Music Industry News

In 1978, in Dunedin the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980 the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years.

The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, ‘Tally Ho!’; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo.

Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle – fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 – this is the band’s history as it unfolds.

The book is out today, accompanied by a four-day book tour across Aotearoa. Find more information here.

“There has yet to be a book that tells the story of the band at the heart of New Zealand underground music and that became synonymous with things like Flying Nun Records and the “Dunedin Sound” that travelled around the world. It is much needed and long overdue. It is written by the ideal author who was not only there when it all happened, but who also recognised why it really mattered more than most.” – Matthew Goody, author of Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981–1988

Check out all things Richard Langston below:
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Richard Langston is a journalist, poet and television director who has written about the Dunedin music scene since the 1980s. The fanzine he edited from 1984–86, Garage, was issued as the book Pull Down the Shades: Garage Fanzine 1984–1986 (HoZac Books, 2023). He has been friends with the members of The Clean for forty years.