Wellington music author Chris Bourke took Capital Times’ reporter Melody Thomas on a tour of the city’s early music precinct. 

CHRIS Bourke admits he is obsessed with music. However, the obsession has been legitimised with a long career as a writer, editor and producer for radio.
After the first ever Crowded House gig in Auckland Bourke interviewed the band in a bedroom. This eventually led to the publication of his Crowded House biography Something So Strong. Taking his love for music one step further, Bourke reported from the road while on tour with Johnny Devlin, Dave Dobbyn and the Warratahs.
The seeds for Chris Bourke’s latest book Blue Smoke: the lost dawn of New Zealand music, 1918-1964, were sown more than 30 years ago. Studying “non-Western music” (now ethnomusicology) at Victoria University under Allan Thomas, Bourke was sent out on a field exercise. Bourke’s love for boogie-woogie and blues piano led him to a conversation with jazz critic Ray Harris. With breaks for piano playing and tangents galore, the conversation eventually strayed to the topic of 1940s jazz and venues in Wellington. Bourke was not entirely new to the scene, his mother had been dropping tidbits about her younger days for years, but she didn’t often go into detail about her era of music because it reminded her of the war.
“All she did talk about was how exciting it was when Artie Shaw came with his big swing band in ’43. For her that was like The Beatles coming,” Bourke says.
“Where my mother dropped hints; Ray elaborated.”
In 2003 Allan Thomas asked Bourke to present a paper about Jazz in New Zealand during WWII at a conference. Bourke realized there was next to no material to draw from, but gave an anecdotal talk anyway. Afterwards Dennis Huggard, an Auckland archivist who became addicted to jazz as a teenager during WWII, approached him.
“In the course of his lifetime, he has assembled a staggering collection of clippings, acetates, commercial discs and tape recordings – mostly jazz, but also of other forms of popular music,” says Bourke. Thankfully, Huggard was open to sharing his collection.
This valuable source material coupled with the realisation that musicians from the era were beginning to die provided all the impetus Bourke needed to begin writing the book. Bourke knew that if these stories weren’t captured immediately, they would be lost.
“Rock n Roll is very dominant; it’s much “hipper”. Old jazz people’s stories are just as good as the rock n rollers, and they remember more too,” he says.
Blue Smoke: the lost dawn of New Zealand music, 1918-1964 weaves stories from the musicians of the era with social history and archival photographs.
Chris Bourke took Capital Times on a tour of one part of Wellington’s “music precinct”.

cnr Bond & Willis streets
The building that is now Wholly Bagels used to be Nimmo’s Building. As well as a top piano and instrument store, this was where the Wellington Swing Club met in the late 40s.
“They’d get together on Sundays and play records that were really hard to get. Arthur Pearce, who was a very knowledgeable broadcaster and authority on jazz, would give talks and then the bands would jam. It was an opportunity for them to play a more relaxed jam for the real jazz fans, not what they were playing in the ballrooms,” says Bourke. The Plume Melody Makers broadcast from Radio station 2ZW upstairs in the 30s.

The Majestic Centre
This building used to be the Majestic Picture Theatre. Underneath it was the Majestic Cabaret. “It was Wellington’s smartest dance cabaret, it hired the best musicians and you had to look good to get in,” Bourke says, “although people still managed to sneak in hip flasks to add to their ginger ale. It even had a glass brick dance floor that lit-up, but heavy American boots in the war ruined that.”
Wellington’s live music scene was thriving in the 50s. In big cities you could find live music to dance to six nights a week. “There was no television and the pubs closed at six. Apart from the picture theatre, dances were the only place to meet the opposite sex.”
One entrepreneurial character would photograph patrons in their dinner suits as they entered the cabaret, run across the road to his darkroom in the Nimmo’s Building, then run back to sell the pictures as patrons left again.

Hotel St George
This is, of course, the famous building where The Beatles stayed. For Chris Bourke’s mother, there were some more important guests there.
“Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh stayed there, and the streets were packed every night. They played the Opera House for a week and they would leave the hotel to great applause, get into their Rolls Royce, the crowd would follow them down Manners Street to the Opera House and then applaud again when they got out.”

cnr Willis & Manners streets
Dukes Arcade was once the site of the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel. “This is where the bohemians and arty types met in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Bourke.
Ruru Karaitiana, who wrote Blue Smoke, was a regular fixture in the area.
Down Manners Street were several important music stores, still “just some of dozens between the railway station and Manners Mall”.
Begg’s was Wellington’s major musical instrument store. “You’d often walk into Beggs to find Ruru sitting at the piano by the front door testing out tunes,” says Burke.
The Golden Horn music store kept brass players happy, and George Miller and Allan Shand, who transcribed Blue Smoke and was a mentor to Ruru Karatia, ran Shand-Miller’s music store.
“I love that Manners Street was a two-way street until the late 70s. The traffic was slow and you could just amble across to see people. It seemed to be buzzier,” Bourke says.

cnr Manners & Victoria streets
The building where the Manners Street Post Office is now was once the Ritz Restaurant. The owner was Fred Carr, who ran the Majestic Cabaret, and the same musicians would play here during the day.
“It was very lavish. It was where ladies doing lunch would come to listen to a small swing combo. It went under though, and Carr escaped with only a gilt birdcage and the bird in it.”
Tucked in behind this in the late 70s was Willy’s wine bar, which is where Toy Love played some of their first gigs.