Follow Your Passion They Say
At just 17, sporting long hair and a pair of bright red opshop pre-Hammer MC Hammer pants, I blagged my way into a job at a new music radio station in Christchurch, New Zealand. Initially to help solder the expensive imported mixing desk, which had glitches and issues from then on, and to join the on-air talent line up–James Daniels, MaryJane Tomasi and Ronnie Kestrup (borderline vaudevillian male/female “you’re such a naughty boys” breakfast format designed to be inoffensive across all demographics), Phil O’Dwyer (the mulleted Wayne’s World rock tragic), Rick Ditchburn (a naturally-aspirated comedic drive show host), et al. The 2-6am shift. Then staying on to help on the breakfast show.
At the time, I was reading NME and listening to bands (remember bands?) on a late night, dark alley on the FM band; The Clash, New Order, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Killing Joke, The Cure, The Stranglers, PiL… along with Grand Master Flash and Melle Mel, Public Enemy and The Beastie Boys from more culturally exotic shores. And from home shores The Chills, The Verlaines, The Clean, John-Paul Sartre Experience, The Gordons… A culture tsunami. There was a fair amount of Twisted Sister, Van Halen and the likes in there as well. Shakin’ Stevens too. I’m not pretending I was a musical aesthete.
This was the 1980s. Local record stores were mostly independently owned. Many nurturing local stuff - all the NZ ‘The’ bands. Matt Johnson’s The The was also on high rotate too. Echo Records, Galaxy, Radar Records were cathedrals. And a dodgy vinyl exchange in the Square–that also sold “josh sticks”, drug paraphernalia and Bob Marley t-shirts–where I bought Madness, One Step Beyond. A visit to this store was a slightly scary adventure for a gormless 14 year old. CD specialists like Compact Records on Riccarton Road were soon to emerge like vape stores but peddling Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd and other Prog Rock candied flavours.
It was all very stimulating. It felt like movements spawning movements. And so knowing I was not ready to head to “varsity”, following a passion seemed like a solid strategy. Heading to the airwaves to delight people with riches from this wave of creative gold I’d been panning on the fringes and late-night radio nethers.
Foolish youth! Sunday mornings, I was now playing the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, arriving as 4 vinyl LPs every week from California. Rather than Jazz Coleman (much later to wind up a neighbour of a great friend in reclusion on an outer island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf) and Johnny Marr, I was mucking out Taylor Dane and Tiffany with appalling comedy filler featuring “Tyrone Shoelaces” and other suchlike. This wasn’t the spirit of NME.
This is How They Make Sausage!
There was a scared wooden box of filing cards sitting on the studio desk. The on-air Talent would draw the front card from categories labelled A, B, C, D, E and F. This was the playlist. The Program Director, John Taylor–renaissance man with ivory bracelet, fulsome moustache and flute at the ready to summon Jethro Tull from time to time–would handwrite the cards; Artist, Title, Intro Length (so we could prattle up to the lyrics. Sorry about that!), and Duration. He’d also hand-draw each show’s pie-chart breakdown segmenting the hour into sections from 12’o’clock/ north: News Break, Talent Piece, “A”, Station Sting, “D”, Talent Piece, Ads, Station Sting, “C”, Promo, “B” etc etc, ad nauseam, usque ad mortem.
I was chuffed to have such a cushy job that I was apparently ok at–best new broadcaster at the 1987 independent radio awards, I’ll have you know. Meaningless of course. And gratified to be around adults, who were all very kind, except Shelley the Ad Exec’s partner who attempted to serve me BisKats (cat biscuits the size and shape of sheep scat) as hors d’oeuvres at a party I was well out of my depth at.
All very interesting. But here’s the thing. The commercial hit radio format nearly killed my passion. And I came predisposed, pituitary glands pulsing with passion for the music I was hearing but not on commercial radio. Of the 5 or so years I stayed involved, the last 4 were to fund my way through university. I won’t pretend the free concert tickets, boozy events, and merch weren’t a factor–I lived in a Tom Cochrane, Life is A Highway, t-shirt for a good couple of years. Loathed the song.
Roxette, Red Head Kingpin, Paula Abdul and Hooty and the Blowfish dulled my senses towards the end and killed any hope or respect for commercial radio operators. But I’d lost my religion years ago, barely 6 months into my broadcasting career. It was a flying visit from a pleated khaki trouser-wearing, short-sleeved “Radio Consultant” from the US that did it. He’d been summoned to advise the effortlessly cool John Taylor which songs we should play according to the Billboard Weekly Hot 100 List. Any desire for a career in music radio was extinguished. “With a bullet”. Absurd.
Even for a rube, it was shaming to be involved in peddling pap while, what felt to me to be, deeply authentic, creative and important music was thriving all around but undergrounded. I could not bring myself to use my name on air–a later Program Director spotted this and pushed for me to adopt the nom de plume The Caveman or The Commander! Tells you everything you need to know about the culture. As an aside, if you were the lucky 9th caller to 91FM Auckland in the early 90s, you were almost certainly a friend about to have a large amount of FM brand chocolate or strawberry milk appear on your doorstep!
The Sausage They Need, Not the Sausage You Want!
Thirty something years on, these reflections keep bubbling up when I ponder the weird world of wine. The resonance between my radio experiences and wine regarding the power of “taste makers” to determine the mind and preference of the listener/wine buyer. Taste makers bear an educative responsibility that seems frequently to be ignored altogether, misdirected by incentives or subject to a lack of curiosity. Plainly, bad taste plays no small role too in my experience. It all arrives at the same monotonous landscape regardless.
Two years ago, along with a wanker (for that is the group noun) of local winemakers, I sat in a seminar on Pinot Noir hosted by a successful (ie., not holding a poker hand of maxed out credit cards like many wine folk do) “flying winemaker”. Flying Winemakers were originally a bunch of Aussie wankers who blasted into Bordeaux in the 1980s to jolt the locals into modernity (and a fastidious regime of sanitation which apparently had not been hitherto seen as that important. Eeew! ) in their vineyards and wineries. In the contemporary era, they’re a class of wine personage who consults around the world to wineries, vineyards, retailers and merchants and whoever; they differ from the Aussie originals in being, like most consultants, of easy virtue. This chap has his own wine brand, so,a little poacher /gamekeepery. But blending is very common in wine, of wine and of incentives and interests. Anyway. Amongst the advice delivered with conviction was that we must all cease what we are doing and begin producing Pinot Noir that is light in flavour, structure, alcohol and colour. Keep in mind, this is Wairarapa where we turn out worldclass Pinot Noir like wizards once pulled rabbits from Las Vegas to Levin.
I could feel the subtle shifting in seats around me. Being polite Hobbits, we did not challenge this misdirection openly. But we did outside the room. And the consensus was unanimous disagreement. I can say without exaggeration, I am yet to meet a customer who prefers a lighter Pinot Noir to a more concentrated style when given a choice. This is the story I hear from other winemakers too.
For example, to keep things interesting at our tastings and to help tell the story of seasonal influence, we offer customers a contrast in styles. After truffling our way through Chardonnay and Rosé, we serve our 2023 vintage single vineyard Pinot Noir; pretty and fragrant. Silky and lovely. Light. We then offer our 2024 single vineyard. A deeply concentrated, red in tooth and claw beast. Dark. Dense. Higher alcohol. It’s an experiment in vintage effects. Both wines are from the same vineyard, grown and made in the same way. One from a wet, low sunshine year. The other from a hot dry year. People really respond to this demonstration of seasonal effect. And in every case, they prefer the concentrated 2024.
Beware the Expert
The Flying Winemaker experience prompted me to think again of the Californian radio consultant and his big ginger “Village People” moustache, if I remember correctly. The arrogance entailed in dictating and selecting taste from so alien a standpoint. If not so banal you could rightly label it cultural imperialism. In the end, it’s just a guy working for a company that had found a way to extract rent and travel the world doing it. What was less understandable to me was the vapid kowtowing to such silliness among local taste makers and gatekeepers. Especially when local and “new wave” music was so exponentially interesting and brilliant outside of the dour Rick Dees hitlist.
“Cultural cringe” is a well understood phenomena in this country. Worthy of discussion but a difficult proposition in these ultra normative climes characterised by frequent gusts of (if not prevailing) toxic positivity. Suffice to say that at the time, NZ Programmers and Disc Jockeys held to a generalised prejudice against NZ music that fell outside of the relative safety of Dave Dobbyn (don’t mention the riot) and Dragon (don’t mention the H); arguing sanctimoniously that it could not be played on radio because… poor production values. So we got Taylor Dane, Vanilla Ice and hair bands. The Chills, The 3Ds, Loves Ugly Children, The Datsuns, The Hallelujah Picassos remained unknown to all but a few outside of student radio.
Today our spectrum and concert stages are full of Lorde, Marlon Williams, Fat Freddy’s, Shapeshifter, Tiki Taane, etc. Despite the taste makers and Billboard Top 100 men-in-khaki, eventually the good stuff breaks through. The people had their way. This is of course a dramatic oversimplification. But I think the point stands, at least for long enough to think about the role taste makers play in educating us and shaping preferences in wine. Just as in music.
How Curious?
While we gnash our wine industry teeth watching wine sales tank with much definitive postulation on the death of wine lest we serve forth lighter styles, No-Lo, natural or “sugar free”, jalapeno-infused, I find myself once again thinking of the Flying Radio Consultant and minion Programmers and DJs. And of the Flying Winemaker. Taste makers. Those who select from an otherwise impenetrable mass of songs, artists, wines, wineries, vineyards, regions, and styles to determine which make it to high rotate with the public. What you cannot forget is that taste arbiters are also arbitrageurs. They are on both sides of the trade in priming you what you think, drink and listen to. Very often their only concern is shifting units, gaining clients, gigs or fees. And sometimes, they might be … not the auteurs and open, curious-minded explorers we might think/hope them to be.
There is often an absurd monolithilising (no, it isn’t a word) underneath tastemakers’ proselytising (yes, it is a word) - a tendency to consider audiences as uniform. Whether in music or wine or anything. Denying the reality of a vastness of tastes, preferences, and curiosity - and this quantum variation can exist in one human let alone across a cluster of us! It is the cultural equivalent of the “reasonable person” test in jurisprudence but applied in the general. Who is to say that the Bette Milder Wind Beneath My Wings fan couldn’t also come to love The Verlaines or some PJ Harvey? Our tastemakers and algorithms almost guarantee they’ll never know.
And where does that leave the general listening and wine public? Not just none the wiser but in fact steered, pigeonholed and misled. And we haven’t mentioned age of the algorithm and mass advertising.
Meanwhile, the great unwashed, dirt and hydraulic fluid smelling viticulturalists and juice-stained winemakers with skin in the game and wolves at our doors, are out in fields and halls foolishly stringing together chords and lyrics; striving for our own melodies and ballads; written in wine. To mix worlds and metaphors, the boutique winemaker is a lo-fi, strummer searching for sacred chords in our vineyards and wineries. We’re below the radar of the “majors”, multinational wine distribution companies. The majors will look down occasionally to anoint something (light styles or example) or someone novel as the next new thing. To many, this feels more like a wine equivalent of Sony or Universal and their flying hitmakers, Stock, Aitkin Waterman of the 1980s or Jack Antonoff et al of today, freshening up their hit factory rosters to signal to customers that they are on the edge and must be obeyed.
We’re bludgeoned and stultified by taste makers, influencers and algorithms. But there’s infinite richness to be found just off the MOR dial or perhaps outside the supermarket aisle.
Brent
pre harvest 2026