New Zealand Net Radio

About New Zealand Net Radio

Recorded programmes and themed mixes from New Zealand Net Radio.

Publisher

New Zealand Net Radio

Category

music

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Apr 2026

Latest episode

23 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

55 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Oct 2026

   In The Mix: New Wave Friday Pt 3

   Fifty years ago this week, a small London label that had been going for barely two months released a two-and-a-half-minute single by a band called the Damned. "New Rose" came out on 22 October 1976. It's generally counted as the first record by a British punk band, it didn't chart, and it was on Stiff Records. Stiff had started that summer with £400 borrowed from the singer in Dr. Feelgood. Its first release, Nick Lowe's "So It Goes," cost £45 to make. Over the next decade the label gave us Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Madness, Kirsty MacColl and the Pogues, and it lost a fair few of them along the way. This week's New Wave Friday is Stiff's hour. We start in 1976 with the Damned and with the Saints, whose "(I'm) Stranded" came out in Brisbane a month earlier and on their own label, so they beat the British to it. We also pay a visit to Propeller in Auckland, another label that started on $400 and a hunch. There's a running story in the middle of the hour. Kirsty MacColl's first single went to number two on the radio airplay chart in 1979, but nobody could buy it because the distributors were on strike. Four years later Tracey Ullman took the same song to number two, and the high note everyone remembers on that record is Kirsty's. We also stop for two singers who died on the same day last month: Pete Byrne of Naked Eyes, whose Bacharach cover went to number two in New Zealand while it stalled at 59 in Britain, and Catherine Ringer of Les Rita Mitsouko, the voice of French new wave. The hour finishes with a Damned record from this year, Nick Lowe still going strong at 77, and a Stiff number one that spent two weeks stuck behind the Village People. Broadcast 23 October 2026

2. 

   21 Oct 2026

   Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Laura Groves

   Two weeks ago, when Jarrett McCall counted down his favourite songs of 2015, one of them came from a four-track EP on a tiny London label, sung by a woman most of our listeners had never heard of. Laura Groves grew up in Shipley, near Bradford, with a radio mast across the road, and she has spent her career trying to bottle the feeling of watching its red light at night. She started out as Blue Roses, making hushed folk for XL Recordings at twenty-one, then reinvented herself in London with electric pianos, eighties synths and a voice that cuts straight through them. She produces most of it herself, releases it slowly, and has picked up admirers including Sampha, Bat for Lashes and the Cocteau Twins' own label, Bella Union. This week I've asked Jarrett back to make the case for her properly. He's brought five songs, and he's built them with real care: one from every record she has released under her own name. There's the night-drive synth of Inky Sea, from her first solo EP in 2013, and the piano ballad Friday (on a Friday, naturally), from the same 2015 EP that gave us Dream Story. There's Any Day Now from her 2023 album Radio Red, and Deep Blue, a Juno-106 confession from last year's Yes EP. His No. 1 comes from A Private Road, the 2020 record she made almost entirely alone. I won't tell you its title yet, except to say that after an hour of songs set after dark, it's exactly right. Broadcast 21 October 2026

3. 

   19 Oct 2026

   Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Three Dog Night

   Ken Cheshire is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best this week, and he's brought one of the oddest success stories in American pop. Three Dog Night had three lead singers and four musicians who rarely got the credit they deserved. They almost never wrote their own hits. For about five years, few bands in America sold more records. Danny Hutton, Cory Wells and Chuck Negron came together in Los Angeles in 1967. Brian Wilson briefly tried to produce them, and they took their name from a cold-weather saying about how many dogs you'd need to keep warm. Their real talent was finding songs. They took the work of writers like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro and Hoyt Axton and turned it into twenty-one Top 40 hits, three of them number ones. The critics mostly sneered, and the radio didn't care. Ken's five follow the band from their 1968 debut to their best-selling album. He opens with One, the Nilsson song written to the rhythm of a busy signal, which Chuck Negron talked the record company into releasing as a single. Next comes Easy to Be Hard, borrowed from the musical Hair, and then Mama Told Me (Not to Come), the Randy Newman song Cory Wells spent three albums persuading the others to record, which became their first number one. Danny Hutton gets his turn on Liar, a Russ Ballard song that had flopped for Argent, sung with an echo the band found in the studio bathroom. To finish, Ken skips the 1972 hit Black and White and goes for Midnight Runaway, the heavy closing track by a writer almost nobody has heard of. All three voices get a turn, and Chuck Negron, who died in February, sings the first song and the last. The show airs eleven years, almost to the day, after we lost Cory Wells, so it doubles as a quiet tribute. And with Danny Hutton, the last of the three singers, telling his side of the story to Rolling Stone just this week, we'll be weaving in a few of his tales along the way, from Harry Nilsson knocking on his hotel door to say thanks, to a last song for Brian Wilson. Broadcast 19 October 2026