The Eighties is still regarded as something of a wasteland for rock, the first period in which the relentless forward motion that had propelled white boy guitar music from rock and roll, through acid rock and into punk, had run out of steam in a mess of hair metal and anthemic stadium-sized post-punk derivatives.

The good stuff was there, – the DIY splurge of the UK’s C86 movement, something of a psychedelic renaissance on America’s West Coast, and the underground seam of US hardcore that was eventually to blossom into the grunge movement, – but it was buried, and there was no internet to prompt your purchases. Only hearsay, rumour, word of mouth.

I’ve no idea how, as a teenager in a suburb of big industrial town somewhere near the centre of England, I began scouring the shops, sometime in the mid-Eighties, for records on a tiny New Zealand independent label called Flying Nun. I’m pretty sure John Peel, whose appearance in any mini-memoir of this nature is now mandatory, played The Chills’ heart-stoppingly haunting Pink Frost, Bailter Space’s grindingly oppressive Grader Spader, and The Verlaines’ exhilaratingly ambitious Death And The Maiden sometime in the small hours on a school night.

I definitely remember him playing Who Is The Silliest Rossi? by The Birds Nest Roys, so if he got that far into the Flying Nun catalogue it’s reasonable to assume he was playing a lot of it. I suppose I followed the leads.

In August 1987, when I moved into a shared student house on the Iffley Road, with big windows that let in the sun, back when you could still sign on and survive on credit, The Verlaines’ jagged and jangly art-pop was the sound track of my Summer, and singles by The Chills and the heroically precious Sneaky Feelings had been on a lone C90 cassette of my favorite tunes that I took away with me when I first left home. It was clear the Flying Nun bands had an instantly recognisable identity. But what was it? And, at the risk of sounding patronising, how was the tiny population of the far flung archipelago producing such a disproportionately massive amount of whatever in God’s name it was they were doing?

The muso in-joke doing the rounds was that someone in Dunedin in the early 80s owned a Velvet Underground album and, denied of contact with the wider world’s shifting cultural trends, the cargo cult that comprises the kiwi rock intelligentsia had set about endlessly recreating it on the limited equipment that was to hand, busted four tracks and run down studios, accidentally creating a whole new sound and kick-starting that smart, sassy, and sentimental lo-fi movement that Pavement, openly in debt to the Flying Nun aesthetic, were to spearhead in the nineties and beyond. Who knows? Perhaps the Nun bands escaped the limitations of fashion, of trends, of expectations, and cooked up a new sound in splendid isolation.

Kiwi comics working London clubs in the 90s were amazed that anyone in England knew the Flying Nun artists, to them just guys somebody’s sister had been dating ,who played at parties and pubs, back home, thousands of miles away. In 2005 I spent two months doing stand-up in New Zealand, touring student towns and flying over vast tracts of untouched country.

The Gordons and The Clean and The Bats were running on my inner soundtrack all the time, and I imagined that something about the landscape or the lifestyle would suddenly explain Flying Nun, in the way that Salford explains The Fall and Tucson explains Howe Gelb and Giant Sand. At the Auckland comedy festival, Michelle A’court gave me a book about Sneaky Feelings and Brendhan Lovegrove gave me a Skeptics album I’d never heard, but no-one seemed that impressed that I owned a copy of the Dunedin Double 12″ and no simple explanations presented themselves.

I left none the wiser.

And yet you know a Flying Nun record within seconds. “Is this one of those New Zealand bands?”, my wife asks, moments into a Verlaines track, presented at random in the car on the i-pod, a small black rectangle that contains more technology than the equipment those classic Flying Nun records were recorded on. Something inexplicably special happened in the Southern Hemisphere a quarter of a century or so ago, the ripples still rumbling, and without it, all the music you love today would sound ever so slightly, and indefinably, different.

Stewart Lee, writer/clown www.stewartlee.co.uk