Flying Nun History with Pictures

Following a review of founder Roger Shepherd’s memoir In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records, Wire magazine has published the stories behind some of the photographs included in the book.

The image here, from 1982, features Shepherd with the first Flying Nun employee, The Clean drummer Hamish Kilgour in the first Flying Nun office on Hereford Street, Christchurch.

“I later saw the building which housed this office being demolished live on television news several months after the devastating Christchurch earthquakes of late 2010 and early 2011,” Shepherd explains.

Also included, is a photograph of Paul Smith, Shepherd and Tony Peake at a party in Christchurch in late 1978.

“Smith did early design work for Flying Nun including The Clean’s “Tally Ho” 7″ single cover, the very first Flying Nun poster as well as the enduring mascot-cum-logo Fuzzy. Peake ran the record department at the University Book Shop on the Ilam university campus and was a key early punk scenester and played in a number of punk and post-punk bands.”

The feature also shows images of posters from the period and the cover of the “disastrous” 1983 Fall album Fall In A Hole, designed by Chris Knox and featuring an article that appeared on the front page of the conservative morning newspaper, The Christchurch Press.

“The problem was that the photo featured only band member Marc Riley who had just been involved in a punch up with bandleader Mark E Smith and was soon to be jettisoned from the band,” Shepherd recalls. “Recorded in August 1982 and finally released in December 1983, Mark E Smith, after initially agreeing to the release, had a fit when he finally saw the finished album causing all sorts of problems for Flying Nun.”

Original article by The Wire, October 2016.

Photo by Alec Bathgate.