{"id":422146,"date":"2026-05-11T11:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/422146\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T11:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T11:00:08","slug":"hello-sailor-mourn-death-of-nz-music-hall-of-fame-member-and-producer-stuart-pearce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/422146\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello Sailor mourn death of NZ Music Hall of Fame member and producer Stuart Pearce"},"content":{"rendered":"

Profiling him in 2020, Audio Culture credited Pearce as having arranged and\/or played on \u201ca number of New Zealand\u2019s most iconic songs \u2013 E Ipo, Sierra Leone, Poi E and I\u2019ll Say Goodbye (Even Though I\u2019m Blue) among them”.<\/p>\n

From a family of pianists, Pearce moved from Wellsford to Auckland City to join a band as a youth and joined his first group, Chapeaux, after seeing an ad in the Herald, seeking a piano player for a nightclub residency.<\/p>\n

Though not in Hello Sailor when they released their self-titled 1977 debut album that produced top 20 singles Lyin\u2019 In The Sand, Blue Lady and Gutter Black, Pearce was inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2011 with Hello Sailor.<\/p>\n

Bandmate Graham Brazier passed away in 2015<\/a>, and Dave McArtney died during an operation in 2013.<\/p>\n

Pearce went on to collaborate with a vast number of Kiwi artists including Shihad, The Topp Twins, Prince Tui Teka, Moana and The Moahunters and Home Brew.<\/p>\n

In 2020, Pearce estimated he\u2019d played more than 9000 gigs across his career, most of those in covers bands.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a musician there is a certain stigma around being in a covers band, but I will say this: when music is being played by people, not one person onstage is thinking about who wrote it,\u201d he told Audio Culture. <\/p>\n

\u201cMost of my recording work has been original Kiwi songs; most of my live work has been covers. A recording pop band may play 25 times a year, a nightclub band may play 250 times. I did both simultaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Profiling him in 2020, Audio Culture credited Pearce as having arranged and\/or played on \u201ca number of New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[74,95,634,6179,156,39275,57236,3177,3192,194,2190,1329,57387,157,65041,111,139,69,1118,106486,28203,46451,6723,9347],"class_list":["post-422146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-after","tag-and","tag-death","tag-died","tag-entertainment","tag-fame","tag-hall","tag-hello","tag-illness","tag-kiwi","tag-long","tag-member","tag-mourn","tag-music","tag-musician","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-pearce","tag-producer","tag-sailor","tag-stuart","tag-veteran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}