Opshop

Nominated for the New Zealand Artist of the Year Award

Opshop are the first to achieve consecutive #1 album & #1 single on the iTunes chart for the second time!

Latest single One Day, which features in the NZ Post campaign, has gone to #1 single and #1 album spot on iTunes.

This adds to the huge successes already achieved for Opshop’s sophomore’s album Second Hand Planet which has reached Platinum sales.

The album’s first single Maybe was the most successful song on New Zealand radio ever, holding the #1 Airplay position for 12 consecutive weeks.

Waiting Now peaked at #13 overall on the NZ Radio Airplay chart, and the video was #1 on C4 Music Television & Juice TV.

Maybe was one of the 5 Finalists in the APRA Silver Scroll Awards for 2007 – NZ’s most prestigious songwriting award

Opshop received the most nominations of any band at the NZ Music Awards in 2007. They took out the prestigious People’s Choice Award.

The band has been working hard on a comprehensive touring schedule taking the new album to the public; they have played their own nationwide tour and supported Snow Patrol, Silverchair, Powderfinger and Brooke Fraser.

Second Hand Planet: The background.

It’s been a while, but Opshop’s long awaited follow up to the platinum selling You Are Here is certainly evidence that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

It was in the early stage of development that renowned producer Greg Haver approached the label and asked if there was a chance to work with Opshop. The band was more than happy to have his involvement.

Greg Haver came complete with a resume packed with international accomplishment having produced, mixed and engineered for a number of acts including Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals, Spiritualized, Catatonia, Lost Prophets, Tom Jones and many more.

“We especially enjoyed what he had done with Manic Street Preachers so he came into the process and he acted as a great sounding board for the songs we had. We already had a fair idea of what would and wouldn’t work but that critical approach was helpful,” says Jason.

After initial pre-production Opshop realised they had some decisions to make. The band had about 14 songs but after recording 10 they realised that because they had been written at different times and for very different reasons, there was a distinct lack of cohesion to the collection. It was the beginning of a burst of creativity which Jason says was perhaps the catalyst the band needed to find their collective voice.

“We knew Greg was going away to Japan with the Manic Street Preachers so we had just three weeks to find those songs that would bind the whole album together. It was high pressure, but that’s where the songs I love off the record came from – songs like Noah, Maybe, One Thing Worth Preserving, Waiting Now and Nothing to Hide (which we completely reworked from the original session) came out of this intense writing period.”

“My whole way of writing songs is that they don’t have to make immediate sense – at an emotional level they just hit where they hit. It’s non-linear, it just works where it works; it pushes buttons throughout; and it represents our perspective of the environment we have made it in. It’s an archive of where we are and hopefully as artists we will look back at these tracks and still believe that the subtexts and the themes were intrinsically linked to our interpretation of history at that point in our lives.”