An independent spirit

Bernie Griffen was a late bloomer. His first album, Everything So Far, didn't come until he was 60. Griffen, who died at 72 earlier this month, might have been late to recording but music was the pulse of his life.

- GRAHAM REID

He brought hard-won experiences, fragility or gravitas to his small but respected catalogue of sometimes appealingly unpolished folk and altcountry songs for his bands the Grifters and Thin Men.

"I'd wanted to be a musician since I was a kid and played a lot of folk music in my teens," he said in 2011. "But by the time I was 20 I just couldn't do it any more. I felt too exposed." Griffen grew up Catholic in Wellington, sang in the church choir, picked up the acoustic guitar, and like many of his generation, was swept up by rock music.

He played in folk clubs, lost confidence but found drugs ("I always covered my fears with alcohol or narcotics"), served two terms in prison and in the mid-1970s left for Melbourne, where he played in bands.

He then spent six years as a commercial fisherman off remote Karumba in northwest Queensland.

When he returned to New Zealand, he and friends established Progressive Music Studios in central Auckland and made music, notably with the appropriately named Pleasure Boys. However, drugs were still the prop.