Record Collection

What do toilet doors, a ticket stub, and a choir gown have in common? They’re all clues to Aotearoa’s music legacy. Our curators collect more than just the hits - sometimes it’s the stuff you don’t see on stage that brings the history to life. In this episode of The Amp, we reveal the unexpected items that help us preserve the spirit of the NZ Music scene.

Episode Transcript

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Record Collection transcript

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Gabriel Tongaawhikau 00:02This podcast is brought to you by Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Jenna Borst 00:13Music at its most basic, is like the decoration of time. But if you've ever rushed to the store to get a physical copy of an album, covered your walls with regrettable holes to put up posters, or survived camping at a muddy festival, you'll know that music is so much more than airwaves. It's something that brings us together and punctuates some of life's biggest moments at Auckland Museum, our role is to collect and study the history of Tāmaki Makaurau in all its forms. So, for Te Mārama Puoro o Aotearoa New Zealand Music Month, we're looking at some of the unexpected ways music makes its way into the collections and the stories they hold. Not through instruments, CDs or vinyls, but some of the roundabout ways music brings people together and the mementos left along the way. Kia ora, I'm Jenna Borst, your host for this episode of The Amp, the podcast from Auckland Museum that amplifies the incredible stories from our collections, our mahi and our place in the Pacific. In our Tāmaki Herenga Waka Stories of Auckland gallery, a few metres down from our old mate, musician Bill Sevesi, who you might remember from our ep about the Orange Ballroom. There's a giant picture of another iconic venue, The King's Arms, and an unassuming door you can pry open. There in our beloved museum building, among the art archaeological finds and stunning taonga, there's our toilet door, and not one that leads you to a toilet either, but an actual cubicle stall door on a wall in our gallery. That toilet door has seen a thing or two in its life, for sure, there's a lot of history there. To get to the bottom of it – lol – we're going back to 2018. In 2018, the infamous Auckland bar and music venue The King's Arms closed its doors after nearly 140 years in business. Starting its life as a hotel in the 1880s, the two-storey wooden building at the end of France Street South in Eden Terrace stood at the edge of the rapidly changing central Auckland suburb Newton. Now just a sliver of what it was the suburb was cut in two to make space for the Central Motorway junction, known for being a pretty rough neck of the woods, The King's Arms was a working man's pub before owner Maureen Gordon and her family transformed part of the building into a live music venue in the mid-90s. It became an Auckland icon, beloved by local bands, and even host to international acts like The Black Keys and The White Stripes in the early days of their career. You could brag to all your mates that you saw some of the world's biggest bands at The King's Arms before they could fill up stadiums night after night. Popular as it was, the venue couldn't survive Auckland's need for high density housing, and in 2016 the site was bought by developers who would later bulldoze the pub to make way for apartments. In the weeks following its closure, the owners of The King's Arms hosted an onsite auction of all its goodies, from the lighting rig to darts trophies, from the sports bar right down to the posters plastered to the walls in the green room.
Jane Groufsky 04:25Well, we knew that it was shutting down. Myself and other members of the curatorial team sort of knew that that was happening and that we wanted to be able to represent that in some way. So we actually did get in touch with the family, but they just let us know that the auction was coming. And we also knew there was a lot of interest out there, because people were already souveniring bits and pieces, like going into the pub and taking things they told us, stole the sign from the outside. So we were lucky that they did have the auction when they did. Kia ora, my name is Jane Groufsky, and I am the Curator of Social History at Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.
Jenna Borst 05:04The museum's social history collection focuses on the social, cultural and environmental history of Auckland city and region. Social history can be really big things, like movements and protests, but it can also be the small and the personal, just like a night out with friends enjoying live music.
Jane Groufsky 05:27Well, it's exciting because it's quite a difficult area of history to collect because of the ephemeral nature of music and the way that people kind of tend to hold on to memorabilia and things like that. It's also something that we don't really get a lot of donation offers for, because a lot of people don't really think about museums being interested in this kind of thing and contemporary culture, you know, a bit more likely to get offers of christening gowns or grandmothers’ clothing, that sort of thing, older things, is what people have that association. So it was exciting that The King's Arms provided this opportunity to grow that part of the collection.
Jenna Borst 06:03Jane attended the busy auction with a wish list of items we wanted to add to our collection.
Jane Groufsky 06:08So there was a lot of bulk lots, a lot of all the glassware you could have bought, you know, 20 glasses of certain kind, or a batch of 10 microphones. And so it was quite an interesting mix of some people were there, obviously to buy out bulk and on sell. Others were, you know, musicians wanting a bargain. We were the only ones who were interested in the toilet doors though…
Jenna Borst 06:30A wish list that might not line up with your usual idea of precious museum items.
Jane Groufsky 06:37We had a list of things we wanted, a couple we weren't able to get. One was a mixing board that they used, which would have been really interesting and significant. But a colleague of mine who's in the music industry, when I'd said we were interested in that, he said, “Oh, that'll probably go for a lot”, because as a piece, as a piece of kit, it's quite valuable. So we didn't, we didn't go for that, because we thought that would get but quite high. We also were looking to get some posters, and had, you know, written the proposal to acquire these. But because they've got a lot of appeal to collectors, they also got bid beyond what we could achieve. But the other things that we wanted, which we did get, were the toilet doors, the three toilet doors from the women's loos. We just wanted them because they're very evocative and a key part of the pub experience. Everyone, probably most people, have had that experience of being a bit tipsy in the loo with a pen in your handbag. So or in the case of these toilet doors, sometimes that was just lipstick that people were using to scroll on them. And so as objects, they just contain so many references. They have references to current events to New Zealand bands, and then a lot of messages about the end of The King's Arms and how sad people were. And so there were kind of a moral element in that reflecting the depth of feeling about that place.
Jenna Borst 07:50And we walked away from the auction as proud owners of another colourful item, a time capsule of a habit, hopefully not enjoyed in many indoor gigs today.
Jane Groufsky 08:04So the other object was the cigarette machine, the cigarette vending machine, which was really a real relic from another time, because smoking had been banned for 14 years already when the king's arms had shut so that obviously just kept it in the pub as a kind of curiosity. And we're interested in collecting that just to represent the changing face of attitudes around smoking and around socialising in this kind of environment. And it is quite interesting to look at it today, because it's still got all the price tags on it. You can see a pack of 20 marble lights is $10.50 and which, from what I can tell, would be about 40 to $50 today. I'm not a smoker myself, but dang.
Jenna Borst 08:45It's fair to say pub auctions might not be one of the ways you expect museums like ours to add to our collections, but it's a bit more involved than just rocking up with the company credit card.
Jane Groufsky 08:58So regarding the usual process of adding objects to the museum collection, we have a lot more in storage than on display, which a lot of people don't realise. And so therefore we have to have quite a rigorous collecting policy which guides what we collect, and we aim to fill gaps, and we try and include underrepresented themes or communities. And so in order to do this, we have to make a case to bring things into the museum. We have to write an acquisition proposal, and that's to kind of explain the history and the context of the object and justify why we want to bring it into the collection. Because things are in the collection for the long haul. So we really have to be able to justify the resources and the expense and everything that goes into it, and particularly if we have to pay money, we have to get a budget approved and all that sort of thing. So that does make it quite tight turnaround sometimes, especially for for auctions, we had approval basically just as we're about to drive to the auction. So sometimes it can be quite touch and go.
Jenna Borst 09:59The items collected are strategically chosen to tell stories and mark chapters in our history.
Jane Groufsky 10:05It's important to collect these, these histories and stories and objects like the toilet doors, because the toys, in particular, they represent a kind of spontaneous, informal information sharing that's really hard to capture in other ways, and even since we've had the toilet doors in storage at the museum, colleagues of mine have picked up on things that are written on them that are really personal and interesting or relevant to them. I mean, for example, an Irish colleague mentioned it's gotten it written repeal the eighth which was an unofficial but widely adopted slogan by people in Ireland during the referendum to legalize abortion in 2018 and so it was everywhere. And it's got really poignant that in the women's toilets we've got this very deep, profound, I guess, message around around abortion, there was also a friend of mine who noticed there was a memorial to a friend of hers who had passed away several weeks before the king's arms shut down. And so that was really special for her to see that and know that that was, you know, that memorial was captured in the museum collection. Even had another friend who knew one of the people in the band, a band mentioned who he reckons she would have been sitting on the loo and writing the name of her band from the level of the on the door that is. So yeah, these objects, they've just got so much going on on them.
Jenna Borst 11:33You can see one of these doors in our Tāmaki Herenga Waka Stories of Auckland gallery.
Jane Groufsky 11:39So we've got three doors. They came as a set of three. We only have one on display at any given time. And one of the reasons for that is to do with the light sensitivity of the materials used on the doors. So they were written on whatever people had to hand, which is a pen, it could have been lipstick, it could have been whatever they had. And some of these, you know, these materials are quite light sensitive, and so we try to minimise the amount of light coming onto these objects at one time. And so having three, we can put one on display, and after two or three years, rotate it out for the next one. And then just, you know, protect the life of those objects.
Jenna Borst 12:17The doors hold stories, co-authored by The King's Arms gig goers, a community brought together through music.
Jane Groufsky 12:24I think that music is because it's so closely associated with emotion, it can really bring back personal memories about how you felt at a particular time, and it can also be quite political and quite reflective of what's going on in the world. And that's sometimes implicit and sometimes it's explicit, but it just helps build up a bigger picture of the mood of the time. And so if we're not paying attention to these, these more ephemeral things, then we miss that. We miss that part of the story, and we miss that history.
Jenna Borst 12:58Just over from the loo doors in the same gallery is a smart looking choir gown with cuffs at the wrists with only four metres or so between them. A choir mistress’ gown and a latrine door might seem like a bit of a storytelling U-turn, but between them, they tell the story of the incubation of musical talent in central Auckland. The same year, we were snapping up loo doors, another story was being put together just 400 metres up the road.
Andrea Low 13:31Aloha Mai Kākou. My name is Andrea Low. I am Associate Curator Contemporary World at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum. In in 2018 November, 2018 PIC Pacific Island church in Edinburgh Street had an incredible exhibition in the Māori Hall, which is just across the road from the church. And Rose Tuitama was somebody who was connected with the curation of that exhibition, and it had an incredible array of tivaevae, family photos, sports photos, arranged in decades around the room, but in the centre of the space was a set of three choir gowns, and they had been gifted to the exhibition by the Inari family. So Sefa Inari was who was head of Pacific dance New Zealand. They were from his family, and they had belonged to his aunt, Epi Phethean. And Epi Phethean was the choir mistress for the Pacific Island Church's choir, and it brought together other denominations and ethnicities that were connected with the church. So there were Niueans. She was from Samoa originally, but there were Niueans and Samoan and Cook Island people in the choir, and one particular choir gown stood out to me, and that was one that had cuffs. The others had loose sleeves at the wrist, but this one had cuffs. And Sefa was able to tell me that that was because when Epi was conducting the choir, she could raise her arms to conduct without the sleeves slipping down.

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Jenna Borst 15:29Before the suburb of Newton was uprooted to make way for the motorway. Newton was a bit of a rough part of town. A 1920s newspaper described it as a “haunt of many of Auckland's best-known crooks.” When the PIC, officially known as the Pacific Islanders Presbyterian Church Newton was built in 1947 it would have effectively been on the same street as The King's Arms, about a five-minute walk. It made a kind of ‘two birds one stone’ sense to uproot the less than desirable suburb and put in a motorway connecting the different ends of Auckland with the Newton junction. Out with the crooks and in with the cars. Now, if you stand by the PIC church on Edinburgh Street, and you look down across the motorway, sort of to the left, you can see the high-rise housing that cleared The King's Arms out of the way.
Andrea Low 16:31The power of the choir at PIC is really important because it brought together different denominations and different island groups, and those island groups used to have their own separate services. So with the choir coming together, it was a uniting force. When you see the photographs of the choir all together, you see what you get is a picture of very smart, beautiful, incredibly well-tailored group looking really great and fit together choir and Epi Phethean was, I think, such a great teacher that she was able to kind of nurture these latent tendencies and people. She was also one of the teachers of the Yandall sisters as they were growing up, who went on to become they were also associated with PIC church, but they also went on to become one of the major musical New Zealand musical groups of the 60s and 70s and into the 80s as well. So they're all associated with that PIC church choir.
Jenna Borst 17:44While King's Arms punters may have been wrapping up their nights, tumbling out onto the streets and shuffling on home. Another group of music lovers just 400 metres away would have been starting their Sundays with song through music. Both groups would have been bookending their days, maybe even frequented by the same people, those probably not so bushy tailed and bright eyed…
Andrea Low 18:11People come together through music, through things like rhythm and pattern and emotion, because you don't often sing, particularly in a choir, without giving yourself over to something and the direction and encouragement from the choir mistress to do your best. And I think she was a very exacting person, so people did want to please her. I think that was some of the driving force, and I think she was also very disciplined, so I think that's some of the driving force in the choir. And so people were united in a way that you might strive to find that kind of connection and emotional engagement outside of a choir, but she was able to bring that out of people
Jenna Borst 19:11With choir alumni spanning global opera prestige and one of Aotearoa most defining girl groups, you can see why Epi’s gowns needed cuffs. Honing talents with her swift and snappy conduction, the cuffs are a testament to the musical prowess being nurtured on Edinburgh Street. The PIC church is special for drawing together different denominations and different languages all under the same roof, united in song, whether indie gospel or something prog rock and weird in between, the communities that made The King's Arms and the PIC church special used music to connect. Now gentrification has drawn a hard line through both these stories, The King's Arms is gone, replaced by high-rise housing, though the PIC church still stands, many of its congregation have been pushed to the city's fringes. What survives in both cases is the music, the legacy of talent, community and connection, the choir gowns, the toilet doors. They don't just recall what once was. They hold memory in physical form. They remind us that behind the shifts of our changing city are people singing, gathering, creating, and that these sounds, though muffled by motorways or fading into archive still echo with meaning. In capturing these stories, we're not just preserving nostalgia. We're tracing the outlines of communities that shaped the cultural heart of Auckland, even as they come and go, besides bathroom stall doors and gowns, music trickles into the collections and other smaller and quirky ways.
Voice actor 21:09Are you ready to party this weekend? Radio, 96 FM present Auckland's hottest downtown venue. See five bands for five bucks. Yeah. Man featuring the larks, the rockers, Sunset Boulevard, frackers…
Jenna Borst 21:18Before the internet came along and organised information into tidy, accessible areas, if you wanted to put on your glad rags and bust a move, you'd have to seek out gigs in all sorts of ways. Music fans would rely on newspapers, radio, word of mouth, flyers pinned up in music stores or stuck to lamp posts. Local papers would list upcoming shows with all the details, dates, venues where to buy tickets and street posters were stuck to all sorts of surfaces. These fragments of information made to be short lived and quickly forgotten, have made a special home in our documentary heritage collections.
Nina Finigan 22:08Kia ora my name is Nina Finigan. My title is Curator Manuscripts. I always think it sounds like I should be in the Vatican, but actually so I look after our manuscript collection, which consists of things like letters and diaries and documents and oral histories, so you know, recordings of people conducting interviews, and also ephemera, which is what we're here to talk about today.
Jenna Borst 22:35Ephemera originates from the Greek word ‘ephemeros’, meaning lasting only a day, items that were never meant to last.
Nina Finigan 22:44I think it's such a beautiful word for a collection. It's one of my favourites at the museum, and I just love that I get the privilege to look after it. So, in a music context, that can look like posters. So posters for gigs, it can also look like things like tickets or, I guess, pamphlets, anything you accumulate this, like detritus, is if you're going to a gig or whatever, like a wristband for a big day out, for example, anything that kind of, you know, you might just chuck it in the bin at the end of the gig or at the end of the festival. But actually, we love that stuff. We collect that stuff. We think that it tells us a lot about the relationship to music and the social kind of context of music, the cultural context.
Jenna Borst 23:28Sometimes small, sometimes scrappy, but together, they help paint a rich picture of what things were like in the past.
Nina Finigan 23:38It doesn't try hard, but it tells you a lot of things. You know, like when you read a letter or something else in our collection, you sort of have to really interpret it. You have to kind of really get into it to get the meaning. But ephemera just kind of reveals all this stuff without trying hard. So like a poster, for example, for a gig, obviously tells us about the band which might not be in existence anymore. It tells us about a venue which probably also might not be in existence anymore, but it also reflects things about print culture. So, you know, the handmade or the design aesthetics of that particular time or that subculture. So, you know, we have punk posters that reflect that real, like rough and ready, kind of handmade punk aesthetic. And so there's all kinds of things, you know, type design, it just, yeah, it reveals so many things. Music, ephemera comes to us in all sorts of ways. Most of it has come through donations, like we have a whole collection of posters that came from an ex-staff member, like, years and years and years ago. And basically they would go to the university or wherever and take posters down after the gig had had played. So you know that was all good is ethical. And. And so for those posters, I just love it, because they've come from their environment, you know. And often they actually come with, like, detritus from the world on the back of them. So like, if someone rips them off a bollard or, like a lamp post or whatever. And sometimes we have the traces of those, that material kind of environment on the back of these posters. So some, yeah, and that's my favourite, actually, when they come with this stuff, and they they've been taken from the kind of place in which they were intended to be seen, and then other times we, we we've bought posters at auction. You know, people collect this kind of ephemera.
Jenna Borst 25:32Part of Nina's job is to find out things to collect as well, seeking out and bringing together items that tell the stories of Auckland.
Nina Finigan 25:41So I am on a few Facebook groups. They're sort of like New Zealand specific ephemera groups, including a New Zealand music ephemera group, and it's just, it's so much fun. I'm a lurker, you know? I don't share anything. But people, it's a really active community, because music is like people's lives, you know, and the ephemera that they have collected over the years is a representation of that deep love, that connection they had to a social group or a subculture or, you know, whatever it might be. And so people are really active in these groups, they're sharing ephemera, and they're telling stories in the comments about, you know, like, yeah, a particular gig or a venue that's now gone, and it's just so cool seeing the recollection of that stuff. But also it's always communal, because it's people sharing, spurring memories, having a conversation, going back and forth. And so that's what we want. We want memory. We want memories. And yeah, to kind of find that connection, I kind of look at these things as really social documents. And I guess by that I mean they sort of represent human togetherness. There's sort of this, sort of like these moments of communing over music, or, you know, when you're at a gig. And for me, it's the closest thing to feeling like you're in a church or something, or like, you know, you're worshiping at the altar of this particular band or or singer, or whatever it might be. And for me, these documents really reflect that deep kind of human desire to commune and be together. And I think what I love about sharing the ephemera collection is that it sparks those kinds of memories and those kinds of feelings and people, you know, it's sort of like, Oh, I remember that, like, you know that gig, or I don't know, I met my partner there, or this, again, it's sort of like these things that don't try very hard, but actually they mean they have such deep meaning, personally and socially and culturally.
Jenna BorstHistory is all around us, even if you don't see it yourself. But if you looked around you right now, thought about what's in reach or What's in your bag, even the smallest things you pick up and use throughout your day can share so much about you and your life.
Nina FiniganEphemera is such a funny thing. When people sort of say, you know, what should I keep? Or how do I know it's important? And to me, it's just such a personal relationship. So I was talking to a student a few weeks ago, and she was talking about a collection of physical bus tickets she had kept from her time in London, or when she was living overseas. And, you know, like to most people, that you literally, you just throw them out at the end of your your journey, or whatever it might be. But for her, this represented something a time in her life. And I guess for us also, you know, like we might collect something like that because we don't, literally, don't use bus tickets anymore. So even though it seems so inconsequential and and just not at all important. That's the great thing about ephemera. That's the thing about it's not trying very hard. It just is the, you know, and it represents a huge, that particular thing, a huge shift in digital culture. And so, yeah, it's a really, it's a personal thing. It's the thing about ephemera is it does that thing of unlocking a memory, and for a music poster or music ephemera in particular, I think it is personal, but it is that thing about the collective because music is such a collective experience. And so, yeah, I mean, I would just say, if it means something to you, Keep it. Keep it. I
Jenna Borst 29:26These fleeting moments are often the most nostalgic and least collected, but what we do have is pretty cool.
Finn McCahon-Jones 29:41Hi. I want to take you to the ephemera store, which is just next to our stacks, and show you some things. And there's a couple of pieces that I really didn't expect to find in our own collection. Come through, come here.
Jenna Borst 30:01Finn McCahon-Jones is the Senior Collection Manager for Documentary Heritage and friend of The Amp from our very first episode.
Finn McCahon-Jones 30:14Welcome to the ephemera store. Yes, excuse the humming noise. We've got a we have a dehumidifier running 24/7, that just keeps the environment just right for paper. We're in a small room. What would you say? This is a single size, maybe double size bedroom, not single, single size bedroom. And let's we've got a whole lot of, you know, floor to ceiling shelves and on them, a whole lot of grey cardboard boxes with with labels on them. And so we we catalogue in the ephemera collection by by subject and by certain collectors. And so we can delve into the boxes and find some treasures. And the thing I really love about the ephemera collection is you don't realize the, you know, what the materiality is. You know, when you when you use something like a ticket at the time, you don't really think about, you know, the design or what it looks like. It's just the ticket. And actually, this is what I wanted to show you. In here we've got some Big Day Out tickets from 2000 2001 and 2002.
Jenna Borst 31:35Big Day Out for those unlucky enough to miss out, was the biggest annual music event on the New Zealand music calendar during the 1990s and 2000s a star studded lineup of international superstars like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, New Order, the Prodigy the Arctic Monkeys, Snoop Dogg, literally, too many of the biggest acts of All time to count, and heaps of underground legends too. At its peak, 50,000 fans would cram in for what was truly a Big Day Out.

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Finn McCahon-Jones 32:15This is like real money, so in my hand, I have three tickets for the Big Day Out, Friday, January 18, 2000 to Auckland Erickson stadium. What I really love about these is they're like the paper is it's really nice to hold. It's like really good quality. It kind of feels like, if anybody remembers the old the old money before the paper money that we've got now, it's kind of paper, and look at this. There's even a kind of metallic thread that runs through it, and it's stamped with a holographic symbol, like it feels like real money. And I remember, you know, going to the big dad at this time. And having one of these is that, you know, you maybe you asked for it for Christmas or something, or your birthday, and you held on to it, and you had to look after this kind of real thing. And I was quite amazed to find, yeah, we've got three in here. So yeah, Y2K year, 2000 and then 2000 2001 any? Anyway, I thought that was quite exciting.
Jenna Borst 33:29In an age where tickets live almost exclusively on our phones as PDFs or screenshots, an old paper gig ticket is a relic from a bygone era. It marks a moment in time and a feeling when someone cared enough to keep that stub, that tiny proof of presence and later passed it onto the museum. For those of us who once clutched those tickets at the venue doors or felt the panic when you couldn't find yours, it's a powerful reminder these little scraps of paper and ink can unlock memories we thought we'd forgotten, bringing back the buzz of the crowd the first chords the night we saw our favourite band live.
Finn McCahon-Jones 34:15When I was thinking about music and the collection, I thought, Oh, do we have much, you know? And I was actually surprised. We've got more than I thought. And but lots of the things that have come in are not always for their musicness. And so one of the things I want to show you is just behind you. Here. It is this. This is the Becky Nunes collection. So she is a photographer, and did a lot of catalogues and magazines and recipe books, and you name it she was if you wanted a cool photo. And here look you. Here's a box of CDs. And I really wasn't expecting to see this box of CDs, but the reason why they're in here, his fur patrol pet, is because she's taken the photographs, not because of the music, but because that she's done the cover art, which I think is kind of kind of cool. And you forget, look, here's super at Tiger special price, 2495 we live in the world with all of these things. And you forget that somebody's designed the microphone or designed the book cover or the CD case in this and so for me, coming across this little box of CDs, I thought, How cool. Like somebody, you know, Becky, has designed it. Look at this one. It's a hologram. There's a whole lot of there's four women on the front, and it's, you move it around, and they move it's a CD single. I didn't know that we had CDs, but I like that we've collected them, not for the music, but for the design. And so there's so many ways that you can come into the collection, find things in the collection,
Jenna Borst 36:04And those finds cascade, one discovery leads to another.
Finn McCahon-Jones 36:14So here we are in the stacks, quieter in here, and this is where we have any books, publications that don't fit into our reading room, and we've got museum archive, and we've got our manuscript collection, and up here is another box of this is where, I don't know if you're the same at a concert, you always want to be just like 10 centimetres tall, even five centimetres taller. It's the same with working in the museum stacks look at this so beautifully organised. So in this box we have a whole lot of Becky Nunes workbooks, and so it's all of her jobs that she did. There's journals of what she was doing. But what's really fascinating is, you go through and you start to see all the names, and she did everything from, you know, photographing celebrities, through to cheese, you know, kind of everything in her book. But it's quite amazing. You know, here she is working on Women's Day, the BNZ newsletter. But of course, she does a whole lot of things for music. Oh yeah, look my FM billboard campaign, Robert Rakete, and so she did, yeah, lots and lots of things. We also have her photographs where she was photographing for Flying Nun, and she was, you know, photographing, it the big day out. It's amazing to see what a professional photographer is actually doing. It's not, you know, you I think of Becky's work as predominantly being in that space, but I see that she is everywhere, doing everything, because she's a photographer, and it makes sense, but it's and same with like you realize that there's this kind of a certain aesthetic that you might see in magazines from the time, and it's like, ah, because there was one photographer doing all this. And one of the things in here as well, folder 4.3 in here is her music folder, and so you know, here she's got which acts at the Big Day Out in 1994 she's photographing Soundgarden, Courtney Love, Butthole Surfers, Smashing Pumpkins, Head like a Hole (nude) in closed brackets. Shihad, Breeders, Ramones, and then you Big Day Out 1997 and on it goes. And then same with NZ local. Tim Finn, Dave Dobbyn, Jordan Luck, King Loser. Greg Johnson, Hasselhoff experiment, Stereo Bus, Headless Chickens, Fur Patrol. Able Tasmans. Emma Paki, The Chills, Hello Sailor, Annie Crummer, Garage Land, I mean, pretty cool.
Jenna Borst 39:11Our photography collections have literally millions of pictures spanning all areas of life and history,
Finn McCahon-Jones 39:20And one of the things that I really liked was seeing these, these images from ‘79 is, gig goers look like gig goers. And I thought that was really cool. And you forget that, you know, especially when you're when you're a youth, when you're a teenager, that you feel like you're inventing everything yourself, and you're just kind of wearing different clothes. You know the style is different, but essentially, you're there doing the same thing. And that's another thing I really like about going through the collections, is you you make those connections to those different areas.
Jenna Borst 39:57It's not always easy to picture your parents or your gran as part of the youth scene…that they would have once lined up for gigs, pored over band posters and carefully chosen their outfits to look the part and style their hair to match, hearing the latest sounds and wanting to be where it was all happening. The love of music and the desire to belong to something bigger than yourself is timeless. It just looked a little different in every decade.
Finn McCahon-Jones 40:25While I've been looking at our music collection, I guess I have been focused on the 90s and early 2000s just because that's a soft spot in my heart. But we do have. Our music collection extends beyond that. So yeah, we do have we've got sheet music, we've got songs, we've got poetry, we've got posters, we've got oral histories and kind of recorded collection. We've got the occasional record that comes in, but like with the other stuff, a lot of it often isn't collected for its musicness, but more its association.
Jenna Borst 41:11Whether directly or not, music is everywhere through the collections, it's a reflection of the people who create and consume it. It can be background noise, as much as it can come to define communities. When you think of a period in time, the music made famous by it almost immediately comes to mind where there are movements, there is music, and decades become synonymous with the genres that defined them. Going to a gig may not feel like a major historical event, but it just might be. Keep your memories, hold on to your treasures, whatever they are, you never know where they'll end up and what stories they'll tell you. That was ‘Record Collection’ hosted by me, Jenna Borst. This episode was written and produced by Steph Strock and Laura Skerritt. Sound Design by Marc Chesterman. The executive producer was Teresa Cowie from Connect Content. Thanks to our guests, Jane Groufsky, Dr Andrea Low, Nina Finigan and Finn McCahon-Jones. For more information about the Museum's music collections and to see some cool posters, visit the links in our show notes. If you're enjoying The Amp, please help others to find us by clicking follow, giving us a review or just telling a mate about us.