Porn and pandemonium in the NZ Herald office
Why street mag Volume shut down after a newsroom invasion.
When boredom hit during lockdown this week, I resorted to YouTube and stumbled across something I’d completely forgotten about. It’s complete chaos: an office invasion, wrestling masks, Pornhub, beers before lunch, a gatecrashed party and the demise of a short-lived music magazine. It’s a great story! Let’s go…
Mexican wrestling masks cover their faces. As three men in jeans and tees wander freely among staff in a beige Auckland office building, those comical lucha libre face hoods are the first sign that something is amiss. It’s by no means the last.
Clearly, some shit is about to go down. And indeed it does.
“Pornhub’s not loading on this computer,” hollers fiery local rapper Tom Scott across the office, hammering at a desktop mouse and keyboard space bar while eyeballing a room full of people dressed far more conservatively than himself. “Where’s Jeff from accounts?”
Home Brew’s beatmaker Harry ‘Haz Beats’ Huavi picks up an office phone and just bellows, “What?!” into it, while his band mate, rapper Lui Gumaka, who is wearing a bird mask complete with a yellow beak poking out of his forehead, mashes buttons frantically on a calculator.
Across what can only be described as a chaotic seven-minute video, the trio sniff marker pens, steal Milo from the office cafeteria, write their own names on food in the fridge, offer promotions to staff they’re not authorised to give, and shove office supplies into their backpacks.
Then they attempt to alter an upcoming Herald on Sunday headline to one involving their rap group. “How about, ‘Haz overdoses on meth?’” says Scott. “It’s sort of like The Truth.”
Back at his computer, Scott’s finally got the WiFi password and gets Pornhub to load. He starts clicking around the world’s most popular porn site, plays a video he admires, turns to his desk neighbour to tell them about it, and says: “I’ll link it to you now.”
Eventually, the trio get bored of office life and go in search of snacks. As luck would have it, there’s a farewell party for someone called Hayden, who’s leaving the office after 12 years. They find it, crash it, then spot a chilly bin full of drinks.
“Cider?” asks Scott, pulling out a cold bottle clearly chilling for the 5pm swill. “What is this? Fairfax?”
Scott finally finds the beers he’s been looking for and starts handing them out. As a crowd gathers, he gives a farewell speech for someone he’s never met before. “Give it up for Hayden!” he yells to applause as the soon-to-be-departing office worker looks on nervously.
As Scott returns to his desk, he declares: “One or two beers before 12pm always gets me energised.” He’s right - it’s not yet midday. Home Brew are already drunk and have used NZ Herald work computers to watch porn. And that’s barely the start of the shit that’s about to go down.
Honestly, I’d completely forgotten all about this. Home Brew’s NZ Herald office invasion happened way back in 2012, before the Herald was owned by a company called NZME, before it had moved into a fancy new building opposite Les Mills, before it had a paywall, and before I left at the beginning of 2019.
It was aaages ago, a lifetime. The only reason this came into my mind was because of YouTube’s algorithm. I’d just watched a 10-minute documentary about Team Dynamite, a Home Brew-affiliated rap group, and their excellent new album, Respect the Process, which is out today. It’s directed by Scott and dives into the behind-the-scenes drama between the group’s three members that meant the album almost didn’t happen. It’s excellent. You should watch it.
At the end, YouTube’s horrific algorithm actually did something good for once: it served me up a video called Toma! Toma! Toma! I clicked on it, and there it was, Home Brew’s NZ Herald takeover day, covered in all its glory. The memories started flooding back, and I dove in.
You should too, because it’s absolute insanity…
That video has only had 800 views, which is baffling to me. Maybe everyone thinks it’s just another Home Brew prank video. Over the years they’ve made plenty of those. But it’s not. There’s so much to this. Maybe no one knows the back story. So allow me to oblige.
Seven months earlier, in 2011, APN, the owner of NZ Herald at the time, had done something incredibly brave. It launched a street magazine called Volume, a rough and ready publication that paid homage to gritty Kiwi music ‘zines of the past, like the early days of Rip It Up.
Run by ex-Real Groove editor Sam Wicks, along with a stable of great contributors like The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive, Jessica Hansell and Hugh Sundae, Volume covered the local music industry in a snarky, witty, bite-y kind of way. Each Tuesday, the mag was printed on smudgy newsprint and deposited on various street corners around Auckland, with much of the content replicated on its own dedicated site. If it felt like a relic of the past, that’s because it was, but it was also kind of cool.
Just a few months later, Scott’s Home Brew crew were about to release their award-winning 2012 self-titled debut. It came after a string of excellent EPs, some of which are bonafide local rap classics, and the hype for their first album, a double, was huge.
To celebrate, Wicks let Home Brew take over and edit that week’s issue of Volume. A takeover is a classic magazine move - music publications do them all the time. Part of Home Brew’s album promotion was filming the group in action around the NZ Herald office as they ran Volume magazine. And that’s when things got calamitous.
Right now, Tom Scott is a lauded musician thanks to his new jazz-rap group Avantdale Bowling Club. He’s become a father, he’s calmed down, and it shows in the music he’s making now. I asked him about all of that when we walked around his local suburb Avondale for this 2018 story, one of my favourite pieces I’ve written. Scott is fantastic company.
But back in 2012, Home Brew were wild. They infamously took a goat to the NZ Music Awards. They infamously released a song that included a death threat aimed at then Prime Minister John Key. They infamously released a video suggesting methods for drunk drivers to avoid the police. They were infamously infamous. Go Google them. You’ll see.
So they came and edited Volume, got up to some mischief, and were filmed doing it. Shortly before the mag’s release, that seven-minute clip found its way online. I remember seeing it on Vimeo. I watched it with my hand over my mouth and my eyes wide. I’d heard rumours about what had happened, but this video was proof that it was all true - and much, much worse than anyone had told me.
Remember, I worked in that office. I don’t know if you’ve spent any time in stuffy corporate buildings, but I spent nearly 20 years in a variety of them. They’re incredibly conservative places. If I got up to pretty much anything Home Brew did that day, including snorting what I can only assume is fake cocaine and holding up a laptop playing porn for the entire office to see, HR would be involved very, very quickly.
My job would disappear just as fast.
The fallout was swift. Twenty-four hours after the video was made live, it was removed from Volume’s Vimeo account. A few days later, after just seven months and 33 issues in print, Volume’s demise was announced. Here’s how NZ Herald covered it, and here’s how Stuff did it.
I can’t say for certain if it was Home Brew’s office antics that led to that decision. Rumours about Volume’s advertising woes were rife. But Home Brew’s edition of Volume was the final issue.
But what a way to bow out.
There’s not much remaining. Volume’s website is gone. I can’t find its Facebook page. The mag’s Twitter account remains active, but its final post was in 2012. Russell Brown wrote a short but sweet obit called Killing Volume for his Public Address blog at the time, saying the mag could “hardly have done better”. And that’s about it.
Volume has been consigned to the history books. It’s done and dusted.
But after an hour of online trawling, I managed to find something: the digital version of Volume’s final issue. I didn’t read it at the time, I don’t think it ever made it to street corners. I certainly didn’t get a copy. But Home Brew’s cover photo is awesome. “What the fuck do these people know about journalism?” asks Scott in his fiery editorial. He interviews his mum, while Haz’ mum reviews Home Brew’s new album.
Honestly, it’s great, an example of a street ‘zine at the peak of its powers. There are plenty of other good reads in the mix, and it’s worth a look. It’s a wonderful momento of the random time a major news organisation tried to do something small and retro and inventive and came severely unstuck in the process.
It’s a shame Volume didn’t stick around for longer, but clearly the marriage of street-punk press and a corporate news organisation made for an extremely odd bed couple.
You can still read that final issue, the one put together during a tumultuous week of porn and pandemonium in the NZ Herald office, here.
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