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The AlbumOffically released in early 1980, despite its title (although a few copies turned up in the shops in late 1979), AK79 is the defining release of the thriving Auckland punk scene of the late seventies. Its release, oddly enough was more a document of a scene that was passing, that was moving on, as it had or was all over the planet. And as such its release was timely. The CD reissue in 1993 was an attempt to expand that record to cover a wider aspect of it and create an historical record of a special, and now distant, era, in the city. Frankly put, if events (and to those there at the time, this was a major event)and cultural explosions like these are not documented, time tends to blur events and they are forgotten over time. And, in a country like New Zealand, much of our popular culture has already faded into the past and continues to.
The musical rupture that hit the Northern Hemisphere in 1976 filtered slowly down to New Zealand, through the fog of the the country's state enforced isolation. Much of that history is covered here and elsewhere, including the liner notes of the CD reissue of this album. The Original ReleaseThe albums history goes back to 1978 when Bryan Staff, a radio DJ on an Auckland commercial station first started to show an interest in the dozens of new bands playing around the Auckland area. The bands were, by mid 1978, centred around a new Auckland venue, Zwines, housed in a 120 year old stone building off Auckland's Durham Lane. The building had a quite a history. It was, so the story goes, Auckland's first jail and in the sixties and early seventies it was a nightclub where some of the more legendary bands in Auckland's rock'n'roll history had played. In the early 1978 it was, very loosely, refurbished as Zwines, and became Auckland's second dedicated punk venue (the first, Hugh Lynn's Diamond Dogs, was short lived).
It became a focal point for the thriving scene, with The Scavengers playing there regularly and residencies being given to the first of the second generation punk bands, such as Rooter (soon to be The Terrorways). In their wake there were countless bands formed, names like Get Smart, The Aliens, The Idle Idols, The Mucky Pups, The Rednecks, The Stimulators and so on. Some mutated into others, all cross bred with each other and the scene grew hugely. In 1978 New Zealand had virtually no local recording industry. True, a few bands were recorded by the majors, but mostly they were a fairly safe and sad bunch and many are best forgotten. Staff came up with the idea of using downtime at the station he was working at to record a few of these punk acts. From there he took the concept one step further. He decided to record an album of some of these acts, using whatever funds he could scrape together. Some acts provided their own recordings (such as The Swingers, some worked on Radio NZ downtime, some at Mascot after Staff worked out a cheap rate there). The idea was that whatever return came from the album would go towards singles by the bands, and other acts in the scene. To this end, Bryan formed a label, Ripper Records.
Over the next few months the album came together and a name, AK79, and a sleeve, designed by Terence Hogan, was applied to it, with the, now legendary image (from one of The Terrorways). The only band who really didn't fit were The Swingers who made it here by virtue of the fact that they were signed to Ripper via the Mike Chunn connection. The stumbling block was, however, pressingand finding the funds to pay for 500 copies. Enter Record Warehouse, an Auckland based record chain, whose Roger King agreed to take all 500 and pay in advance for them. That allowed Staff to, if not cover all his costs, at least get the records in the store. And so it was as the new decade turned, AK79 hit the shelves. And left the shelves...within a few days they were all gone. And that was it for a time, until Bryan moved his label's distribution to CBS in 1981. They repressed the album, and even did a now very rare cassette edition. However by the end of 1983 Ripper was no longer operating and the album was no longer available. Over the next few years it became harder and harder to get and attained an almost mystical status, selling for big bucks.
The ReissueAbout 1990 Bryan Staff passed the rights in all the Ripper masters to Propeller and Flying Nun, but little was done with any of them. In 1992 I approached Roger Shepherd and suggested that perhaps we should look at a CD reissue but we should use the opportunity to expand it, to turn one of the few releases from the NZ punk scene into a document. So with that in mind, and having agreed that the album would be a joint release between my Propeller label and Roger's Flying Nun we went ahead at full speed. I complied what I though would be an appropriate track listing, using a bunch of songs from Propeller and Ripper, some of which were fetching big money and most of which were unobtainable. There was a little duplication with my Bigger Than Both of Us collection, but that too was out of print at the time. There were a few unreleased tracks too plus some singles, such as The Suburban Reptiles' debut which had never made it to LP or CD. I spent the next few months tracking down masters and photos etc before we finalised a track listing.
I remastered the compilation (and mixed the unreleased Suburban Reptiles track, and Megaton which existed only on a 4 track) at Airforce Studios in 1993 and the whole thing was repackaged, around Terry's original artwork, by Andrew B White at Revolver with extensive new liner notes from myself and Kerry Buchanan, the original drummer from Rooter, plus Bryan Staff, and released early in 1994. So AK79, the CD. The album ties up an era in Auckland, the punk era, which existed from early 1977 through to early 1980, although it had mutated into something else by the end of that year (anything calling itself Auckland punk after that date really had little to do with this album and the acts and scene it represents).
If anything AK79 is a tribute, not only to the bands who played in the scene, but also to the vision of Bryan Staff, without whom, much of this music and history would have been lost. AK79 is still available on CD on Propeller / Flying Nun via Warner Music. Also on non-DRM MP3 at Amplifier. The tracklisting:
 Photo: Sara Leigh Lewis
 Photo: Sara Leigh Lewis
John Atrocity, 1979. Photo: Sara Leigh Lewis
Photos © Courtesy of Anthony Phelps / Sara Leigh Lewis /Murray Cammick /Simon Grigg
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