The Dunedin Sound: Flying Nun and the jangle from the bottom of the world

Everything starts here. The Clean's 1981 single "Tally Ho!" cost about sixty dollars to record and somehow reached number 19 on the New Zealand charts, which told Flying Nun there was an audience for this. The Boodle Boodle Boodle EP that followed is the founding document: David Kilgour's chiming guitar, Hamish Kilgour's clatter, Robert Scott's bass melodies, all of it loose and instantly hummable. It sold thousands on a label that barely existed yet.

Martin Phillipps wrote pop songs too pretty and too sad for the scene that raised him. Submarine Bells (1990) was the major-label swing, cut for Slash after a decade of lineup changes that Phillipps outlasted the way other people outlast weather. "Heavenly Pop Hit" is exactly what its title claims and completely sincere about it. If you only take one melodic Dunedin record, this is the one that will follow you around.

Graeme Downes studied music seriously enough to end up teaching it, and it shows: The Verlaines wrote in odd meters and minor keys while everyone around them chased jangle. Bird-Dog (1987) is dramatic, literate guitar music that name-checks the French poet the band took its name from and means it. It rewards the kind of listener who reads liner notes, which is to say, you.

Robert Scott played bass in The Clean and led The Bats on the side, and The Bats never really stopped. Daddy's Highway (1987) is the warmest record on this list, all interlocking guitars and Kaye Woodward's harmonies, songs about roads and weather that go down easy and stay for years. It is the sound of a band with nothing to prove and no reason to hurry.

Sneaky Feelings were one of the four bands on the 1982 Dunedin Double EP that put the scene on the map, and the odd one out even then. They loved harmony pop and Motown more than reverb and murk, which made Send You (1983) an outlier: cleaner, sweeter, arguing quietly with the whole aesthetic. Two singers who couldn't agree on much wrote some of the era's most tuneful songs while barely speaking.

Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate came out of Toy Love, one of New Zealand's great punk bands, and then shrank the whole idea down to two men and a four-track. Tall Dwarfs recorded at home, on tape loops and household junk, years before anyone called that lo-fi a movement. Weeville (1990) is playful and strange and homemade in the best sense, an argument that you never needed the studio at all.

Knox was the scene's live wire: cartoonist, provocateur, and the man behind the four-track that recorded half these bands. Seizure (1989) is his solo peak, and it holds "Not Given Lightly," a love song to his partner and children that New Zealand adopted as a standard. A stroke in 2009 largely ended his music, which makes this record's plainspoken tenderness hit harder now.

Shayne Carter had more menace than the jangle bands and knew it. Straitjacket Fits set his snarl against Andrew Brough's sweeter melodies, two writers pulling in different directions until the tension became the sound. Hail (1988) is where the Dunedin template gets loud and widescreen; "She Speeds" still detonates. Carter and Brough would fall out, because of course they would.

Five women, three EPs, gone by 1988, and better than their brief run suggests. Look Blue Go Purple made hazier, dronier pop than most of their peers, all overlapping vocals and organ, and then everyone went off to other bands before the scene could pigeonhole them. This compilation gathers the lot. It is the great what-if of the whole story.

By the early 1990s a younger crowd was roughing the jangle up. The 3Ds had two guitarists and a cartoonist's sense of chaos, and Hellzapoppin (1992) pushes the pretty melodies through fuzz and shout until they bristle. Denise Roughan and David Mitchell trade leads like they're daring each other. This is the Dunedin sound after it discovered volume and stopped apologizing.

Before Bailter Space there was The Gordons, one of the loudest bands New Zealand produced, and that DNA carried over. Robot World (1993) trades jangle for slabs of guitar drone and motorik pulse, closer to Sonic Youth or shoegaze than to anything twee. Alister Parker's guitars sound like machinery running warm. Play it after the melodic records and hear the same scene reaching for the horizon.

The name was a joke that eventually got them a legal nudge, so they trimmed it to the JPS Experience. The band itself was no joke: The Size of Food (1989) is dreamy, psychedelic guitar pop that drifts where The Chills chime, less immediate and more atmospheric. It's the record for the night after the party, when you want the jangle blurred at the edges.

The Clean never fully broke up so much as paused, and in the gaps David Kilgour made solo records that distilled his half of the band: the guitar tone, the unhurried melody, the sense that a good song doesn't need to raise its voice. Here Come the Cars (1991) is where that starts. If The Clean got you, this is the quieter, sunnier continuation.

And here's the scene's dark twin. The Dead C took the same cheap gear and pointed it at collapse: guitars falling apart, structure abandoned, recordings that sound like they're rotting in real time. Trapdoor Fucking Exit (1990) is confrontational and genuinely free, the point where Dunedin's DIY logic curdles into noise and drone. It's a hard door to walk through, and the one that most changed what came after.