Music magpie Harry ‘Ratbag’ Russell shares some of his favourite discoveries
Harry Russell - aka Harry Ratbag and Harry the Bastard - grew up in Remuera and was part of Auckland’s underground punk scene in the early '80s before heading overseas to absorb the world’s freshest music in London and New York for a couple of decades.
Harry Russell was just a teenager when he first made his name as a tastemaker - writing irreverent reviews for the Kiwi music magazine Rip It Up.
He released seven inch EPs by his punk band Herco Pilots on his own record label Rem (short for Remuera) and later worked for the enigmatic English record label Rough Trade and the American techno distributor Watts Music.
While living in New York in the '90s, Russell released three popular deep house compilations under Harry the Bastard Presents Club H (Club H was the nickname for his Manhattan apartment).
Harry Russell moved back to New Zealand in the late 2000s.
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It was 1985 when Russell left his “dead end job” in Auckland for the bright lights of London and soon after ran into a schoolmate at a Chills gig.
“He was working at Rough Trade, and said, you want a job here? And I'm like, Yeah, sure. All of a sudden, I'm starting out in the warehouse at Rough Trade and it's just like this massive amount of stuff you've never heard of before that you'd never get in New Zealand and 90 percent of it's absolutely fantastic.
“Imagine being in a dead end job down here, working in an accounting office. And, in London you’ve got the tea lady coming around, smoko was a spliff and a Red Stripe (pie) before you got back into it.
“It was every colour hair you could imagine running around that warehouse picking orders to the sound of these massive Tannoys we had on top of the racks. It got so loud we had to take the phones out because nobody could hear them ring. It was nuts, but it was so much fun. The people, they were great.”
Russell on the cover of Harry the Bastard presents Club H Volume 2,
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In 1989, Russell was transferred to Rough Trade’s New York office and when that folded a couple of years later found a job with the techno distribution company Watts Records, leaving the Big Apple to head home in 2009.
“New York was fun back then - anything went, you know. Now there's a Starbucks on every corner, there's a Chase Bank on every corner, all the little mom-and-pop businesses have been pushed out. Landlords got greedy. The whole place is just like a billionaire circus.”
Harry Russell played:
The Rolling Stones - ‘Sweet Black Angel’
“I've seen the Stones 22 times over the years. This a standout track off one of rock's finest albums - the 1972 double album Exile on Main Street.
“This was a political song. It's about a woman called Angela Davis, who ran into a pile of trouble while she was a professor at UCLA studying Marxism. she got involved with the Black Panthers.”
Big Black - ‘Bazooka Joe’
“I'm partial to a good bit of American hardcore but this one took the biscuit. It was just utterly fantastic. This was on every day in the Rough Trade warehouse, maybe two or three times. And if Rough Trade still had a warehouse today it would still be getting played daily. It was that good.”
Spiritualized - ‘Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’
“We always used to go on a Friday night to this big New York club called The Limelight, which was in Chelsea on Sixth Avenue, about a block away from where I lived.
“It was a very crazy place with pounding hardcore techno the whole time. Imagine 2,500 people in a church with semi-naked dancers hanging from the roof in cages, pilled off their bollocks, dancing to hardcore techno.
“After a night of this mayhem, we'd always go back to my place and listen to Spiritualized because it's just the ideal coming-down music.”
Mr Fingers - ‘Can You Feel It’
“When I started getting into house music it was a lot of cheesy and a lot of techno stuff like that, but I ran into a few things from Chicago. And everything out in Chicago was run by a guy called Larry Sherman, aka Mr Fingers.
Galaxy 2 Galaxy - ‘Hi Tech Jazz’
"I love the music out of Detroit - it's hard music for a hard city."
Snowboy - ‘Casa Forte’ (Joe Claussell's Spiritual Life Samba Remix)
“When I was working at Watts in New York we were importing and wholesaling domestic records.
“One of the big stores in New York was a store called Dance Tracks, and it was a beautiful store down run by two guys Joe Claussell and Stefan Prescott, who were just old record hounds.
“Joe got into production, and when this came out I'm like ‘What the hell's going on here?’ It's a take on an old Cuban percussionist track and they've just remixed it and added a whole bunch of stuff to and it is phenomenal.”
