Feature Articles

An interview with Roger Shepherd by Gavin Bertram. Courtesy Real Groove Magazine.

In 2008 Real Groove published a story about Warner Music neglecting the great Flying Nun back catalogue. Since they’d acquired it after buying FMR, many of these great New Zealand records had become unavailable. At that time we knew the label’s founder, Roger Shepherd, had been attempting to buy Flying Nun back from Warner. However, an 11th hour call from him meant we didn’t publish that information. Shepherd regaining control was finally confirmed in December last year. It hasn’t been an easy process though, with several years of negotiations, a failed business arrangement with Arch Hill’s Ben Howe, and shareholders including Neil Finn now on board.


In January, Real Groove talked at length to Shepherd while he visited Dunedin to meet with veteran Flying Nun musicians. We touched on some of the label’s history, what led to him leaving in 1997, about the reacquisition, and what his plans are now. That interview appears here. But for the full story see the March Real Groove.

Real Groove: Was it coming to Dunedin to see The Enemy and The Clean in 1978 that helped crystallise your desire to start a label?
Roger Shepherd: Just recently I got given a recording of it. There were interesting things happening in Christchurch for the few years previous, there were some good bands, but clearly The Enemy were the real deal. And that was the start of the connection really, coming to Dunedin and seeing The Clean play the same night at the Beneficiaries Hall. It would have been The Clean’s first show.

I sort of dropped out of university and was working in the record shop and a year or two later had the crazy idea of starting a record label. So it was going and seeing bands a lot, and initially wanting to document it. The idea was we could sell enough to cover costs. The Clean came through in '81, and they were a phenomenally good band, the best band anyone had seen since The Enemy or Toy Love. I persuaded them to release a single with me, which was Tally Ho, and I guess it was Chris Knox and Doug Hood’s friendship and love of the band, and Chris had recently acquired a 4-track and thought they could do a better job than Tally Ho. So it was The Clean that brought all those things together, and The Boodle EP was phenomenally successful, and gave us the cash flow and the confidence to do more material. No one knew how to make records, or what was involved in a record label. No one knew about publishing or royalty rates, or what was involved in manufacturing a record and getting covers printed, or what’s an invoice. So it was very much trial and error. We were lucky we had that initial success and rode a bit of a wave. If we hadn’t connected with The Clean it would have been very different.

Real Groove:The Christchurch Flying Nun office in the 1980s was notoriously chaotic. Was there any kind of view on traditional business practice?
Roger Shepherd:It was trying to find out what that traditional business practice was. Record companies have always been very different anyway, all sorts of stuff your average accountant wouldn’t know about. It was very much about finding out as we went along. There was a chaotic aspect to it, but that was part and parcel of doing it - finding out what the best way of doing something by making all the mistakes all the time. There was no one that could tell us.

Real Groove:Obviously you enjoyed the music – but did you ever enjoy the business end of things?
Roger Shepherd:Not a great deal. In many ways it was easier to start a business. I pretty much started it on credit from the Record Plant, and I’m not sure that would happen now. So some aspects of it were loose and wobbly and that sort of helped everything move along. But it’s easier to run a business now, everyone knows how to do a spreadsheet. And communication was by mail - making a toll call was considered an extravagance. Flying somewhere like Auckland was virtually unheard of. We used to drive; we used to drive to Dunedin, and if there was a gig in Auckland we’d drive, because petrol was cheap. And I guess you had the time to do it. Fax machines came in the mid-'80s, and we’d use the one at the post office. The Flying Nun archives are just all these pallets of boxes that are full of paper. They’re still in a warehouse out in West Auckland. I have to get them back to Wellington to sort through properly. It’s probably better that I try and put some order to it.

Real Groove:Things were more professional in Auckland, but there were still issues. What did you make, for instance, of what Matthew Bannister wrote in Positively George Street?
Roger Shepherd:I really enjoyed Matthew’s book, I admired the fact he got it published where none of the rest of us have got around to it. I guess he had a point of view, and that book highlights the musical differences between the road The Sneaky Feelings ended up travelling musically and perhaps where the label was headed. You could say the Xpressway Records thing was in another direction as well.

But I still love some of the music they made, and they had a good crack at it and went overseas. I respect him for having a different viewpoint really. He obviously found Chris Knox grating, and we all know that Chris can be grating, and sometimes you just need to know when to slip out the back door. He opens with the idea of the chaos of one compilation that there’s not a Sneaky Feelings song on and it’s a valid point. The expectation is perhaps not necessarily that well expressed or not that well extracted on my behalf as well. And that’s the problem with any arts driven kind of business where you’re dealing with personalities and expectations, and things always changing, even within projects as much as between them. That would be the trick, to manage them, whereas then we didn’t even know what the word manage meant.

Real Groove:What were your hopes when you left for the UK in 1995?
Roger Shepherd:It was to solidify what we saw as a level of interest in Europe. There was the idea that there was a bit of a sales base that existed in Europe, and the UK was significant. Even then you could generate media interest that had an influence outside the UK. So we ground away at that with an eye to get sales moving in Europe. But the UK is a harsh environment to sell music in, very competitive. A lot of bands gradually realised that as they spent more time in that environment - the romantic notion of what it is to be in a band faded somewhat, because it was really hard work. The label’s always been held in high regard by critics and the ongoing ambition is to match that with some tangible commercial success, and that’s the tricky bit. It’s fantastic being involved with a whole lot of bands getting great press, but the trick is to transform that into something that represents income for them. Ideally you’re trying to match their ambition as well.

Real Groove:In 1996 there was the relative triumph of the 15th anniversary celebrations. How were you feeling about things then?
Roger Shepherd:It was a good time. Everyone was pretty exhausted by the actual event, it was 10 gigs over 10 days or something like that. No one could drink the beer at the end of it. Everyone was sick of Roger’s Ruin. I was looking at the label and I reckon half the problem was that it was only four per cent so people were drinking a lot of it… But I think that was a high water mark. And I think there have been lots of peaks, there have been lots of memorable times when things have been achieved.

Back then a lot got done out of ignorance and not really realising how difficult a lot of the tasks were. Like what was involved in trying to sell music internationally, we just gradually got sucked into it. It started off being a bit of mail order interest, press interest, and record labels being interested in some of the bands. And it was very much find out how it works by doing it. And it was quite expensive, record being heavy things, and sending them cost money, phone calls cost money. Now with the internet a lot of the networking thing which was strength of the label in the 80s can be done efficiently and quickly without spending half your day at the post office licking stamps. By the same token there’s a lot more music out there and it’s a lot more competitive. But there seems to be a bigger appetite for music, and I feel that music business has split into two. The major record companies which are essentially becoming mass market vehicles, and smaller labels or bands who are releasing material themselves, who can operate in a different way.

Real Groove:In 1997 you were gone from the label. Was there a sense of disappointment, or relief?
Roger Shepherd:A bit of both really. There were changes at Mushroom Records and a director that I was quite close with, Gary Ashley, got pushed out. And it just seemed a matter of time really. What was happening was (Mushroom Records) Michael Gudinski was getting the label ready to sell to Rupert Murdoch, which is what happened in the end. It was kind of a relief; the UK is a very harsh environment, with a lot of wide boys I guess you’d call them. It’s pretty tough, and pretty cut throat. I got soured by the music business realities there and I was detached from here, on the other side of the world.



Related artists: The Chills, The Clean, Chris Matthews and Robot Monkey Orchestra, The Verlaines, Robert Scott, David Kilgour, Martin Phillipps, Look Blue Go Purple, Hamish Kilgour, Graeme Downes

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