Inside Jim Wilson’s legacy as Dance Exponents mentor and poster pioneer

“We’d been together probably a week, if that,” Luck says as he casts his mind back 45 years.

“I’m at a bus stop on Woodham Rd. This fellow approaches me with a pipe. His name was Pete Waller, and he said, ‘are you in a band’?

“I don’t know, I might have had a look, and I said, ‘oddly enough, yeah, and we rehearsed over there’. He said, ‘well, I work for Jim Wilson’, and my knees near dropped because Jim was beyond legend.”

Wilson booked live music for some of the biggest live music pubs in Christchurch.

“I started promoting bands when I was 16 and running dances in the suburbs. New Zealand was very quiet at this point in time and I just wanted to bring a little excitement,” Wilson says.

He describes the Christchurch live music scene as “wild, crazy, genuine, heartfelt and producing the best music ever heard in New Zealand”.

The Gladstone Hotel, the Hillsborough and the Star & Garter were all Jim Wilson venues.

“Basically, if you wanted to be getting a booking, you’d probably want to be dealing with or at least know a pub manager that would be dealing with Jim,” Luck says.

To this day, Luck doesn’t know how the bus-stop meeting came about – but it was certainly the genesis of their profound success.

“We met up with Jim and he said, ‘yeah, I can get you some gigs’.”

The first gig was well-documented, opening for the Zero Bars at the Hillsborough Tavern.

“October 15, 1981 – my 20th birthday and [guitarist] Steve Cowan’s 22nd,” Luck says, before recalling their own luck.

“Talk about falling on your feet. We’ve been together just over a fortnight, and here’s us opening for one of the big draws and probably played to about 500 that night.”

Wilson liked what he’d heard and seen in the young five-piece.

“I saw The Dance Exponents playing and I was immediately impressed. They were having a wild, good time. The mood at the time for bands was quite depressive and here was a band getting people up and dancing. It was beautiful to see. The singer, Jordan Luck, was wearing a kilt,” Wilson says.

Soon, Wilson was representing the band.

“Jim would be organising all the groups [touring] through. We’d open for DD Smash, who were massive, Graham Brazier’s Legionnaires, Dave McCartney and the Pink Flamingos. We opened for everybody that came through, basically at the Aranui [Hotel] or the Hillsborough,” Luck says.

“It was all down to Jim. Easily the greatest manager we ever had.”

Wilson’s most celebrated act as the band’s manager was a phone call he made on their behalf.

“The thing that really swung us so quickly, why I’m here speaking to you now, is because he called Mike Chunn,” Luck says.

Chunn, the former Split Enz and Citizen Band bassist, had not long joined Mushroom Records and was eager to sign talent. He was also a very good friend of Wilson’s.

“I got a phone call. ‘Chunny’! He called me Chunny. ‘Chunny! Have you heard of Dance Exponents’? This was in 1982 and I said no, even though I was lying,” Chunn says.

“I didn’t tell anyone I had a demo sent to me, I think by [Dance Exponents guitarist] Brian Jones, a green cassette. But I hadn’t got around to listening to it.”

Wilson’s “hurry-up” led Chunn to hastily arrange a trip south.

“He said, ‘well, you need to see them, you need to hear them. You need to do something with them because the surname of their lead singer is Luck’.”

Chunn says he came down on the pretext of seeing Dick Driver’s band Hip Singles.

“The minute Dance Exponents started, I was completely taken over by joy, by the thrill of emerging newness and great, great lyrics all of a sudden – and cool arrangements and the whole thing was wonderful.”

It was just as Wilson had promised.

“The whole thing about him was here he was in the room at the Hillsborough. And it wasn’t a smug look or anything, but it was one of happiness, and so you could see that he had followed a hunch – but knowing deep down in his heart that he was right and all around the hundreds and hundreds of people in Christchurch had proved it to him and us,” Chunn says.

Next came the business.

“I went backstage and I said, ‘hey guys, are you interested in signing with Mushroom Records’? They all looked at me like, ‘are you an idiot? Of course we do’.”

The next day they talked about a single – Chunn wanted it to be Victoria.

“Which really surprised us, because most of our stuff is kind of fast tempo. Whereas Victoria, no drums basically at the front – it would often be the song where people would sit down in our set. Dave and Harry would go for a drink,” Luck says.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

“So everything kind of came together and it was like a rocket taking off. Jim was always there. Jim would be the one to advise me about where they should be playing, what the audience is most likely to be because he understood and had unearthed [them].”

On the outside looking in was Roger Shepherd – the founder of the great Kiwi record label Flying Nun. Shepherd’s memories of Wilson go back 50 years. In 1982, he was championing Dunedin group The Clean as Wilson pushed the Christchurch-based Dance Exponents.

“He really believed in them, I don’t think he was particularly interested in being a manager,” Shepherd says. History would support that notion.

The beginning of the band’s commercial success also marked the end of their formal relationship with Wilson.

“Victoria happened and at that stage, well, Jim just sort of let us go, that was that,” Luck says.

“Probably picked the right time to be getting out of it and into the poster business.”

For as long as Wilson had been booking bands, he had been promoting them through posters, beginning in the 1960s.

By 1982, he launched Phantom Billstickers.

“People started coming to him and saying, ‘can you do my posters as well’? So he turned into an actual business,” current Phantom CEO Robin McDonnell says.

Wilson’s business ventures could blur at times. Luck remembers being deployed to the front line of guerilla marketing.

“We did poster runs, not for ourselves, we did poster runs for other artists that Jim would have. We would be up there glueing, and it was kind of a tricky business – there’d be another company running around glueing after you’d glued. This is 3am, because a lot of spots were illegal,” Luck says.

Wilson sold Phantom sometime around 1985-86 before heading overseas.

He bought the business back again in 1992.

“I thought I could make a difference, and John Greenfield, who I had sold it to, was collapsing under the weight of it all. It has always been a very busy company and we often put up more than 100 campaigns a week. I was as passionate about the poster company as I was about the bands I was promoting,” Wilson says.

Wilson returned with a vision of legitimising the poster and outdoor advertising industry, but what he did next was closer to revolutionising it.

“He was the first person in New Zealand to actually pay for space. He made approaches to councils around New Zealand, Christchurch being the forerunner, to put in poster bollards, which are just a part of the cityscape around New Zealand these days. And, for the most part, [he] paid to put those bollards in,” McDonnell says.

Wilson was changing the face of the industry with every stroke of his glue brush.

“It seems simple to us now, but things like having an agreement with the landowner where you say, ‘okay, you’re allowing us to put posters on this building and we’ll pay you money for it’, whereas previously it had been done all as a kind of as a guerrilla thing and sort of under the cover of darkness and on derelict buildings,” McDonnell says.

“I think there’s a number of larger commercial operators that probably don’t realise the impact that Jim’s had on the industry.”

Kelly Wilson, a director of Phantom and the wife of Jim Wilson, has seen first-hand the impact her husband has had on the industry.

“Jim’s company, Phantom Outdoor Advertising, laid the foundation for large-format out-of-home [advertising] in Christchurch,” Kelly Wilson says.

“It’s fair to say that Jim’s success, innovation, longevity, and willingness to support and mentor other players in the industry have been foundational to the creation of the out-of-home industry in New Zealand.”

Jim Wilson looks over the company that he started almost 45 years ago with enormous pride.

“The work we are doing now has gone to the next level,” he says.

In January, Jim Wilson announced that he was terminally ill and that he intended to end his life through assisted death. Without elaborating on his illness, he says he is experiencing debilitating respiratory issues. He was too short of breath to speak easily with the Herald – preferring to answer questions by email.

When Wilson dies, either by his own choice or otherwise, he will leave behind a legacy that spans New Zealand’s arts.

“The poetry project that he initiated – we’ve put hundreds and hundreds of different New Zealand poets on posters and put them up around New Zealand and around the world. I think there’s probably a laundry list of legacies that he’s leaving,” McDonnell says.

“He had a huge significance. He was responsible for a lot of those bands, whether they were conscious of it or not,” Shepherd says.

“Jim’s fighting spirit has been the good oil for the creative heart of New Zealand for decades and he will be missed,” Kelly Wilson says.

Jim Wilson has crossed paths with many – and left his mark on each of them.

“Fearless. If he wanted something done, he did it. That was his attitude,” Luck says.

“I’ve always felt that he and I are the best of friends. He knows the intricacies of especially live music, and it was a wonder to be part of his train,” Chunn says.

“Jim’s got this saying, he’s been told ‘you can’t put that there’ by more people in New Zealand than anyone else, and we’ve sort of turned that into, well, if Jim had actually listened to those people, none of us would be here,” McDonnell says.

Kelly Wilson sums her husband up as a warrior – at his core.

“He has always fought against the grey. He’s spent his life finding unique voices in New Zealand and breaking through the obstacles that kept them from being heard,” she says.

“He fought not just for musicians who became household names but for writers, poets and artists who had something to give.

“He has fought against council bureaucracy, punishing regulations, lack of resources, problematic staff, disappointing business partners, artists determined to wreck their own treehouses and the prejudice of authority figures who don’t forgive crimes of his youth – no matter how much he gives back."

Jim Wilson reflects favourably on his near 75 years.

“I’ve had a very interesting life and I feel like I’ve made a big difference to the arts in New Zealand. These days, the arts of New Zealand are renowned all around the world and I like to think that Phantom Billstickers has been a starting point for that. It’s been a privilege to support the musicians, artists and writers we work with.

“It’s true what they say, you get something by giving back.”

Mike Thorpe is a senior journalist for the Herald, based in Christchurch. He has been a broadcast journalist across television and radio for 20 years and joined the Herald in August 2024.