Tony Stamp: 'Once I started just making beats my music fell into place'

With an origin story that includes being "bullied" onto the microphone by his 95bFM colleague Wallace Chapman and invited to tell weird tales by his Facebook friend David Farrier, Tony Stamp has been part of the RNZ Music team for close to two decades.

Starting out as a sound engineer, the award-winning music journalist now works as the producer of Music 101 and host ofThe Sampler.

On his mixtape of five favourite songs, a radio-friendly '80s hit rubs against some saucy R&B first heard at Khuja Lounge and the "warm and inviting" electronica of Four Tet.

After growing up in South Auckland and studying at Auckland University, Stamp scored his first job in broadcasting as production assistant at Auckland student radio station 95bFM.

He got a taste for being on the microphone after his former creative director there (and now host of RNZ's The Panel) Wallace Chapman "basically bullied him into the voice booth".

For 14 years, Stamp co-hosted bFM's Saturday Drive show and also learnt how to edit and tell a story with audio while working on the station's New Zealand music show Inside Track.

A few years later, writing became another string in his bow when the editor of movie website flicks.co.nz Steve Newall- who Stamp was in a Game of Thrones Facebook group with - invited him to write some reviews.

Later, in a different Facebook group, journalist David Farrier read some of Stamp's posts about the "weird stuff" he'd discovered online, and invited him to write the column Totally Normal.

In 2010, Stamp's first solo-produced audio story to air on RNZ was a report on the Christian musical festival Parachute. Twelve years later, for his work on long-form documentaries about local music, including a story about hip-hop musicians who've become mentors, he was "stoked" to win the inaugural Outstanding Music Journalism Award at the 2022 Taite Music Prize.

While it was "intense" looking down at a line-up of famous musicians' faces in the front row as he gave his acceptance speech, Stamp has met and interviewed quite a few of his music heroes over the years, including local acts Pitch Black and Shihad and the American iconoclast David Byrne in 2020 and again in 2025.

One memorable day, the Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killah strolled into the BfM studio with two minders while his Drive co-host Dominic Corry (aka Carlton Crisp) was doing a snack review.

"On mic, he said, 'Hi, Ghostface Killah. Would you like some raspberry liquorice? And Ghostface Killah said, 'No, thank you.' From then on, he was super cool. He talked to all of us. He shook hands. He was great."

Stamp, who releases music on Bandcamp as TL Stamp, started writing "really bad singer-songwritery stuff" - which he later scrubbed from the internet - as a teenager.

Living just outside of Dublin for a year in his early 20s, in the form of his cousin's musician husband, he had his first encounter with someone making music on their computer at home - "a relatively new thing at that time".

On his own laptop years later, Stamp says he managed to face the fact that he was never going to be a "good singer".

"Once I started just making beats, it kind of fell into place… All of that [ TL Stamp] stuff that I've made over the last five to 10 years, I really stand by. I think it's really good."

Stamp still frequently hits play on this 1984 hit that he remembers hearing as a child in Papatoetoe.

"It has lived with me my entire life, and I still think it's absolutely fantastic. I really enjoy it."

After agonising over which song to choose by pioneering indie band The Pixies for his Mixtape, Stamp went for the one that was his "gateway" to becoming a lifelong fan.

"This is where it all started", an impressive older cousin told the young Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins fan as he handed over a cassette of the 1989 Pixies album Doolittle.

"[Their music] did seem like this vaguely scary thing that was for people older than me, definitely people cooler than me. I'm still in love with that record, it's such a strange album… every time I go back to it, I still love it."

For Stamp, this "wild card" song selection represents a time in the early 2000s when he spent every weekend dancing to R&B and hip-hop at the Auckland venues Khuja Lounge, Rakinos and Galatos.

"This is just a song that I've always come back to, and it gives me a chance to shout out Timbaland and Missy Elliott... that production was insane and still is so forward-thinking. I remember going to Khuja and hearing this track."

Stamp was working at The CD Store on Vulcan Lane when a colleague "twisted his arm" into listening to the 1997 album Thriller by Nashville band Lambchop. To his delight, he discovered a country band had made a soul record.

"There's horns and a gospel choir and all these accoutrements… Man, I would put this at the drop of a hat any day, anytime. It is so good, so uplifting."

A 2016 performance by this Scottish vocal trio at Auckland venue Cassette Nine rates as one of the best shows Stamp says he's ever seen.

"The power of that performance, just singing over a backing track, was just incredible, phenomenal… Amazing, amazing performers, like such infectious energy. And yeah, it stayed with me."

Listen to Tony Stamp's interview with Young Fathers member Graham Hastings here

This 2004 track by British producer Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) is the most similar in sound to the music he releases as TL Stamp, he says. (The 'L' stands for Lester).

For him, Four Tet, especially the earlier stuff, is "hugely inspiring."

"It's super warm and beautiful and inviting at this stage of his career... He's a musician I just find super inspiring."