By Roselyn Fauth
I have been cleaning out the attic. No small feat. But slowly we are getting there. There have been a few trips to the crows nest and the dump... and in the midst of trying to be ruthless and reasonable to sort through a mess... I found my old stereo. Beside it, tucked away in boxes with a few forgotten things, we also found our CD collection. A flood of memories came rushing back. I can remember where I was when I bought some of them. Going into stores, putting on headphones and working out who I liked and who to buy.
This silver Sony stereo had 4 speakers, a CD at the top and a duo tape deck at the bottom. This became my treasure as a late 80s and 90s kid. I can't remember if this was my first one or if I bought an earlier one that was just a tape deck... either way music mattered to me deeply. With limited pocket money and no streaming services, this machine was my gateway to the world. Sundays were my favourite day. I would sit in my bedroom, ready with blank tapes loaded, finger hovering, waiting to record Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 off the radio. He talked through the start of songs far too often, which drove me mad, and if I got distracted I sometimes forgot to stop recording at the end of each track. But this was free fun, and I loved it...
Rick Dees felt impossibly far away. An American voice broadcasting from Los Angeles, somehow landing to our South Canterbury ears every Sunday. I never really thought about how strange that was... just pressed record and hoped he would stop talking. Looking back, it was extraordinary that a chart show recorded on the other side of the world could shape my tastes and soundtracks.
Radio mattered then, especially here. In the 1990s, local stations were just part of daily life. Familiar voices in the kitchen, in the car, at work. Music, weather, notices about what was happening around town. Before the internet, radio was a primary source of how new music arrived. Recording songs off the radio was not piracy in my eyes. It was participation.
Music felt physical and expensive. I didn't skip tracks casually, and the albums were listened to from start to finish, in the order the artist intended. In the early days of recording off the radio, lyrics were not easy to come by. You listened harder, rewound more often, and filled notebooks with your best guesses. It could be frustrating, but it made music feel earned, and I knew it so well.
I loved that tape and CD player. I bought it with my own saved money. Whether it was this one or an earlier one, I am unsure, but I remember Dad taking me into the Sullivan & Spillane store on Stafford Street. The building has changed so much over the years that I cannot actually picture exactly where the shop sat now, maybe where Chapter and Versus was, and now Stirling Sports?... but I remember quite clearly the staff showing me the features and then turning the knob to full bore. Fleetwood Mac filled the store, almost embarrassingly loud. I was fizzing as I handed over my hard earned money and carried the boxes home.
One of my first tapes that I played was a gift from a family friend we called uncle Ron. I’m Walking on Sunshine. I later remember being at Chapter and Verses and telling dad that Mum would love the Spice Girls CD for Christmas. That year he surprised me by giving it to me instead. I loved that CD. I loved the Spice Girls.
I used to sit and listen over and over, trying to pick out the lyrics. Some of them were a complete disaster. What I thought was “I got my first real sex dream” turned out to be “I got my first real six string”. I am sure I was not alone in that. I had a big folder of handwritten lyrics that I took to school, and I would play piano and accompany my fellow Timaru Girls’ High School friends at singing cup competitions.
My brother and I went halves on CDs and shared them. I still have Now That’s What I Call Music Volume One and subsequent albums featuring Chumbawamba songs and a tune Barbie Girl by Aqua. But the most memorable from our collecting days was the Aussies, Triple J Hottest 100 vol 4 double album. It felt different. Like a doorway into something else. To be honest I felt pretty cool having this in my collection.
Later, with a friend Bridget Keenan, we became very resourceful music buyers. We would buy a can of V each, sit on the floor of The Warehouse, and work our way through the bargain CD bins. At around thirty dollars each, full price CDs were well beyond my saving capacity. but there were many $5 bargins to be had if you could be bothered hunting for them.
A boyfriend once had a fancy five CD stacker in his car stereo, which definitely earned him a few brownie points on the cool Richter scale. Then one Christmas, Mum and Dad bought me a Gigabeat. Essentially a one gig hard drive that could hold music, plug your headphones straight in, or connect to the car stereo. It felt futuristic. Portable. Pretty epic, really. I still have it... somewhere... probably in the attic!
One of the boxes of CDs that has sat in our attic for years...
Music streamers arrived on our computers, and everything shifted almost overnight. Maybe a bit like it was for my grandparents moving from records to tapes... we had nothing physical at all.
Spotify was one of my first streamers and still is. You used to have to have a Swedish IP address to access it, and then it was available to the world. It didn't take long to shift from needing to own music, and to just being able to access it. Albums gave way to playlists. Songs seemed shorter. Easier to skip. Musicians started earning tiny amounts per stream instead of dollars per sale. Convenience won, but something else changed too. Music became endless. Always there. Easier to move past than to sit with.
Now Spotify has everything. It decides what you might like next. Lyrics appear instantly on screen, ready to sing along to. I think the first band I listened to on Spotify was Whitest Boy Alive.
I was too young to experience Timaru’s live music heyday, and that feels like a real shame. Back in the day if you didn't follow the liquor licencing rules, one of the first penalties for a licenced liquor venue was to loose their live music privilege. From what I have read, this seems to have been a slippery slope to eventually hardly having live acts in bars at all. If we do have live music in Timaru, its no where near as regular or as expected as in the past. Maybe we do not support live musicians the way we used to, and there will be many reasons for that. Changes to drinking behaviour, Costs, lack of taxi's, Covid ... they definitely all had an impact. The whole industry works differently now, and so does the way musicians make a living.
Still, I was lucky enough to be part of it in my own small way. I loved singing with OJ (Owen Jackson) in his band, then doing backing vocals on a recording with Rangi, called Dayles Song. I had a wee jazz soul solo project for a while, playing keys and singing at restaurants and weddings. Then, before we had our girls, about ten years ago, I played with a eight piece funk soul band called The Soul Agency.
I play by ear, so when the beat kicked in on a Ray Charles song I would get the sweats, stressing about smashing out the piano properly, but I learned so much from the seasoned musicians around me, people a bit older than I was, with years of experience playing live for audiences. They were all fantastic musicians in their own right. Weddings and festivals were my favourite gigs. Being in the bars until 2am my least... There is something special about those moments, when music lifted a room and brought people together.
I was scrolling through Spotify the other day, and found a band created entirely by Ai. Gah... as much as I love some things about Ai, this was a strange and sad moment. I actually got my kids to sit and listen to the song, and then I explained to them they had just been part of a pivot in music history (and hopefully a short lived one) where we didn't need the creative expression of an artist to fill our ears and hearts... and that algorithms thought they could create something better. It was gross on so many levels. I am not sure the kids really understood what I was banging on about. Music has always been shaped by technology, whether is was generational knowledge to construct the best violin, to synthesizers and auto tune... most generations of music listeners have had new tools to push stories and entertainment into new experiments and directions. The future of music is being pushed into a slopy ecosystem that wont hurt our ears as much as it will hurt our ability to create, share and entertain. Hopefully we will see greater transparency about the music we hear, like disclosures, filters and enforcement on impersonation violations.
Total music payouts on Spotify have grown from $1B to $10Bin a decade, enticing people to find ways to test and cheat the system with tactics like mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificial short track abuse... the "AI slop" has become easier to exploit as AI tools make it simpler for anyone to generate large volumes of music.
Our kids today have no idea how lucky they are to pick and play. They can find free playlists or make their own. When it literally took me a month of Sunday's recording Rick Dee's Weekly Top 40s.. they have it when they want. They can curate sound to match their mood, and read the lyrics to connect to the song and artist they are listening to on a deeper level and explore the meaning behind each song. It all expands their musical horizons as well as room ambience and entertainment.
And yet, in some ways, I think we were lucky too. While I am in my early 40s now, I learned to type on a typewriter, had no cell phone till after high school, had the pain of the internet dial up noise while on the families landline.. It taught me to be patient, and greatful, to take notice and think carefully where I spent my hard earned cash and consumed.
I think I will set the silver sony beast back up. Pull the CDs out of their boxes. Show our kids how we used to absorb music. Slowly. Properly.
Now for a little side quest into a history hunt of the store that sold me my first stereo... Sullivan & Spillane on Stafford Street.
At the time, it was just a shop. A place Dad took me. A counter. A loud demonstration. A moment that mattered because I was spending my own money.
Only later did I learn how deep that story runs. Back to 1869. Back to Mick Spillane, a young Irish immigrant, a farm near Pleasant Point, hotels at Arowhenua, and generations of adapting as the world changed. Hotels to bicycles. Bicycles to motorbikes. Motorbikes to appliances, electrical work, electronics and marine technology.
By the time I was standing in that Stafford Street store listening to Fleetwood Mac echo off the walls, the business had already survived wars, depressions and endless reinventions. In 1972 Jim Spillane and Peter Sullivan formalised that long lineage by founding Sullivan & Spillane Electrical, grounded in Temuka and Timaru, shaped by curiosity, practical skills and the willingness to keep learning.
While formats change and technologies move on, some things stay the same... taking the time to explain. Turning the volume up so you can really hear it and take notice. Standing behind what you sell long after the boxes are gone.
That stereo did not just carry music to my ears. It carried the ideas, skill, practice and investment of generations who believed in doing things carefully, properly. I did not know any of that back then. I just knew I loved music.
Maybe that is how heritage works... It sneaks into your life through reconnection of old objects. Bringing back memories of the shops you walked into and the people who served you. Through things you save up for. Through memories tucked away in attics, waiting to be found and remembered again.
It feels like a long time ago now.
A little critical reflection, from here... I keep thinking about what we gained, and what we traded away, as the music world changed.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the gatekeepers were obvious. Radio programmers... Record labels... The big stores... If you got played, you were in. If you did not, well I guess you were invisible unless you played and played live shows to get your music and name known. That was unfair in all sorts of ways, and I suspect plenty of great music never got a chance. There were fewer doors, so when one opened, it meant something. Music was special because access was limited.
Now the doors are wide open, which is brilliant. Anyone can release a song from a bedroom in Timaru and have it heard in Berlin. The gatekeepers did not disappear thought, they just changed shape. Playlists became power. Algorithms became taste makers. And the new pressure is not to make something lasting, but to make something that survives the first fifteen seconds. That's a bit grim.
It has also shifted the value of music in a way we do not talk about much. When we bought an album, money moved directly. You paid, you owned it, the artist got a cut. Now music can be treated like its on tap. Always on. Always available. Beautiful, yes. But hard to earn a living from. Streaming has made listening easier, but it has made making harder, unless you are huge, relentless, or constantly on the road I suspect.
There are some like my wonderful and talented friend Lucy Hiku who has nailed the Spotify system and puts out regular music to the young children demographic. She has found a way to make music pay. And maybe if the traditional revenue was only available she wouldn't have been able to make music and share it in this way. (Bubble Shop by the way is still may favourite song of Itty Bitty Beats).
There is the cultural bit that sneaks in thought, when music is everywhere, it is easier to use it as background. A soundtrack to chores. A noise buffer in the car. I do it too. I am sure we all do. But sometimes I miss the way we used to sit with it, talk about it. Listening properly. Letting an album carry you from track one to track ten. Learning the lyrics the hard way. Playing a song until you knew it by heart.
Maybe the answer is not to romanticise the past, because it had its own challenges. Maybe it is to be more intentional now. To choose, sometimes, to listen slowly again. To pay for the gig ticket. To support the venue who brings live music to town. To clap hard for the local band. To remember that music is not just content... tt is someone’s work, craft, artistry.
Maybe that is why I am dragging the old stereo out of the attic.
Not because it is better than Spotify. But because it reminds me how music is meant to be felt...
You can hear some of Rick Dee's shows here: https://ia804501.us.archive.org/29/items/rick-dees-weekly-top-40-the-90s/
Side Quest: Radio Caroline
Radio Caroline has been part of South Canterbury’s soundscape for generations. It began life in Timaru on 18 January 1949 as 3XC, a government-owned community radio station broadcasting on AM. For decades it provided a familiar local voice, not just in Timaru but also further inland, with a relay service in Twizel. Like many regional stations of its era, it blended music, news, and community connection in a way that felt distinctly local.
Over time the station evolved alongside changes in broadcasting. In the late 1970s it shifted frequencies and became 3ZC, reflecting nationwide changes to the AM band, while continuing to serve both Timaru and Twizel. By the early 1990s Radio Caroline moved onto FM and was absorbed into Radio New Zealand’s Classic Hits network, becoming Classic Hits 99FM, while still retaining strong local programming through the day. Even as ownership changed in the mid-1990s and local content was gradually reduced, the station continued to carry South Canterbury’s name and identity, at times operating as South Canterbury’s 99FM.
In the 2000s the station rejoined the Classic Hits network, later broadcasting on both 98.7FM and 94.7FM, before another national rebrand saw it become part of The Hits in 2014. While formats and presenters shifted, the station’s long lineage traces back to that original post-war community service. Radio Caroline’s story mirrors the broader history of regional radio in New Zealand, shaped by changing technology, ownership, and economics, yet grounded in decades of local listening and shared memory.
https://ent.kotui.org.nz/client/en_AU/timaru/search/detailnonmodal/ent
Side Quest: History of Radio Before broadcasting, before stations
Long before radio meant music, news, or familiar voices filling the room, it began as something far more tentative. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wireless communication was experimental, fragile, and often improvised. Signals were sent in Morse code, sparked across short distances by enthusiasts who were part scientist, part tinkerer, and part problem-solver. There were no stations as we would recognise them today, no schedules or playlists, just the quiet thrill of a message travelling invisibly through the air.
New Zealand stepped into this new world early. By the 1890s, wireless experiments were already underway, including work by Ernest Rutherford at Canterbury College. At the turn of the century, experimental messages were being sent between hilltops and across harbours, testing both the limits of technology and the imagination of those using it. In 1902, James Logan sent Morse code messages across Wellington Harbour. In the same year, W. P. Huggins in Timaru and Joe Passmore in Dunedin were also sending wireless messages over short distances. These were not broadcasts in the modern sense, but they marked the moment when communication first began to leap through the air in Aotearoa.
Radio’s value quickly became clear, particularly for maritime communication and safety in a country shaped by sea travel. As wireless use increased, regulation followed. By the early 1900s, unlicensed stations were restricted, and during the First World War amateur radio was banned altogether, with equipment redirected to the war effort. Yet the knowledge did not disappear. In the 1920s, amateur radio was formally licensed, national call signs were introduced, and New Zealand operators began making long-distance contacts with Australia, the Americas, and Europe. Radio was no longer just an experiment. It was becoming a network.
Tucked into this early history is Timaru’s own contribution with a brief record of W. P. Huggins sending Morse code signals in 1902 places the town firmly within New Zealand’s earliest wireless experiments, decades before regular broadcasting began. Beyond this reference, I couldnt find out much about Huggins himself. (https://nzart.org.nz/info/milestones-the-history-of-nzart/)
By the 1930s, radio had proven its public value beyond doubt. During the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, amateur operators played a vital role in emergency communication, helping to cement radio’s place in civil defence and search and rescue. By the time the post-war era arrived, the foundations were firmly in place for community and commercial broadcasting.
When stations like Radio Caroline emerged after the Second World War, they did so on the shoulders of decades of experimentation, emergency service, and technical curiosity. That deeper history sits quietly behind the familiar voices and frequencies, reminding us that South Canterbury’s relationship with radio did not begin with a dial, but with sparks, signals, and a simple desire to connect.