School of rock

April 16, 208

Smokefreerockquest, the annual competition to find the best from hundreds of high school rock bands, is celebrating its 20th year with a function in Wellington today. Geoff Collett talks to the Nelson-based organisers about why the kids keep coming back year after year. --------------------
Ah, the wit of youth. Featured band on the Smokefreerockquest website: Bridget Jones' Diarrhoea. Their self- penned profile: "A recently formed band, from the wonderful town of Marton (commonly referred to as the hub of the Rangitikei). We love, everyone and thing." Stated inspirations: Foo Fighters, David Bowie, Muse, Lights Out Pants Off Posse, Alexisonfire, etc, etc. "Although we do not particularly sound like these bands, we're (still) cool."
Surely they'd be worthy winners in this, the 20th anniversary year of the Rockquest, for their name alone, never mind their carefully honed insouciance? After all, surely the pose is 90 percent of the winning formula in rock'n'roll?
Well, maybe. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Today, the folks behind Smokefreerockquest are celebrating the event's 20th year with a shindig in Wellington, presided over by the prime minister, but the real business at hand hasn't even started yet. As soon as the party is over, they will be back home to Nelson to gird themselves for trundling up and down the country during May and June, listening to something like 650 high school rock groups, through the heats, the regional finals and then the national final, to find another year's winner.
Guaranteed there'll be dozens of those they see and hear in the weeks ahead who are at least as clever as our friends from wonderful Marton, if it's cleverness you're looking for. Guaranteed, too, that there'll be dozens - probably hundreds - who will be downright forgettable, correctly destined to vanish from the stage for good after their five minutes of fame in front of the judges and a bunch of mates.
But most certain of all, a relative handful will be sharp enough even as 17, 16 or 15-year-olds to promise some kind of bright career in rock music.
Which underlines the point: if there was ever an anniversary that warrants a short spell of reflection and recognition, it would be this one, both for the enthusiasm and recognition the quest has brought to bear on the country's wannabe teen idols, and for the stamina demanded of the organisers, who have spent most of the past 20 years regularly facing up to the legions of bright-eyed youth, all wanting to sup at the cup of rock infamy.
The event's two stalwarts are Nelsonians Pete Rainey and Glenn Common, who have run the Rockquest for 19 of its 20 years. They took it on in 1989, when both worked as high school music teachers in Christchurch.
The inaugural event was hosted in 1988 by a radio station in that city. Even if, as Common recalls now, the first one had a few issues - including being won by "a couple of haircuts and a drum machine . . . it was basically a karaoke performance"; and even if rock music performance was ignored in school music curriculums of the day, he and Rainey were sufficiently impressed to take up the challenge of a repeat effort.
Rockquest's formula is simple: high school-based bands get to perform on a real stage, through a concert-sized sound system, in front of a real audience (made up of their peers). Reasonably early on in the event's life, the stipulation was added that they would play original music.
Rainey and Common's first go at the format was again a solely Christchurch event. To their astonishment, they packed out that city's Theatre Royal. The kids and the performances, as they say, went off.
The next year, in 1990, the pair secured more funding and took the event further afield. The first of 20-years-and- counting worth of stars were born.
Today, both men are Nelson-domiciled, and joined by a third fulltime member of the Smokefreerockquest venture, Dan Kendrick. They work from a grungy sort of office behind a central Nelson tyre shop, although a shiny espresso machine and various music gear lying around suggest that the grunginess may be a little bit studied.
As they talk through their views of the last two decades, some things become most evident. It has not made them rich, but nor has it made them jaundiced, even if the music industry can be a struggle to deal with.
The Rockquest has had its near moments when sponsors have suddenly decided to sponsor something else. Its main backer, the state anti-tobacco sponsorship outfit Smokefree, has been with it 19 of the 20 years.
Maybe most important is that the pair have not used the event as an excuse to kid themselves that they are cool by dint of their involvement with such a youthcentric carnival. They realised very early on that the magic ingredient to gaining the acceptance of their target market was to give the kids as much control over things as possible, with the adults fading into the background, concerning themselves with making sure things happened smoothly and safely.
Other than that, the bands were kids and the audience were overwhelmingly the same.
"It wasn't mums and dads, nanas and grandads, little brothers and sisters. It was their mates, their peers coming along . . . I reckon that's still one of the key ingredients to it, " Common says.
What you see at a Rockquest event is very much driven by the participants, he says. Beyond basic rules - a time limit to each performance, for instance - they can do what they like.
"We've never stopped a performance because of the nature of what they were performing on the stage, " Rainey says.
Perhaps the fact that the schools offer a guiding hand in supporting bands into the event might help to reduce some of the enthusiasm for teen excess, but he reasons that it is ultimately self- regulating: "Kids realise that in the long- term this is about being successful in the music industry."
Silly stuff, like letting rip with lots of swearing, is ultimately a dead-end.
In turn, most schools are remarkably tolerant: conservative boys' schools, for example, who give tacit approval to a bunch of their lads showing up to growl and bark through some death metal silliness.
"What we've found is that schools suddenly realise this is a bunch of kids who may not necessarily have been successful at anything in school . . . Even if it's death metal, at least they're doing something, " Rainey says.
"And also the kids have to learn to get on with their teachers and their principal, and to negotiate time and space and all those things . . .
"You can't just play. You also have to be responsible to be able to organise all the things that support a band."
While media attention paid to the Rockquest may focus on today's big- name acts who got their start in the event, in one sense such success - and for that matter, all of the music they expose themselves to - seems immaterial. It is the journey rather than the destination that counts.
Rainey does offer the line that the Rockquest is "the research and development arm of the New Zealand music industry"; the pair add that it is getting harder to find the emerging big names who haven't got a Smokefreerockquest pedigree, as its tentacles have spread.
But whether the industry treats the event as enthusiastically as it might, or whether the bands parading before them are performing death metal, a cappella show tunes or bluebeat reggae barely matters in the grand scheme of things.
What does matter is giving them the opportunity to play on a big stage, through a decent sound system, with a big audience. "And treat them with respect, as adults saying to young people, 'We do want to listen to what you're going to play. We're not going to put our fingers in our ears and run away telling you to shut up', " Rainey says.
However gruelling the prospect may seem of year-in, year-out listening to hundreds of bands, some dreadful, many entirely predictable, Rainey promises that once on the road, it all quickly makes sense again. "It's incredibly infectious once you get out there."
The supposed fickleness and fashion-sensitivity of youth is what makes Rockquest's longevity most noteworthy - rather than falling from favour as new generations have come along, it has grown in popularity. Common says entries have grown about 5 percent a year in recent years.
The fact that the event is now older than any of its participants provokes some ironic humour. Rainey suggests, only half-kidding, that they will need a special prize for the first young band member who tells them that "my mum was in Rockquest". Then he stops laughing - that, he ponders, will be scary.
Most of all, Rockquest plays a huge part in the lives of budding musicians across the country, and especially in small towns, where it's often the biggest organised event for youngsters all year.
Rainey likes to reflect on the social benefits Rockquest has brought with it, bringing teenagers together in a determinedly teen-focused constructive way. There's been one fight - maybe two - in 20 years, he says. Problems with alcohol are almost solely the preserve of parents watching the action from the back of the hall. He muses on what could be if school rock bands attracted anything like the energy and attention devoted to sport: if they got the chance to do the Rockquest thing six times a year instead of once, what a force that could be for the country's youth. "Then, far out, things would really change." Nelson Mail