In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records

Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd has sat down, picked up a pen and put together a a collection of memoirs reaching back to the early days of Flying Nun from the early 80s where it was dreamt up in the back rooms of a Christchurch record shop through to it's present day incarnation. Simply put it is the inside story of New Zealand's iconic independent record label by the man who made it happen.

Read more

In 1981, Roger Shepherd was working in a Christchurch record shop when he realised the local bands he loved needed someone to make their records. Flying Nun was born.

"I wanted to be more than just an observer. I wanted to be a part of what was going on. I had told someone and the word was out, and now I had to actually do this thing. Start a record label. I must have been drunk."

And those records and the bands that created them - The Chills, The Clean, Chris Knox and the Tall Dwarfs, The Verlaines, Sneaky Feelings, The Bats, Straitjacket Fits and many more - went on to define an era and create what became known as "the Dunedin Sound". In truth it was less a unified sound than a spirit of adventure and independence that characterised the Flying Nun ethos. In this long-awaited memoir, label founder Roger Shepherd describes the idealism and passion that drove the project in the first place, the hard realities of the music industry, and the constant tension between art and commerce. Filled with revealing anecdote and insight, this is the definitive insider history of the one of the most innovative and original record labels of the modern era.

"Surely the label with the highest quality output per capita in pop history." - Guardian UK

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 272 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. You Can Drum But You Can't Hide Shares music, memoir
  2. Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running A Label Shares music, memoir
  3. Greetings from E Street: The Story of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Shares music, memoir
  4. Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music Shares music, memoir

“If you want more of the same, start with these.”

  1. Amped
  2. Riff
  3. Lost In You
  4. Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes: P/V/G

“If it was the music that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Jesus and Mary Chain: Barbed Wire Kisses
  2. I'm In the Band: Backstage Notes from the Chick in White Zombie
  3. Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll
  4. Let it Be

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD
  2. Punk Diary, 1970-1979: The Ultimate Complete Day-By-Day Reference Guide to Punk
  3. Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry
  4. Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music