At the Stetson Club in Dairy Flat "Ooh, I would say early 2000s, maybe 2004 or 2005" - Glen Moffatt (right) with revered New Zealand guitarist Chet O'Connell. Photo / Supplied
At the Stetson Club in Dairy Flat "Ooh, I would say early 2000s, maybe 2004 or 2005" - Glen Moffatt (right) with revered New Zealand guitarist Chet O'Connell. Photo / Supplied
It's a little over 30 years since musician and journalist Glenn Moffatt left Hawke's Bay for the big smoke – Auckland until 2002, then across the ditch to Brisbane.
But Napier's still home, as shows clearly in his writing of a just-published 21–piece map work of the Napier music scenefor New Zealand on Air-backed online New Zealand music history site AudioCulture.
Napier Story Map is an eclectic collection from must-haves The Top Hat of the 1960s, The Cabana of the 1980s/1990s and Mission Concerts to parts played variously by successive albums of groups from St Joseph's Maori Girls College, teachers of Port Ahuriri School, Harston's Music Shop, and Perreaux Sound.
There just had to be a place for the Lions Hall, where he cut most of his musical teeth with the Napier City Country and Western Club in the 1980s.
There could have been many more – like the mezzanine floor of the Napier Sailing Club where he and fellow Napier Daily Telegraph reporters did a few numbers at a Christmas do about the end of 1988.
As it happens, the software for AudioCulture's maps didn't extend to many more than the current offering, but in a few weeks there will be a Hastings Story Map.
But for the Covid, the now 51-year-old Moffatt would have been back in recent times – his last visit was for a gig at The Cabana in 2016 with Ian Turbitt, from early band The Colonials, which predated Moffatt's first album, "Somewhere in New Zealand Tonight", released in 1995.
Still performing occasionally with an Eagles covers band in Brisbane, the career was taking another step with the emergence this weekend of Glen Moffatt and Sons (Quinn, 21, and Reuben, 18) at the Friday night Waitangi at Twilight, at the Kingston Butter Factory, in Logan, Brisbane, the brainchild of another ex-Colonial, Tamihana Johnston.
Otherwise earning a crust as a fulltime caption-writer for TV productions, he's been writing for AudioCulture as well since about 2014, although when one gets to a certain age it's case of who's counting.
Glen Moffatt and sister Sharlene on stage at the Lions Hall, January 1982, with John Wraith on bass. Photo / Glen Moffatt
It started when he was unable to find a publisher for a book on Paul Hewson, a founding member of NZ rock icons Dragon.
"Nobody, wanted it," he recalls. "I ended up sitting around with all this stuff, and nowhere to put it."
In AudioCulture he found an outlet for the few chapters he'd written at that stage, and he guesses he's done about 30 items since, although a day soon after the chat he's messaging that, presumably from a self-search of the website he'd found out he'd done 80.
He says he was a relative latecomer to the appreciation of New Zealand music, eventually learning that among the car radio listening of local station 2ZC, later Bay City Radio, that Creation, the Heartbreakers and others were actually Kiwi origin among the McCartney and Wings, Captain and Tennille, and Meat Loaf.
The hook for his own intrigue was the book Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand rock 'n' roll, 1955-1988, written by John Dix.
"That was in 1988," he says. "I was at the Daily Telegraph, and I remember the day it came out"
"I thought I knew all about New Zealand music, but it was John Dix who inspired me – John Dix opened the door."
