I saw them at some shithouse little gig at a Working Men’s Club in central Christchurch. From memory, there were four members in the group. A lot of bands became three or four-piece outfits for these gigs, so as to get a better share of the little money to be had and to not owe so much on the bar tab at the end of the night. What delighted me that night, watching Dead Men Walking, was that Mike (the best vocalist in the band) still had a snarl in his voice. I thought it remarkable that someone who had seen good times and extremely bad times and who had been often trampled on in this world (like us all) could still fight back via a beautiful and mean singing voice. I mean Beautiful and Mean. That night Mike sang Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of “Midnight Special” and he spat it out like he meant it. No Krispy Kreme Donuts for him, just the real thing. But, in the end, you just got to blow the right guy.