The Suburban Reptiles First Live Performance....Almost
We sat in the back of the old 19th Century Wharf Police station in Quay Street on downtown Auckland’s grey waterfront. It was on an early Autumn Saturday night in 1977, about, I think, 1am. The station itself was in a dank 19th Century building in the decidedly seedy area behind the now, thankfully, demolished Britomart car park. The building is still there, refurbished as something but no longer a police station. At that time of the night, in the mid to late seventies, it had already become quite dangerous around the central bus terminal which was under the car park. It was largely populated by aspiring young gang wannabes who had missed the last bus and were waiting for the first, with nothing but time and glue to entertain them.
Saturday Night Stay At Home Video
Dressed in our attempt at full punk regalia, in an era where Split Enz had just summarily been tossed off a TV talent show for the way they looked, we had just wandered through the centre of it without any conscious warning bells going off. Looking back, the only conclusion I can come to is that we were rendered oblivious to the danger by adrenalin.
Our small party arriving at the Wharf Police Station included Will Pendergrast, recently renamed Billy Planet, and bassist; his then girlfriend, Trish Johnson, and myself; plus a member of something called The New Zealand Anarchist Society. That, of course, is quite a contradiction in itself, but it was an era of contradictions and half-baked misstatements.
I’m not completely sure how we found them, the anarchists that is….this far out my best guess is it that was Billy’s idea; I think he knew them through University. These sorts of situations could often draw a line back to William. Billy usually saw things a little differently to most people; his logic was often a mental maze and it was generally foolish not to flow with it. In his usual precisely argumentative way, he was now trying to convince the Duty Sergeant that it was in everyone’s best interests that we be returned the rotor from the Commer. A diligent young constable had removed the part from our van full of band gear, borrowed as most of it was, like the van and its driver. We really weren’t making a lot of headway and it was getting a bit heated. As Billy argued slowly and increasingly convincingly, and several of us, police included, tried to smooth the situation. Then the anarchist, leaning on the front desk, mumbled rather loudly “Tomorrow when I get my van back I’m gonna drop some acid and drive down to Wellington and pick up some dope”. This moved the goalposts somewhat.
The late Brian Nicholls
“Who owns the bloody van” asked the very frustrated, and now increasingly grumpy Police Sergeant . “Uh, he does” we all said and pointed to the potentially LSD infused anarchist who seemed happily unaware of the increasing fracas and his part therein. Upon reflection we realised he may already have sampled his desired driving booster. That Billy had swastikas wrapped around his arm and I was wearing my father’s blue air force flying suit, complete with service badges, didn’t really help either and it quickly became obvious that the situation was irresolvable in the short term.
The cop might have, but it’s a very slim, might, given us that little black device that we needed to un-disable the van parked in Fort Street, unlocked, with all the gear. However, realistically there was no way in hell that he was going to give it back to the hippy mumbling about ingesting illegal drugs and driving the length of the North Island to pick up more illegal drugs. This was a given.
Twelve hours earlier when we’d set all this in motion, this was not an envisioned outcome. I’d heard a rumour that there was a party at the little house attached to Architecture School at Auckland University, and we’d decided that this would be the debut performance of The Suburban Reptiles, the gig that Auckland didn’t know it was waiting for.
I’d come up with the concept of this band late in 1976, in concert with my best friend, the aspiring avant garde film director, David Blyth, who was later to make some of the decade’s most groundbreaking left of centre NZ cinema. I’d been, in a studenty way, (I was an ex-student) talking on and off with another friend, Brett Salter, about forming a band. It was very loose. I could play nothing (although I planned to learn guitar) and Brett had a passing acquaintance with the saxophone. We talked jazz, but with our musical expertise were clearly looking at reinventing the freeform idiom. We had a name…Froggy Morton, to which Brett had added “and The Reptiles”, but the talk had gone on for many months, over coffee and cigarettes.
In my flat in Herne Bay one afternoon, David had, however, pointed out a tiny review of a live gig in the NME I’d bought that day. What had made the review stand out was that it was obvious that here was something tailored perfectly to our abilities and ambitions…a new genre was emerging and out lack of musical prowess was perhaps a potential bonus rather than a liability.
With a psychological push from David I drove around to 10 Ponsonby Terrace, to Brett’s student flat, to put the proposal to him. Newspaper in hand I explained the concept, which was still absolutely alien to us all. The beginnings of punk had yet to reach the tabloids in the UK and thus make any dent in the antipodean consciousness or media. I had, however, been intrigued a year earlier by a double page spread in Melody 
Maker about these new bands in New York City, and the scene they grew out of…although at this time the link hadn’t clicked with me.
Brett was enthusiastic but said we should keep the Reptiles name. I agreed but after a while we agreed we should add the word Suburban to the front. From there it was easy. Brett’s flatmate, Will yelled across from the sofa that he was going to play bass. His other flatmate, Trish Scott wanted to play guitar and it made sense to ask Brett’s girlfriend, Clare, to sing...she looked the part, with her bright red razor-ed hair, and was very keen. Clare, soon Sally Slag, but quickly Zero, was an old friend of mine. Two others joined within a day or so….my flatmate Kim Smith, and Will’s girlfriend, Trish, both on backing vocals.
We also decided to ask a first year who could actually play, and looked like a pop star, Brian Nichols, to join on guitar…he agreed and was quickly renamed Shaun Anfrayd. We had no drummer through, and on the first few practices I tried on the kit that was sitting in the basement of the flat in Ponsonby Terrace. To no avail….even by the standards of the time, a drummer who could keep time was important. My role was clearly to remain more managerial. I decided to approach a young guy I knew who had played a bit. Unlike us, Des Edwards was not from a University background…in fact he was an apprentice butcher, in St Heliers, and I’m really not sure how I knew him. 
I suspect it was a party or two. But he was a drummer, with a proper kit, and so I asked him to join. He agreed.
He was a drummer but from the early practices it was clear he wasn’t actually a very good one, but no matter, he was better than me and not much worse than the rest of the band. Practices went into 1977, interrupted by various university breaks and work, and I’d found myself a job at the Labour Department (having been placed there by the dole people) in charge of Carpentry and Hairdressing apprentices. It had several advantages. Firstly it was paid; secondly it was glide time…which meant one could arrive before morning tea and leave after afternoon tea, as no-one actually cared; thirdly it provided a lot of time to be out of the office in the DOL’s car, as often as not scouring the record shops with my immediate supervisor, Christian Martin, who had once been in an early version of the Incredible String Band; and, finally, it gave me access to as much photocopying time and paper as I wanted. This I used to advantage. I began a government funded guerrilla campaign for The Suburban Reptiles, photocopying thousands of flyers with little more than the name and some smart sloganing that we thought up in the practice rooms. We thought this was somehow subversive, but nevertheless, the combination of a DOL supplied car and a photocopier meant that these flyers were distributed far and wide across Auckland city for some weeks.
By the second month of 1977 we were ready for some gigs, but finding such was not easy. I rang a couple of booking agents to no immediate avail (that would come later) and we then decided that, like our flyers, guerrilla action would be the best action. We would simply turn up and play at places uninvited. We had a repertoire of some ten songs, including Roxy Music’s Editions of You, Sympathy for The Devil, 
and a Stooges song or two. Our only exposure to the thing that was foreign punk came from The Ramones album I’d bought from Taste Records, one of only two they imported, a listen to a few records bought to NZ by Tim Blanks, Kiwi PA to Bryan Ferry (and now a Style.Com fashion guru), and twenty seconds of Anarchy in the UK caught from TV news. The last was mutated into one of what was a brace of original tracks, by repeating the phrase ‘Anarchy In NZ / you need to have your head read’…over a wall of noise for two minutes. The other originals were little better, considering Des’ inability to hold a steady beat. It was Cacophony in NZ.
So uninvited to the University we would go…somehow. That somehow turned out to be the van belonging to the New Zealand Anarchist Society. So gear, borrowed also, we headed down to the Symonds Street area in the late afternoon to reconnoitre, only to find out that the party had been cancelled. What a spanner, so rather disillusioned we went across to the Student’s Quadrangle next to the café to regroup. Peter Urlich was there. Not only was he a mate of mine, he was also the lead singer in Th’Dudes, then the clearly up and coming trad teen rock’n’roll band around town, and booked to play in the café that night. It was pure providence and between us we concocted a scheme whereby The Suburban Reptiles would play their debut in the Quadrangle using the power and the crowd from Th’Dudes, coming on immediately as they finished their encore inside. And so it would be, but in the interim most of the band departed to the Globe Hotel in Wakefield Street (now facelessly demolished) for some courage, leaving myself and Kim to guard the gear and van. I don’t know where the anarchist driver had gone…probably for a lentil and acid burger.
Flip ahead a couple of hours and the rest return from the pub yelling “there are more of us”. Up until that day we had thought that we were it, the only “punks’ as such, in Auckland. We now knew that to no longer be true…the band had, in the upstairs bar, literally bumped into four guys who had recently transformed themselves from the more traditional IB Darlings, to the decidedly more punk The Scavengers. Like minded souls....it came as quite a revelation. And we were invited later to their practice rooms….yes they had proper practice rooms…in Commerce Street. The irony was that these guys had formed less than 200 metres from our base at Auckland University, across Wellesley Street, in the graphic design department of Auckland Technical Institute. 
As the night progressed quite a crowd turned up….for the popular Th’Dudes…looking a little puzzled by the over made-up oddities milling around the door. We set our gear, rudimentary as it was (the vocals were going thru some amp guitar or bass amp as I recall) in the quad, beside the wall and the sliding door through which Peter would pass a power lead as they finished, which they did. I plugged the lead into the over-patched multi box and, as the crowd milled out of the café….. ‘One, two, three, four’ was followed by three songs in five minutes of completely formless cacophony, with five musicians playing five different things and three vocalists wailing over the top. It was fantastic, until it stopped dead. And dead it was, no power, no lights, no nothing at all. I assumed a blown fuse or the like but was soon put right by the Students Association Caretaker screaming blue murder whilst holding the other end of the pulled plug. And that was it, that was the first punk gig in New Zealand, over.
With some disappointment, and more than a little resignation, we packed down the gear into the Commer, with the help of our roadie / anarchist, and a couple of new found fans, and decided to take the Scavengers up on their offer. So we went down the road, with Billy driving my red Austin Mini 850, with our anarchist driving the van, until we reached Jean Batten Place, the short lane between Shortland and Fort Streets.
Due to the vagaries of various council planners hover the years, this has at times been two way, and one way in both directions. In early 1977 in was one way heading south, and we entered heading north, with our resident anarchist mumbling something about how he did not recognise the authority of facist street signs.
It was little surprise that the next thing we saw was a very young police constable waving us to the side. Initially our anarchist kept going, in the belief I guess that he, like the sign, had no authority, but our voices prevailed and he stopped in Fort Street…about ten metres from the White Lady burger wagon. A brief conversation with the constable resulted in the policeman noticing that not only had we driven the wrong way, but we had none of those Babylonian accessories like Vehicle Registration or a Warrant of Fitness. He said he was disabling the van, and took the small black rotor from the motor, indicating it would be returned once proof of registration was provided. Hence we found ourselves in the Wharf Police Station pleading.
<Student's Arts Festival, Wellington, Aug 77
We’d left Des in the van, since his drum kit was clearly the most valuable item, as a guard. Which brings us to the beginning of this story.
We got absolutely nowhere and made very the sensible decision to visit the nearby Scavengers. We found their practice rooms on the corner of Customs and Commerce Streets, in an old building, up three flights of stairs. We were blown away. Not only did they have lots of quite expensive gear, they also had reel to reel tapes of much of the UK punk and punk-ish material we’d not heard. And Mike Lesbian could perform the, as yet unheard in full by us, Anarchy In The UK, note and stance perfect.
As we drank warm beer and listened, we leaned out the window, over the footpath some three floors down. Below us stood, looking around for the source of the music, the same young constable that had removed our rotor. Our anarchist, spying the agent of oppression, tossed an almost empty beer can at him. It glanced off his helmet and he looked up at us. He went across to the door and started demanding to be let in, so a few of us decided that the smart thing was to oblige and went down. We didn’t know that, as we left, our anarchist tried for another beer hit, but missed. 
Student's Arts Festival, Welington, August, 1977
We opened the door to a very angry policeman demanding to know who threw the can, and we pointed to the stairs. He ran up a couple of floors and we followed, coming across our anarchist. “Which Way?” he asked, and number one anarchist pointed to a door….the cop ran in and the anarchist quickly locked the broom closet door. Thinking it was time to leave, we gathered Suburban Reptiles and ran, down past the hammering constable, and out, to the van, hailing what taxis, we could, and utilising my parked red mini (you can get a kick drum in the back seat if you try), fitted in the gear and were gone.
We didn’t see the anarchist or the policeman again, but I suspect they found each other.
Photographs: ©Jonathan Tidball & Simon Grigg, plus several uncredited, which I would be happy to credit if you wish to contact me.