Galloway Street, that was really something. Youthful folly manifest.
So it was your local?
It was everybody's local.
They got a lot of business then?
Well yeah, but more than business, it was a whole scene, you know? I hate that word, 'scene'. But that's what it was, a kind of micro-climate. 'The Gallows', everyone called it. That was the aesthetic – macabre, man. The windows were papered over, all the walls were black – the garden littered with skull bongs and tealight candles. They hosted a few gigs, if you could call them that. It was all pretty hard conceptual – dissonant harpsichords and gregorian chants, you know.
Oh the nineties.
(laughs) Yeah but it's always the same isn't it. Kids drunk on independence, devoting themselves to getting artfully wasted. Philanthropic enough to get everyone else stoned too, for a reasonable price. Thursday mornings I'd swing by as soon as my allowance came through. Usually didn't leave 'til Friday morning. Then back again Friday night with a slab, stretching out the weekend beer by beer, cone by cone. But places like that are unsustainable. It was the occult stuff that did it in the end, ironically.
What, like witchcraft?
Like pentacles on the floor, burnt feathers et cetera. Very theatrical. The neighbours got suspicious when their chooks kept going missing. By then things were a bit out of hand, obviously, but some unprecedented collective sanity kicked in and the flat disbanded before the police got involved.
Where did they go?
I don't know. None of them were selling anymore so I never saw them. Found another source pretty quickly though, he was a mean, paranoid guy. But he delivered.


The above is an excerpt from the forthcoming book 'Hash Palaces: An Oral History of Great New Zealand Tinny Houses'.