Punk apostle back on air - with rock

Never mind the bollocks, here's Barry Jenkin - this country's original punk missionary with a voice like a country mile of gravel road is back on the air.

For some, Jenkin, aka Dr Rock, was a life-changing force. His shows on Radio Hauraki and 1ZM during the late 70s and early 80s threw listeners into the moshpit of a revolution that spat on all that had gone before.

In a city with only six radio stations he was hard to ignore. Soon groups like The Stranglers, Jam and Buzzcocks were scrawled across the school bags of wannabe Johnny Rottens who swapped tapes of Jenkin's shows in the far corner of the playground.

Until now all that remained of the 55-year-old Aucklander's influence was the legend and some lingering spiky hairdos.

All his work on television music shows Grunt Machine and Radio with Pictures was wiped so the tape could be reused by early soapy Close to Home and his irreplaceable record library was sold by Radio New Zealand after he was sacked in 1984.

Now, after 20 years, he is back presenting short-haired rock and roll on Radio Hauraki every Sunday evening from 7 to 9.

Jenkin's eyes sparkle through the ever-present cigarette smoke as he recalls his punk conversion, a "road to Damascus experience", in 1977.

"These English clips came in from The Stranglers, The Damned and Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats. Halfway through this live Rats clip someone came out and socked Geldof on the jaw. He just kept singing and I thought this was just fantastic."

Within a fortnight his old records were binned and his afternoon drivetime show on Hauraki was turned over to this new "young, loud, snotty" music.

It was commercial suicide.

"I'd been playing the Stones, Deep Purple and Led Zep, stuff like that. Then along came punk and I tossed it all away. What happened? My ratings plummeted, but what else could I do? Everything else seemed irrelevant.

"I was never a proper punk, I didn't adopt the lifestyle or dress, but I loved the music."

He lost his drivetime slot and his 51 per cent ratings as he pogoed between Radio Hauraki and 1ZM while descending from late-evening slots to the graveyard midnight until dawn shift.

Still, the music kept coming. Jenkin had enlisted a young guy in Leeds who got £5000 a year to drive his van around the hundreds of independent English record labels, picking up anything that took his fancy.

"He took all this stuff to New Zealand House in London and sent it to me in a diplomatic bag. 'Smash the state' music coming in in a diplomatic bag. Fantastic."

But the constant battles with radio management ended bitterly when he turned up at 1ZM one night and found he had been locked out.

"I felt very isolated anyway. Everybody at the radio station hated what I was doing, but I was pretty devastated by it, to be honest. I didn't realise I was so unpopular. They were just waiting to get rid of me.

"Music gave me up and I pretty much returned the compliment. I was down for about a year, stayed unemployed for quite a while and lived off my savings."

Fed up, Jenkin headed to Australia, where his gravelly tones got him lucrative voice work.

He has continued rumbling across advertisements and programmes for radio and television since returning to Auckland 12 years ago.

A renewed association with Radio Hauraki inevitably led to debates over the station's musical flavour with programming director Mike Regal and the opportunity of another crack.

"I almost turned him down, it's been a long time ... But I needed the dough ... It's been fantastic to rediscover [the music] all over again."