PUMP UP THE JAM SIMON GRIGG

Rip It Up, Issue 240, 1 August 1997, Page 24

PUMP UP THE JAM SIMON GRIGG

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INTERVIEW N 0.4

M » walls of Simon Grigg’s tiny office JL Uw— tucked away on the first floor of a non descript building on Auckland’s High Street — are peppered with some classic names in New Zealand music. Posters and pictures feature infamous band names such as Toy Love and the Suburban Reptiles, playing at long lost venues called Zwines and the Rhumba Bar. Not-quite pride of place goes to a framed wide angle shot of the Screaming Meemees playing to thousands at the 1982 Sweetwaters Festival. If you look closely, Grigg can be seen, standing side of stage, almost hidden amongst the clutter of people and banks of equipment. For almost two decades, Grigg has had his finger firmly planted in many pies within the inner and outer realms of the New Zealand music scene. And on the surface, at least, it appears he has the midas touch. Grigg is the owner and operator of Huh! Records, the small local indie that gave the world OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’. To date, the song has sold over 1.3 million copies across the globe. In the mid 80s, Grigg was at the forefront of introducing dance music to New Zealand. And by endeavouring to remain, “cutting edge”, he has enjoyed a fruitful longevity in the Auckland nightclub scene since 1986. Up until 18 months ago, Grigg’s club, the Box, “was the lone venue playing underground dance music in Auckland.” In addition, Grigg owns a thriving inner city record store, BPM, named after the weekly dance music show that he has hosted on Radio bFM for the past decade. With such a full CV, it’s not surprising that Grigg says his biggest problem in life is, “getting to the next appointment.”

It all started for Grigg in June 1980, when he was 24. His first venture was the independent punk label, Propeller, that helped make local heroes out of bands such as Blam Blam Blam, Screaming Meemees, the Spelling Mistakes, the Features, and the Newmatics.

What was your motivation for starting Propeller? “The first record I made was by the Suburban Reptiles, it was financed by the band and supposedly it came out on my label, Partisan, but it ended up on Vertigo. I thought at the time that it would be nice to have a record label and do my own thing. A couple of years later, Bryan Staff decided to put out a couple of singles on Ripper Records, and he rang me up and said, ‘l’m putting out these singles’, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, how do ya do it.’ He said, ‘Ode Records are going to manufacture these things and all you have to do is give them the tapes. I was flatting with this guy, James Pinker, well James’ girlfriend actually, but James was there 98 percent of the time. James was in the Features and I thought they were amazing, but they couldn’t get a deal, they’d been turned down by every record company, so I borrowed 400 bucks to release their record. About the same time, my brother-in-law was managing the Windsor Castle. He had a Battle of the Bands, and the band that he managed was the Spelling Mistakes, and they won. The prize was a days free recording, so I said, ‘l’ll release your record’. We released a couple of singles to see what would happen, and they took off. There was a massive groundswell of support for this whole underground, punk, indie scene happening in Auckland, which the major record companies had no idea about. That, combined with the fact there was no New Zealand recording industry, back in those days. We released more records in the first 12 months after Propeller started, the indies did, than had been released by New Zealand record labels in the whole of the 705.” Did you have a clue how to operate a label, or was it trial and error? “It was trial and stupidity as much as anything. We didn’t have the faintest idea of

what we were doing. We released the Spelling Mistakes, and the single entered the chart at Number 32, and we thought, ‘this is amazing, we’ve got a big hit single on our hands’. I was working at Taste Records in High Street, and this guy walked in and said, ‘I wanna put your Spelling Mistakes single on Solid Gold Hits. Here’s S2OOO as an advance, and here’s a contract, just sign it’. That sounded good to me, S2OOO was a lot of money in 1980, so I signed this contract, and handed over a master tape a day or so later. He came back 24 hours after we’d given him the tape, I still hadn’t banked the cheque, and he said, ‘we listened to the song and it’s terrible, we don’t want to put it on our record anymore’. He took his cheque back, and it wasn’t until he’d walked out of the shop that I realised I had a signed contract. I could’ve had them over a barrel, but it didn’t even occur to me. Then we started selling all these records — the Features, the Spelling Mistakes, the next one was the Marching Girls’ single. And as fast as I could press them, they kept on selling. Then it occurred to me, about a month later, ‘hold on, these things are selling for $2.99, times X number of thousand singles, there’s some money here somewhere’. None of us had even thought about it.” Did working in a record store help you chart Propeller releases? “Yeah it did. New Zealand’s record charts are notoriously dodgy anyway, everyone knows they’re crap, they always have been and they still are. I reckon the top 10 are probably close to accurate, and the rest of the chart is retailer whim — despite the fact that the industry will probably tell you otherwise. It’s a bit of an old boys network, like, ‘l’ll give you 100 free singles if you mark my single up in the chart’, and that’s bollocks. I had the support of all the Auckland retailers, who were totally into what I was doing, and even when the singles were out of stock they were still marking it up there. Then there was some sort of chart investigation. Radio Hauraki complained to RIANZ [Recording Industry Association of NZ] in Wellington, saying, ‘this is a fiddle’. A year later we had a Number One single with the Screaming Meemees, and Radio Hauraki couldn’t understand how we entered the chart at Number One without their support, because Hauraki was all powerful in those days. But it was a legitimate Number One, we sold three and a half thousand singles in a day.” What would you suggest as reasons for the avid support for local bands in the early 80s? “There was just a huge local band buzz, which doesn’t exist so much anymore, the scene is so fragmented now. On a good night, when Propeller was at its peak, I could go and see three of my bands playing to capacity crowds in Auckland, at different venues, and they all had 300 to 400 people in them. I don’t know how many kids you had in central Auckland on a Friday or Saturday night, wanting to do things, but it was a lot, and this gave them something to do.” After such a brilliant start for Propeller, what began to go wrong? “It was a combination of a whole lot of things. It was business naivety, and it was having to make the jump from a ‘singles’ label to an ‘albums’ label. We charted something like 30 singles out of 36, and all those bands, after three hit singles, wanted to

make albums. Unfortunately, they all reached the album point at the same time, so I had the Blams and the Meemees in the studio making albums, and I wasn’t savvy enough to say, ‘if you spend more than 10 grand, you’re paying for it’. With the backing of a studio owner [Doug Rogers of Harlequin Studios] who said, ‘don’t worry about it, we can take the money out of the royalties later on, and if you don’t recoup it will be fine’, we went ahead and made the albums. It was a verbal agreement; ‘This industry needs these albums, we’ll all benefit from it’, I can remember him saying. As soon as the albums were made he was like, ‘right, give me the money’. But, I still allowed the albums to go overboard. We needed to sell 10, 000 of each album to break even and we sold 5000 of each.” And you were arrested for not paying the studio bills...

“Yeah, the studies owner had me arrested. I was working in a record shop, and I was in the middle of selling someone a Richard Clayderman record, and this guy came in and said, ‘l’m a bailiff and you’re under arrest’, and he dragged me off to the t Auckland District Court. It was five o’clock on a Friday night. I was called up before the judge, and he gave me a S2OOO bond which I couldn’t pay. The. judge said, ‘if you can’t find the money we’ll put you in the holding cells for the weekend’. My parents were away, so the only person I could ring was Jerry Wise [Managing Director of Festival Records]. I rang Jerry up, and he said, ‘don’t worry, I’ll be there in five minutes’. He turned up, having come straight from staff drinks, and he was in a feisty mood, and he just gave this bailiff an earful. Jerry . put his house up as bond, and I didn’t have to go to jail, he saved my butt.” During the last full year of Propeller's existence, Grigg made a business decision that he now counts amongst his biggest regrets.

“I got offered Factory Records in 1982, when the next single was ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order, and I turned them down because I thought Factory was a dead label. I could have had Factory on Propeller.” What do you recall as the most memorable moments of being at the helm of Propeller? “It was a non stop party — apart from the financial pressure. Probably the best time we had during the whole thing was

touring. Trekking up and down the country, getting pissed and doing the rock ‘n’ roll thing is always quite fun. The Screaming Blamatic Roadshow was great, we arrived in Christchurch with Top 10 hits, and we were treated like Gods, we had everything we wanted thrown at us. We felt like we were breaking new ground. That was the time when the New Zealand record industry started to exist, when the industry that we have now, began. Apart from that, I’m extraordinarily proud of some of the records we made, I think the catalogue stands up as a really strong catalogue. We released the odd dog, every company does, but the crucial stuff we released are some of the greatest New Zealand records ever made.”

In August 1983, Grigg moved to London, and remained there for two years. He spent his time, '‘bumming around, deejaying in nightclubs, managing a few DJs, hanging out, trying to survive, and learning a helluva a lot. ”

Why did you shift to London, were you disillusioned with Auckland? “London was where it all seemed to be happening. I got sick of the idea of running a record label in New Zealand and battling against major record companies. I decided to put the label on hold for a few years, so I hopped on a plane, flew to London, and discovered dance culture.”

From a punk background to dance music, how did that come about?

“The dance ethic, the whole singleorientated, instantaneous, of-the-moment ethic, is pretty much the punk ethic. And there was energy in dance culture. The whole rock ‘n’ roll thing had got really

lethargic and it started getting boring. I couldn’t deal with bands playing in black jumpers, on stage, with a holier-than-thou attitude. I arrived in London, and if you’re in London you can’t help but get engrossed in dance culture. It was exciting, it was really vibrant, the whole hip hop/electro thing was happening, there was breakdancing all over the place. I went and saw Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and you felt like you were on the edge of something that was really exciting, just like when punk came along. Grigg returned to New Zealand in \. October 1985. Armed with 300 dance records he’d brought from London, he

became a resident DJ at The Six Month Club, a venue run by local dance aficionados, Peter Urlich and Mark Phillips. Grigg, Urlich, and Phillips also formed a label, Stimulant, to license and release UK dance music. Their first act, Princess, scored a massive hit in New Zealand in early 1986, with ‘Say I'm Your Number One’.. However, Stimulant weren’t always so on to it. “I got offered Mel and Kim and turned it down”, says Grigg. - Grigg continued to DJ in various clubs around central Auckland, but growing increasingly dissatisfied with working for other people, Grigg and his flatmate Tom Samson, started the Asylum club night at the Galaxy (now the Powerstation) late in 1986. Over 1000 people turned.up on

opening night, and Grigg knew he was onto a good thing. “It wasn’t open every weekend, only when the Angels weren’t playing. What we used to do, on the .Friday we’d put a little ad in the Auckland Star, it would just say, ‘Asylum Tonight’ or ‘Asylum Tomorrow’, and that was the sum total of our advertising. And we used to fill the place. Suddenly, we had all this money and we didn’t know what to do with it.” The Playground, another club that Grigg and Samson were involved with in 1987/88, was equally as successful. “I used to go to bed some nights with sls, 000 cash underneath my bed. One day Tom and I went up to Continental Cars, and bought two Fiat Unos and a jeep. We paid cash for the cars and put the jeep on HP. And then we went for holidays around the world, a month in New York and Paris. We basically pissed the money away. Tom and I were paying ourselves SSOO a week each in cash out of the company. We’d pay every conceivable expense — rent, phone, power, cars — out of the company, so we had SSOO to put in our pockets. We were eating in restaurants seven days a week with the company cheque book, it was just party, party, party the whole time. It only lasted about a year and a half, but it was what Auckland was doing, it was insanity.” ... Do you consider yourself an astute businessman? “Oh christ, that’s a difficult one. Well,

I’m still in business... but I’m not in this business for the business. It’s nice to have a bit of money and enjoy the fruits of some of my work, but I primarily own a nightclub, run a record label, and have a record shop, because I love music.” ~ . "T. ‘ Grigg and Samson opened the Siren nightclub in High Street, in December 1988. Metro described it as a “hellhole”, . John Lydon, on tour with Public Image Limited, told his New Zealand record . company it was the best club he’d been to in the world. Grigg gave up club deejaying in 1990, the year the Siren was renamed the Box.

What has been the key to your success and longevity as club owner? “Our secret primarily has been that we’ve concentrated on the music more than anything else, the music is what runs your club. You’ve got to be reliably-good, and ■ we’ve always tried to stay cutting edge in what we do musically. A lot of it’s to do with keeping in touch, you’ve gotta stay on the street, if you’re not on the street you don’t know what’s going on.” . It was Grigg’s ear for music that rekindled his interest in starting another record company. After the demise of Stimulant, Grigg had vowed never to start another label, however, he, “couldn’t stay

away from it”, and Huh! was formed in June 1995. The year before, the South Auckland compilation Proud was released, featuring Sisters Underground’s ‘ln the Neighbourhood’, and ‘We R the OMC’ by the Otara Millionaires Club. Grigg was impressed. A longtime friend, Alan Jansson was involved with Proud, and Grigg got in touch.

“When Proud came out, I thought, ‘this is the most important record to come out of New Zealand in the past 10 years. I still believe it’s one of the crucial turning points in New Zealand pop music. I went to Alan and said, ‘the next thing you do is with me’, and he said, ‘okay, fine’, so we set up a little deal. Alan had been working with Pauly, he was quietly building up a concept for Pauly’s career. We signed Pauly sound unheard. I signed Pauly because I wanted to work with Alan, and the best way to work with Alan was to work on the next record Alan was going to be working on — Pauly’s album.” Is Alan Jansson’s input into OMC underestimated? “What you’re hearing on Pauly’s record is an Alan Jansson record, basically. Pauly’s come up with the germs of the idea but Alan’s turned it into an album — it is the Alan Jansson sound. Alan’s input is substantial. I’ll put it this way, that record would not have existed in any form without Alan Jansson.” • When Huh! released ‘How Bizarre’, did you foresee it being successful beyond New Zealand? “I knew we were going to have a big hit in New Zealand, but translating a New '

Zealand hit into an international hit doesn’t come down to having good songs. The strength of the material is obviously a part of it, but it’s only 5% of it, the other 95% is politics. You sell a record internationally if you have the right people on your side internationally — look at Crowded House in America, their stuff is amazing but they couldn’t give it away there. Unfortunately, the New Zealand industry hasn’t got passed the naivety of thinking that if you make a good record you’re going to sell it, that’s not what it’s all about. “‘How Bizarre’ is one of those songs, that if there’s someone behind it initially to sell

it, it’ll just keep on going. ‘How Bizarre’ tends to go in plateaus; you release it, and it does really well ’cause you get a few radio plays, and it gets to a certain point. Then it sits there for a little while, and radio stations can’t drop it ’cause the requests are high, and then it goes ballistic. It’s doing that in America at the moment, and it happened in Britain as well. In fact, Polydor UK tried their damnedest to kill it, because it was an inconvenience — it was this pesky little record from New Zealand with these odd people from New Zealand coming over wanting to promote it. They did not want that record to be a hit, unfortunately for

them they had a couple of people in the company who were keen on it.” Will OMC record a second album? “We’d be crazy if we didn’t do one. I don’t think Alan will do it, Alan feels he’s given Pauly a career and it’s up to Pauly to •prove himself. Pauly’s off working around the world, he’s got a better chance than any other New Zealander has ever had. At the moment he’s probably the single most well known New Zealander in the world, and he’d be amongst the top 10 of all time — Jonah Lomu means nothing in America, Pauly’s been invited on Letterman.” With over a million sales worldwide, has the money started to roll in? “It takes a long time, it will roll in. There has been some money through, but I don’t really want to go into that. I didn’t do it for the money — I’m not going to. say ‘no’ to a nice, healthy cheque, but what you’ve got to be aware of is, it doesn’t last forever.‘How Bizarre’ will continue to be a ‘gold’ record until the year I die, I’ll probably earn a lot of money off it, as will Alan and Pauly, ■ until the year they die. There’s money there, but not as much as people would have you believe — it costs a shit-load to break

America.” OMC’s current labelmates on Huh! are Lava Lava, and South Auckland singer, Zina (who did backing vocals on ‘How Bizarre’), while Grigg is negotiating “the last draft of the contract” with Auckland techno outfit, Mesh. At present, Grigg has no intentions of signing a rock band, but points out he doesn’t hold the view that rock 'n roll has one foot in the grave. “Just because the Americans have discovered dance music five years after the rest of the world, it doesn’t mean that rock

music is dying. If you look at what’s happening in the UK at the moment, there’s actually been a swing back to guitar. You’ve got Radiohead and Supergrass, bands like that, who’ve got a real dance influence in what they do. Rock music will never die, it stagnated for a long time, but I. feel it is making a bit of a move ahead. There’s a limit to how. much you can do with guitar, bass, and drums, but there’s no limit to what you can do if you have slightly wider horizons, and you’re willing to use samplers or whatever. The Americans have done their damnedest to kill rock music with the amount of crap they’ve forced on us in the last five years. In the aftermath of Nirvana, god, the number of bad American bands. But the Americans always do that, in the aftermath of punk they forced all these awful power pop bands on us.” And now they’re about to unleash a wave of Prodigy/Chemical Brothers soundalikes... “Of course they arc. And that will probably destroy that whole sound as well, eventually. There’s going to be hundreds of those sorts of bands coming out of America, it’s already started to happen.” How do you view the local rock scene? “The state of rock music in New Zealand started to reach a bit of a nadir apart from a few key bands. I still think Shihad are an enormously exciting band to see. There was some great Flying Nun bands towards the end of 93, Straitjacket Fits are one of the greatest bands I’ve seen live, but it started to get boring. I’m passed the target age by a long way now so it’s hard for me to comment on the whole thing. Rock ‘n’ roll won’t die, but it will be peripherised for awhile. At the moment ‘dance’ is the youth culture. [The Box] is dance orientated and all these other clubs are dance orientated, and they’re all full, just like it was in 1980 when all the rock venues were full.” Is Auckland an exciting place for you at the moment? “Auckland’s starting to reach that crucial point where it’s going from a large town to a small city. There’s a vibrancy here now that hasn’t been for awhile. You can feel it starting to happen again, it’s starting to move, things are exciting. Well, I can feel it anyway, I don’t know if I’m wrong, but it’s just a feeling that I’ve got.”

“I couldn’t deal with bands playing in black jumpers, on stage, with a holier-than-thou attitude.”

“There’s money there, but not as much as people would have you believe — it costs a shit-load to break America.

JOHN RUSSELL