Peter Gutteridge obit

RIP Peter Gutteridge, one of New Zealand music's spiky heroes

This article is more than 9 years old

A founding member of the Clean, Peter Gutteridge had little time for many of his Kiwi contemporaries, but was one of the greats of Flying Nun 

He was not on the list.

And there goes another. In a scene of unsung heroes, one of the least sung will be making no more music, changing no more lives from his place on the periphery. Peter Gutteridge – described as “a true hero of New Zealand music” by Flying Nun, the label that has released so many of his recordings – has died.

Gutteridge, who was in his early 50s – no one seems to know exactly how old – had been a founder member of arguably the two most important Flying Nun groups, the Clean and the Chills, though he didn’t have a lot of time for the latter. “It was too controlled for me. There wasn’t enough room for me to really explore stuff,” he said in a rare interview last year, with unusual frankness for a man from a small place, in a music scene where everyone knew each other. “It was too regimented. I’m not a particularly technical guitarist, but I like certain sounds. Certain rhythms. I’m interested in drone music as well as melody. I don’t like to pigeonhole myself too much. I just found that with the Chills I just couldn’t go with their aesthetic. It bored me.”

In fact, he didn’t care for a lot of the music he was considered a founding father of – the music known as the Dunedin Sound for the South Island city it came from. Hence the group he would form in the late 1980s, Snapper, had little in common with the jangly melancholy of the Dunedin Sound. They sounded like a band who took drugs, and in that interview last year Gutteridge took quite a scornful attitude to those who view drugs as no more than a bit of fun: “Most people take hallucinogens and never take them again. That is the common thing. They have a brief phase in their life when they take them. I, on the other hand, take hallucinogens. I take them on a serious level. Not for amusement.”

I first heard Gutteridge on the John Peel Show in, I think 1983, when – with his former bandmates in the Clean, Hamish and David Kilgour – he had formed a band called the Great Unwashed. Peel played a song called Duane Eddy, explaining that had he formed a band, he would have called it the Great Unwashed, and that since Duane Eddy was one of his heroes, it was only natural that he play the record. That was also my first exposure to Flying Nun, and the start of a musical passion that lasts to this day (the other week I was thrilled to interview Martin Phillipps, the leader of the Chills, for a forthcoming Guardian piece).

When I bought Snapper’s Shotgun Blossom album in 1991, expecting it to sound not wholly dissimilar to the oddball whimsy of the early Clean or the Great Unwashed, I got a surprise: they were harsh and hard and droning and unrelenting (they were a key inspiration to another group who loved repetition Stereolab, though without any of Stereolab’s sweetness). They were more Jesus and Mary Chain than Orange Juice.

One of the great sadnesses of the original Flying Nun groups is how few of them ever gained the recognition they deserved. In later years, the Clean became well regarded on the American college rock scene, getting namechecked by Pavement. But for most of them, part of what was arguably the greatest per-capita concentration of talented musicians in the history of pop, there would never be more than a degree of fame at home, and scattered and adoring cults abroad (and if you think I’m joking about the concentration of talent, think of this: Dunedin has a population about the same as Slough’s. Within a short period in the early 1980s it produced the Clean, the Chills, the Verlaines, Look Blue Go Purple, Straitjacket Fits, Tall Dwarfs and many more). Yet they inspired a fierce devotion.

Whatever Gutteridge’s feelings about his peers, he did not exist in a vacuum: part of what drew people to his work was the knowledge of the other Flying Nun bands. But it’s true, he was different: if Flying Nun felt oddly cuddly, Gutteridge seemed spiky. He was the tartness to offset the sweetness. He didn’t make much music, but he was an important musician. He deserves to be – and will be – remembered.