In December 2023 the Hawke’s Bay Music Hub launched ‘Under The Sun (Vol.3)’, the latest in a series of compilation albums featuring and promoting local artists, and this NZ Music Month will stage the first Hawke’s Bay Music Industry Gala, an evening of live performances, inspiring talks and networking. The background story mostly involves Kevin Murphy, whose employment history importantly includes senior roles for Sport Hawke’s Bay and Napier council. Richard Thorne talked with him about establishing and maintaining a regional music trust.

Few will be likely to recall the ambitious City Showcase NZ music industry event which took place in Napier in 2012, but no doubt plenty of NZM readers have enjoyed the nationally franchised Blues, Brews and BBQ festivals, which Kevin Murphy ran the Hawke’s Bay version of for about 12 years as event manager.

“I’ve been actively involved in all sorts of events along the way, and through the ’80s NZ music scene I’ve always had an affiliation with and really loved the music side of things.

“Going back about a decade neither Hastings or Napier council had anyone working in the event space, whereas a lot of other councils did. I ended up getting that new role, which sort of gave me the opportunity to merge the arts and music with the sporting content.”

Today his current role as Events Manager for Napier City Council involves about 60 local events throughout the year, and he’s clearly proud of introducing music concerts to Napier’s famed sports ground McLean Park, first with Six60 and in April this year with Tom Jones as their first international act.

“Tom Jones was another great success for us with 85% of the audience coming from outside Hawke’s Bay. And the promoters loved the venue!”

Which brings us back to that 2012 City Showcase NZ music industry event in Napier, during which he had early discussions with Mike Chunn of Play It Strange fame, who lent his weight as chief judge.

“We were sort of throwing around ideas about whether the Play It Strange Trust could extend, or whether we should just create a trust here and focus on educating and giving younger artists especially, more opportunity to understand the industry, and a bit of focus on songwriting. That was really the start of how we ended up creating the Backline Charitable Trust in 2015.”

Well known local musician Tom Peirard, then a music school tutor at Hawke’s Bay’s EIT polytech, and Rhythm & Vines founder Hamish Pinkham, joined Kevin as trustees. Establishing a charitable trust approach meant they could apply for funding.

“Initially, I suppose, we wanted to just bridge the gap between the local artists network and what was happening in Auckland, which is still seen to be the guts of the industry. For the three of us to do that in a volunteer capacity, we were going to be pretty limited to just do things off our own bat.”

In town as a guest at that year’s sports awards event, Julia Deans became the trust’s first mentoring session guest. Now each year sees them hold around six different mentoring sessions, typically afternoons in local high schools followed by evening sessions.

By 2019 it was agreed the trust needed an online platform for the local artists they were supporting to be better seen, and plans for the Hawke’s Bay Music Hub website (hbmusichub.co.nz) started coming together.

“It took a while to round up the money for the creative development, but when we got it up and running the Music Commission and a couple of others around the country could really see the benefit, and were very encouraging. It’s not a commercial booking platform, it’s really just a window into the artists here, and it gets driven by the artists. It’s all free to register, but they have to keep it up to date.”

Kevin admits that ends up being an admin issue for himself, the ever evolving and migratory nature of musicians meaning a revamp of the way the website looks and works is on the cards.

“At the end of the day it has to be driven by the industry around here, and when I say that, it’s the public looking for a band, the artists wanting to be seen, and the venues wanting to be viewed by both artists and promoters. So that’s the angle, and we’ve got an API setting with Eventfinda, so all the local music gigs are in one place, which is quite useful.”

A contract employee helps keep things professional from the backend, listing events on Eventfinda and doing Facebook promotions etc., but largely it’s the unpaid work of trustees Kevin and Tom that keeps things moving forward.

Hawke’s Bay Music Hub newsletters go out to a database of around 1000, the content compiled by Kevin, who likely underestimates his input to average about five hours a week. He’s also on the board of the NZ Events Association, NZEA.

“The whole music landscape and the knowledge that I’ve got can feed into the stuff that I’m doing with the trust, which is really understanding the wider network of where opportunities are for artists.”

Over recent years a line of funding has allowed for the creation and vinyl pressing of three local artists compilation albums called ‘Under The Sun’. For the small trust each represents a lot of work over a six-month period, requiring volunteer input from selection panel members, along with professional services like artwork design and mastering at Munki Studios in Wellington.

Kevin recalls an earlier local Hawke’s Bay compilation on cassettes, and maybe CD when he was young, which possibly led him to the idea.

“Getting access to NZ On Air funding for a young artist coming through, when you’re in a region, is not that easy. And you could count on one hand how many people have had that funding from Hawke’s Bay over the last six to seven years. So we thought well, ‘What else can we do to help profile the more active or motivated artists that want to be part of something like this?’ Understanding that not everyone will, but some will probably want to see what it looks like before they get involved.”

A local connection to Holiday Records led to them pressing 300 copies of Vol. 1 in 2021, with funding from the Lion Foundation. Half were sent out to an industry database, the other half given to the artists included for their own use.

‘Under The Sun Vol. 2’ included MC Mouse, Danica Bryant, Arahi, Nick Herbison and The Munros among others, with growing enthusiasm meaning about 50 songs were submitted. Local musicians who might have moved off to university elsewhere qualify for inclusion, Bryant being an example.

‘Under The Sun Vol. 3’ was released in December 2023 at a function that doubled as a farewell to Tom Pierard, who was heading off to teach in Kuala Lumpur for the next two years.

With no double-up artists this time the 11 tracks include Te Tokotoru, Molly Pawson, Lucid Hiest, Miakie, Bradley Lewis, Kenya Boerman and The Phil Edwards Band among others. Easily found on Spotify. Kevin says that recording time and producer knowledge are aspects that currently hold back a lot of artists.

“The biggest problems that we’ve identified in the region is access to producers, and also access to studios. In a place like Hawke’s Bay, it’s virtually non-existent. There’s a few private studios run by engineers, and EIT have some studios for their students, but we don’t have anything publicly available like The Stomach in Palmy.

“There’s also only a couple of producers openly available to work with a young artist here, then you’ve really got to travel to Auckland or Wellington, and so straight away there’s a cost barrier.

“Five years ago, we were lucky enough to have the first ever regional song hub session here usually has APRA brought their Songhubs to Hawke’s Bay and some of the connections and associations that have happened since then, with some of those producers and some of the Hawke’s Bay artists have been gold. So we’ve tried to pick that up as a trust, doing one day writing sessions.”

On the same day the new compilation was released last December, they had Laughton Kora looking after a group of four writers, while Josh Wells and Harry Charles worked with another four.

“Again, that was pulled together by scraps the money from APRA and a local trust, but I think that’s the direction that the trust is now wanting to move in – to really focus on those who are motivated to go up to the next level, and to give them experiences like the writing sessions. Because if they don’t get to rub shoulders with some of those sorts of producers, it just makes the whole thing just so much harder.”

With the aid of funding from the NZ Music Commission, HBMH will kick off NZ Music Month with a live celebration of home-grown talent at the Toitoi Arts And Event Centre in Hastings. Billed the Hawke’s Bay Music Industry Gala, it includes the chance to network with promoters, event planners and fellow music enthusiasts.

The challenge of funding their modest suite of artist support activities is continuous, and with NZ Music Month approaching when we talk, Kevin is on the hunt for new sponsorship options to deliver mentoring sessions over the rest of 2024 and beyond.

“I do find it frustrating that it seems a lot harder motivating businesses (including a variety of funding entities) to support contemporary music compared with things like sporting events – and yet most people have very strong memories that include songs and music of some sort at various stages in their lives. Without support for emerging artists to help progress in a very tough industry, those music memories just might not be so many in the future.