Rock Your Radio EP (12")

In recent years, it’s been as Bryce International Airways. Before that it was as the Deville Brothers, and before that they were the Leisure Suits. There have been a few others. You get the picture. These guys work well together.

It’s more than a quarter century since their friendship formed at a popular party flat on Wellington’s The Terrace in the mid to late 80s. It was a union born of a love of music and the desire to have fun making it.

Bass player Bennett (known as King Ad B in Emulsifier) came from a DIY/ punk background, getting a start with bands like the infamous One Less Customer For The Butcher, while drummer Martin (AKA Juan V) had formative musical experiences with the likes of Brothers Gorgonzola, among others.

According to Bennett there were gigs with those early bands at venues “like the Clyde Quay, the Terminus, and places like that” but neither man can recall exactly where or when Emulsifier’s first gig was … although it happened “sometime in 1988 or 1989”.

Over the next half dozen years, Emulsifier became one of Wellington’s “go-to” bands for international supports.

Over the next half dozen years, Emulsifier became one of Wellington’s “go-to” bands for international supports, earning curtain-raiser slots for the likes of Faith No More, the Beastie Boys, The Pogues, and Pop Will Eat Itself, at venues in both Wellington and in Auckland. There was an EP – the Wildside label’s first release – and in 1993, an album, Cerebral Implosion.

For a brief period in the early 90s, the band – Bennett, Martin, and guitarist Mal Mesweski, who now lives in the UK – appeared to be riding the peak of some sort of funk-rock zeitgeist. Things eventually started to unravel, as these things inevitably do, sometime in 1995.