Rockabilling all over Franklin

Ron Allnatt grew up in a little area called Galatea and went to school at Rangitahi College, where he learned to dance, play the guitar, and sing.

After finishing university, he went to Greymouth, where he joined a group called The Black Velvet Band, which played weekly gigs at the local hotels. They played Irish folk music along with what Ron called “some hippie stuff, too”.

He later travelled around Europe, playing with several groups. That’s when he started developing a real love of performing and collaborating with other musicians.

In the early 1990s, he moved back to New Zealand and established the band the Tree Fellers, an Irish-style band that used double bass drums, fiddles, guitars, and banjos, which played all over Northland.

Later, he formed another band called The Dodgy Brothers with friend Scott McDowall. The name came about when they were playing something, and MacDowell would look over at Allnatt and say, ‘That’s a bit dodgy,’ and Allnatt would say, ‘Well, that’s a good name for a band, isn’t it?’

“After that, I had a bit of a hiatus, but I’d play every year for St Patrick’s, I’d put a little band together and have some fun.

“But about three years ago, I had a concert that I held in the hall at Mauku, and one of the people who came along to sing was a man named Larry Coulter, and I didn’t know him, but he came to sing at the concert, and I was absolutely amazed.

“I talked to him afterwards and asked Do you want to do a bit more music? ‘ and he said,
‘Yeah, I would.’ So, we’d meet in my shed every Thursday for the next six months, chewing the fat, playing some songs, and getting some ideas going. The amazing thing was that we got a really, really good reception.

“It wasn’t rock, and it wasn’t country, it was just some quirky mixture of rockabilly and ballads,” said Allnatt.

They called their new band the Shed Shakers (after the noise coming out of Allnatt’s shed), began finding more work, and eventually added drummer Rick Shirley to their group.

Allnatt’s philosophy is that they are not a rock band and like to keep things quirky and fun.
While they are not a traditional rockabilly band, they play a lot of rockabilly music with influences from rockabilly bands from the 1950s and from songwriters like America’s J.J. Cale.

“When we go out to play, and I think Larry and I would agree on this, we want to see people moving to the music, we want to play music that people can move to, that just gets their bodies moving.

“We don’t want to be too loud, so we do control it. We’re quite strict about that. We have a philosophy where we try to honour the song of whoever wrote it. We would hope that if they heard our version, they would say, ‘that’s ok’”.

In addition to covering songs, they also perform some original music that they write themselves. One of them, Shed Shaker Boogie, was written by Allnatt, and another one, Thinking of You, was written by Coulter.

Both Allnatt and Coulter are retired and are happy to keep a steady stream of ‘gig’ work going, but are interested in releasing their own album by the end of the year.

“We don’t want to be headlong into it all the time, but we’d like to keep a steady stream. We are building up a repertoire of our own songs, and we will take those into a recording studio and do some recording,” said Allnatt.

The Shed Shakers play regularly at the Mr Henry bar and eatery at Patumahoe and performed at this year’s Steels n Wheels in Waiuku, where they sang Shake It, Baby Shake It.