Tom Verlaine

10 of the best: Flying Nun Records

ONE of the world’s great independent labels, Flying Nun Records was founded in 1981 by Christchurch-based Roger Shepherd. But the locus of the emerging New Zealand punk and post-punk scene and many of its key players were further south, in Dunedin: all bar one of the following bands, Christchurch’s JPS Experience, hail from the university town […]

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Gimme gimme the Ramones, forever

My favourite quote about the Ramones comes from Richard Hell, the New York provocateur who, along with Tom Verlaine, formed the art-punk band Television in 1974 and – with the help of threadbare clothes held together with safety pins, on account of the fact they were too poor to buy any more – was already

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Guiding lights

Danny Fields – so-called “company freak” of Elektra Records in the late 1960s; the man who discovered the MC5 and then the Stooges; later the first manager of the Ramones – once rapturously described Television as the band with “the most perfect skin in the world.” They literally got under mine: on the inside of my

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