New Zealander Graeme Jefferies is noted for his work in the often terrific Cakekitchen, and his brother Peter has been rightfully praised for a handful of solo LPs, but in the early ’80s they were the main pillars in one of the finest if too seldom heard Kiwi outfits, the startlingly original This Kind of Punishment. To describe their self-titled 1983 debut and its ’84 follow-up A Beard of Bees as post-punk isn’t wrong, but it does feel more than a little reductive and in the global underground of that era, both albums’ contents rank high.
I remain fond of classifying The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, and Tall Dwarfs as Flying Nun’s Big Four; this is in part due to persevering reputations, but it’s also because in the late ’80s, due to a licensing agreement between that crucial New Zealand label and Homestead Records, those acts were the easiest to hear in the US. And for a while, it wasn’t easy to hear much else, which only intensified the notion of the Flying Nun “sound” as melodic, catchy and guitar-based (with Tall Dwarfs only somewhat excepted, as that two-man unit, if psych-tinged and proto-lo-fi, also wielded a sharp pop sensibility).
However, time has reinforced that Flying Nun’s stylistic reach was much wider than many youthful Yanks once assumed. There was the moody post-punk of Pin Group, whose “Ambivalence” 45 was the label’s first release; there was the loud and heavy Gordons, who slowly morphed into Bailter Space; there was the artier pop-punk of Bill Direen and his group the Builders, whose Beatin Hearts was Flying Nun’s first LP; and of course, there was This Kind of Punishment.
Before Graeme and Peter emerged with TKP in 1983, they were part of Nocturnal Projections, a band formed in 1981 in the North Island municipality of Stratford. Today, their 7-inch and two 12-inch EPs go for major scratch, and even the out-of-print Nerve Ends in Power Lines comp CD from ’95 is rather pricey. This is a shame since the Joy Division-ish post-punk found in their grooves illuminates how the brothers Jefferies didn’t just conjure the excellence of TKP out of thin air.