A Tale of Two Cities

Australia has long held sway over my imagination, a consequence in all likelihood of a misspent decade gorging on Neighbours and Home & Away as a child. But despite spending three years a mere pond’s hop away from it, I’ve still barely scratched the arid surface of this vast and obscure continent. 

With only a couple of months to travel in between leaving Auckland and our full-time return to the UK, we had to prioritise and decided to focus on South East Asia and the USA over New Zealand’s friendly Antipodean rival. Nevertheless, we did reserve ten days to catch up with friends in Melbourne and Sydney, two cities I’ve visited before but which, on this trip, I found myriad new reasons to cherish. 

            I must confess that Melbourne, our tour’s first port of call, did not exactly bowl me over on my initial visit some four and a half years ago. Knowing my character - and specifically my love of coffee and culture - friends had often remarked that Melbourne and I would be a heavenly match, but on my virgin trip to Australia I surprised them and myself by liking rather more the glitz and glamour of Sydney, with its iconic harbour and brassy beaches. 

            Melbourne, characterized by café-lined back alleys, grand arcades and world class art spaces, had felt more like a European city to me, and therefore inherently less interesting to this London-based Brit. And with limited time constraining me to a whistle-stop tour of little beyond the grid-based city centre, the charms of Melbourne’s eclectic suburbs sadly eluded me. But with the benefit on this visit of local friends to show us around, I was finally able to experience the best of a city I should have fallen for half a decade ago. 

              After Auckland, where bars often sit empty on a Monday night and city squares can lie vacant at midday but for sun-basking pigeons, I was struck immediately by how busy Melbourne was. For all the ease of living in a quieter city, I quickly realized that I’d missed the clatter and velocity of a London or a Paris, and Melbourne certainly had shades of both. For one, it boasts an exceptional public transport system revolving around an extensive and always timely tram network. I’ve often thought Auckland, in some future era of higher population and prosperity, would be a perfect candidate for a tram line, and Melbourne certainly showed its benefits as it rattled us from suburb to suburb, showcasing a city sparkling with culture, shopping and entertainment.

            An early highlight was a trawl through the labyrinthine Queen Victoria Market northwest of the city centre and home to purveyors of every food type imaginable. Recalling France’s grand marchés, its narrow undercover alleyways are hemmed with dozens of window stalls proffering breads, cheeses, pastries, salamis, chocolates, craft beers, juices, sandwiches and a hundred other delectable goodies. Our friends do almost all their food shopping there, and it was easy to see why, the range of fresh meat and fish particularly impressing. How anyone but the most discerning chef can hope to choose between over twenty different butchers flogging what appeared to be exactly the same cuts, joints and minces remained a mystery.

           
            Our mission at the Market was to source breakfast and we left sated with the dreamy pairing of a piping hot borek (a type of Turkish bread roll laden with spinach and feta) and an excellent filter coffee from an establishment whose tagline was “We love to make coffee for the city that loves to drink it”. Pretentious, perhaps, but their caffeinated output certainly delivered to the marketing spiel. 

            An afternoon was spent hobbling (on account of a new pair of Converse I’d foolishly overlooked to wear in before packing them as my only holiday walking shoe) around Brunswick Street in the north eastern suburb of Fitzroy, another trip highlight that cast Melbourne in a whole new light for me. Bringing to mind parts of San Francisco, with screeching trams rattling through unfeasibly long streets studded with boutique shops, bars and cafes, Fitzroy is a haven for anyone with a vaguely alternative taste in fashion, furniture and the arts. The homeware emporiums were particularly inspiring, with gorgeous antiques jostling with expert modern craft, and there were so many eateries that a resident might never have to visit the same one twice. 

            On which note, this being a holiday for us as much as an opportunity to explore a new city, a significant chunk of our visit was inevitably spent eating and drinking. Again, we were blessed with local friends to escort us around the hotspots, but I was impressed in general by the high quality of bars, restaurants and cafes we encountered. The volume of rooftop bars, dotted across the whole city and offering skyscraper views as a backdrop to a twilight beer or cocktail, particularly stood out, and left me wondering why more cities don’t make such crowd-pleasing use of their upper floors. 

            One watering hole we didn’t enter but which certainly had me intrigued was a garish black brick corner bar near the Victoria Market named, I kid you not, Witches In Britches. From the rubber ghouls behind iron bars that cackled as you walked past, it was clear this was no ordinary establishment, but given its proximity to a strip of brothels it was unclear whether this was designed as a fetishist’s fairground or hen party’s final resting place. Either way, I was more than happy to people-watch from across the street rather than risk poisoning from a pint of witches brew. 

             
           Away from the CBD, it turned out Melbourne offers almost as much seaside interest as the more famously beachy Sydney. A tram ride through the gentrified and leafy suburb of South Yarra and the shopperheaven that is Chapel Street led us to St Kilda, where a long beachfront walk culminates in a cluster of oceanside bars, gourmet patisseries and the glamorously fading Luna amusement park. 

More scenic was the daytrip we took with a hire car to the Mornington Peninsular, south east of Melbourne and a good two hour drive to its spindly apex. Once we escaped the clutches of the city’s seemingly endless outer suburbs, the landscape opened up into an idyll of rolling hills, lush woodland and sparkling sea views. 

Though the area is renowned for its wineries, a limited timeframe for returning our vehicle sadly prevented us from indulging in any cellar door tastings, but we were able to stop for a good old-fashioned pub lunch at the seafront hotel in Portsea and then gobble down a hopelessly decadent vanilla slice at the otherwise uninspiring town of Sorrento, where such slices are proclaimed, somewhat dubiously, to be “world famous”.

If we harboured any negative feeling as we departed Melbourne, it was reserved only for the cost of eating out, which felt high when converting back to the NZ dollars in our bank accounts. But Kiwis have long bemoaned how much better paid Australian jobs are compared to their New Zealand counterparts, so the more expensive cost of living probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. 

As I’ve blogged about it previously, I won’t linger too long on Sydney, where we spent five nights following our week in Melbourne. The city remained as intoxicating as ever, in part thanks to the exceptional weather, unblemished blue skies and thirty degree temperatures belying the fact that it was officially only a couple of weeks into spring. 

With an ever-rising number of Kiwi and British friends now based there, Sydney continues to hold an allure for me, and our mates didn’t hold back from teasing us about our impending return to the damp and chill of the British winter while they bask smugly in the searing Australian sunshine. 

Sydney’s weather though is not without its drawbacks, as we discovered during a hot but lasciviously windy walk through scene-setting Surry Hills. Every gust of muggy air swept up and forged a maelstrom of tree dust, engendering the unpleasant sensation of battling through a sandstorm. Our eyes and throats were so raw after only a few minutes of valiant exploration in the face of this woody onslaught that we were compelled to take refuge for a good half an hour in a gift shop until the winds died down. 

The blustery weather again proved obstructive the following day, when we were forced to call off a planned boat trip around Sydney Harbour just as we’d finished loading aboard our hired vessel enough food and beer to pacify the Wallabies. Though there was certainly a hot breeze coursing through the bay where we were moored, it hadn’t initially seemed to us seafaring novices to be anything particularly untoward, but the boatyard’s owner was insistent that it would be far too choppy to be enjoyable once we got out on the water. 

Before disappointment could set in, however, the owner graciously suggested that we could move to another, far more luxurious boat in the marina and spend the afternoon playing on it, albeit without actually moving anywhere. Though this wasn’t quite the sightseeing afternoon we’d had in mind, it would have been churlish to complain about spending four hours hanging out with friends in brilliant sunshine, and with all that food and booze still to be guzzled. We even managed to fit in a spot of fishing - not that we caught anything, so well adapted the local fish proved to be as they nibbled through all our bait without once attaching themselves to our increasingly deflated hooks. A couple of our group went for a dip themselves in the water, though when we later noticed, mere meters from the boat, a stingray that was closer in size to Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi submarine than your average marine life form, I was thankful I hadn’t joined them. 

The rest of our time in Sydney was spent exploring some of its inner suburbs. The quaint terraces and shady trees of Paddington, for example, provided the backdrop to a pleasant afternoon dipping in and out of boutique shops and cafes. We especially enjoyed a pair of lunchtime toasties at a café called, cutely, Not Just Coffee, on narrow Perry Lane off Oxford Street, followed by a stroll around the perimeter of the vast Centennial Park. We also paid an early evening visit to Bondi Beach, where lively seafront pub The Bucket List cleansed our weary limbs with pints of pale ale soundtracked by a live dreampop band. 

Outside of the CBD, we were fortunate enough to spend a couple of nights with friends who live in Little Bay, a sleepy community several inlets down the coast from Bondi. Though the area has none of the entertainment options that abound in the more central suburbs, it does boast a stunning secluded beach and cliff-top walking track that meanders for a couple of kilometers through the local golf course. We enjoyed a memorable afternoon flip-flop sauntering along it, dodging golf balls and wary of the snakes that were said to have been spotted in the area, but also marveling at the tourist brochure views that left me briefly questioning why on earth I was giving all this up for the grime of inner city London. 

Yes, I’d be lying if I said that leaving Australia after a fortnight of non-stop sun-kissed fun didn’t tug a little at the heartstrings. Certainly, it hit home as we boarded our Thailand-bound flight at Sydney Airport that this really was the end of our time ‘down under’. But with so many friends this side of the world, and with so much of Oz still undiscovered, we won’t need any excuses to come back again and again.  

Jonny

Farewell, farewell

Long-time readers of this blog may recall that it began with a shameless exercise in self-indulgence whereby I listed ‘things I will miss about the UK’ as I embarked upon this globe-hopping adventure of mine. Three years on (can it really be that long?) and Holly & I have recently bid adieu – for the time being, at least – to the place I came increasingly to call ‘home’: the land of the long white cloud, country of dag rattlers and nation of sickeningly good rugby players – New Zealand. 

So before I leap to the exciting travel itinerary we’re currently working our way through en route back to the UK, it seems appropriate to revisit that inaugural task and consider the ‘things I will miss about NZ’ when I’m ensconced back home and muttering visible curses through the ice and grey of the Great British winter…

·      The sunshine that bathes Auckland in almost obscene quantities

·      Consistently excellent coffee (espresso + a dash of water: done)

·      Beachfront walks - living postcards, framed by glorious, gnarled pohutukawas

·      The friends I’ve made, some only known for the briefest of times but sure to be mates for life, and of course the wonderful extended family I’ve acquired through Holly

·      The Golden Dawn, the only place for Friday late night revelry on Ponsonby Road (it’s just a shame it shares its name with Greece’s fascist party…)

·      Real Groovy record shop, one of the few great surviving independent emporiums of music anywhere

·      The freedom of being able to drive everywhere, offset only slightly by carbon guilt and the clenched fist-inducing rush hour bottlenecks on the motorway

·      Famous chefs serving customers in their own restaurants, like Al Brown, who recently brought me in person a ‘plate of bad’ (chips, cheese and gravy, obviously) at his superb new Manhattan-style diner on Federal Street

·      Auckland’s Sky Tower, the lighthouse that defines the skyline and guided me wherever in the city I happened to find/lose myself

·      Trips to the South Island, that mind-blowing smorgasbord of mountains and lakes seemingly lifted straight out of Tolkein’s head

·      Trips to Northland, where almost tropical white-sand beaches line NZ’s most stunning coastline and location of some unforgettable new year’s parties

·      A summertime Christmas Day with beach walks and barbecues and cricket in the back yard – the novelty never wore off

·      The almost total absence of chain restaurants and cafes. NZ must be one of the only developed markets in the world to give a two-fingered salute to Starbucks and it’s all the better for it

·      Feeling safe when running through dark suburban streets late at night with my headphones on and the music LOUD

·      Not having to queue for a table in a restaurant, or for service at a bar, and not being put on hold and being forced to listen to crackly 70s soft rock for an hour when you call the bank

·      Draft lager that that doesn’t taste like watered down piss

·      The seemingly infinite choice of superb independent cafes for a weekend brunch – and menus that don’t give up at bacon & eggs

·      Palm trees everywhere, making me feel like I’m always on holiday

·      La Cigalle, the Parnell-based French market that became a favourite spot for picking up organic produce and a crisp buttery Danish on a Sunday morning 

·      The ease of al fresco exercise all year round – and so many fantastic places to walk and run, like Tamaki Drive and Cornwall Park

·      The outstanding quality of the sushi – how did Tesco ever earn the right to pass off those dry, chewy, faintly acrid rolls of theirs as the same stuff?

·      Barbecues every night of the week in summer

·      Jeff and the cats of Kumeu – as entertaining and eclectic a bunch of feline friends you could ever hope to acquire

·      People actually being nice to you in train stations

·      Takeaway roast dinners – why has no one in the UK ever thought to do this?

·      The wine, especially the stuff from Central Otago – some of the best pinot noir you’ll taste anywhere ever

·      The pride Kiwis take in fresh produce and good honest home-cooked grub – ready meals are a tiny portion of their market and everyone seems a good deal healthier because of it

·      For a couple of (relatively) little islands, the incredible diversity in landscapes and natural scenery, from white sand beaches to smoke belching volcanoes, from green rolling hills to vast crystalline lakes – for once, the ads don’t lie

·      Being able to see really massive bands play in really small venues

·      The supermarkets staying open late on a Sunday evening – how did I ever cope when they used to shut at 4pm in the UK? How will I cope again?

·      Colonial style villas with huge “decks” out the back (terraces) and front (porches) – perfect for afternoon reading and evening drinks

·      The abundance of alpaca, nature’s most endearingly gormless animals

Etc. Etc. The list could go on. What started as a tentative step into the unknown, when I first made the decision to move halfway around the globe to a country I’d never been to, became one of my life’s most rewarding experiences to date. I’d be lying if I said it had always been plain sailing, and my blog entries over these past three years have spoken freely of some of my pet frustrations. Certainly, unlike many émigrés, I never came to think of New Zealand as my permanent home, but my time there has opened my eyes to a place that is, if anything, overlooked and under-valued by the wider world. 

Few people I know back home have ever been there, or even thought to visit. Yes, it is a long, long way away, but so is Australia, and Brits don’t seem as reluctant to embrace the idea of a holiday in Sydney or a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit franchises have of course given prominence to the spectacular scenery-fest of the South Island, but as I hope the above list shows, there is a lot more to New Zealand than that and, for me, a compelling case to make a home there for anyone seeking a working holiday or temporary change of scene, or even a permanent move abroad. 

For me, New Zealand has been somewhere that has allowed me to become more independent and further my career, to understand the real meaning of great coffee and of great sushi, to revel in summers that have appeared to stretch out for over half the year, to see stunning landscapes and live in a city full of sublime views, to meet some wonderful people and make some wonderful friends and, maybe above all, to prove to myself that I’m able to carve a rich and fulfilling life for myself far away from the mates and family and places and culture that I grew up around. 

But all good things must come to an end, and ultimately the call of home has proven too much to resist indefinitely. This isn’t just about reconnecting with those things I thought I’d miss though (and yes, it has been a struggle at times without the football and pubs and culture of the UK). For me, it’s an exciting new era that will allow me to reintegrate into British life with new eyes and new ideas, and show Holly the best - and the worst - of the place where I grew up. 

In the short term, it might mean exploring the areas – like the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish Highlands – that, for whatever reason, I ignored during my first 27 years there and for which my time in NZ has awakened a new fascination. In the long term, it might mean setting up a business or driving an enterprise that will see me attempt to bring some of the things that New Zealand does really well - but which the UK manifestly doesn’t - to home soil. Like good coffee, of course. 

Right now, it’s about celebrating an amazing time in a bloody awesome country and getting excited for home sweet home. And just a little bit of travel in between, as I’ll soon be writing about in my next blog. Stay tuned!

Jonny

Winter's Memory of Summer

Few things are as certain as the cycle of the seasons and yet, when you find yourself hopping from foot to foot on the scolding sand of some impossibly scenic beach at the height of the New Zealand summer, the very notion of winter appears like some Nordic fantasy. More than ever, I felt like this, this last summer gone, as the sunny days and muggy nights seemed to cling on in heavenly perpetuity. As late as May, this Englishman, weaned on wet holidays and white-grey skies, found the impending creep of colder weather an unfeasible prospect as I sauntered around Auckland comfortably jacketless.        

            Slowly but surely, though, the weather has turned. The faintest breeze blows fragile leaves from their branches and pavements have disappeared beneath detritus beds. Daylight hours can still preserve the illusion of summer for a while, but the air cools rapidly when the sun sinks behind the skyline and evenings are once again spent huddled around plug-in radiators. Almost three years on from my arrival in New Zealand, central heating is still to be discovered, it seems.  

            And yet, I have to remind myself that I’m a lucky man, for even the chilliest days in Auckland are still a picnic compared to the arctic nightmare of the British winter. It rains a lot here, but in between storms, the sun can still light up a winter’s day like an ersatz summer. Rainbows appear with startling regularity, and late afternoon sunsets over the city skyline are frequently things of wonder. 

           Dusk sets in later here. I remember the despair I used to feel back home when darkness would fall as early as 4pm during the year’s shortest days and seven hours of confinement in the office could mean you’d miss the succor of daylight altogether. We only recently passed the winter solstice here and yet twilight can still hold off as late as 6 o’clock. And, for all my moaning about the lack of decent interior heating, it never gets that cold. One night recently, I even had to stick a leg out from beneath our double duvet because it was keeping me just a little too snug. 

            The worst aspect of winter here – and specifically, the month of July – is the lack of decent entertainment on the box. The very time when you yearn most for a cosy night in front of the TV, all the best series (Mad Men, Game of Thrones) have finished their runs in time for the US summer, and the new footy season is still a good six weeks away. 

            Winter here, I find, is best enjoyed exploring Auckland’s wealth of eating and drinking establishments. I have waxed lyrical about my adopted city’s culinary excellence on many occasions, but even after 3 years I am still finding new bars, cafes and restaurants to write home about. 

            A recent discovery that has quickly established itself as a favourite of ours is Selera, a Malaysian eatery in Newmarket that serves some of the city’s tastiest rendang and noodle dishes at improbably reasonable prices. I even overcame my initial reluctance to dine somewhere without an alcohol license, for the food is so good that you barely register the absence of a nice lager to wash down the spice.

            Dominion Road, which boasts an impressively long strip of cheap but quality Asian diners, has also become a regular haunt in recent months. The choice of restaurants is almost overwhelming, but Metro magazine’s brilliant Cheap Eats blog has been an indispensable guide to the best picks. The wonderfully named Zap 2 is a particular favourite, and its extensive Thai-themed menu has eventuated in many an evening of noodly indecision. 

            It’s not all about rice and dumplings on Dominion Road though. La Voie Francaise is no gimmicky imitation of a French café, but an authentic purveyor of the finest baguettes I’ve tasted in the southern hemisphere. Though there’s a bakery just a couple of blocks up from our house, the 15 minute drive to La Voie is well worth the effort, and as an accompaniment to a warming winter stew or soup, there’s nothing better than a warm hunk of their mouthwatering bread slathered with creamy butter. 

            Another acclaimed French-run establishment is a café called Voila in the nearby suburb of Sandringham. Incongruously stationed in the middle of a street of Indian restaurants that collectively pump out a cloud of spicy air so strong that it carries down the whole street, Voila cooks up some of the finest breakfasts in town, its speciality crepes provoking vivid daydreams of a favourite pancake stall near Notre Dame.  

            Auckland caters expertly for most types of Asian cuisine, but it does Japanese especially well. Half-decent sushi was something of a luxury in London, and I would often find myself opting for the ‘cheat’ breadcrumbed chicken options over the raw fish variety. For whatever reason, New Zealand sushi is a class above and Japanese cuisine as a whole is well served by an array of quality eateries to suit any budget. Tanto on Manukau Road is something of a hidden gem, but for those in the know it offers an extensive range of delicious Japanese dishes, including sushi, tapas-style mini plates and full-blown mains. With its modern yet cosy interior and attentive wait staff, Tanto is equally suited to large gatherings and couples looking for a quiet night out, and is licensed to wash your meal down with as much Asahi beer or sake as you can stomach.  

            Livelier, and my pick of Auckland’s suburban Japanese restaurants, is Nippon Sake Bar, which is nestled a little further up Manukau Road and is decked out inside with an evocative assemblage of paper lanterns, bamboo awnings and paintings of mythical scenes. You know you’re not in for a run-of-the-mill dining experience the moment you step through the front door and get greeted by the banging of a gong and a chorus of salutations from the chefs. Seating options cater to all requirements: intimate booths for couples or friends; cushioned benches for larger groups; and for the brave, a bar with a front seat view of the masters at work in kitchen. The bar is always my preference if my dining group allows it. There’s something mesmeric about watching a culinary craftsman up close and you appreciate all the more the dishes they serve up to you steaming and sizzling within seconds of completion. 

            At the top end of the spectrum and offering one of the finest dining experiences I’ve had the fortune to enjoy anywhere, let alone in Auckland, is the recently opened Kazuya, which turns Japanese cooking into an art form. The seven course degustation is not cheap - especially if you opt to include matching wines and sake - but if you’re going to spend an evening in thrall to food this exquisite, you don’t want to be doing it by half measures. Exceptional service (the wait staff never had to check who had ordered what, even for a table of almost twenty people) and minimalist dark hued décor set the scene for a gastronomic extravaganza, where every fastidiously presented dish was greeted with awe and fascination. From a plate of over thirty individually prepared vegetables to the childhood dream come true of pastry ice cream, Kazuya electrified my taste buds in a way few restaurants have before.

            So with dining options this good in ever abundant supply and days filled with sunshine that make a mockery of the season, I should have been able to navigate another winter in Auckland with relative ease. But then, a week ago, I was suddenly struck by the most acute pangs of homesickness that I’ve felt in the near three years I’ve been here. The cause? Andy bloody Murray. Yes, the gawky Scottish miserablist turned tennis superstar that Britons have been willing to Wimbledon glory with the collective force of 65 million hopes and prayers for over half a decade. And the year that he finally vanquishes the demons of 77 years of failed attempts by male British tennis players and actually goes and wins the bloody thing, I’m asleep under superchilled bedsheets some twelve thousand miles away. 

            It wouldn’t be so disquieting were it not for the fact that during my time in NZ I’ve already missed, in 2011’s Royal Wedding and last year’s Diamond Jubilee and London Olympics, three of the most iconic events of modern British history. I was, granted, fortunate to be back home for that magical afternoon exactly a year ago when Murray reached his first Wimbledon final, but watching him get beaten by Roger Federer’s untimely reminder of his claim to be the greatest men’s singles tennis player of all time left a rather bitter taste in the mouth. 

When it comes to national sport, only the England football team’s failure to win, well, anything, for nearly 50 years has caused me as much consternation as our little island’s inability to produce a homegrown champion at the world’s premier grass tennis tournament. Year after gut-wrenching year, I spent my formative summers cheering on the latest young pretender to Fred Perry’s immortal racket, from Jeremy Bates to Tim ‘Tiger’ Henman, but always with an increasing sense of resignation to the belief that Britain would never against produce a Wimbledon men’s champion. Even when Murray himself roared onto the scene in the middle of the last decade and emerged from that gawky teenage frame to be, you know, a little bit good, it seemed inconceivable that this lanky lad from Dunblaine could ever topple the then twin towers of tennis greatness, Federer and Rafael Nadal. 

So to miss the moment when a Brit – at long long last – actually won Wimbledon was just a little disappointing. Especially when it happened to coincide with some of the finest summer weather the UK has seen in many a year and all my friends back home are basking in London parks with carelessly sunburnt shoulders and a smog of barbecue smoke filling the evening air. I try to remind myself that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and for every weekend of glorious sunshine in England, there are ten more when the sky is so washed out you wouldn’t notice if you went colour blind. At the very least I can comfort myself with the thought that living in New Zealand means I’ll be spared the British press’ cringe factor fawning over the imminent birth of our future monarch. Good luck Will and Kate, you’re going to need it!

Jonny

Listen up!

 It was with a heavy heart that I read the recent news that HMV - the record store chain that has been for so long a mainstay of the British high street - had gone into administration, its future as a viable business hugely uncertain. In many ways, it had done well to cling on this long, its core offering of music and video having been gnawed away at inexorably over the past decade by a technology revolution that has seen computers and portable devices become the dominant platforms for at-home and on-the-go entertainment. The story resonated with me acutely, not just because of my nostalgia for an institution I grew up with, but because the shift in the way I myself consume music has paralleled, and even contributed towards, HMV’s sad demise. 

            As a music-hungry teenager whose general philosophy on shopping was to spend as little time doing it as possible, HMV was one of the few places in a city centre where I could happily spend hours (not to mention cash), propping myself up against listening posts and rifling through CD racks in the hunt for exciting new sounds. Of course, unashamed music snob that I am, I would always prefer an independent record store if I could find one, but as the years went by and digital formats began to steal an ever greater share of the market, HMV became in many towns the only place outside of the supermarkets where you could buy the latest releases on a Monday morning. For older albums and records by alternative acts, it was often the only choice consumers had. 

            For a long time, I clung staunchly to physical editions when buying albums, even though I’d begun to listen to most of my music digitally through my iPod or laptop. I felt great pride watching rows of CDs accumulate over time into a whole wall of music in my living room, each album a marker of a particular moment in my life, imbued with memories of where and when I bought it, and the feelings running through me when I first heard its songs blast out from my speakers. Closer up, I loved the tactile nature of CDs: iconic sleeves from history and modern artwork grappling for iconic status; the linear notes with details of the cast who created and honed each work; the latter era digipacks and bespoke casings that vied to capture the physicality and collectability of old vinyl. 

            Through many a change in my life and at a cumulative expense I daren’t now contemplate, I amassed a music collection that stopped guests in their tracks when entering the room and seeing an entire wall scaffolded by shelf upon shelf of CD spines. It became my own little record shop and I must have spent a thousand evenings in my mid-20s obsessively perusing its plastic treasures and spinning songs into the wee small hours.

It was something of a wrench, then, when I came to ponder moving to New Zealand, as I knew straightaway that there wouldn’t be a chance in hell that I’d be able to take my collection with me - not unless I wanted to spend a minor fortune shipping it half way round the world in cardboard boxes anyway. Of course, such expense could not be justified, even for a staunch music traditionalist like myself, and I quickly realized that I would be forced, at long last, to embrace wholeheartedly the modern age and rely henceforth solely on compressed digitalised versions of all my singles and albums. 

            In the end, my collection was packed – geekily ordered by artist and by decade - into boxes, but rather than being taped up and carted off to an Oceania-bound cargo ship, they were loaded into a van and taken back to my family home to gather dust until such time as I could be reunited with them. For sentimental reasons, I did choose to take one item with me on my travels: my complete box set of remastered Beatles albums, a discography so perfect that it alone out of all oeuvres could keep me sane on a desert island in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

            Inevitably, once the spell had been broken and circumstances consigned me to an MP3-only future, I never looked back. With the tactile pleasures of my thousand-strong CD collection a fast-fading memory, I began to do regularly what I’d previously reserved for one-off tracks and new single releases: download music from the iTunes store. At first it felt uncomfortable, the ability to source any album I could conceive at the mere click of a mouse button feeling almost uncomfortably easy. And those incidental pleasures of the physical album – like the first slipping of an inlay booklet out of a cover tray and the obsessive pouring over lyrics and production credits – were suddenly gone, making the experience of a new record all about the music and nothing else. 

            I had not entirely given up on CDs though. While my primary outlet for music shopping was now the internet rather than HMV, happy memories of the good old fashioned record store were vividly reawakened by Auckland’s Real Groovy, an emporium of both new and second records, as well as myriad memorabilia of rock ‘n’ roll past and present. If only the CDs here weren’t so prohibitively expensive, I might even have bought one, but these days the only physical albums I do still buy are box sets whose lovingly designed packaging and unique special features provide significant value beyond the music. 

            Like the UK though, record shops are few and far between in New Zealand. Where music is really starting to thrive here is on the live circuit, where an ever increasing catalogue of bands from distant parts of the Earth are finally starting to wake up to the opportunities of the Kiwi market. In the past - and still today for certain tours - international bands would often trot the globe all the way to Australia, only to turn round and fly back to the northern hemisphere without so much as a chord struck for little old New Zealand. When The Cure, one of my all-time favourite acts, played a three night residence in Sydney where they built whole evenings around some of their most revered albums, it was a case of ‘so close, but so far’.

            But over the past two and a half years I have managed to see more bands in New Zealand than I would have thought possible when I said a sad farewell to my much-loved London gig scene in 2010. Morrissey. Radiohead. New Order. Portishead. The Smashing Pumpkins. These are just some of the iconic groups that have played concerts at Auckland’s Vector Arena in recent times, categorically debunking the assumption of some friends back home that no band of any serious note would ever come to New Zealand. Only last week, The Stone Roses, recently reformed after a 16 year hiatus and still in the early stages of feeling their way back into the UK public’s consciousness, touched down on Kiwi soil for a triumphant evening of late 80s nostalgia at Vector. 

            For a venue that from the outside looks far better suited to basketball or ice hockey than live rock music, Vector has proven to be a surprisingly accommodating domain for the bands I’ve been blessed enough to see perform there. With crisp acoustics and a movable stage that can turn a cavernous, cathedral-sized arena into an almost intimate setting, the gigs I’ve attended there have boasted a sound and atmosphere that many similar venues in the UK would struggle to achieve. 

Good though Vector is, I do tend to feel more at home in smaller, cosier gig venues where I can get up close to a band and see the sweat of a hundred moshing bodies trickling down the walls. Auckland’s answer to this brief is Mount Eden’s The Powerstation, the closest New Zealand has to a Brixton Academy or London Astoria. 

            In my time here, The Power Station has played host to many well-known and critically acclaimed acts from across the world, including some groups who could pack out stadiums with ten times the capacity back home. One such band was Elbow in March last year, only a couple of months before their sleeper anthem ‘One Day Like This’ became the de facto soundtrack to the London Olympics. There was something special about seeing a band from my home country perform so far from the shores where we both grew up, Guy Garvey’s chirpy northern banter cutting a line straight back to Manchester through the largely Kiwi crowd’s chatter.

            Smaller still is possibly my favourite of all the music venues in NZ – the King’s Arms in Newton, which is not only a landmark of local rock ‘n’ roll history, but also one of the few pubs in Auckland with a decent outdoor beer garden. In 2012, the endearingly jangly Real Estate graced its stage not long after releasing one of the best indie albums of recent years, the critically acclaimed ‘Days’. A band built for venues like the King’s Arms, their chiming guitars and lolloping bass lines filled this tiny space with a summery sound that had the whole crowd grooving appreciatively along. 

            I feel a little guilty for not paying more attention to local acts here, but festivals like the Auckland Anniversary Weekend alternative festival Laneways provides a great opportunity to check out the best of New Zealand music as well as visiting bands from overseas. Now in its fourth year, Laneways has never been the best organized of events and this year, for a second year running, murmurs of discontent sounded early when the supposedly VIP portaloos flooded and the entire site’s supply of beer ran out a little after 8pm, well before the main headline acts had got anywhere near the stage. My personal experience of the booze drought was particularly galling. I had queued in the supposedly queue-free VIP bar for well over half an hour – missing most of indie oddballs Yeasayer’s set in the process – only for the guy that I’d ordered four beers from to forget who he’d been serving and hand my drinks straight to a girl standing down the row from me. Feeling charitable, I let the moment pass, and re-ordered from another, sour-faced bartender, only to be informed curtly that the beer – at that very moment – had run out. Suddenly feeling the very opposite of charitable, I tried feebly to explain that her colleague had given the beers I’d ordered and queued patiently for to someone else, but my protestations were met only with a face that read “Do I give a f%^&?”. 

            It was fortunate, then, that the bands on the line-up were a little more inclined to crowd-please. While the highlights of the day were New Zealand’s very own rock chameleons The Phoenix Foundation and rising Aussie stars Tame Impala, whose thunderous White Album-era Beatles psych-rock provided the day with a rousing finale, my biggest cheers were reserved for my fellow Brit Natasha Khan - aka Bat For Lashes - whose stunning voice soared above the booze-fueled crowd with grace and drama. 

            While I still pine for the days when gigs were part of my weekly routine and I could wander down to the local newsagent on a Wednesday morning to pick up a freshly pressed copy of the NME, I’m far from bereft of musical entertainment in NZ and as long as my iPod continues to function (never a given from recent experience), my wall of albums in London at least remains accessible to me through my headphones. And I’d willing to bet that a decade or so from now, world touring bands will leave New Zealand out of their itineraries at their peril.  

Jonny