My friend Maureen could only remember going to one live show in the late 50s & that was to see Johnny Devlin when he played at the Town Hall in Lower Hutt. She wasn’t given permission to go but went anyway, leaving the house via a window & running to meet a boy who had the loan of his father’s Ford Prefect for the evening. The show was wonderful & hadn’t diminished in her memory over time, despite the recall that quite soon after the show the family found out that she went even though she was told she was not allowed to.

Her interest in music was sparked again when she began at teachers’ training college in Wellington. These were the days when there were large numbers of coffee bars in the city that had live music & were extremely popular. Monde Marie was the hub for local folk singers & attracted large crowds. On Friday nights with a group of students, Maureen went to venues like Man Friday or the Mexicali to listen to local bands play (covers of course) before catching the late train home.

In Auckland when I was first there, I went to the Monaco almost every Saturday night. The Four Fours played there early in 1966. Later it was Larry’s Rebels who played at the Monaco each weekend. Just occasionally I went to the Top 20, the Shiralee (later re-named the Galaxie) or the Platterack, where at the latter, towards the end of 1966 I first heard the La De Da’s.

Embarrassed as I am to confess this now, the first live show I ever went to (in 1963) was one by the Howard Morrison Quartet. I went with a girl a year younger than me. Our mothers were friends so decades later I presumed in a well-meaning way our mothers thought we would enjoy this show & accordingly bought us girl tickets. I just wanted to go to pop shows; knew even before I was aware of the term that this show was middle-of-the-road & suitable for the whole family not what provincial teenage girls craved for.

The first show I asked to go to was On Stage ’64 featuring Max Merritt & the Meteors plus solo singers like Tommy Adderley & Lyn Barnett. I went with a class-mate who loved music as much as I did. Often over the decades I have recalled that show. I thought the sound was loud that night (compared to the volume I was allowed to play records at home) but really it wasn’t loud at all when I think about hearing Led Zeppelin at Western Springs in Auckland in 1972. Now that was L-O-U-D.