A life of music and sport

• Published date: 18 April 2024
• Publication title: Mountain Scene

AS Arrowtown School’s sports coordinator and a guitarist in local bands, Paul Winders has made quite an impact during his 15 years in the township

However, the 59-year-old’s more widely known as a guitarist for many years with seminal Dunedin band, The Verlaines.

Six months after joining the band in 1992, they recorded an album, Way Out Where, in Los Angeles.

That record’s now been remastered at London’s Abbey Road and will be re-released in vinyl on Record Store Day this Saturday.

Raised as one of eight kids on a farm just outside Invercargill, Winders says he wanted to be a teacher and a jockey when he was little.

‘‘But then by the age of 10, I was too big to be a jockey, and then I wanted to be a race commentator.’’

While a pupil at Invercargill’s Sacred Heart and Verdon College, rugby was his passion, though, and he was a Southland under-age rep.

‘‘Back then it was rugby, rugby, rugby, we didn’t know anything else.’’

Winders learned piano from a nun, but at 14 taught himself guitar.

‘‘I think guitar was more my style — it’s a bit hard to lug a piano around a party.’’

Music took over when he went to uni and teachers college in Dunedin — those were the years, he says, when there was live music in different pubs from Tuesday till Saturday night, though unfortunately those venues mostly don’t exist any more.

After teachers college he taught in Napier for two years, then returned to Dunedin to finish his degree.

He’d been a fan of The Verlaines — formed in 1981 by Graeme Downes — and when they were looking for a guitarist, he signed on.

Winders played full-time for five years, then part-time.

He only left when he got married and had three kids, he says — ‘‘it’s no kind of life when you’ve got kids’’.

Meantime, he’d moved to Riverton where he was associate principal of the seaside town’s primary school for 10 years.

His artist wife Cathy Tane set up the Riverton Arts Centre, which has since been bowled as a quake risk — sadly, she died of cancer in 2007.

Winders then met and married Riverton woman Janey Wallace and moved to Arrowtown where she was living.

Meantime, he’d got into songwriting, and subsequently recorded two albums with muso mates as Paul Winders and The Goodness.

He says he thoroughly enjoys his Arrowtown...