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The Clean's Boodle Boodle Boodle
In this critical appraisal of The Clean's landmark release, Boodle Boodle Boodle, Geoff Stahl explores how it impacted the emergence of a new DIY scene alongside a retrospective on the role The Clean played in shaping New Zealand's independent music industry.
The Clean's 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa/New Zealand and defined what became known as the “Dunedin Sound”. At the time, The Clean were seen as ambassadors for a burgeoning independent music culture in Aotearoa, drawing on the DIY spirit of punk and post-punk centred around Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island. Geoff Stahl considers the influence and legacy of the EP and band on indie music in New Zealand and elsewhere. Examining the myth of the “Dunedin Sound” associated with The Clean, the EP, and Flying Nun Records, he details how this myth emerged, its repudiation by many of the artists it presumes to cover, and its complicated persistence in the contemporary New Zealand imaginary.
The Clean's 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa/New Zealand and defined what became known as the “Dunedin Sound”. At the time, The Clean were seen as ambassadors for a burgeoning independent music culture in Aotearoa, drawing on the DIY spirit of punk and post-punk centred around Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island. Geoff Stahl considers the influence and legacy of the EP and band on indie music in New Zealand and elsewhere. Examining the myth of the “Dunedin Sound” associated with The Clean, the EP, and Flying Nun Records, he details how this myth emerged, its repudiation by many of the artists it presumes to cover, and its complicated persistence in the contemporary New Zealand imaginary.
- GenresMusic
153 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 12, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 24, 2025
A wonderful summary of the recording, the elements, history, context, and the city — as well as the way the participants have somewhat wrestled with the legacy of it all.
March 11, 2025
First, a warning: this is a long review and a lot of it is more about the music of my favourite band in the world ever. But I can’t really review the book without going into this at length.
Annoyingly, The Clean were not in the first purchases from that life changing batch of Flying Nun records at the Loughborough Friday Flea Market back in December 1997. They were in the box of records I bought so many masterpieces from, but for some stupid reason I left In-A-Live during the first week and it had gone by the second (probably to my record shop buying nemesis, an older postman who almost always seemed to be coming out of record shops and record fairs JUST BEFORE I got there and frequently with records I really wanted tucked under his arm - certainly he got to Hallelujah All The Way Home by the Verlaines before me, the rotter)
They were on Pink Flying Saucers Over The Southern Alps, which was one of those first week purchases, but much as I enjoyed Draw(in)g To A (W)hole it was not one of the records that really startled me on that collection. In fact it was one of the last appearances of the Flea Market Flying Nun box that I eventually fell in love, when I picked up the video of In Love With These Times Vol. 1 and became, quite frankly, obsessed with almost everything on that extraordinary tape.
But it was Tally Ho! which was the song that obsessed me the most. Until then my favourite single of all time had been Little Hands by the BMX Bandits, still a perfect pop song in every way, but Tally Ho! managed to somehow be every single thing I wanted in a pop song. It was joyous, it was fun, it was infectious, it sounded like the band were having the best time performing it, it sounded like it could collapse at any moment but was held together by the giddy pleasure of where the song was taking them - it was perfect. It was and still is everything - EVERYTHING - I wanted in a song and remains for me the greatest single of all time, bar none. It's just perfection and I can never tire of it.
I had a bit of a fallow time post Loughborough trying to find anything Flying Nun in Bedford, and it was only a lucky discovery of the weirdly quite well promoted soundtrack to Topless Women Talk About Their Lives that provided me with anything new in the form of another perfect pop song - Anything Could Happen - and what sounded like a surf song from another universe, Fish. But it was Point That Thing Somewhere Else that changed everything for me. And again, I mean that word literally.
Because my music taste going into that song for the first time was not the same as my music taste coming out of it. I had never heard anything like it before - five and a bit minutes of hypnotic, droning, psychedelic brilliance. It arguably introduced me to what I would eventually know as Krautrock/ Kosmiche music and made more of an impact than my scant listens to the Velvet Underground had in terms of loving drone music. I became obsessed and would play it endlessly while walking around Bedford just before I finally left. It was as if it represented musically the world of possibilities that moving to Nottingham was promising me. It felt like a whole new world I could explore after three years of mostly misery at Loughborough and ten years of absolute grimness at school. Here was the future.
There's no such thing as a bad Clean record by the way. They're all essential, but I particularly point you to the wonderful Merge double disc collection which has all the early stuff and bits of the later records and some rarities. The Flying Nun Collection and Oddities collection, derived from the two tapes of the same name, are also pretty essential just because they're the records I grew up loving the most. And yes, I do have lots of duplications and no I don't care. Their greatest album - and after Bryter Layter my favourite album of all time - is Unknown Country, a beautiful, strange and woozy record that I've obsessed over for about twenty five years and still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of. It's a proper mosaic of a record, just like the cover. Fragments heading towards a greater whole.
Anyway. Rambling aside, I've just finished the Boodle, Boodle, Boodle book (a record I obsessed about before I even heard it - my email address was chris@boodle.fsnet.co.uk in the late nineties because I loved the word so much) and it’s bloody good. I’ve not read any of the 33 1/3 series before, but the template is clearly very similar to the BFI volumes on classic films that I am very aware of with an attempt to juggle some academic stuff with a popular tone. And it does it really well, only wading into jargon when it absolutely needs to, and positioning one of my favourite records within a historical, creative and cultural context much of which is new to me (although a lot of it is not thanks to my recent NZ music reading binge)
It’s particularly good on how terms like the Dunedin Sound/ fetishisation of Flying Nun have become something approximating a shibboleth in some circles. Which is fair, because it’s a frequently lazy shorthand which in the U.K. would parallel with how Sarah and Postcard have become the bywords for eighties indie to the detriment of dozens of smaller, equally brilliant and frequently wayward labels. And it’s not a criticism of those labels and those terms, but it’s always important to look at the other stuff that those records inspired (both in the U.K. and in New Zealand). Those records and labels will always be extraordinary but if they become the only ones people look to they tell only part of the story (I guess the equivalent of Dunedin might be how Manchester fetishes certain bands over smaller, stranger musicians to a great extent). And this book is a perfect entry point for locating more of the extraordinary music of New Zealand that has always - and always will - mean everything to me.
Annoyingly, The Clean were not in the first purchases from that life changing batch of Flying Nun records at the Loughborough Friday Flea Market back in December 1997. They were in the box of records I bought so many masterpieces from, but for some stupid reason I left In-A-Live during the first week and it had gone by the second (probably to my record shop buying nemesis, an older postman who almost always seemed to be coming out of record shops and record fairs JUST BEFORE I got there and frequently with records I really wanted tucked under his arm - certainly he got to Hallelujah All The Way Home by the Verlaines before me, the rotter)
They were on Pink Flying Saucers Over The Southern Alps, which was one of those first week purchases, but much as I enjoyed Draw(in)g To A (W)hole it was not one of the records that really startled me on that collection. In fact it was one of the last appearances of the Flea Market Flying Nun box that I eventually fell in love, when I picked up the video of In Love With These Times Vol. 1 and became, quite frankly, obsessed with almost everything on that extraordinary tape.
But it was Tally Ho! which was the song that obsessed me the most. Until then my favourite single of all time had been Little Hands by the BMX Bandits, still a perfect pop song in every way, but Tally Ho! managed to somehow be every single thing I wanted in a pop song. It was joyous, it was fun, it was infectious, it sounded like the band were having the best time performing it, it sounded like it could collapse at any moment but was held together by the giddy pleasure of where the song was taking them - it was perfect. It was and still is everything - EVERYTHING - I wanted in a song and remains for me the greatest single of all time, bar none. It's just perfection and I can never tire of it.
I had a bit of a fallow time post Loughborough trying to find anything Flying Nun in Bedford, and it was only a lucky discovery of the weirdly quite well promoted soundtrack to Topless Women Talk About Their Lives that provided me with anything new in the form of another perfect pop song - Anything Could Happen - and what sounded like a surf song from another universe, Fish. But it was Point That Thing Somewhere Else that changed everything for me. And again, I mean that word literally.
Because my music taste going into that song for the first time was not the same as my music taste coming out of it. I had never heard anything like it before - five and a bit minutes of hypnotic, droning, psychedelic brilliance. It arguably introduced me to what I would eventually know as Krautrock/ Kosmiche music and made more of an impact than my scant listens to the Velvet Underground had in terms of loving drone music. I became obsessed and would play it endlessly while walking around Bedford just before I finally left. It was as if it represented musically the world of possibilities that moving to Nottingham was promising me. It felt like a whole new world I could explore after three years of mostly misery at Loughborough and ten years of absolute grimness at school. Here was the future.
There's no such thing as a bad Clean record by the way. They're all essential, but I particularly point you to the wonderful Merge double disc collection which has all the early stuff and bits of the later records and some rarities. The Flying Nun Collection and Oddities collection, derived from the two tapes of the same name, are also pretty essential just because they're the records I grew up loving the most. And yes, I do have lots of duplications and no I don't care. Their greatest album - and after Bryter Layter my favourite album of all time - is Unknown Country, a beautiful, strange and woozy record that I've obsessed over for about twenty five years and still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of. It's a proper mosaic of a record, just like the cover. Fragments heading towards a greater whole.
Anyway. Rambling aside, I've just finished the Boodle, Boodle, Boodle book (a record I obsessed about before I even heard it - my email address was chris@boodle.fsnet.co.uk in the late nineties because I loved the word so much) and it’s bloody good. I’ve not read any of the 33 1/3 series before, but the template is clearly very similar to the BFI volumes on classic films that I am very aware of with an attempt to juggle some academic stuff with a popular tone. And it does it really well, only wading into jargon when it absolutely needs to, and positioning one of my favourite records within a historical, creative and cultural context much of which is new to me (although a lot of it is not thanks to my recent NZ music reading binge)
It’s particularly good on how terms like the Dunedin Sound/ fetishisation of Flying Nun have become something approximating a shibboleth in some circles. Which is fair, because it’s a frequently lazy shorthand which in the U.K. would parallel with how Sarah and Postcard have become the bywords for eighties indie to the detriment of dozens of smaller, equally brilliant and frequently wayward labels. And it’s not a criticism of those labels and those terms, but it’s always important to look at the other stuff that those records inspired (both in the U.K. and in New Zealand). Those records and labels will always be extraordinary but if they become the only ones people look to they tell only part of the story (I guess the equivalent of Dunedin might be how Manchester fetishes certain bands over smaller, stranger musicians to a great extent). And this book is a perfect entry point for locating more of the extraordinary music of New Zealand that has always - and always will - mean everything to me.
December 13, 2025
Just fantastic. I wish I'd had access to this gem while I was writing my dissertation earlier this year!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews