The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Bill Lake, Geoff Rashbrooke, Rick Bryant, Andrew Delahunty and Nick Bollinger, conducted by Kevin Ikin for Radio New Zealand in March 1999 in Wellington's Bar Bodega.

BILL: I had a band in Canberra where I grew up, a jug band, and we named ourselves after a band we heard on a record - a Folkways record - called the Mobile Strugglers. I didn't realise until last year that a "struggle", in black parlance, is a party so a bunch of strugglers are party players. That's what the Garden City Strugglers was. So when I wanted to start a band here I thought the name should stay the same so I just changed the city identification. I was eager to avoid the draft in Australia, sort of draft-dodging, but one of the members of the jug band I had in Australia wanted to come over here and he suggested it. Eventually he didn't come, but I came.

GEOFF: The Victoria University Folk Club wanted to set up its own jug band. There was a very good Christchurch one called the Band of Hope which had come round and played. So they had a meeting. It started off with about 18 people. That's when I first heard Bill play and first heard the harmonica sound and realised this is what I had heard on records but hadn't identified as a harmonica.  There were a lot of people there, John Clarke probably became the best known, but he wasn't good enough for the band!

BILL: Within this meeting there was this big schism half way through when half of us decided we wanted to play properly, the other half just wanted to have fun, play kazoos, stuff like that, so we hived off to another room.

GEOFF: When I look back on it, it was really punk music ahead of its time, except it was in the blues idiom.

RICK: Let's not beat about the bush, we were often drunk. It's not as if we were throwing up in the fireplace or throwing our bread rolls at the waitress - we weren't a day-to-day disgrace - but let's say we weren't as couth as some of the straighter musicians.

BILL: By this stage the band consisted of Geoff, myself, Rick, and Julie Needham who played fiddle, a valuable addition. Geoff left at some point and we had another couple of guitarists, Kris Smith, and Robert Taylor, who was subsequently in Mammal and then Dragon.

RICK: It was the gutsiest kind of folk music. A lot of other folk music was a bit of a have. You've got to remember this was in a context of William Clauson, Peter, Paul and Mary and Burl Ives. There was a blues boom on as well, and that wasn't quite the same as the folk thing. There were all sorts of people who were buying blues records who weren't necessarily the same people that went to folk concerts. And it was leaking into pop music, especially once John Mayall came along. But we were a bit unusual because we were in the folk thing and the rock'n'roll thing and in a small way at the tail end of the jazz thing. But some of the people who played jazz or were into jazz - Colin Heath was one, Max Winnie was another - were also into all three subsets of the thing. There were people in the folk scene that thought we were just too bloody noisy and hairy, even before the drums came along. It was a time of strongly held opinions.

BILL: For a long time we were in parallel. We would do Strugglers performances where several members of Mammal were present, Robert Taylor, Rick, Julie Needham.

RICK: Mammal were able to use the mixture of blues, R&B, acid-rock if you like...

BILL: Tony Backhouse, the main writer ...

RICK: He was art-rock...

BILL: But it gelled somehow. We had a pretty funky sound as well as these very sophisticated harmonies which Tony supplied. But Mammal became a very serious affair after awhile, especially after I left, they became a road band and the Strugglers couldn't really go on after that, there were too many members missing. So it just sort of folded away, but not for many years as it turned out.

ANDREW: I'd played harmonica around the folk scene quite a bit and also a bit of the electric stuff as well. I'd played in a jug band in Auckland, the Mad Dog Jug Band, and another called Sylvester Turk and the Immaculate Conception [laughter] briefly.

NICK: It was my first year out of school. I think Bill had been to see a band I had with some of my high school mates, Last Gasp, and I got a call from him one day to say that the Strugglers had been offered a residency at the Royal Tiger to drive the crowds away [much laughter] because Midge Marsden's Country Flyers had been playing there and the place was getting overpopulated. So they decided they needed a bass player because Geoff and Bill had been alternating on bass.

BILL: The Strugglers Mark II went from 1974 to about 1976. And I think, possibly because Nick went off to be on the road with Rick in Rough Justice, it just sort of faded away and didn't actually start again as the Strugglers until the late 80s, so it was a real hiatus.

GEOFF: I was trying to pass exams and had small children, musicians' hours were just too unsocial, so I pulled out.

NICK: In the late 80s some guys in Wellington had bought a recording studio and were mainly doing post-production sound for films but were interested in recording music and actually looking at starting a record label. And they sowed this idea of Rick and Bill getting back together to record some of their acoustic blues repertoire, some of the stuff they had done 15 years earlier in the Strugglers.

RICK: I didn't need a lot of persuading because I had missed the Strugglers all the time they were in recess and it always seemed to me that it was an enterprise that, geography allowing, should have kept happening. I'd never stopped loving country blues or jug band music and also, to cut a long story short. I wanted to make music with Bill. Bill plays the guitar in a way that not many other people around do and as long as I was singing with Bill I was singing things I couldn't do with anyone else. And by that time I think we'd realised that it wasn't strange or impossible to be in several different bands at once, it was manageable. When you're a kid there's this whole idea of branding. Pop music. You all flat together, it's like some utopian communist experiment in the ideal society. Originally I thought bands had to be The Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all, but eventually you realise that as time goes on that there's no reason why, if you manage things properly, you can't be in half a dozen different line-ups. You just have to manage your time well.

BILL: Also, I think you could say too that in the wider world of rock music rigid orthodoxies had broken down by then. You'd had punk, and that had been a rigid thing for a while, and then you had all the fashionable stuff. And by the late 80s pluralism was bit more of a thing, anything could be done if it was good. And there were lots of examples of bands whose members played in different bands that did different things, especially acoustic things.

RICK: In fact, only a short while after we did this it became a global fashion. It was called unplugged, only we had pulled the plug first. [laughter]

BILL: Because Rick lives in Auckland we play fairly irregularly, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

RICK: We cope pretty well I reckon.

BILL: I can't see any reason for it to stop, but it does set a certain sort of limit.  If we were playing all the time and rehearsing lots of songs we would undergo a period of very rapid development into something or other and then, who knows, we might not like it. [laughter]

NICK: I think we all agree that even though we do other jobs and things to pay the mortgage or whatever, the Strugglers is a really important thing in all our lives.

RICK: It's a special band, a special chemistry.

ANDREW: All that other stuff is fairly peripheral but it takes up a lot of time, unfortunately. But I think it is liberating in a way that we don't expect to make a living out of being the Windy City Strugglers because it can then be completely our own inclination as to what we do.