This is where Charlotte Ryan goes to invest in her wairua (Photo: Petra Leary)

PartnersSeptember 10, 2021

Birdseye View: Charlotte Ryan and the mission to make music come alive on the radio

Contributing Writer

This is where Charlotte Ryan goes to invest in her wairua (Photo: Petra Leary)

To celebrate 10 years of Parrotdog, The Spinoff is partnering with the brewery to share the stories of New Zealanders doing great things. In the first series of Birdseye View, we’re interviewing 10 interesting Aucklanders about their relationship with the city and how it shapes their lives. To kick us off, Charlotte Ryan tells Simon Day where she goes to find peace – and how she’s striving to create the perfect five hours on Music 101.

Monday is Charlotte Ryan’s Sunday. While the rest of the city gets back into the grind, it’s her time to rest, to reset.

Ryan is the host of Music 101, the acclaimed Saturday afternoon show on RNZ that devotes five hours to a diverse catalogue of musical genres across interviews, live performances, reviews and documentaries. For Ryan, every show is the culmination of a week packed with music – listening to music, reading about music, talking to people about music – and she leaves the studio both exhausted and high on adrenaline. Like she’s just finished a gig.

Monday is different. A day of quiet. She’s got a few special spots around Auckland where she finds solace. The summit of Maungawhau. Digging in her garden in Eden Terrace. The Monday I hung out with Ryan we met at Open Coffee on Karangahape Rd for her morning “real coffee” (at home she’s got a jar of Moccona). Then, on a stunning winter afternoon, the month before the delta outbreak threw Auckland into lockdown, we visited Herne Bay beach.

This is where she goes to invest in her wairua, to enjoy Auckland in comparative peace. Walking along the beach with her daughter, Annie, Ryan is a picture of contentment. She loves her job. She feels lucky to live and raise a child in a city like Auckland and a country like Aotearoa. “I like being by the water. I love the climate. And I love the people, I’m a lot closer to diversity here,” she says.

A week earlier, when I arrive at RNZ’s central Auckland studio on a Saturday afternoon, Ryan is bouncing to the stormy sound of Troy Kingi and Delaney Davidson’s Black Sea Golden Ladder. She’s just played an interview she recorded with Mara TK earlier in the week, exploring TK’s mental health and the way he was able to find his way out of a dark space through the support of a Māori therapist and making music.

The conversation captures the spirit of Music 101, Ryan reckons – a space for musicians to share their personal stories as well as discuss the motivations and meaning behind their art. It also captures Ryan’s vibe as a broadcaster. Intensely curious, she listens closely to her guests, gently shaping the dialogue while letting them lead the conversation. Absent any palpable ego, her obsession focuses more on the musicians, and on the show.

Inside the RNZ live music recording studio (Photo: Simon Day)

Two years after she took over the programme, Ryan thinks she has finally nailed the Music 101 mix. “It took me longer than I thought it would to find my groove. But once I did, the most awesome interviews are coming to me,” she says.

“My goal for Music 101 was to make it more accessible. If you want to learn about music, or get back in touch with it, or be introduced to new music, this is the show for you. The audience is really open to anything. Whatever you play, if you contextualise it and explain it, you can take people with you.”

As host Ryan juggles the roles of journalist, critic, fan and music lover. While she’s deeply knowledgeable about music, the show never feels intellectually exclusive or too cool. She’s warm and welcoming and it means guests are willing to open up to her.

Putting together the five-hour show is like creating a set list. Each week Ryan attempts to create a flow, an expedition through music that provides different insights throughout the show’s different parts. “I’m searching for different vibes and energy all the time,” she says. “The show is like a peak every week. It wears me out. I joke with musicians that it’s kinda like a gig.”

On the Saturday I spend at the studio the show begins with an interview with the Doors’ drummer on the 50th anniversary of LA Woman, features a live performance from Louis Baker and the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (an excuse for Ryan to share her affection for the sound of an orchestra tuning up), and then reveals the sensitive romantic side of Newsroom journalist Emile Donovan though his selections for The Mixtape.

The following week she was travelling to Christchurch to record interviews for the 40th birthday of Flying Nun. And she’s excited to have a call with Lorde about her new album Solar Power. “It’s a fucking cool job. There aren’t many music journalists left.”

Charlotte Ryan’s Herne Bay Beach (Photo: Petra Leary)

Ryan is a Christchurch native (she went to school at Villa Maria College). She always loved music and desperately wanted to be involved in broadcasting. While studying for a bachelor of education and sociology at the University of Canterbury she spent her spare time hanging around student radio station RDU and alt-station Channel Z, which had a base in Christchurch at the time.

“There’s lots of us in the music industry who love music so much but aren’t musicians, so we surround ourselves with music,” she says.

After graduating Ryan took a job as brand manager at RDU. Four months later she was poached by bFM – Auckland University’s famously cool and rogue radio station. Twenty years later she’s still in Auckland, and her career has taken her across the music industry and the media.

She left bFM to manage Shapeshifter and Ladi6 then worked at record labels as a publicist. When her daughter was born she took a year off before launching her own publicity company working with everyone from her friend Lawrence Arabia to legendary American soul singer Roberta Flack.

Throughout her career, however, Ryan has been drawn back to broadcasting. She returned to bFM to take over as the five-day-a-week host of Morning Glory. Her time at the station marked a moment when b’s infamous reputation for parties, drugs and high profile male hosts went from untouchable to problematic. Amid that reckoning, her presence, a progressive and thoughtful voice amid a murky tide, was never more valuable. In 2012, after four years at bFM, she moved to Kiwi FM, where she stayed until the station closed three years later.

Over more than a decade she had carved a prominent space in a music industry too often defined by a misogynistic culture, her knowledge, talent and ambition wrapped up in a rare enthusiasm and universal warmth for everyone she meets. Along the way she watched criticism of bFM’s culture and its treatment of women ignored. (Earlier this year she wrote about the New Zealand music industry’s #MeToo reckoning.) And then MediaWorks pulled the pin on Kiwi FM. She left the radio.

‘It took me longer than I thought it would to find my groove.’ Photo: Simon Day

Ryan moved from behind the mic to in front of the camera on TV3’s Paul Henry show. It was a huge amount of fun, she says, complete with vigorous exchanges with the likes of Winston Peters. But eventually the 3.15am alarms took their toll, affecting her mental and physical health. She was concerned about the impact it was having on her role as a parent. So, against the (unsolicited) advice from industry insiders about never giving up a high profile position on TV, she quit.

David Bowie had just died and she felt herself pulled back to music, to musicians. Ryan took the role of Neil Finn’s assistant. The title underplays the work she did. She was part of his management team, looked after Roundhead Studios, toured Australia and New Zealand, oversaw Finn’s businesses and charities, and worked with him on three albums.

“The stuff I learned with Neil was amazing. A special part was streaming the making of his Out of Silence album live to the world. I helped produce this – and it was huge. That meant organising all the singers and coordinating the filming, lighting and streaming to a live audience.”

She also got to go on tour with Fleetwood Mac when Finn was asked to join the band. The opportunity to travel with a group that huge was an experience she hadn’t expected to be a part of her career. Her lasting memories include dancing with Christine McVie at the New Zealand tour party at Roundhead, and a random encounter at the LA show.

“I was backstage and I was on cloud nine. I was walking towards this group of people and there was this one person smiling at me, and I thought that person and I really connected. And then as we got closer I realised it was Harry Styles. I got a tingle. You knew he had the X factor.”

After four and a half years with Finn, broadcasting called again. “I find musicians fascinating and I love communicating with them.”

“I like being by the water. I love the climate. And I love the people.” (Photo: Simon Day)

The first time I met Charlotte Ryan was on the dance floor at a 40th birthday afterparty in the last days of summer earlier this year. Her presence made for one of the most intimidating Spotify DJ gigs I’ve been in charge of. I started questioning my natural instincts. I knew Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’ would make the dance floor pop off, but was it cool enough for the host of Music 101?

I needn’t have worried. She’s the opposite of a music elitist (although she admits as a young woman she got kicked out of bars for complaining to the DJ).

“I’m really not a music snob at all. I have to interview so many different people.”

Ryan acknowledges people’s relationship with music is intensely subjective and intimate. She sees her role as tapping into that emotional relationship. With the intensity of the news cycle over the last 18 months, she has tried to give people a place to escape. This is never more important than in lockdown. “My energy on the show changed hugely last year. I’m interested in music psychology. I know that when people are sad they want some nostalgic music,” she says.

“I did this thing where people could ring up and request a song for a loved one who they couldn’t see. Then I did music to make you happy in the third week of lockdown.”

Music 101 continues to broadcast through Auckland’s level four lockdown. She prepares for the show from her kitchen table looking out to her garden and goes into the studio to record. A news addict well before Covid-19 arrived, Ryan has deliberately tried to disconnect from the constant stream of headlines. RNZ was always on in the house (she’s got a passion for the hourly pips).

“I’ve realised now, [I need] to give myself time away from the radio – walks, lying on the couch listening to records – like we did when we were teenagers – reading, gardening, talking with friends and family.”

Ryan believes music is more important than ever during this challenging time. It gives people a chance to remove themselves from the world and to share their feelings with others despite our forced distance, she says.

“Music is such a comfort for many of us, and a great way to connect, and feel all sorts of emotions.”

Keep going!

Illustrations: Sloane Hong

PartnersSeptember 9, 2021

The vital role of international education in keeping Aotearoa connected

Shanti Mathias

Contributing writer

Illustrations: Sloane Hong

Before the pandemic, New Zealand was a temporary home for over 100,000 international students – global citizens who bring their knowledge, experiences, culture and diversity with them.

The future looks like arts and crafts. In a room at the TSB Arena in Wellington in August, the Festival for the Future expo floor is packed with things to paint and fold and stick and make. At a stall for the Sustainable Development Goals I pick up a wooden bead representing the 11th goal – sustainable cities and communities – and paint it carefully orange, ready to be strung into a bright pattern with everyone else’s.

As a shameless eavesdropper, this is my natural habit. I listen to two people discuss 3D printing, while another group sip ethical soda on colourful beanbags and chat about responsible investment.

At the Education New Zealand Manapou ki te Ao (ENZ) stall people line up for coffee while filling out forms about their experience of “global citizenship”. ENZ is the crown entity responsible for international education in Aotearoa. In 2019, pre-Covid-19, there were over 100,000 international students in New Zealand, studying mostly at tertiary institutions, but also at primary and secondary schools. Since 2013, more than 2,400 New Zealanders have been awarded Prime Minister’s Scholarships to study in Asia or Latin America.

Global citizenship is an essential part of New Zealand’s international education strategy, and these inbound and outbound students represent an opportunity to create global connections, research links and broad partnerships for New Zealand.

ENZ partnered with the Festival for the Future to discuss what international education and global citizenship looks like in the unique confines of 2021. For Carla Rey Vasquez, ENZ’s global citizenship manager, the strategy’s value in an era of limited travel is the gift of a dual perspective to complex problems. It is also an opportunity to help New Zealanders understand the nuanced and mutual benefits of international education and the long-term relationships it creates with people around the world.

“Our world is characterized by complex issues. Global citizenship offers an opportunity to find ways to navigate and respond to those issues through shared understanding,” she says. “It’s about realising the value and power of your identity and knowledge, but also acknowledging the potential of others’ experience and perspectives on the world.”

This is a worldview that Rey Vasquez says is built on a relationship of local belonging and responsibility to our people as well as people across the world. International education is an essential way New Zealand builds that bond with the rest of the world, bringing diverse people, organisations and countries together.

Vasquez, a former international student herself, knows how transformational international education can be for both the student and New Zealand.

“It brings the world to our home, if we can harness the cultural value that international students bring to New Zealand we will all grow as global learners,” she says.

ENZ sees global citizenship as a way to bring shared understanding and learning between countries and cultures. Marc Doesburg, senior innovation advisor at ENZ, believes it offers new perspectives on the world, and a chance to question one’s own understanding.

“We give young people an opportunity to critique [their cultures] by going overseas, to see that things are done differently here.”

International students are a significant source of income for education institutions and the New Zealand economy, contributing more than $5b in 2019. But for both ENZ and international students the benefits students bring New Zealand are far broader than a GDP injection.

“I don’t want us just to be seen as bringing money – we bring culture, we bring international values…we want to know local people,” says Claire Lu, a Taiwanese student studying politics and international relations at Victoria University of Wellington.

That works both ways – studying abroad was an “invaluable” experience for New Zealander Anna de Boer, who studied Mandarin in Shanghai as part of a Prime Minister’s Scholarship and has been back to China several times since. De Boer now works with international students at Victoria University of Wellington. She wants to reframe the narrative that international students “come here, take something, then go back to their home country.”

There’s a huge benefit in how international students can take a piece of New Zealand home with them, and leave an important part of their own story behind in Aotearoa too, says De Boer. This builds long term relationships that have value far beyond the years they spend studying.

Covid-19 has obviously had a huge impact on international education. It’s changed the shape and delivery of ENZ’s programmes, but it has also been an opportunity for new approaches. Exchanges between New Zealand and internationally-based classrooms have continued digitally, a concept ENZ has pushed for years, and shown how education can continue to build global citizens even when borders are closed.

She tells me about a marae graduation she attended to celebrate a rangatahi who has been part of a global programme conducted fully online. It brought together international teams of young people to find commercially viable solutions to problems in their own communities.

The effects of programmes like this can reach the lives of people who might never travel overseas. By participating in global educational programmes online, you have what Doesburg calls a “talisman”, something tangible that connects you to the world.

“There’s an obligation for education to stay globally engaged, to exchange ideas, to exchange best practice, and give our students the strongest opportunity they can to really broaden their skills and cultural competence,” he says.

Hannah Prince was born in New Zealand but lived most of her life in Thailand. She moved back to study linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. Though she can’t see her family – who are still in Thailand – at the moment, she has built new local connections at university through Newswatch and International Friendship Club, spaces for international students and New Zealanders to connect with each other.

“I found connecting with people from around the world really helps to understand why people do things differently. Learning about different people’s experiences and cultures can really enrich your own knowledge of the world,” she says.

In her time in China, De Boer discovered the same thing. The university context was a way to connect with people with a shared purpose, and interests – much easier than going to China on her own. At the university, she could easily connect with others.

“You’re seeing everyone on campus, you’re waving, you’re eating and you’re all working towards a similar goal of improving your language skills so you’re motivated to go and find friends,” she says.

Her work now with international students is informed by the “joy of being able to communicate with someone you’d never otherwise have had an opportunity to communicate with.”

Knowing the intensity of living in a distant country has been an important background to De Boer’s work with international students on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Manaaki scholarships, many of whom are unable to see their families due to the pandemic.

“Having that experience helps me to identify with students who are having a tough time.”

When Claire Lu arrived in New Zealand, she found a community in language exchange groups. These places become what De Boer calls “bridges” across communities. She encourages New Zealanders to be that connection that someone might need when they arrive here. When she moved home she found comfort in finding friends who knew what she meant when she used a Chinese word in an English sentence.

De Boer’s story resonates: when I moved from India to Aotearoa to study, I felt like my ability to talk to people relied on me understanding niche pop culture references. I felt drawn to people who looked and spoke like me, people who were fascinated by the way that Aotearoa is inextricably tangled with a beautiful, varied world. That’s the power of global citizenship.

Rey Vasquez uses te reo terms to anchor ENZ’s global citizenship approach in the values of a Māori worldview.

“If you give people a sense of place by going abroad or coming here, you show the value of kaitiakitanga, manaakitanga, whanaungatanga in action.”

These aren’t transactional relationships, where you pay money to get a degree, and maybe a visa, then a job; it goes far beyond that. This is the point of global citizenship, Doesburg says.

“There’s a lot of diversity in perspective.”

Even with the Covid-19 altered landscape, international education is a reminder that New Zealand isn’t alone. Prince brings her experiences in Aotearoa and Thailand to her linguistics classes; Lu is studying the quirks of New Zealand politics while thinking about Taiwan; de Boer knows that when she next goes to China she’ll be able to organise a wi-fi router in a foreign language. They’re all learning to belong to New Zealand and the world, both at once.