TESS JAINE
Music plays a loud part of Grant Smithies’ life so it’s no surprise to see him with a smile on his face in his own record store at The Free House Pub in Nelson.
Nelson’s music man Grant Smithies is described as the country’s finest music writer. His ear for a tune and eye for a yarn have led him around the world, to the halls of Hollywood celebrity and to fireside chats with some of the world’s biggest names in music. Yet his roots remain firmly at home with family in Washington Valley and nattering to locals at his record store in central Nelson, where Tracy Neal caught up with him.
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n the vinyl-lined hut, old records in mint condition compete for space with new releases, including Lorde’s latest, Solar Power. It features an odd sticker over her nearnaked butt as she scissors over the album cover. “The record company did that,” Smithies volunteers, lest we think he has a prudish streak. Smithies, as he’s known, has forged a big career out of music, shaped by little else than his dad’s ancient radiogram and his mum’s cassettes which whirred and stuttered around an old tape deck in the kitchen. “I grew up in a skint part of Whanganui, in a house with a yard full of dead cars next door. My old man had a radiogram one of those ancient valve ones, and a bunch of 78s.
“The first record we had was a Beatles compilation called The Essential Beatles. It had a scratch on the song Penny Lane, so it went: “Penny Lane is in my….Penny Lane is in my…over and over, so every time I hear it on the radio I expect the song to do that.” Smithies can hear a fine tune before it’s been created but he doesn’t read music. He admits his musical abilities are limited to the tin whistle – a simple six-holed instrument one might expect to hear rising above the din of the school orchestra. “I got a guitar at some stage, learned to play three chords, then it got dusty in the corner before I gave it away, but I can play a surprising number of semi-adept things on the tin whistle.” Before his ascension to musical raconteur, Smithies spent a
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