'Living Up To Their Name' - Live At The Gluepot 1987

Guitarist, singer and songwriter Matthew Bannister’s introspective memoir and history, Positively George Street: a personal history of Sneaky Feelings and the Dunedin Sound, frayed tempers and dented egos when it was published in 1999.

Bannister’s kitchen sink work challenged the hardened perspectives that had developed over two decades around the 1980s Dunedin independent music scene’s key musicians and their worth. It made contentious and contested environments that had increasingly been painted as cohesive and complementary.

As a key singer, guitarist and songwriter in Sneaky Feelings – the self-proclaimed outsiders of the Dunedin Double EP groups – Bannister was close enough to access revealing detail and removed enough to be honest about it.

Bannister’s narrative is consistent with what the group said in media interviews during their active years. The difference being, it was often drummer, singer and third songwriter Martin Durrant laying down the party line there. The group’s other main songwriter, guitarist and singer David Pine, is the one least heard.

In Bannister’s book, it is Pine who has the most to do with the broader indie community in Dunedin. When his voice is muted, those connections disappear or remain half seen and poorly examined. In ring-fencing his own group’s experience to the degree he has, Bannister may have drawn out his own group’s distinctiveness, but he also replicated the same defensive inward-looking perspective he accuses the wider indie scene of.

On top of that, Bannister has overlooked Sneaky Feelings’ wider influence in New Zealand. Their sound resonates in songs by Palmerston North groups The Remarkables and Three Leaning Men, and The Wild Poppies and Let’s Planet from Wellington, to name just a few.