David Stone looks at a photo of The Tremors band from July 1965.
Long before global tours, private jets, and digital playlists, music in Waipā meant packed dance halls, crepe-paper streamers, and teenagers chasing the excitement of a new sound.
David Stone checks out part of the local music display at Cambridge Museum with administrator Karen Payne. Photo: Mary Anne Gill
At the heart of that scene was David Stone, the charismatic frontman of Cambridge’s 1960s band The Tremors.
“We were just five guys who wanted to make a nice noise,” he says.
For a few years, that “noise” took them from Cambridge to Hamilton to Te Awamutu, playing to packed dance halls.
Stone is 78 and lives in Nawton, Hamilton. He was born in Dunedin and moved north to Cambridge as a child.
His family story is part grit, part determination. His father Gorton was an architect and builder and had Parkinson’s disease. His mother, Ethel, bought a business in Hamilton, employed a baker and opened a sponge kitchen.
“Within three or four years she’d freeholded the house, bought a car, put money in the bank,” he says. “Good old mum.”
Music had arrived earlier in Cambridge after Austin Pattison moved in next door when Stone was about nine or 10. The boys would entertain adults at home with skits and music.
Stone suggested to Pattison that they get a band together. Pattison bought a snare drum and a hi-hat and became the drummer.
“That was the starting kick,” says Stone of The Tremors’ formation.
Stone sang and played bass, swapping duties with Max Edge so there was always someone behind the microphone. When they played instrumentals, Stone stood out front with maracas or tambourine.
“And smile at girls and phone numbers,” he says of his time as a local heart throb.
The band’s rise coincided with an explosion in popular music. Armed with guitars, drums and boundless enthusiasm, they played a steady circuit of dances, school events and club nights.
They built a set list around English rock and roll and the songs that were landing with young crowds. Rhythm guitarist Jeff Allan’s sister travelled to England and brought back a copy of the Dave Clark Five hit Glad All Over.
A 1965 publicity photo for The Terrific Tremors, from left David Stone, John Meddings, Jeff Allan, Max Edge and Austin Pattison. Photo: Cambridge Museum
“We listened to it, we practiced it, and we did it that night,” says Stone. “We probably did it for six weeks before anyone else had heard it (on the radio).”
They played hard and often. The fifth member of the band was lead guitarist John Meddings.
The band had a standing gig every two weeks at the Buffalo Hall in Cambridge. The parents chaperoned, and the band and their mates decorated the place themselves.
“We used to go down and get big punga leaves and crepe over streamers and do it up and blow balloons up,” he says.
“I can see it now. I can smell it when you walked in with all the punga,” Stone says.
The Tremors broke up when Meddings, who Stone says was the band, left town.
After a brief period performing and running a record shop in Rotorua, Stone made a pivotal decision to move to “the other side of the business.”
Joining WEA (Warner-Elektra-Atlantic), he built a career spanning more than three decades in music promotion and artist management, helping bring international acts to Australia and New Zealand. His job was taking new releases to radio stations and convincing programmers to play them.
“I’ve met hundreds of overseas acts,” he says. “I’ve driven them, partied with them, been on tour with them.”
Among the highlights was working with legends such as Eric Clapton, whom he describes warmly as “one of the loveliest guys I’ve ever looked after”.
He also spent time with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin and drove members of Elvis Presley’s original backing band through the South Island.
There was also George Benson, fresh off a concert in front of 32,000 people at Mt Smart Stadium.
The job wasn’t all glamour. It involved relentless travel, pitching songs to radio stations, and managing the unpredictability of touring artists. Yet it placed Stone at the centre of the music industry during some of its most dynamic decades. His diaries, kept over 32 years, document every journey, gig and encounter.
He has thought about a book, but what happens on the road stays on the road, he says.
The Tremors in 1962, the very first line up, from left David Stone, Austin Pattison, Max Edge and Peter Madden. After Madden left, Jeff Allan and John Meddings joined. Photo: Cambridge Museum
Through it all, his perspective remained grounded. While he witnessed the excesses often associated with the industry, he largely steered clear, reflecting that his early band days were more about “beer, shandies and playing music” than anything more destructive.
Now 78, Stone looks back on a life defined by music, with no regrets about the path he chose. He is curious about how things have changed, even experimenting with AI music, though he says nothing compares to the raw energy of a live band.
Band member Jeff Allan has donated his stage jacket to Cambridge Museum. Combined with black trousers made of wool, terylene and mohair and they with the checked jacket were made by Wilkinson’s Tailors in Hamilton, costing £37.10 each.
They are a reminder of a time when a local group could pack a hall every fortnight, learn a song off a record from England, play it that night, and have the crowd feel like they were part of something big.
The band reunited in the early 2000s and has played again in recent years, including last year at Lake Karāpiro, drawing crowds keen to relive the dance hall days.
Stone is still up for it too. If The Tremors play again, he does not want a sit-down concert.
“We’ll do a dance night,” he says, with three 45-minute sets.
And if he gets his pick, there is one song that keeps coming back.
“Route 66,” Stone says. It does not need a big arrangement, and he has performed it hundreds of times with that twinkle in his eye the girls used to love.
A display featuring The Terrific Tremors is on at Cambridge Museum. David Stone looks at a photo of the band from July 1965. Photo: Mary Anne Gill
