Linda Herrick: Local music all grown up

In a week where there's been a ruckus over the Government decision to rescue the sickly Kiwi FM, many believe our music scene is grown up enough not to need an all-Kiwi music station. The evidence presented so far in the music doco series Give It a Whirl (Saturday nights on One) suggests they are right.

Saturday's programme, about women singers and musicians, began in the dark days of the 60s, when music was simply not an career option for a girl.

What a backward place New Zealand was back then, patronising the little ladies who wanted to write their own songs and, horror, even play the bass.

Maria Dallas' name was changed by her manager without consultation and she sang songs selected by him, even if she didn't like them.

The stroppy (for then) all-female band the Fair Sect worked like slaves at a nightclub but they were not only rejected by the C'Mon show because they didn't look right - too butch, perhaps? - the musicians' union rejected them because they were the wrong sex.

Things got a teeny bit better in the 70s, when Shona Laing and Sharon O'Neill started to write their own songs. But even then, interviewers were more likely to bang on about what it was like being a "girl singer" than ask them about their music.

Laing's Glad I'm Not a Kennedy couldn't get airplay until it had taken off in Australia and her America single, as in anti-America, was deemed too scary for the boys who ran the radio stations here. "Political censorship," huffed Laing.

Enter Jenny Morris, nagged to sing with the Crocodiles, then she toured the world with INXS. And still, she complained, she was dogged by questions about what it was like to be a woman in a band. "That really pissed me off," she hissed. Would we ask such questions now? I think not.

According to Give It a Whirl, which picks a weekly theme, then skips along at a chronological pace, the 80s saw the rise of the DIY-Flying Nun ethic and rough-as-guts female bands like Look Blue Go Purple.

But the big 80s phenomenon, girl-music wise, was When the Cat's Away. How fitting. Formed just as the crash was about to happen, the "Vera Lynns of New Zealand" as former member Debbie Harwood put it, filled a vacuum in an empty era and played to thousands of people seeking solace in cover songs. But you wouldn't want to spend much time with them now. A few clippings of Annie Crummer's tonsil-stretching solos and the girls' jerky dance routines were quite enough.

Thank the lord for the present day and sheilas like Julia Deans of Fur Patrol, whose original musical sensibilities were awoken at age 13 - by Led Zeppelin.

That's the thing with a programme - or radio station - that focuses solely on New Zealand music. It's a good thing our musical history is explored and the stories are told. But a good song is a good song, wherever it comes from.

Music is a matter of context, the more diverse the better. That's how we absorb, broaden out and grow up. The story of our music over the past 40 years is the charting of our maturity.

If you've ever been stuck in an Air New Zealand lounge overseas, you will have experienced the New Zealand muzak syndrome. By the time your flight's announced, you'll never want to hear Dobbyn-Finn-Finn-When the Cat's Away-Goldenhorse et al again in your life.

Good luck to Karyn Hay and Kiwi FM but variety is the spice of a grown-up musical life.