Roger Perry changed us. A life.
I wrote a few words, quite a few actually, for my buddy, Roger Perry, for AudioCulture, just published in three parts.
With Roger Perry, it’s a matter of where to start. His influence on Aotearoa’s cultural, club, DJ, and electronic music scenes from the mid-1980s onwards was immense and pervasive. It remains omnipresent.
How about we start with an evening at Auckland’s The Asylum? It was late 1986, and Auckland was in the full flush of 1980s club culture, with hip-hop meeting early house music in this vast cavern of a club that would later become The Powerstation. The dancefloor was packed with hundreds of kids from all tribes, all coming together to dance. Roger had just played Farley Jackmaster Funk’s Chicago anthem ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’, and the floor was expectant.
He stopped the record. Silence ... for what felt like an eternity. And then, bam! A huge guitar riff dropped in, and the crowd went totally nuts. It was a moment of pure genius. ‘I Love My Leather Jacket’ by The Chills was a long way from the Chi-town and NYC rhythms that dominated the club, but it was ours, and it was all over student radio at the time.
Roger had only been headlining around the city for two or three years, since his first tentative steps into a DJ booth at Russell Crowe’s The Venue on Symonds Street in 1984, but he was already the name. His tastes and the intuitive way he played music, together with his mix of soul, funk, indie and edgy local pop, defined the growing scene. When he dropped The Chills that December night, he was regularly playing to 1000 people at The Asylum every club night …
Roger Perry, part 1 at AudioCulture.
Roger Perry, part 2 at AudioCulture.
Roger Perry, part 3 at AudioCulture.
Thanks Simon for posting this. I will read your three-parter at AudioCulture in due course. But I did spend a couple of hours watching most of the Roger Perry Celebration video. Hopefully I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve had a chance to absorb it. But I will say this: my strongest memory of Roger—brought back from the photo montage—was the one from 1985 when I first saw him and Tony DJ-ing at Zanzibar. He made such a big impression because we were in such awe of his talent and musical knowledge. So that era of Roger is just imprinted on my brain.