H-town wiki
The H-town wiki: a brief history
Google any aughties Hamilton music trivia and you’re bound to come across the h-town wiki. An incredible rabbit warren and chronicle to the Hamilton music scene, from the heady days of the “artists’ dole” (ahem, I’m sorry, the Pathway to Arts and Cultural Employment (PACE), which ran from 2001 to 2012), and when radio stations had a voluntary quota of 20% local music content.
One of its founders, Dan Satherley, says that actually two or three people really came up with the idea at the same time, around 2006, to fill a vacuum created by the demise of the contact/UFM/generator complex in 2003. (One of which is University of Waikato Associate Professor Ian Duggan - you can read about his musical extracurriculares here).
Clinton zine
“I don't think I was the only one, from memory, but having already started/been involved with other online things - like the egroup/YahooGroup email list in 2000, and then htown.co.nz [an online forum he ran from 2003 with a guy who's online name was “drift”, and who’s real name he’s since forgotten]… I guess I was the most likely to actually bother to do it.` Satherley also “80% ran” Hamilton zine Clinton from 2000 - 2001, which also faithfully documented the Hamilton music scene at that time (its back catalogue can be found, you guessed it, on the wiki), and worked for both UFM and then Generator (both, in that order, were iterations of what used to be contact fm, the original University of Waikato student radio station).
Satherley says there was nothing especially difficult or unique about what they were doing; just a willingness to set up and contribute to projects like the zine, the wiki, and the forum. “It honestly surprises me there weren't equivalents in other cities around New Zealand. All it took was having an idea, a willingness to act on it, and then someone who had the technical chops to carry it out, which by 2006, wasn't that hard anymore.
“None of us were so technically minded as to know how to even change the logo [of the wiki] - as you can see, 17 years later it's still the default image,” says Duran.
Peter Smith, who for a time was the bassist for Wellington band Family Cactus, often found himself in Hamilton because of his then-girlfriend, but specifically remembers the h-town wiki and how it captured the vibe of the scene; how it was different to Auckland and Wellington. “It made it seem like there was a positive, inclusive community in Hamilton. It didn’t really seem to matter that much who you were or what music you were making, people just liked that you were making music in Hamilton. Dynamo Go? Rad. Mobile Stud Unit? Awesome. Katchafire? Sweet.”
“It had an endearing combination of self-mythologising and self-deprecating,” he continues. “If your band had only played one show of covers? You could have a page, and you probably did… While Auckland and Wellington bands were probably writing their own pages on actual wikipedia, quoting Cheese On Toast reviews calling them ‘the new Strokes’ or whatever.”
Returning to Duran, perhaps some of motivation for the h-town wiki was a proverbial middle finger to these other scenes. “I think maybe the reason we went so hard was we had this impression that others saw Hamilton as a musical backwater,” he says, “and we wanted to prove them wrong. Auckland bands would come down often and get their arses handed to them by local bands, and we were wondering why our bands weren't getting coverage in the magazines. And by the early/mid 2000s most of us were online, and it was virtually cost-free, so we went for it.”
And unlike the myspace of the day, it’s all still there for our present-day enjoyment, and is infinitely more readable as a companion to the era. Duran continued to post to htown.co.nz even once he’d moved to Auckland, although this is the year, he says, where he will finally have been living in Auckland for longer than he was ever was in Hamilton (he moved here age 7). “As Datsuns producer Scott Newth once told me, you can leave Hamilton but you'll never get the stink out… I'm pretty sure my old Fender guitar amp in the garage has a UFM sticker on it,” he says, “and a 'student debt $5 billion' sticker, which shows its age..”
The five greatest H-town wiki pages
Issue 19 included a thinly-veiled takedown of UFM management of the day
“Borne out of everything from patriotism to derision, there have been a number of songs inspired by Hamilton.” They are compiled here.
Hamilton circle jerk was a long-running Hamilton event where Hamilton bands would cover each others’ songs. A later attempt to renamed it Harden up Ow was hopeless; the original name just stuck.
Jed, whoever he is: “Cantankerous driving force behind Truckers Move America and The Sadie Hawkins Atom Bomb, and guitarist for SophieXEnola. Relocated to Wellington in a fit of pique.” We are all Jed.
RIP the Wailing Bongo. We still don’t understand their hack whereby they could serve alcohol to 18-year-olds prior to the law change, but sacred heart girls of a certain vintage will remember it well.
