From the birth of Britpop to carving out a life at the bottom of the world

• Published date: 09 September 2022
• Publication title: Oamaru Mail

FRASER Lewry may just be the most interesting person you didn’t know lived in Oamaru

The Kiwi-born ex-Londoner has a long list of achievements on his CV, not least of which is featuring in documentary Kick Out The Jams: The Story of XFM, about the early days of a ground-breaking British radio station, released in the UK last week.

He is online editor for Classic Rock magazine — which at last check had more than 1.7million Facebook followers; had a cooking column in The Guardian newspaper (‘‘Fraser Lewry’s Animal Alphabet’’ — yes it is exactly as it sounds, octopus and ostrich surf ’n’ turf, anyone?); and started a cult website: Kittenwar! May the Cutest Kitten Win!

Mr Lewry was born in Wellington to ‘‘£10 Pom’’ parents who moved to New Zealand in the 1950s, met, got married, had two children and moved the family back to London in 1979, when he was 12.

He had always wanted to work in the music industry, and even based his choice of university around being ‘‘where the music was’’.

‘‘I applied to five different schools in London ... I wanted to be somewhere where I could go out every night and watch bands play, and so I got into a college, and then left after a year, to go and work in a record shop, because that seemed like a more sensible career move.’’

From there, Mr Lewry landed a job as a roadie for a band, which had some success — playing at Glastonbury and Reading music festivals and garnering television and radio airtime.

‘‘For a while they had a sound man, who went on and started a radio station — it was a station that was based in the offices of the band The Cure, and so for a while he employed me as a kind of a station lackey, for want of a better word.’’

That station was XFM, and it started off with two-week trial broadcasts, a couple of times a year between 1992 and 1996, before gaining a broadcasting licence.

‘‘During those trials I would literally live at the station. I would sleep overnight on the sofa, I would get up at 6am to greet the first DJ in and I would work through till 2am the following morning, sleep for four hours on the sofa, and get up and do it all over again, not showering, seven days a week.

‘‘I’d go home once a week for a break, and then come back to the station again.’’

The station started up just before Britpop bands like Blur, Oasis, Radiohead and Supergrass were household names.

‘‘So we got a kind of a reputation for supporting underground music and new bands, before this huge, big successful wave, and so when those bands...