I have been trying to write something about the Christchurch earthquake for a couple of weeks now and continue to find it very hard to do. The scale of the disaster is so impossible to comprehend and ones’ perception of it all is constantly challenged and altered as one learns more.
Like a lot of people it has taken a while for the enormity and scale of the destruction to sink in. Television and print news gave us a chilling selected smattering of the devastation in the central city that were indicative of the severity of the quake. But in reality it is talking to family and friends about their actual experiences that gives one a broader view of the enormity of the reality. The simple nuanced voiced response to my offer of going down to help; “no, you really don’t want to come here”, told me more than a days worth of nonstop television news.
I grew up in Christchurch and all my family still live there as do many of my best and oldest friends. The school that I attended, Shirley Boys High, appears to have been devastated and I am pretty sure the building that housed the Record Factory shop I worked at on Colombo Street has gone as has a number of houses, flats and venues that I and my friends lived our music obsessed lives in. It was the local Christchurch music scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s that inspired me to start up Flying Nun. You can see the building that housed our first office here.
The building where the first Flying Nun office was on Hereford Street in Christchurch
The death toll is terrible and the whole event makes Christchurch a very different place to the one I grew up or even visited last year. I really feel for the people trying to pull their lives back together down there. I still don’t really know what to say about it all really. In fact words are a waste of time. We need some action. Over the last week we have been pulling together a compilation of material – much of it either unreleased, unheard or not available digitally – with all proceeds going towards the earthquake relief effort. More about that in the next couple of days
