One of the biggest culture shocks I experienced after moving from the UK to New Zealand had nothing to do with the weather, the food, or even the accent. It was the music scene.
When I first started playing in bands in the UK, we wrote original songs. That was simply what you did, every musician I knew was trying to create something of their own. You might throw a couple of covers into a live set if you ran out of your own songs, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Nobody I knew set out to become a covers band. Our conversations revolved around songwriting, recording demos, getting gigs, and trying to develop our own sound. Every pub, club, and small venue seemed to have original music happening.
Then I arrived in New Zealand. Almost every advertisement looking for musicians mentioned covers. Original bands seemed surprisingly rare, and in some circles they almost seemed like the poor cousin of the music scene. I remember wondering why – it didn’t make much sense to me at first. Then, after living here for a while, I think I finally understood.
It came down to geography and NZ’s remoteness on the world stage. The UK is incredibly compact and relatively close to Europe, plus it has a huge population compared the NZ which, as a country, is a similar physical size. If a band was building momentum in the UK, there was a good chance they’d tour the country. The same was true across much of Europe. New Zealand is different – not least because it’s a country of two halves divided by a 3 hour ferry crossing. The world’s biggest acts would occasionally make the long trip to NZ and play stadiums or festivals. If you were lucky, you’d see someone like David Bowie or Led Zeppelin on a New Zealand tour. But there was a huge layer of missing artists underneath those headline acts.
The thousands of mid-sized touring bands that constantly travelled around Britain simply didn’t come here. The economics didn’t make sense. Yet New Zealanders still heard all of that music as the country has always had a huge number of radio radio stations, so listeners knew of many of these bands. They just never got the opportunity to experience those bands performing live. Someone had to fill that gap and that’s where covers bands became incredibly valuable.
If people loved a song they heard on the radio but the original artist wasn’t likely to tour New Zealand, a local band would perform it live. For many audiences, that was the closest they would ever get to hearing those songs played in person. Once I looked at it that way, the popularity of covers bands made perfect sense.
I sometimes wonder whether generations of Kiwi musicians grew up believing that playing covers was simply the way you built a music career. Perhaps it was. If audiences wanted familiar songs and venues could guarantee full dance floors, covers bands naturally became the safest commercial option. There’s nothing wrong with that from a practical perspective. It simply wasn’t the culture I came from. And, of course, none of this is to say there have never been successful original Kiwi bands because there have.
Even now, after all these years in New Zealand, I still have no desire to record covers. I’ve never really been interested in recreating somebody else’s music. For me, the excitement has always been in creating something that didn’t exist before. Writing a song from scratch, watching it evolve, recording it, and finally releasing it into the world—that’s the part of music that has always inspired me. That’s not to say covers aren’t enjoyable to play. They clearly bring enormous enjoyment to audiences, and they keep live music thriving in countless venues. They’re simply not why I became a musician.
Perhaps that’s one of those differences that never completely leaves you. Even though New Zealand has long since become home, part of my musical upbringing still comes from those original-band scenes I grew up in. And maybe that’s why, after all these years, I still wouldn’t dream of releasing a cover. I’d much rather write the next song instead.
