Christchurch the Music – Double CD Release

Tuesday 24 May 2005

Today we are celebrating the best in home-grown Christchurch music. Well done to all those who have been involved in the production of this double CD set. It’s a wonderful achievement and will bring a sense of pleasure and pride to all southern music lovers.

It is also a hugely important milestone for Christchurch becoming recognised as a producer of great modern music and musicians. A few years ago we opened the new Christchurch Art Gallery and that was a major sign of our maturity as a city. Today we are celebrating what is best in our musical heritage.

The reality is that it is never the experts and opinion makers of any age that define us. That job lies with the artists, the musicians and the poets.

Today it is our musicians that we hold up to the light. Christchurch has started to get some of the cultural credibility it deserves - that it has in fact earned in most areas.

This compilation allows us to appreciate how talented, and how influential our musicians are today, and have been in the past. I’m told that Christchurch can in fact claim to have been the crucible in which New Zealand rock and roll was forged.

Names like Ray Columbus and Max Merritt immediately come to mind, and the great dances that were held weekly at Spencer Street and the Caledonian Hall are revered memories for many.

The cultural exchanges between the Christchurch Deep Freeze base and the locals included major musical treasures from the world of American music. As it blossomed into rock and roll our people were picking up on it. Our bands heard and adopted it first before taking it on tour into the rest of New Zealand. It started here. It evolved from here.

One of the great ironies of Christchurch’s image is that we are to this day seen as a very conservative city. When you listen to some of the music on this CD you realise that what we are really is a very multi-layered city. Musically we have come of age.

In recent years we have seen some of our talented performers move onto the world stage. That would have seemed a very far off dream not so long ago.

In the world of music as in other areas, we are finally starting to realise just how good we are. And were. The production of this compilation proves it.

Congratulations once more to all of you who have helped put this project together.