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Music

New Zealand Punks No Tag Have Reissued Their Classic 1982 Album ‘Oi, Oi, Oi’

Auckland isn't known for it's oi scene but this classic early 80s EP is full of burly and rugged punk rock.

This article originally appeared on Noisey Australia.

In 1982 No Tag released Oi, Oi, Oi, three tracks of burly and meaty street punk. With a cover featuring a muscly-tattooed bicep and song titles such as “Legalised Dogs,” the music was gruff and rough but packed with melody and edge. But the band weren’t from the streets of East London, Liverpool, or the Lower East Side. Guitarist Andrew Boak, singer Paul Van Wetering, drummer Carl Van Wetering, and bassist Mark Sullivan hailed from the North Shore of Auckland, an area not particuarly known for a strong punk or oi scene.

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Released as a 12-inch EP on Propeller Records, the album debuted at 15 in the NZ Top 40 and the band reached a level of success including a support for the Dead Kennedys on their 1983 visit to New Zealand. The band relocated to London before calling it quits in 1986.

Thirty-three years later New York City label Radio Raheem has re-issued the record from the original reel. We had a chat to guitarist Andrew Boak about the album and a recent gig the band played in Auckland.

Noisey: Were you listening to UK oi like Sham 69, Cocksparrer, The Business at the time or was it more general punk?
Andrew Boak: It was a bit of both really, definitely more UK stuff than US. We had a pretty good supply of punk and oi records coming in on import and there were a couple of radio shows playing a lot of it too, so our exposure was pretty decent.

Oi has always identified with the working class. What was North Shore and Auckland like around then?
The North Shore and Auckland in general had the usual class structures as with any city of that size. I don’t think the North Shore was any less or more working class than the other suburbs, but it was definitely suburban, that’s for sure…

TVNZ made their studios look like a pub for your 1983 television performance. What do you remember of the shoot/performance?
TVNZ asked us to invite a few punks down to be part of the audience, but word got around and a whole bunch of peoples turned up. They had only purchased about six-dozen bottles of beer, so that ran out almost immediately. As it was a TV studio and not a gig, there was no P.A., so we ended up turning the vocal monitor speakers around to face the audience, so that they got a better mix of the gig. It was weird also because between songs we would have to stop and wait until they moved the cameras to different areas, so it made it hard maintain the momentum and feel that you would have at a regular gig…

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Like many scenes violence started to get out of hand in Auckland in the mid 80s. Was this racist violence or drunken (or both)? I was told that there were a small number of Maori boot boys in the scene around this time.
It was definitely not racist violence in New Zealand, because, as you stated, there were a good few Maori boot boys in the scene, and it wasn’t necessarily skinhead violence either. Whenever you mix loud aggressive music and alcohol together, there is definitely an increased chance of violence, whether the person instigating it is a punk, skin, boot boy or a normie.

The Flying Nun bands had a more arty side to their sound. Did you ever end up playing with any of these early Flying Nun bands?
I believe we did, we were definitely friends with them all. We would try as much as possible to have a wide range of genres of bands supporting us at our gigs. We were, and still are, firm believers that all music genres are good in some way or another. The NZ scene is pretty tight knit. When we toured NZ supporting the live LP, the Flying Nun bands put us up in Dunedin in their houses and things like that. I personally think that The Clean are the best band to have ever come out of NZ.

You supported Dead Kennedys in Auckland and later made guest vocals on Bedtime for Democracy in SF? Have you kept in touch with Jello or other DKs?
I live in San Francisco and so run into Jello on a regular basis. He still remembers the Auckland gigs… His current band rehearses in the same studios that one of my current bands does.

What was it like playing as an oi band in London in the mid 80s?
We didn’t identify as an oi band, it was a label that was thrust upon us by the media, if anything, the whole idea of labelling a band by genre was something we hated and hence the name of the band itself. We got a few gigs when we were in London, but we didn’t have a manager, or any real direction as to how to be a successful band in a big marketplace, so we pretty much tread water until we called it a day in the late 80s.

How did the September gig at the Kings Arms go? Will it be a one off performance?
The reform gig in Auckland was a great success. It was sold out, and I thought we played fairly well considering the short amount of rehearsal time we had together. People seemed to enjoy it too, so overall we were very happy. As far as I can tell, yes, it was a one-off performance, but you never know.

'Oi, Oi, Oi' is available now from Radio Raheem.