pages 56-58

To us [Sneaky Feelings] the Stones were Johnny-come latelys, as they hadn't really been around long, but they seemed to possess a raw, visceral appeal to the prime movers of the [Dunedin Double EP] project. In Chris Knox's words, 'They are plugged into the white man's soul.' I think what he meant was that they were like blues was to the black man. Certainly they were primitive. They even looked like the Stooges. They were hideous - they were perfect. You couldn't get more garage, more street level than the Stones.

Martin [Durrant] was convinced that their bass player, Jeff Batts, was in cahoots with the social activities officer at Otago University (spooneristically dubbed Meat Puller) to exclude us from gigs at varsity. But there was also a fundamental difference of approach. We were very serious about what we were doing, whereas the Stones' attitude, as their name suggests, was pretty carefree. As their name also suggests, they were Neanderthal. Their approach in the studio was improvisational, to say the least. On 'Down and Around' they pulled open a piano and banged the strings inside to create a massive din at a strategic point in the chord sequence. But it worked.

Years later Jeff Batts said to me: 'You guys [Sneaky Feelings] are weird. You think about your music.'

To him music wasn't something to be thought about, it was something you did. He could afford to say that, as for a while The Stones were pretty popular. Jeff came from Logan Park and had played in the Same; Wayne Elsey, the guitarist, had cut his musical teeth playing bass in an early incarnation of Bored Games. So they had a rough and ready audience for their rough and ready sound. We played gigs with most Dunedin bands, but not many with the Stones.

pages 60-62, Matthew discusses the Dunedin Double cover artwork

The other two sides of the record [the Stones and the Verlaines] highlight the tight little refusenik world of Dunedin culture. They're like a private scrapbook of snapshots that has accidentally fallen open. And I feel alternately repulsed and envious - you're just too, too obscure for me.

The Stones' cover was a desecration of the kind committed only by the arrogant or the insecure - or the urban guerilla. Defacing the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street was... a decade ahead of its time (Pussy Galore 'covered' the album a decade later). It's the kind of thing that academics sniffing for a subculture would have a field day with: 'appropriation of mass production retooled and adapted for personal use by resistant nomads in the desert of modern culture...'

The excess was also there in the boyish sexual innuendo, the amount of beer on display, and the photographs of friends who weren't in the band. The aura was tribal - there were photos of Bored Games, of The Enemy (first gig) with Roger Shepherd in the audience. It was an act of solidarity - 'we are the possessors of an (iggy) nominious lineage'.