NZ on Screen: Valentine's Day love songs

A scene from the music video for Love Love Love by Avalanche City. Photo / YouTube

Opinion

NZ On Screen Content Director Irene Gardiner gives you some inspiration for Valentine’s Day tomorrow with this selection of great New Zealand love songs.

Sometimes it's pretty hard to work out what is a love song and what isn't. The line between love songs and hate songs can be fairly fine sometimes, and there are all kinds of love - including that for the leather jacket of an absent friend.

So - to narrow things down a bit - let's only go for songs that have the word "love" in the title, in some form or other. And let's go in chronological order from 1978 to 2011.

Written by one of the finest songwriters New Zealand has produced, the late Paul Hewson, Dragon's Still in Love With You, from 1978, is an enduring classic for the band. The simple performance-based music video works thanks to the star power and charisma of original Dragon singer Marc Hunter, also sadly missed.

Here's Still in Love With You by Dragon:

Dave Dobbyn is another of our great songwriters, and he has penned many a fine love song in his long and distinguished career. Oughta Be in Love from 1986 was written for the Footrot Flats soundtrack, and inspired by Dobbyn's love of 1950s crooners. In the movie, the song accompanied Wal Footrot's wooing of Cheeky Hobson, but You Oughta Be in Love has gone on to be a perennial wedding favourite, even gracing Hayden and Loretta's nuptials in Outrageous Fortune.

You can see the original music video for You Oughta Be in Love here:

Also from 1986, comes I Love My Leather Jacket, written by Martin Phillipps of the Chills. The jacket in the title was bequeathed to Phillipps by deceased bandmate Martyn Bull, and is warn by him in this video, which features tourist footage from the band's visit to England in 1986.

Watch I Love My Leather Jacket here:

Sweet Lovers, which was a huge hit for the Holidaymakers in 1988, isn't actually a New Zealand song, but we have claimed it as our own. It's a cover of a little known Bill Withers song, but the Wellington soul band gave it a Pacific feel that has made it eternally popular with Kiwis. It spent six weeks at number one and was the biggest selling single in NZ in 1988. Director Fane Flaws' music video for the song won Best Video at the NZ Music Awards in its year.

You can view it here:

To close our selection, something a little more recent - Avalanche City's number one single Love Love Love, from 2011. The song received mass exposure when it was used for TV2 promos, and it took off on release, going gold in four weeks, and later winning an Apra Silver Scroll song writing award.

The animated music video was directed by Josh Smith, and you can watch it here:

You can see a more comprehensive selection of New Zealand "love" songs in NZ On Screen's Valentine's Day collection.