It must be the most New Zealand opening to a sentence ever.

“Shane (real name Trevor) ...”

How Kiwi is that? In the country that gave us the North and South islands, changing your workmanlike, everyday name for another workmanlike, everyday name is made to seem aspirational.

That half-line, about the 60s pop singer we knew as Shane and his mum knew as Trevor, comes from Steve Braunias’s Cover Story: 100 Beautiful, Strange and Frankly Incredible New Zealand LP Covers. The book is full of such Kiwi-isms. Braunias has made a career of them, whether writing, as here, about pop stars, true crime (his books The Scene of the Crime and Missing Persons) or takeaway shops (The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road).

Importantly, though, Braunias resorts neither to detached irony nor cultural cringe. “Kitsch,” he writes, “is a dread condition that sucks the life — and charm — out of everything it touches. So does Kiwiana.” Braunias has a genuine affection for what most of us would consider to be the mundane.

Some of the record sleeves in the book, reproduced in near LP size with accompanying essays, are extremely mundane, but Braunias finds beauty in them; this is not a ‘100 awful album covers you must see!’ listicle. However, the book Braunias has written is not the one suggested by its title or even its author’s introductory claim:

“How do we visually identify music?” Braunias asks, quoting a series about LP covers from the AudioCulture website. “It’s the central question of this book.” Perhaps, but it’s not the question Cover Story answers.

The records come from Braunias’s own collection, which he compiled during several years by wombling his way through charity stores up and down the country. But he collects not the sounds that lie within the grooves – much of which he admits is rubbish – or even the sometimes garish, often amateurish LP covers. Instead, he collects the tales these artefacts represent and the cultural thumb-smudges they have left behind. Records are simply a rack from which Braunias hangs a series of stories about New Zealandness in its many forms.

Charity store crate digging lends itself to storytelling. These items meant something to someone at some time. They carry the vapour trails of their previous owners. Often you’ll find a complete collection. I once spotted a dozen or so specialist CDs of classical music played on famous church organs. When you see that you know the CDs’ owner has died; no one who has lovingly assembled a connoisseur’s selection of organ music is going to dump the lot at the Sallies. There’s something ineffably sad about the dead person’s family finding no use for an item that was once treasured, that has caused pleasure and spine shivers in the person they loved.

Instead of speculating about who owned the LPs, though, Braunias searches for people who can tell him something interesting about them. Occasionally he unearths (sometimes tenuous) connections to a famous person – Russell Crowe, Sam Neill, Simon Bridges. Other times he’ll talk to the artist – Shane/Trevor. But he’s just as likely to track down the photographer, designer, record company owner or just someone who knew them.

Several of the people Braunias spoke with have since died; Cover Story makes a fitting tribute to them. With a few words he sketches his subjects, managing to capture their essence. Braunias describes the late Peter Posa as, “New Zealand’s greatest, most successful, most loved and loneliest guitarist,” while the still-living Murray Grindlay is “a nice old man looking back on an excitingly misspent youth.”

Braunias doesn’t, however, quite capture the racism or sexism underlying many of the covers. He touches on both without really delving into either, beyond briefly examining the role of colonisation and cultural appropriation, and the pervasiveness of the male gaze. Despite Braunias’s early acknowledgement of Baudrillard, there is no post-structural analysis of the album cover as simulacrum.

That’s for the best; this is not an academic text. It’s enough that Braunias is our most insightful essayist and that Cover Story offers an engrossing, exquisitely written version of what it is to live and flourish and be forgotten – or unforgotten – in Aotearoa.

Reviewed by Richard Betts