The Clean: in the dreamlife you need a rubber soul by Richard Langston

Auckland University Press published three books between 2022 and 2026 that combine to form a detailed picture of an exciting and still unparalleled era in New Zealand rock music. Call that era the Flying Nun years. Matthew Goody’s Needles and Plastic (2022) is an impressively thorough catalogue of the first 145 or so releases on Flying Nun Records during the seminal (such a rock critic word) period from 1981 to 1988, before head office moved from Christchurch to Auckland, the corporate music industry beckoned and the weirdness evaporated. Craig Robertson’s Chris Knox biography, Not Given Lightly (2025), tells the life story of the singer, artist, writer, cartoonist, gatekeeper, agitator and prickly conscience whose strong personality helped shape how the label looked and sounded. Robertson’s account has a level of insight and intelligence that is rare in local rock writing. And of course, Knox’s pre-Flying Nun Dunedin punk band The Enemy inspired The Clean, who released the first single on the label, ‘Tally Ho!’/’Platypus’, recorded in a Christchurch studio for $50. The single hit the top 20 and the rest is history. The Clean are the subject of the third book, Richard Langston’s In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul.

Parts of the above story are so well-known that many New Zealand men (and some women) of a certain age can recite it from memory. The Flying Nun years have not exactly gone undocumented, but while it can be easy to feel a little wary about the endless memorialising of that era, an astounding amount of good, original music poured out of two cities in the South Island in a short time. The histories were patchily or incompletely told before Auckland University Press published these three thick, large-format books that set a high standard in both quality of writing and production. Now we can say it has been done.

There are inevitable overlaps. All three books have accounts of the legendary recording of The Clean’s Boodle Boodle Boodle EP in an old hall on Bond St in Auckland over a couple of days in September 1981. The Clean’s Hamish Kilgour also appears on the front cover of Needles and Plastic, from the period when he worked for the label in an old building (long gone) on Cathedral Square. He could have walked over to a window and looked down on the spot where TVNZ’s Andrew Shaw shot the video for The Clean’s ‘Anything Could Happen’ two years earlier.

All three books are alert to the look of the times, as well as the sound of the times. That means they are generously crammed with rare photos, posters and cover art, often designed by band members themselves. This tendency to raid the archives to make historical scrapbooks started for Auckland University Press with Chris Bourke’s very successful Blue Smoke (2011). They are an elevated form of cultural coffee-table books. It is also clear these stories have to be collected now, and done properly. In just the past few years, we have lost Martin Phillipps, Doug Hood, Jim Wilson, Hamish Kilgour and Andrew Shaw. All their voices are captured here.

While Goody and Robertson’s writing is closer to scholarly, Richard Langston is a mainstream journalist and fanzine creator (he made Garage in Dunedin in the 80s) turned TV documentary maker. He tells The Clean’s story as an oral history rather than an authored account, almost entirely removing his subjectivity. This turns the book into a collaboration with the band and those around them, resulting in something more informal and intimate. And, as we learn, both qualities suit the story of The Clean.

The Clean, Roundabout, Dunedin, early 1980s. Credit: Craig McNab, Pufferfish Photography.

They emerged in the punk and post-punk era but they were also a pre-punk band, as inspired by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. Like everyone in New Zealand’s counterculture in the 1970s, they worshipped Lou Reed, both as a bohemian symbol and a songwriter, and for the Velvet Underground songs more than the solo stuff. The South Island cities were less trend-conscious and more immersed in the past. It is hard to communicate just how cut off from the rest of the world New Zealand was then, and hard to overstate the importance of certain media outlets and record store proprietors in this cultural desert, such as Roy Colbert in Dunedin. True devotees, both Hamish Kilgour and his younger brother David could recall exactly where and when they bought or heard certain records. Nico’s first album was found in a Dunedin appliance store. Hamish was turned on to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison by a high school art teacher. Someone else can recall exactly which Can album he bought at which shop in 1974. There is normal memory and then there is music memory. This was a time when people started friendships based on the records they were carrying. Langston has been supplied with notebooks, letters and diaries, which add depth and texture (Hamish’s diary in 1977: ‘Went to lectures – got V.U. live and The Saints – sold some records at Roy’s. Went to Joe Cocker – got ripped – good concert – came home listened to V.U.’)

A version of The Clean was started by the Kilgour brothers in 1978 but they really found their direction in 1980 when Robert Scott joined. Then there were the fast, glorious years of ‘Tally Ho!’, Boodle Boodle Boodle, Great Sounds Great and ‘Getting Older’, before they disbanded in 1982. It still seems shocking that they achieved greatness and national attention so quickly and then stopped so suddenly. There is a sense that success was too much, especially for David. The contrast and tension between the brothers become clearer as you follow the story over the years: David wanted to stay in Dunedin, but Hamish wanted to see the world. As David grew in confidence in a solo career, Hamish spread himself more thinly across art and music, adjusting to the sheer difficulty of living in New York, where he moved in 1989. He sold his paintings on the street, motivated by a radical honesty and direct creativity that became hard to accommodate in 21st century urban life.

The Clean reunited in London at the end of the 1980s and reformed again periodically over the decades. There were other bands during the interruptions, with Robert Scott’s The Bats as the most enduring. By the 1990s, an international audience of college radio listeners and indie musicians had caught up with them, especially in the US. Of course, it all risks getting muso-ish, and perhaps only diehard fans will want to know who played dulcimer on which tracks on 1996’s Unknown Country, but then there is the 9/11 stuff. The band happened to be in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit (David: ‘I think we entered a dream state; we experienced delayed shock the day after. I mean, we were watching hundreds if not thousands of people dying.’) And this is when the feeling shifts.

Orientation Tour, 1990. Credit: Chris Knox.

I had always thought of The Clean’s music as uplifting, bright and colourful in contrast to the monochrome of the times. They were psychedelic, not gothic. Not uptight. Not angry in the way punks were. But there is darkness in this story too, and it is sensitively handled by Langston in two closing chapters. If you are going to write about The Clean, tragedy cannot be avoided.

There is the story of early member Peter Gutteridge, who was in the post-Clean band the Great Unwashed with the Kilgours and later founded the formidable Dunedin band Snapper. In 2014, Gutteridge made his way to New York, presumably in the belief that he could join The Clean on stage. He was in a bad state, and it was a sad and chaotic episode. When he flew back to Auckland, Customs officers found him disorientated and he was checked into a psychiatric unit, where he took his own life. To read Langston’s account is to follow a slow-moving disaster that should have been avoided.

And then there was Hamish Kilgour. The story of Hamish was prefigured by the fate of his father, Macgregor, a war veteran shattered by his experiences (David: ‘He saw atrocities on both sides’) who became a voluntary patient at Cherry Farm Psychiatric Hospital. By 2022, Hamish found himself back in Christchurch after those years in New York. His mental health had deteriorated, and he too was a voluntary patient in a psychiatric unit. He went missing in Christchurch’s red zone and was found dead eight days later.

These chapters about the sad deaths of two of the most original and creative people in this story cast a shadow over everything that precedes them. How could they not? Then you might wonder about the book’s title. It comes from a Clean song, off the last album Mister Pop, which was apparently difficult to make. I have no idea what the song title or lyrics meant to The Clean but in the context of this story, it can be repurposed to talk about the kind of resilience you need to live the artistic life. Not just the day-to-day dollars-and-cents side of it, either, but the sense of being an artist or outsider in a country that didn’t always embrace them. It’s tough and not everyone survives it.