Style: August 05, 2022

Style | Feature 29
Disk Den, 118 Princes Street. The music store with a
vintage double window frontage displaying Adele posters, Roy
Orbison albums and Led Zeppelin t-shirts has long been a
walk-in time capsule. But it is also a more than six decade long,
living thread in the warp and weft of Dunedin’s music fabric.
Owned by Hing and Noni Chin for the past 45 years, Disk
Den was, at one time, at the forefront of record retailing in
New Zealand. It also gained an international reputation as the
go-to store for Dunedin Sound music.
Today, as the eldest of this generation of Chins prepares to
retire, their store at the quiet, homely end of town is a changeless
monument to a lost era. But it remains a much-remembered,
deeply significant institution in the lives and memories of
music-lovers throughout the country and around the globe.
It was 1977. Hing was 26 and preparing for his OE, his first
overseas trip since arriving in New Zealand from Guangzhou,
China, as a 3-year-old, in 1953.
‘‘My father noticed the business was for sale,’’ Hing recalls
of what was then called Russell Oaten’s Disk Den, in Rattray
Street. He said, ‘You should go and have a look’. So I had
a look, and there we go.’’
Hing says he planned to run the music store, which had
been started by Russell Oaten 18 years previous, for a couple
of years ‘‘and then flick it off’’.
The first year, Hing increased the profit.
‘‘So we stayed for another year. And next year, we
exceeded the previous year.’’
They kept doing that – even while shifting from Rattray
Street to the City Hotel building on the southeast corner of
Princes Street and Moray Place, in 1983, and then, in 1986, to
the present site, which they bought – until well into the 1990s.
In the meantime, the store’s sales had swung from 75 per
cent vinyl to 50 per cent cassette and then, from the
late-1980s, to almost entirely CD. It was a busy period, as
people swapped their vinyl collections for polycarbonate plastic.
‘‘When CDs first became popular, they’d be buying up to
five at a time,’’ Hing’s wife Noni says.
Disk Den was the first in the country to become a Top of
the Pops album discount store.
‘‘We were $2 cheaper than The Warehouse,’’ Hing says.
‘‘Their Top 40 CDs were $26.95 and ours were $24.95. So,
we basically captured a large proportion of the market.’’
The mid-1990s was the peak. Disk Den – a single
independent music store in a city of 120,000 – had about one
per cent of the country’s music market.
‘‘There was about 100 million [dollars] New Zealand,
wholesale, [per year] of total music CD sales. We did just over
a million dollars worth.’’
Business plateaued and, early in the new millennium, the
Chins thought of retiring.
Then they noticed a resurging interest in New Zealand
music – especially Dunedin music – particularly from
overseas visitors.
‘‘Our daughter was living in London at the time,’’ Noni says.
‘‘She rang one day and said, ‘Did you know Disk Den is in
Lonely Planet [travel guide]?’
‘‘We had wondered why all these tourists were coming
in to buy New Zealand music. It was mostly Dunedin Sound
bands they were interested in – The Chills, The Bats, Tall
Dwarfs, 3Ds, The Verlaines…’’
The growth of music streaming platforms has changed
everything. It is now ‘‘a lot quieter’’.
Hing is a member of Dunedin’s Chin dynasty. Chin Fooi
emigrated to New Zealand from China in the early 1900s,
setting up laundries in inner-city Dunedin.
His son, Eddie Chin, Hing’s father, opened various businesses
including the Sunset Strip and Tai Pei cabarets, in Dunedin’s
Exchange area.
Eddie married in China, in 1949. Hing and his mother came
to New Zealand four years later. His five younger siblings
include Sam, who owned Sammy’s Cabaret, and Jones, who
owns the Crown Hotel.
Hing’s musical influences began early when his grandmother
gave him a crystal radio set. The loudest radio station was
4XD, fostering his affection for country music, particularly Kris
Kristofferson, and the music of the 1960s – ‘‘Roy Orbison, the
early Rolling Stones, just about all of The Beatles’’.
Hing was also the happy recipient of free concert tickets
given to his father, who was too busy to attend.
‘‘So as a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old, I went to Louis Armstrong
at the Town Hall here, in 1963, Marty Robbins, in ’64, and the
Rolling Stones, in ’65.’’
Noni’s musical tastes are more contemporary – The Cure,
The Smiths, Fat Freddy’s Drop, L.A.B. – but the couple have
enjoyed many concerts together, sometimes courtesy of a
grateful record company.
‘‘We go for the vibe, for the music, for everything,’’ Noni
says. ‘‘Leonard Cohen was probably our favourite.’’
Noni grew up in Christchurch. She and Hing married in
1973. They had three children; Lisa, Nathan and Lawrence.
Inevitably, the store and music were foundation stones in
the children’s lives.
‘‘When Lisa was about two she already knew all the Neil
Diamond songs,’’ Noni says.
Lisa adds that she was vacuuming and serving behind the
counter while still at primary school.
Dunedin bands became her passion, fuelled by access to
her uncle’s music venues. Her first concert was a matinee
performance by Netherworld Dancing Toys.
‘‘I would go and do the coat check when I wasn’t old enough
to work behind the bar. So, I got to see all of those bands. My
favourites were Straitjacket Fits, The 3Ds and The Chills.’’
Hing and Noni’s children, however, had no interest in
continuing the family business.
‘‘It’s a sunset industry,’’ Hing agrees.
Music and commerce, divergent arts, have been deeply
entwined in Hing and Noni’s lives, expressing themselves as a
single entity, Disk Den.
The key to running a successful music store is stocking what
your customers want rather than catering to your own tastes,
Hing says. ‘‘Because music is fashionable, the hardest thing is to
gauge what the coming trends are.’’