Can We Get Away With It?

Very smart vinyl  with the cover showing minor shelf wear, creasing and 3 cm split in centre of spine.

Legendary ‘’80s Auckland Punk band No Tag are reforming for a show at the Kings Arms in September. The band included Andrew Boak who has since had a colourful journey in music, his time on guitar with No Tag leading on to a varied career. Working at Radio B (before it became bFM) as an Auckland University student, he was one of the first local DJs to cross over into commercial FM radio. No Tag took off overseas in 1986 and Andrew has continued to indulge his passion, working (and playing) first in the London scene and subsequently in San Francisco, where he has been living for the last few decades.

So how did No Tag form, and how did you build an audience?

The Regulators broke up around the same time as The Flicks, and I remember meeting Mark Sullivan at a Screaming Mee Mees’ gig and saying, “Let’’s have a jam”.” For the next six months we rehearsed every weekend, rain or shine, at Progressive Studios, developing a few riffs into songs. We were on the lookout for a drummer and a singer, so when we ran into the Van Wetering brothers who had just moved up to Auckland from Wellington, it worked out perfectly.

We spent the next three months rehearsing at an industrial building at the top of Hobson St, where some friends had a demolition/construction company. We came up with about 10 songs in less than a month, some from stuff I had done with Mark, but most of it fresh as we gelled as a band fairly quickly.

We wanted to do something punk-ish, but with lots of energy and snarl. Our influences were wide-ranged; early punk, good classic rock and even reggae, but mainly the punk sounds coming out of England at the time, which included some Oi! bands. We pretty much had an audience from the get go, as the first wave of NZ punk bands had broken up or moved overseas, so we fitted into the need for a punk band fairly easily, and with that came a ready made audience.

Our first gig was a bbq at the building at the top of Hobson St, so there were loads of punks and boot boys and all types on that afternoon. The audience built itself from there, I would say through word of mouth, but also from doing the few gigs at venues that would have us.

We played with many other bands of the time, some punk gigs at school halls, and others at established venues. We pretty much wanted to play with most of the young bands of the time, our attitude, and hence our name, was based on the fact that people shouldn’t pigeon-hole us because of our image or audience – that we were just a rock band after all. We also made it a policy to get bands we liked to support us, no matter what style of punk/new wave they were. There were some very talented musicians around at the time, and as the punk DIY attitude was now firmly in the minds of up and coming bands, there was a plethora of people to play with. Getting gigs however was another thing.