COUNTRY FLYERS ‘Live’ Tapes Found

The Country Flyers were one of the first ‘alternative’ (ie. R’n’B, Blues, Country Rock) bands to spend many years on the road that was the New Zealand Breweries ‘Pub Circuit’. 10 o’clock closing was introduced to NZ Hotels on the 9th October 1967 and after a settling in period, forward thinking Hotel Managers such as Richard Holden began employing bands to play in their establishments and the NZ Pub Circuit officially began in mid 1970. In fact, I played at the ‘launch’ of the circuit (July 1970) at the Lion Tavern, Molesworth Street, Wellington with our band at the time, ‘Olibet’ (John O’Connor, myself & Tom Swainson) alongside Mark Williams and Sharon O’Neill.

So now we’ve discovered some old 1/4 inch tape recordings of Midge Marsden’s COUNTRY FLYERS from 1976 - Luckily this was BASF tape, which didn’t suffer from ‘sticky shed syndrome’ (where all the oxide peels off the tape) like various batches of AMPEX tape from around that time and later. So we were able to digitally remaster the tapes because our Studer/Revox 2 track Tape Machine has been lovingly restored by our resident technical geniuses Paul Crowther and Doug Jane - (see next blog !)

These cover versions of songs by Bob Marley and Commander Cody’s Lost Planet Airmen were from a show at the Wellington Opera House just before the band moved to Auckland and beyond in 1977. By this time the Country Flyers had teamed up with the Red Mole Theatre Troop to play seasons of cabaret at Carmen’s Balcony in Wellington and Phil Warren’s Ace of Clubs in Auckland.