Peter Gutteridge (The Clean) passed away
A founding member of the Clean, Peter Gutteridge had little time for many of his Kiwi contemporaries, but was one of the greats of Flying Nun. And there goes another. In a scene of unsung heroes, one of the least sung will be making no more music, changing no more lives from his place on the periphery. Peter Gutteridge – described as “a true hero of New Zealand music” by Flying Nun, the label that has released so many of his recordings – has died.
Gutteridge, who was in his early 50s – no one seems to know exactly how old – had been a founder member of arguably the two most important Flying Nun groups, the Clean and the Chills, though he didn’t have a lot of time for the latter. “It was too controlled for me. There wasn’t enough room for me to really explore stuff,” he said in a rare interview last year, with unusual frankness for a man from a small place, in a music scene where everyone knew each other. “It was too regimented. I’m not a particularly technical guitarist, but I like certain sounds. Certain rhythms. I’m interested in drone music as well as melody. I don’t like to pigeonhole myself too much. I just found that with the Chills I just couldn’t go with their aesthetic. It bored me.”
In fact, he didn’t care for a lot of the music he was considered a founding father of – the music known as the Dunedin Sound for the South Island city it came from. Hence the group he would form in the late 1980s, Snapper, had little in common with the jangly melancholy of the Dunedin Sound. They sounded like a band who took drugs, and in that interview last year Gutteridge took quite a scornful attitude to those who view drugs as no more than a bit of fun: “Most people take hallucinogens and never take them again. That is the common thing. They have a brief phase in their life when they take them. I, on the other hand, take hallucinogens. I take them on a serious level. Not for amusement.”
Source: The Guardian
Image source: http://www.offthetracks.co.nz/r-i-p-peter-gutteridge/
