As New Zealand music has become a brand over the last decade, many of its earlier champions have been forgotten.

Take Brian Wafer. The Taranaki native ran the Ima Hitt label for a decade and half, releasing great local punk acts like Sticky Filth, The Warners and many others. He also owned the record store of the same name in New Plymouth, ran the notorious Mushroom Balls, and promoted international acts.

It all started for Wafer when he witnessed a band The Trend, playing Beatles covers in a local gym when he was 10. For the next 10 years music ruled his life, although he says that he was growing bored with it before punk came along. He remembers seeing bands like Fragments of Time, the prog rock act that soon morphed into Mi-Sex.

“We were talking about music,” Wafer reflects. “I said,  ‘come around home’, and they drove their bus to my parents’ and I played them Sex Pistols, Radio Birdman, the first Fall single. And (guitarist) Kevin Stanton said, ‘hey, there could be a future in playing this stuff’.”
Sure enough, Mi-Sex went on to play their own commercial interpretation of punk, and found massive success in Australia. It may be the most spectacular example of Wafer turning people on to great music, but he sees it differently.

“I run into people all the time and they’ll introduce me: ‘this is the guy that turned me onto music’,” Wafer laughs. “And I say, ‘no, I’m the guy that helped ruin your life, mate’. That’s a better way to be remembered.”

Over the years he was actively involved in music it’s safe to say Wafer helped ruin a lot of people’s lives. He first dipped his toes in when bands like Toy Love and No Idea were coming through New Plymouth in the late 1970s. When the band outnumbered punters at a Toy Love gig, Wafer took it upon himself to start promoting acts coming through.

A few years later Taranaki bands like Nocturnal Projections, Casualty, and Final Solution started to emerge. Wafer says the scene in New Plymouth began to converge into something he wanted to be more involved in. A conversation with a friend convinced him that the town could use a label to document what was going on, and Wafer couldn’t see any particular reason not to do it.

Ima Hitt Records began as a cassette label in 1981, and over its first few years released a range of acts, beginning with blues man Ralph Bennett’s Live At El Clubbo. Wafer continued with a Casualty/Final Solution split, then the likes of Penknife Glides, Vividly Anonymous, Mice in the Radiogram, and Skeptics.

“By then it was just like, why not?” he explains. “Anything can be done. I suppose now the mystique of how to do things is well and truly gone, but then there seemed to be a big wall you had to climb over even to get any knowledge. Once I did a bit of research and started to understand it was like, yeah, let’s do it.”

Throughout the ’80s Wafer released a bunch of cassettes, including compilations like 1984’s Ima Cassette Thing in 1984. Within a year several things had happened − Wafer opened the Ima Hitt Records shop in New Plymouth, he saw Sticky Filth play, and he started booking bands at the White Hart Hotel.

The record shop and the label were intertwined, and Wafer says the idea was that the shop would finance releases. Even then his devotion to the cause was such that he was working day jobs, often as a commercial cleaner, to keep financially afloat.

But Sticky Filth repaid Wafer’s dedication, becoming an inspiration to him. In 1985 he released their The Lion And The Witch tape, which was followed in 1987 by the live 7” record At Least Rock’n’Roll Doesn’t Give You Aids. It was the second slab of vinyl on Ima Hitt, after the What Is This Place? compilation.

They were pressed at EMI in Wellington, on the last commercial record pressing plant in New Zealand. It was soon decommissioned and allegedly dumped in Cook Strait.

“I thought, ‘shit, we’ve got to get a record out before that’, Wafer remembers. “I went through some live tapes I had and put out 200 records, made the covers and everything before the band even knew. They didn’t know until the day it arrived. I thought it was a great thing to do. And bang, we had it in the shop the next morning. And they were gone.”

Sticky Filth’s albums Weep Woman Weep (1987) and Nectar Of The Gods (1990) went on to become some of Ima Hitt’s biggest sellers. They played with several other bands at the first Mushroom Ball at the Railway Hall in 1987. Over the next 10 years the event took on mythical proportions, with people coming from around the country to partake in the intoxicating brew of punk rock and psilocybin.

“You’d have your skinheads, punk rockers, and bikers there,” Wafer says. “There were some great bands, and probably some not so great ones. And some good experiences – the guy from TAB at the Westown Hotel just dropped his pants on stage and set his pubes on fire. And sometimes there were people who’d had too many mushrooms doing strange things on and off stage. Dancing out in the middle of the intersection. But it’s all good fun.”

In the meantime there were releases from New Plymouth and elsewhere, including Wretched Skinny, Nefarious, TAB, and Reptiles At Dawn. And further compilations such as 1990’s great North Island punk compilation Celebrate The Sonic Arts. Some sold well while others didn’t. “It’s always good if people dig what you’re doing – that’s a bonus,” Wafer says. “But the bottom line is you do things like that because you’re into them and you just want to share the good stuff. Sometimes the world doesn’t want to know and that’s a bit tough. But when they do want to know then that’s good.”

Unfortunately Australia didn’t really want to know. A deal with Australian record label Waterfront soured after they could only shift Sticky Filth albums, while others languished on the shelves. That and ongoing issues with Inland Revenue over late tax returns contributed to Ima Hitt closing in the mid-’90s. Wafer had been touring international acts of the calibre of Bad Brains, Zeni Geva, No Means No and Unsane. It was enjoyable work, but money was tight. The crunch came when he realised he couldn’t even afford to buy his kids an ice cream. But for Wafer there are no regrets.

“The whole thing was very inspiring to be involved in,” he reflects. “Rock’n’roll was exciting and I felt like I’d found a purpose in life for a change. It was almost like a spiritual awakening. And it carried on for quite a while, but died a slow agonising death, because you don’t give up on good things.”

These days Wafer spends much of his time collecting vinyl. Recently he bought a rare copy of Sticky Filth’s At Least Rock’n’Roll Doesn’t Give You Aids on TradeMe. It was, he says, extremely expensive. But he had to have it.