Papua New Guinea: Tolai Rock

When rock reaches the edges of the planet

Picturing rock being born in Papua New Guinea means stretching the imagination. Jungle-covered mountains, isolated villages, languages that change with every valley, ceremonial drums and songs handed down through generations: everything, on the surface, seems to place this country at the furthest margins of musical modernity. And yet, right here, in one of the most peripheral corners of the planet, rock doesn't just arrive: it takes root, transforms itself, and finds a voice of its own.

The history of rock in Papua New Guinea is, for this very reason, anomalous, fragile and deeply uneven. We're talking about one of the countries with the highest concentration of languages in the world, second only to Vanuatu: an extremely intricate cultural mosaic, where identities, rituals and musical traditions often coexist without ever fully merging. Until the late Seventies, this richness was reflected in a strongly local musical production, lacking any real industrial infrastructure: there were no private recording studios, only a handful of state facilities tied to national radio, and music circulated mainly live.

On top of this comes a decisive structural factor. Independence in 1975 left behind a country that was formally sovereign but still lacking solid cultural infrastructure. There is no national recording industry, opportunities to record are rare, and record distribution remains sporadic and dependent on imports. For much of the Seventies, popular music continued to be conceived mainly as a communal, educational or religious practice, not as an autonomous cultural sector nor as a space for urban youth expression. When rock arrives, it does so in fragments: through cassettes, radio broadcasts and individual contacts, never quite translating into an organized scene.

In this context, sonic modernity takes shape in an essentially amateur way. The beating heart of musical circulation is the stringband: small ensembles of guitars and voices that reinterpret traditional melodies, religious hymns and popular songs, moving from town to town and adapting their repertoire to different linguistic contexts. It's a mobile, communal music, more functional than spectacular, far removed from Western industrial models yet deeply rooted in the social fabric.

Then, almost suddenly, something changes. In the early Eighties, in Rabaul – a port city overlooking a volcanic bay on East New Britain – an urban generation begins to imagine another possibility: electric, amplified, sung in local languages but built on rock's forms. A scene takes shape rapidly, with a feverish, concentrated energy, as if time were running short. Over the city hangs a sense of fragile balance, as though everything – daily life, work, music – unfolded with the awareness that catastrophe could strike at any moment, without warning.

Rabaul: a gateway to the world

By the late 1970s Rabaul was a city living on transit. A commercial port, colonial outpost, and human crossroads overlooking a restless bay dominated by the presence of the Tavurvur volcano, it packed Chinese, Malay, Polynesian, Australian and European communities into a few square kilometres, interwoven with a strong tolai presence, the Melanesian population native to the region. It's a small but porous city, where goods, people and sounds circulate with an ease unknown elsewhere in the country. Before a genuine indigenous rock scene existed, live music was already part of the urban fabric: clubs and social circles hosted performances to entertain officials, traders and professionals, often with repertoires borrowed from Western pop and rock.

Within this early musical circuit moved John Wong, a central and early figure in Rabaul's musical life. A musician before he was ever an organiser, Wong was already active in the Sixties and Seventies as a guitarist and driving force behind jam sessions in the city's clubs, from the Chinese community circle to the venues frequented by the urban elite. He played for the love of it, with no ambitions of a recording career, mixing Hawaiian songs, jazz, rock'n'roll and Western pop repertoire. It was an informal but constant musical practice, one that helped normalise rock's presence in the city's everyday life.

Around Wong, a space of musical sociability formed almost spontaneously. His house, shared with his wife Winnifred, originally from New Ireland, became a natural gathering point for musicians, friends and curious young people. Instruments circulated, rehearsals stretched on, amplifiers were taken apart and put back together. It was here that the awareness took shape that rock could actually be practiced in Rabaul too.

Around 1975, the year of Papua New Guinea's independence, this energy began translating into actual bands. John Wong's elder sons, Basil and Dennis, together with their friend Desmond Woo, founded the Winterwood Band, playing rock and pop in the city's venues. At the same time other similar outfits appeared, such as the Cats Squirrels, made up of young people of mixed background – Malay, Ambonese (from the island of Ambon in the Moluccas), German – and aimed at an urban audience made up largely of foreigners. It was still a scene separate from the tolai world: indigenous youth continued to favour acoustic stringbands, gospel choirs and village music, while electric rock remained an urban, outside language.

For much of the 1970s these two worlds coexisted without really touching. City bands played almost exclusively covers of rock, pop or country, learned from imported records and broadcasts by Australia's Abc and Radio Rabaul. Meanwhile, groups like the Unbelievers Revival Band and the Wanderers began offering young musicians a space for collective learning: fluid line-ups, often tied to hotel circuits and city parties, functioning as genuine musical training grounds. Other acts, such as the Yellow Top Band, stayed closer to the stringband tradition, but they too helped make the idea of a shared repertoire and regular public performance familiar.

Towards the end of the decade this dividing line began to crack. Some tolai musicians joined existing groups, others formed new ones, bringing with them their own language, their own melodic sense and a different conception of singing. John Wong himself was among the first to embody this transition. Raised between Kavieng and Rabaul, shaped musically within family and school settings, around 1976 he put together the Rastaman Vibrations, one of the first outfits to bring together young tolai and Chinese-Papuan musicians under the banner of rock and reggae. It was still a fragile experiment, but a decisive one.

Alongside the Rastaman Vibrations, other youth outfits emerged, such as the Apple Suns (led by Wong himself together with Frankie Low), the Pila Zackmates and the Doy Trotters. In student circuits and local venues, these bands began pairing covers with their first attempts at original composition. Similar processes were also under way outside Rabaul, as shown by the activity of the Ararua in Wewak, a sign that the electrification of popular music was becoming a nationwide phenomenon, albeit still scattered.

It's at this stage that John Wong's role fully took shape, not only as a musician but as a facilitator: a figure capable of breaking down ethnic and generational barriers. Whereas Rabaul's bands had initially almost always been made up of members from the same community, it was also thanks to Wong that, over time, tolai musicians began collaborating steadily with those of Asian or mixed background. This laid the groundwork for something that went beyond the sum of individual bands. Rock stopped being an imported language and started becoming a territory of appropriation. Tolai musicians were about to take hold of the Rabaul scene.

Building an industry from scratch

By the late 1970s, as Rabaul's live scene grew in a chaotic but steady fashion, a decisive shift took shape: Papuan music began to be conceived also as a recording, no longer just as an event. The trigger for this leap was Greg Seeto, a young entrepreneur from the city who had returned home after studying and playing guitar in Australia. A musician before he was a producer, Seeto, like many others, sensed the ever more obvious gap between the energy of local shows and the lack of facilities able to capture it on tape. In 1980, together with his Australian friend Philip Foley and Eddie Schultz, Seeto founded Soundstream Studio, Rabaul's first genuine commercial recording studio. It was still a makeshift set-up, built around a four-track recorder, but enough to radically change the landscape: for the first time local bands could record their own songs without going through national radio or state-run studios. Almost simultaneously, in Port Moresby, the Chinese-Papuan label Chin H. Meen set up a sixteen-track studio, a sign that an embryonic recording industry was emerging in the capital too. It was in Rabaul, however, that the process quickly picked up speed.

Soundstream soon became a reference point for emerging bands. Here the Unbelievers Revival Band, featuring a very young George Telek, cut their first tracks, and above all the Barike, who recorded "Waikiki Tamure", a song destined to become one of the first genuine national hits of Papuan pop. The public response was immediate. Cassettes circulated, radio picked them up, and for the first time Papua New Guinea could listen to modern music played by its own people, sung in its own languages.

At this point the scene stopped being a strictly local phenomenon. Born in Rabaul, this music began to circulate the length of the country: from the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago to the Highlands, all the way to the capital. The combination of easily duplicated cassettes, radio airplay and musicians' mobility turned a concentrated urban experience into a pop language shared on a national scale.

Alongside Soundstream, other players were active. Nbc, the national public broadcaster, had regional studios equipped mostly with two- or four-track recorders and continued to play a central role above all as a distribution platform: its recordings, often technically bare-bones, served to document and circulate music more than to build competitive recorded products. Small labels like Keynote Music rounded out the picture, but the centre of gravity remained firmly in Rabaul, where music was not just recorded, but organised, and began to imagine itself as a system.

When Soundstream closed in 1983 due to financial difficulties, the momentum didn't stop. Seeto decided to go it alone and founded Pacific Gold Studios (Pgs), while almost in parallel Philip Foley opened Kuanua Studios, named after the tolai language. Within a year, however, Seeto had equipped Pgs with a twenty-four-track recorder, while Kuanua remained anchored to a four-track system, insufficient to support more ambitious productions.

Seeto's philosophy was clear and consistent: modernity without renouncing tradition. Under his guidance, recording projects emerged conceived as platforms for collective growth. The "Brukim Bus" compilations – a tok pisin expression (the main language of Papua New Guinea) meaning "to take a shortcut" – showcased young local bands recorded in a nimble, accessible way; the "Rock And Roll" series, on the other hand, had an almost pedagogical approach, aimed at training musicians and sound engineers to Western standards, though applied to repertoires in local languages and pidgin.

The Pgs explicitly encouraged the use of the Kuanua language and the reworking of Tolai heritage. Popular songs were rearranged in a rock key and captured on cassette with a sound quality unprecedented for the country. The traditional ballad "Iau Ra Biavi", re-recorded by Barike, became a national hit; the same happened with "Bing Bing Luhr", a ceremonial chant that found a second life in a pop-rock version. Imagery mattered too: album covers favored local symbols and cultural references, steering clear of the standard aesthetic of Western bands.

Within a few years the Pgs produced dozens of albums and helped launch some of the names destined to leave an indelible mark on Papuan music. Among them, "Painim Wok" by the Molachs stands out, recorded in 1983: from the record emerges "Vunalaslas", a Tolai-language track that won over audiences in the mid-Eighties. The album's success was such that the Molachs decided to adopt its title as their own name, becoming Painim Wok. Led by George Telek and guitarist John Warbat, they became the most popular Papuan rock band of the decade, with eight albums to their name and a constant presence on the national charts.

Thanks to the success of Painim Wok – a lineup made up entirely of Tolai musicians – Rabaul firmly established itself as the country's musical capital. The competition tried to react too: Kuanua Studios produced a few local groups between 1984 and 1986, but technical and organizational limitations curbed their impact, leading to closure in 1987. One telling anecdote concerns the album "King Kong" (1985) by Okoro Mates, recorded at Kuanua: the liner notes wryly thank the Pgs technicians as well, a sign of a musical community that, even amid competing studios, remained deeply collaborative.

During these years the Pgs was not just a studio, but a genuine breeding ground for talent. Alongside Seeto worked technicians and musicians who honed a recognizable production style; among them was also John Wong, by then involved as a sound engineer and an operational figure both at Pgs and at the Nbc and Chin H. Meen studios. The goal remained constant: to achieve polished recordings capable of showcasing local peculiarities without flattening them. It's no coincidence that the activity of Pacific Gold Studios extended beyond Rabaul: over the course of the Eighties the studio also hosted musicians from neighboring islands, such as Vanuatuan singer-songwriter David Andrew or Solomon Islands groups like the Sexy Apples, confirming the city's role as a regional musical hub in the Pacific.

From this collective work a recognizable sound gradually emerged, a shared grammar blending melodies, rhythms and rock structures with Melanesian sensibilities. It's here, more than in any single band or record, that what would come to be known in the country as Tolai rock took shape.

When tradition goes electric

When Pacific Gold Studios' cassettes began circulating beyond Rabaul, it became clear that this music was not simply "rock made in Papua". Describing it required a new name, and the local music press found one: Tolai rock. Not a convenient label, but the recognition of an autonomous language, born in the province of East New Britain and deeply rooted in the culture of the Tolai people, or Gunantuna, who dominate the Rabaul and Kokopo area. Formally, Tolai rock adopts the structures of Western rock songwriting – verses and choruses, electric guitars, bass and drums – but bends them to a different sensibility. Vocal harmonizations are often choral, in two or three parts, direct heirs of the stringbands and communal chants. One of the peculiarities of Tolai singing is the use of three-part harmonies, with a third voice slipping in between the lead line and the response, in a fluid movement often described by the musicians themselves as "Snaking The Vocal". The rhythm, while keeping to a classic four-four, is crossed by accents and pulses that recall the traditional kundu and garamut drums. It's not uncommon for a reggae feel to surface, especially in the work of the rhythm section, but always filtered through a melodic lightness immediately recognizable as local.

Language is a central element. Many songs are sung in Kuanua, the language of the Tolai, others in Tok Pisin, and the lyrics recount daily life without forced metaphors: the village, work, the sea, the land, kinship ties, ceremonial customs. It's music that speaks "from within", seeking not exoticism but shared experience. As George Telek would later explain, the goal is to tell what belongs to the community: simple gestures, common experiences, emotions recognizable to anyone living in that territory. Musically, the electric guitars avoid excessive virtuosity, favoring clean melodic interplay, often built to echo the dialogue between multiple guitars typical of acoustic stringbands. The chord progressions are simple, but enriched with touches that recall traditional singing, with frequent use of parallel thirds and suspensions. The result is a bright, immediate sound, capable of making people dance and sing, but also of conveying a subtle melancholy.

The roots of Tolai rock reach back to the late Seventies, when Rabaul groups began "electrifying" folk repertoires to play them in villages and city venues. Orally transmitted songs were reinterpreted with bass and drums, without losing their identity. At the same time, listening to rock and reggae from Australia and the Pacific suggested new possibilities: not to imitate, but to appropriate those forms to tell a different story. In the early Eighties, with the national rise of the bands linked to Pgs, Tolai rock consolidated into a recognizable genre, sustained by a surprisingly vital live circuit. Toward the end of the decade, the Rabaul scene was at its absolute peak: frequent concerts, local festivals that also made room for modern groups, and growing attention from abroad. One episode became emblematic. In 1988 Australian musician David Bridie, on holiday in Papua New Guinea, happened to hear a cassette of Telek with the Moab Stringband. He was struck by it, fascinated by that blend of vocal harmonies and seemingly simple yet deeply original groove. The following year he returned to Rabaul with Not Drowning, Waving and recorded the album "Tabaran" together with Telek and other local musicians.

Released in 1990, "Tabaran" is far more than a one-off collaboration: it's the point of contact between Tolai rock and the international audience. The album was received with enthusiasm and carried Rabaul's music beyond the borders of the Pacific. David Byrne named it one of the albums of the year, while Peter Gabriel invited Telek to perform on international stages and later to collaborate with his Real World label. It was the definitive confirmation that Tolai rock, while remaining deeply tied to its homeland, possessed an expressive force capable of speaking to the world.

At that moment, without anyone yet knowing it, this music had already reached its peak. Rabaul was at the center of everything, and for that very reason its fate remained inseparable from that of the city.

"Dance On A Volcano"

In the decade between 1980 and 1990 Rabaul established itself as a wellspring of musical talent unprecedented in Papua New Guinea. The city, often remembered as "the pearl of the Pacific", experienced a season of exceptional cultural vitality, sustained by the relative economic prosperity of the area – driven by copra and cocoa plantations – and by a strong sense of identity that had matured in the years immediately following independence. In bars, hotels and community halls there was live music almost every week: it became an integral part of urban life, often introduced and championed by the young DJs of the local Nbc station.

Songs born in Rabaul began to circulate well beyond the provincial borders, reaching villages in the Bismarck Archipelago and the Highlands. For the first time, a broad, cross-cutting audience recognized itself in modern music sung in its own languages. Traditional stringbands remained popular, especially in rural areas, but they too began absorbing the influence of Tolai rock, amplifying their acoustic guitars and adding songs born in Rabaul's urban scene to their repertoires. Radio programs like "Raunraun Musik" consistently paired local productions with international hits, cementing this music's full legitimacy on the national airplay.

In this fervent climate, an impressive number of groups flourished. The scene expanded rapidly, generating an unprecedented density of projects, languages and individual paths: bands destined to become touchstones coexisted with more short-lived outfits, side projects and complementary trajectories that nonetheless contributed to the overall health of the system.

September 19, 1994

At dawn on September 19, 1994, Rabaul's time ran out. After weeks of tremors, ambiguous signals and intermittent alerts, the two volcanic cones dominating the bay – Tavurvur and Vulcan, on opposite sides of Simpson Harbour – erupted almost simultaneously. Within hours the sky went dark, the air filled with ash and volcanic debris, and the city vanished beneath a relentless rain of glowing fragments. It was a swift, violent, irreversible event: what for years had been experienced as a looming yet distant threat suddenly became reality.

Rabaul was overwhelmed. Public buildings and homes collapsed under the weight of the ash, fires spread through the neighborhoods, the streets became impassable. Mango Avenue's seafront, once the beating heart of city life, was buried; the market, the schools, the clubs, the hotels – the places of gathering and social life – ceased to exist or were left severely damaged. Thanks to a swift evacuation, helped also by the collective memory of the 1937 eruption, casualties were few. But the material and symbolic destruction was total.

That same morning also dissolved the musical ecosystem that had made Rabaul a unique case in the Pacific. The recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and infrastructure that had sustained the local scene were destroyed or rendered unusable. Pacific Gold Studios, the hub of record production in the 1980s, was buried under ash; the small independent studios disappeared, local radio activity was cut short. It wasn't just a city that was struck, but an entire cultural system, concentrated within a few square kilometers.

In the days and months that followed, roughly 100,000 people had to be relocated out of the danger zone. Rabaul's community scattered toward Kokopo, Port Moresby and other provinces. Among those who left the city were also the musicians who had defined its sound in the 1980s: instruments saved in haste, cassettes salvaged, songs carried along as the only truly essential baggage. The scene, as it had been born and had grown in the preceding years, ceased to exist.

From that moment on, everything concerning the music of Rabaul belonged to a "before" and an "after". The volcano wasn't just a natural disaster: it became the dividing line that closed an unrepeatable cycle. With the 1994 eruption, the entire balance of Papua New Guinea's popular music shifted. The season of tolai rock, concentrated in space and time, ended up buried under a thick layer of ash. What remained was memory, diaspora, transformation. And it is from this rupture that the paths of its protagonists must be reread.

"After… nothing is the same"

After the eruption, Rabaul's music suffered a mortal blow. Its protagonists kept playing, recording and performing, but they did so under radically different conditions, stripped of the shared fabric that had made possible the creative concentration of the 1980s. The musicians' diaspora did not generate a "new Rabaul" elsewhere: Kokopo, Port Moresby or Australia became individual points of arrival, not hubs capable of rebuilding a shared system.

Some paths found new strength precisely in separation. George Telek, having returned to the village of Raluana, turned the experience of loss into a more personal and universal language, culminating in international recognition by the late 1990s. Other protagonists carried on parallel or intermittent professional careers, keeping the tolai rock repertoire alive in different contexts, often far from the spotlight. But what was lost was the possibility of a daily dialogue between bands, studios, radio and audience.

Meanwhile, Papua New Guinea's popular music changed shape. New urban languages emerged, and in the years that followed lokal took hold: a genre explicitly rooted in identity, but simplified and geared toward consumption, effective in terms of nationwide reach, less so in terms of the cultural complexity that had characterized Rabaul's experience. Tolai rock survived as a style, as memory, as an emotional archive, but no longer as a driving center. In 2000, what remained of Pacific Gold Studios also closed down.

As the years passed, that season took on the shape of a closed chapter. The worn-out cassettes, the Pacific Gold Studios albums, the musicians' accounts all conveyed the image of a scene that could not simply be "revived", because it was tied to historical and geographical conditions that no longer existed.

Rabaul became, more than a myth to idealize, a finished laboratory, whose legacy was measured not by what was rebuilt, but by what it made possible: careers, languages, awarenesses that kept moving elsewhere, carrying with them the echo of a city that had ceased to exist, but not to resonate.

The protagonists 

When, in the early 1980s, Rabaul's music stopped being a scattered phenomenon and became a recognizable scene, a few figures emerged capable of giving it a stable shape. The protagonists that follow are chosen not merely on the basis of popularity or commercial success – though relevant in many cases – but for the role they played in defining a language, an imagery and a concrete possibility of making rock music in Papua New Guinea. Some embodied a symbolic and identity-defining role, others represented the full normalization of tolai rock as everyday music, others still expanded its geographic and stylistic boundaries. What they had in common was the ability to turn a set of local practices into something recognizable, shared and lasting. Telling the story of the scene through them means following not a ranking, but a trajectory: the one that made Rabaul, for a brief but decisive period, the musical center of the country.

Barike: the idea of a national music

At the heart of the Papua New Guinean music scene of the 1980s, Barike were not simply a band: they represented the voice of an era and the sonic embodiment of a Papua New Guinea striving to define itself through its own identity. The group was formed in Rabaul in 1981 out of the meeting between John Wong, already active in local circuits, and Matalau Nakikus, a teacher who had just returned from Sydney after studying at the National Institute Of Dramatic Art, where he was a classmate of Mel Gibson. Glenn Low, Fabian Tadoi and Don Lessy soon joined them. The name itself, Barike, taken from local slang and roughly translatable as "team spirit," was a statement of intent.

From the very beginning the band developed a sound deeply rooted in the territory: the structures of modern rock were grafted onto the melodies, harmonies and rhythms of tolai folklore. Songs like "Iau Ra Biavi" and "Bing Bing Luhr" reinterpreted the folk songs of New Britain in an electric key, while "Ringa Maue" affectionately rendered the traditions of the western part of the island. It was accessible, familiar music, but far from superficial: behind every choice lay a clear cultural intent.

The turning point came with "Wan Kantri," recorded in the early 1990s, in the midst of the Bougainville civil war. Written by Glenn Low with Don Lessy and performed by Kanai Pineri, the song became a true national anthem: a symbolic journey from east to west, from the Baining communities to the Highlands, calling for unity in a country riven by deep divisions. The song stayed at the top of the charts for over a year and echoed everywhere, from radio stations to schools, from official ceremonies to villages. Barike sang in kuanua and tok pisin, took the stage wearing bilas, traditional ceremonial ornaments, and presented themselves unambiguously as "undeniably PNG."

As early as 1983 the album "Team Spirit" had cemented their popularity. The cover, iconic and controversial, sparked mixed reactions but reinforced the band's image as a catalyst for change. It was here that Nakikus's role became clear, bringing to the band a theatrical conception of performance: Barike turned into a dramatic ensemble, in which every gesture and every pause carried narrative weight. Their collaboration with the Raun Isi Theatre Company and their work in unconventional settings often turned their concerts into genuine acts of civil resistance.

The eruption of Tavurvur in September 1994 marked a definitive rupture. Displaced after a concert in Goroka, Barike once again responded through music: "Rabaul Town" became a tender lament and an act of remembrance for the lost "Pearl of the Pacific." The band thus became a moral touchstone for a scattered community. Barike didn't simply achieve success: they redefined what it meant to be a Papua New Guinean band. As Nakikus put it, "We just want to remind this country who we are." A mission that, decades later, their music continues to fulfil.

Painim Wok and mainstream success

Painim Wok marked the moment when the Rabaul scene definitively broke out of its local boundaries and became a nationwide phenomenon. The group formed in the early 1980s as Molachs, a band active in the city's rock circuits, and in 1983 recorded the album "Painim Wok" for Pacific Gold Studios. The record's success was such that it quickly overtook the fame of the original name: the band decided to adopt the album title as their new identity, marking the start of the most popular and recognisable phase of their career.

Led by the charismatic voice of George Telek and guitarist John Warbat, Painim Wok became, within just a few years, the most listened-to rock band in Papua New Guinea. Their music took hold thanks to a formula able to speak to different audiences: songs such as "Vunalaslas," "Talaigu," "Meri Lewa" and "Rabaul Town" became fixtures of radio programming and part of the country's everyday soundtrack. At the peak of their popularity, the band managed to place three songs simultaneously in the national top 10, an unprecedented achievement for a Papua New Guinean act.

Painim Wok's success was symbolic too. Singing in tok pisin and kuanua, the band normalised the use of local languages in chart-bound pop and helped make tolai rock a permanent presence in national airplay. Their records, released in quick succession throughout the 1980s, circulated across the whole country and cemented the idea that a band born in Rabaul could speak to the whole of Papua New Guinea without any mediation.

After the 1994 eruption, which marked the end of the cultural ecosystem they had emerged from, Painim Wok disbanded. Their name remained forever tied to the golden age of Rabaul music.

Shutdown: the tolai rock supergroup

Shutdown were a genuine supergroup, born out of the meeting of already established musicians, each bringing decisive experience from within the tolai rock scene. Formed in the late 1980s, when the local ecosystem had by then reached full technical and creative maturity, they embodied the moment when that language became stable, professional, and reproducible over time.

The line-up brought together some of the scene's finest talents: the virtuoso guitarist Kabu Rita, already known for his work with Xnb, Narox and Quakes; singer and guitarist Kanai Pineri, formerly of Barike and destined for a hugely popular solo career; and bassist Patti Potts Doi, also a former member of Xnb, who later founded Tarikana with John Wong and in turn became a central figure of national pop. This convergence of paths made Shutdown an ideal synthesis of the Rabaul scene at the end of the decade.

Musically, the band stood out for an instrumental quality above the average. Kabu Rita's guitar work was central, with clean, precise lines often built on rhythmic figures that interacted with the movement of the body: it was in the integration of rock and tolai dance that Shutdown found an original, instantly recognisable voice. Pop-rock structures served as a natural foundation for traditional choreography and rhythms, achieving a balance that few other groups managed with the same effectiveness.

This identity took shape across a series of albums released at a steady pace at Pacific Gold Studios: "Shutdown" (1988), "Reza" (1989), "Dadar" (1990) and "A Votong" (1992). Songs like "A Bul Ralolo", "A Votong" and "Matai Tulungen" circulated widely on cassette and local video, standing alongside those of Barike and Painim Wok in the collective memory.

Itambu: the hard face of tolai rock

Itambu represented the toughest and most instrumentally ambitious side of tolai rock. Active from the late Eighties, they positioned themselves right from the start at a high level of performing skill, with no apprenticeship period or transitional phase. Led by Leonard Kania, a voice also well known as a solo artist, and by John Warbat, already a member of the seminal Painim Wok, Itambu stood out for an approach that was more forceful, electric and muscularly rock than many of their contemporaries.

Their debut "Una Laun Damana" (1989), recorded at the Pacific Gold Studios in Rabaul, is often regarded as their most representative work. Here Itambu immediately made their signature clear: solid structures, a tight rhythm section and instrumental work of real substance. Songs like "Las Spin" showed off this approach perfectly: long, almost epic guitar solos grafted onto local folk melodies without ever distorting them. It was a rare balance, in which the soloing was never mere decoration but the narrative engine of the song.

With "Suruk Nating" (1991) and "I On Yet" (1994) the band kept operating at the same level of quality, refining a language that was already fully formed. The guitars remained central, the solos expansive yet controlled, the overall sound tight-knit.

Kopex: the endurance of the format

Active on the Rabaul-Kokopo circuit, Kopex embodied a form of tolai rock that was by then fully codified, played with consistency and skill, with no ambition to break new ground but with a remarkable ability to stand the test of time. In a scene often remembered for its creative peaks, Kopex occupied a different, complementary role: that of persistence.

The core of the band revolved around the Babate brothers: Oscar, the main songwriter, Patrick, on keyboards and arrangements, and Sebastian on guitar. Around them grew a stable lineup, fully embedded in the local production system, with regular recording sessions at the Pacific Gold Studios in Rabaul.

Their discography included "Haus Benzin" (1988), "Malira I Nogut" (1991) and "Win I Raunim" (1992), records made for local consumption and built according to the canons of tolai rock: clean or lightly distorted electric guitars, steady, danceable grooves, call-and-response choruses that spoke of work, village life, relationships and belonging to the land. It was music that was instantly recognizable, seeking no marked stylistic deviation but banking on familiarity and effectiveness.

Chris Mandawali: a decisive outsider

Chris Mandawali held a singular position in Papuan music of the Eighties and Nineties. Born in 1964 in Maramba, in the East Sepik province, and raised in Wewak, he came of age far from the tolai axis of Rabaul, developing a personal musical language from an early age. He learned to play guitar young, influenced as much by local music as by radio broadcasts of Western pop and country, and gained significant performing experience with the Raun Isi Theatre Company of Wewak.

After his first recordings at the local NBC studios, Mandawali arrived at the Pacific Gold Studios in Rabaul, where he recorded several albums throughout the Eighties and Nineties. The first and best known remains "Mandawali" (1988), one of the most original and interesting records of the entire scene of that era. Here, melodies and rhythms from the Sepik intertwined with melodic rock structures and a pronounced country imprint, already fully absorbed into his songwriting.

In the years that followed Mandawali kept releasing albums, maintaining an open, cross-genre approach: his later work also showed disco and dance touches, particularly evident on "Vol. 5" (1997), always filtered through Sepik rhythms and timbres, with recurring use of kundu drums and bamboo flutes. A solo artist more than a band man, Mandawali built a national audience through concerts, tours and wide cassette circulation.

A figure passing through rather than a leading light of the Rabaul scene, Mandawali represented one of its most significant points of openness: he showed how that creative era could welcome different regional identities and sustain a fully authorial vision, capable of blending local melodies and different genres in a coherent, personal way.

George Telek: from Rabaul to the world

George Telek was the figure who, more than any other, brought about the first international breakthrough of Papuan music. Born in 1959 in Raluana, on the Gazelle Peninsula, he grew up immersed in Tolai culture and ceremonial music, which formed his first sonic horizon. For Telek, singing began as a collective, everyday practice, tied to communal life rather than to the idea of individual authorship.

His first contact with popular music came through the stringbands, particularly as a member of the Moab Stringband, where he honed an essential, narrative vocal style that was instantly recognizable. The decisive turning point, however, came with his entry into Rabaul's electric scene and the Molachs, later renamed Painim Wok. In this phase Telek became the most familiar face of tolai rock: his clear, direct voice established itself as one of the most recognizable sounds of 1980s Papua New Guinea.

The artistic heart of his career coincided with the long and intensely productive period of recordings for the Pacific Gold Studios. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, Telek released an extraordinary number of solo albums and cassettes, often more than one a year, alongside his work with bands. In a market built on the cassette format, with no real copyright protections and driven by constant demand, the priority wasn't building a "definitive" catalogue, but keeping the music in constant circulation. The quality of individual records was inevitably uneven, but this phase shouldn't be read as minor or transitional: it was an ongoing workshop, in which Telek shaped his own language pragmatically and directly, in contact with the local audience. He varied structures, melodies, rhythmic density and the relationship between voice and accompaniment, building an expressive solidity that no international production could ever have replaced.

It was precisely this field-tested solidity that made his opening to the outside world credible. The first international breakthrough came in 1990 with his participation in "Tabaran", a project made together with Australia's Not Drowning, Waving under the guidance of David Bridie and with the involvement of musicians from Rabaul. The album was hailed as one of the first successful examples of an equal dialogue between Papuan music and contemporary Western production, earning praise even from David Byrne, who named it his album of the year. In 1992 Telek was invited to perform at Womadelaide at the initiative of Peter Gabriel, following an Australian tour with Not Drowning, Waving: a decisive step that brought him into the international festival circuit without distorting his identity.

His international solo debut, "Telek" (1997), winner of an Aria Award, was therefore not a break but a moment of consolidation and recognition. The productions became more polished, the songwriting more selective, the audience wider, but the language remained the one built during the Pgs years. The international phase translated and made legible to the outside world a path that was already fully formed.

In the years that followed, Telek continued to release numerous records, often organized in volumes, alternating personal projects, collaborations and works reclaiming tradition. But the deepest meaning of his career remained anchored to Rabaul and that unrepeatable season: it was there that Telek built a national music before it ever became a global one, showing how a deeply local practice could speak to the world without losing its original necessity.

Sanguma: the sound of sovereignty

The story of Sanguma was born in an unrepeatable moment in the history of Papua New Guinea: the years immediately following independence in 1975. It was a period in which music was perceived not merely as entertainment, but as a tool for the symbolic construction of the nation, capable of giving shape to a collective identity that was still hazy. In this context, Sanguma wasn't simply a band, but a conscious cultural project, conceived to represent the country's ethnic and sonic complexity in a new, shared form.

The group formed in 1977 within the National Arts School of Port Moresby (at the time the Creative Arts Centre), an institution founded with the explicit aim of valuing local cultures without freezing them into a museum-like dimension. It was here that the so-called creative workshop took shape: a method based on collective practice, orality and the reworking of regional traditions. In this environment, teachers such as Sandra Krempl-Pereira, Les McLaren and Keith Stebbins encouraged students to bring the songs, rhythms and instruments of their own provinces into the classroom, not to "preserve" them, but to let them coexist in a new form.

The group's line-up fully reflected this approach. Sanguma brought together musicians from different areas of Papua New Guinea — Sepik, Madang, Milne Bay, Bougainville, Central Province — each carrying their own rhythmic, melodic and linguistic heritage. The result was a heterogeneous ensemble, in which bamboo flutes, garamut, kundu, percussion and polyphonic singing coexisted with keyboards, electric bass, jazz horns and the occasional guitar. The outcome wasn't a mere juxtaposition, but a collective form of composition, often built on long iterative sections, polyrhythms and open structures.

The very name "Sanguma" made the project's ambition clear. In Tok Pisin the term denotes a feared form of magical power, associated with the ability to influence the invisible world. The band reclaimed it in a positive sense, asserting the idea that music possessed a real transformative force, capable of shaping the collective imagination. Their concerts became true rituals, in which the sonic dimension proved inseparable from the visual one: traditional bilas, body painting, dance, staged movement.

Sanguma's recorded output reflected this constant tension between accessibility and experimentation. The first albums, "Sanguma 1" (1978) and "Sanguma 2" (1979), still raw in nature and strongly tied to traditional material, already showed a tendency to move beyond the song form: extended sequences, circular developments, and a focus on rhythm and timbral variation suggested a kind of Melanesian progressive folk, instinctive rather than theoretical, born from the aggregation of different languages.

This dimension emerged with particular clarity on the two volumes of "Live In Port Moresby", recorded and released in 1980. Far from being mere concert documents, these live recordings captured Sanguma at the moment when their music became above all a performative experience: stretched-out tracks, collective improvisation, a constant dialogue between percussion, horns and keyboards. It was here that the band definitively clarified its nature as an ensemble, closer to a sonic workshop than to a pop group in the traditional sense.

With "Sanguma Suites" (1981) the group took a decisive leap: jazz fusion improvisation and extensive use of synthesizers and horns made the music more experimental, fascinating critics while leaving part of the local audience skeptical.

The peak is often identified as "Papua New Guinea" (1984), released in New Zealand by Ode Records: a work that managed to balance complexity and immediacy, bringing Sanguma to international attention. It's no coincidence that the group became one of the country's first musical ambassadors, performing in Australia, Europe, Japan and the United States, up to their 1983 tour supporting Steel Pulse, which culminated in an appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

This success abroad, however, exposed a deep contradiction. Back home, Sanguma's music was often perceived as too cultured, too urban, too far removed from the tastes of an audience that, during those same years, increasingly identified with tolai rock, local country music and radio-friendly pop. The band ended up celebrated as a national symbol while remaining, at the same time, marginal in the domestic market.

Between 1985 and 1988, as the idealistic drive of the post-independence era ran out of steam and internal difficulties mounted, the project fell apart. The brief reunion of the 1990s, in the age of world music, took place in an entirely different context, marked by new dynamics of exploitation and cultural decontextualization.

Sanguma's legacy remained decisive, however, particularly for having legitimized the idea that Papuan music could speak to the world without asking permission. Their example proved fundamental for artists like George Telek, who drew from that experience the conviction – and the tools – to carry Melanesian music beyond national borders in a more personal and lasting way.

Sanguma thus remained a unique case: not a popular band in the strict sense of the term, but the first great sound laboratory of independent Papua New Guinea, in which music became political language, cultural vision and long-term project.

Tambaran Culture Of P.N.G.: the scene seen from outside

Tambaran Culture Of P.N.G. emerged in the early 1990s, but its roots stretched back into the previous decade, within the National Arts School of Port Moresby. More than a band in the strict sense, it was the result of a collective project developed by students and musicians keen to bring indigenous instruments, repertoires and performance practices back into circulation in an organized form, suited both to the contemporary stage and to international touring.

Their approach stood clearly apart from that of the Rabaul bands: Tambaran didn't start out from rock in order to "indigenize" it, but instead built a performative language centered on traditional percussion, bamboo flutes (mambu), regional rhythmic structures and singing, incorporating Western instruments and timbres like sax and guitar only partially. The result was a total spectacle, in which music, dance and visual arts coexisted as inseparable elements, closer to a theatrical conception than to the song format typical of tolai rock.

Their debut album, "Tambaran Culture" (recorded between 1992 and 1993), was cut at Pacific Gold Studios in Rabaul. Tracks such as "Pinggo" achieved a degree of circulation outside the country too, thanks to tours and collaborations that brought the group onto international stages, including festivals like Womad. This is also where their relationship with the Australian band Not Drowning, Waving came in, helping to raise the profile of Papuan music within the then-booming world music circuits. Among the group's most notable members were Pius Wasi (flute and artistic direction, originally from East Sepik), Ben Hakalitz, a virtuoso of percussion and drums, and Raymond Rangatin on vocals and performance.

Other key figures and side trajectories

Alongside the names that most clearly defined the Rabaul scene, a wider constellation of artists and groups took shape who, while remaining on the margins of the main canon, added to the complexity of that ecosystem.

The Junior Unbelievers were perhaps the most interesting case. Led by the dazzling left-handed guitarist Danson "Kamit" Mamua, they were among the most technically accomplished acts to emerge from mid-1980s Rabaul. Their sound paired energetic solos with clearly recognizable tolai melodies, in a direct, engaging mix that placed the electric guitar at the center of everything. Unfortunately, they released only one album, the excellent "Ol Yangpela" (1985).

On a strictly musical level, John Wong, as a solo artist, embodied the more accessible, popular side of tolai rock. The author of an extensive, ongoing body of work – including albums such as "Solo In The Volcano", "Vamanga" and "Vamanga II" – Wong favored direct songwriting, built on singable melodies and simple structures, often anchored to Western pop and country-rock models. Among his projects worth mentioning is also Gecko, dedicated to children's music, which reflected a strong communicative and educational bent.

Formed at the tail end of the golden age, in 1993, Tarikana represented one of the last developments of the original Rabaul scene. Tied to John Wong, who co-founded the group together with singer Patti Potts Doi, they blended tolai rock with a pronounced taste for reggae and R&B, reflecting Wong's desire to explore softer, more international sounds. They recorded a handful of songs for Pacific Gold Studios – including a popular reggae version of "Under The Boardwalk" and original tracks like "Lau Rinda" – before splitting up within the space of a single year, swept away by the events of 1994.

More peripheral but still significant was the figure of Aquila, a guitarist and singer from the Duke Of York Islands. His album "Duke Of York Ailan", released by Pacific Gold Studios in the late 1980s, fit squarely within the conventions of tolai rock: local melodies, danceable grooves and clean guitar arrangements. A solid, representative work, even if nothing set it clearly apart from its contemporaries.

The Quakes, linked to central figures of the scene such as Kabu Rita and Patti Potts Doi, boast a particularly substantial discography and a steady presence on the local circuit. Their output fit squarely within the most widespread conventions of tolai rock. Rather than for any distinctive stylistic signature, the Quakes stood out for the sheer volume and continuity of their releases.

The Riot Squad, by contrast, stood out for a harder, more atypical attitude: sounds closer to hard rock and metal, with clear nods to a certain strand of theatrical British rock, from Queen onward. An isolated case, but a telling one, revealing how permeable the Rabaul scene was to outside influences, even ones far removed from the most canonical tolai rock.

A fundamental, if often underrated, role fell to the Moab Stringband. Active in reshaping Papuan stringband music, they modernized its language by incorporating Western pop structures, more elaborate guitar work, and urban lyrics in tok pisin. Their collaborations with George Telek on various recording projects helped establish this format as one of the pillars of Papua New Guinea's popular music, showing just how porous the line between acoustic tradition and modern production really was.

Also worth remembering, more for his success than for any real musical value, is the artist Anslom, a Bob Marley epigone and author of several albums.

Also to be placed within the Rabaul scene is David Andrew, a musician originally from Vanuatu but active in Papua New Guinea in the mid-1980s. His album "Flash" (1985) was, to all effects, an integral part of that context: a sparkling, immediate record balancing radio-friendly pop with tolai rock. While carrying a melodic sensibility traceable to the wider Melanesian area, "Flash" fit seamlessly into Rabaul's creative climate, confirming its open and inclusive nature.

Finally, other minor or less documented figures from the scene, active between the late Seventies and the early Nineties, deserve mention: Keni Lucas, Narox, Double Vision Band, Paramana Strangers, Julie Toliman, Xnb, Frank Low, Black Temple Band, Okoro Mates, Reks Band, Sexy Apples, Sagothorns, Crisis Survivors, Omadi, Fr. Herman Taliva, X-Vibes, K-Dumen Band, Lista Serum, Azzimbah Band, and many others besides.

Taken together, these artists did not write a counter-history, but they completed the picture. It is partly thanks to them that the music of Rabaul stopped looking like the product of a few isolated names and instead took on the shape of a genuine cultural system.

Sources:

https://digitalpasifik.org/

https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/

https://www.originmusicpublishing.com/

From The Ashes: A Case Study of the Re-development of Local Music Recording in Rabaul (Papua New Guinea) Following the 1994 Volcanic Eruptions

https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/528412/30th-anniversary-of-the-twin-eruptions-of-rabaul

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20/03/2026