The Datsuns - AudioCulture Profile and Photos

We've teamed up with the fine folk at AudioCulture — "The noisy library of New Zealand music" — to help spread the word about their immensely informative, continuously updated and highly useful wealth of Aotearoa music history resources, freely available to all over on their website HERE.

Aotearoa guitar heroes The Datsuns have a new album named Eye To Eye releasing this coming May, the first long player in six years from the team of Dolf de Borst, Christian Livingstone, Phil Somervell and Ben Cole. Originally including Matt Osment, The Datsuns have been local legends pretty much from the get-go — since they transmogrified from a promising Cambridge unit named Trinket back in 2000 into the world conquering rock 'n' roll behemoth we know and love today. The tale of how they rapidly rose to global fame is described in eye-opening detail over on the AudioCulture site by none other than Rip It Up founder, 2020 Independent Spirit Award winner and ONZM for services to music Murray Cammick.

The Datsuns emerged from a creatively fertile community of untamed jean jacket-wearing Aotearoa guitar wreckers, including fellow travellers The D4, Nothing At All!, and such down & dirty units as Hasselhoff Experiment and Rock 'N' Roll Machine. Adored by UK tastemakers NME, they were placed on a pedestal right alongside Detroit garage rock revivalists White Stripes, NYC hotshots The Strokes and London ratbags The Libertines.

Split into two chapters, Cammick's in-depth profile reveals The Datsuns' international success can be traced back to their support slot for the White Stripes' first NZ show at in Hamilton (the debut gig of their first overseas tour). This led to an invitation for the four-piece to join the US duo on their 2002 Australian tour. That in turn swiftly led to more tours, multiple Peel sessions and a label bidding war. Cammick details the band entering the eye of a cyclone: the image-obsessed UK music industry of the early '00s...

Dolf spoke to AudioCulture about getting noticed and signed in London. “We liked to think we were more savvy than we were but the level of naivety in this band was high. It was endearing in a way. In the British scene and especially then – it was about playing a game with the media – in terms of ticking boxes. Being young is good, good-looking is good, having the sound of this week is good. A lot of people try and cultivate that and chase it but we were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time – we bumbled into it – in a way. People mistake some of the stuff we did as being calculated and they mistake some of the stuff we did as being naïve or ignorant ­– when sometimes it was the other way round.”

For the full two part AudioCulture profile of The Datsuns by Murray Cammick + photo / poster gallery head over HERE.