Grant Gillanders: A life-long love affair with New Zealand music

Not many people have done more to keep New Zealand's musical flame burning than Grant Gillanders.

He’s put together dozens of compilations of New Zealand music on CD and vinyl, bringing back into circulation tunes that might otherwise have been lost and forgotten.

Although steeped in music from a young age, Gillanders told RNZ’s Mixtape he never aspired to be a musician himself.

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“It always seemed like the too-hard basket to learn chords, I'd rather listen to it than play anything. And that's a route I've gone down all my life.”

It’s a route that started in Te Atatū in the 1950s when four-year-old Gillanders first got his own record player, for which family and friends supplied the tunes.

“Dad would go to some of the jukebox places and buy cheap records for me that they'd finished with, you know holes out of the middle, and I remember the neighbours buying records for me from the local fair.

“That would have been ‘59 because the first few I got was the ‘Battle of Waikato’ from Howard Morrison and 'My Old Man's a Dustman'. After that the records kept coming, the music kept coming.”

Gillanders quickly became enamoured of rock'n'roll, despite parental misgivings about it being a gateway to juvenile delinquency and general indecency.

“I remember Mum talking to the lady next door, they kept talking about Elvis the Pelvis and I didn't really know what that was.”

Gillanders left school early in 1970, a music obsessive who needed a job to fund his record collection, although by then the music he loved was changing.

“I left school and The Beatles broke up, and all my favourite pop bands turned heavy or broke up. All of a sudden, three-part harmony was replaced by 10-minute drum solos.”

He got a job in an Auckland hardware store, strategically close to a uptown record shop. Although he was asked to interview for a job there, Gillanders feared that it might kill his great love.

“I looked the part because I looked quite trendy. The owner asked me some questions. I had a lot of retail experience by then, and he asked me some questions about music.

"The first one I knew and I just said straight away before he asked the question. And then I realised that I don't really want to work here. I don't want to listen to all my favourite records all day. I don't want to get sick of them.

“So the next question, I deliberately got wrong. And the third one, I really bombed out. I can't remember what the question was but I remember the answer was the Doobie Brothers. I deliberately failed that audition.”

Fast forward a decade or two and the stars aligned for Gillanders when record companies started to mine their back catalogues for CD re-releases.

“In 1999, at that stage we lived just around the corner from Shane [the singer of St Paul], and EMI and we were re-releasing all the ‘60s stuff. They were going out as then budget releases, $9.99 retail.

"I was talking to Shane one day, and he says, you know, ‘They're doing The Simple Image and Lee Grant, they're doing Allison Durbin. And I sold more records than them. They haven't done me yet.

“So I said, 'Well, I've got a contact there. Do you want me to give him a ring?'"

It turned out EMI had plans to release Shane’s stuff, but the master tapes were “a bit of a mess", Gillanders says.

“There's different stereo masters and mono masters, because things were done differently when he came on the scene.

“All his tapes were a mess, so Shane went in to sort out the tapes and then they gave me the job putting the CD together.”

That led Gillanders to a second career unearthing Kiwi musical nuggets. His most famous compilation was a series called A Day in My Mind’s Mind, featuring rare 1960s psychedelic cuts.

“Really that was doing what I should have done after leaving school, doing that art design. 30 years later I did the artwork, gave the artwork to them. I said, 'Here it is, you just need somebody to write it now. Who are you going to get to write it?' And they said, ‘Well, you are, buddy’.”

Despite igniting interest in obscure '60s and '70s New Zealand music, Gillanders got rid of his old singles and albums when CDs came in.

“I held off buying CDs for a long time, and somebody played me that Elvis ‘56 CD that came out, the first track, 'Jailhouse Rock'. You can hear Elvis take a deep breath before he starts singing, and I'd never heard that before.

"I went home and played all the vinyl versions. And yes, it's there on the vinyl but you can hardly hear him taking that big breath.”

That sold Gillanders on the audio clarity of CDs.

“I didn't even sell the singles. I just think I threw them because they sounded so terrible. And they were English pressings too, so they should have sounded better. “

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