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Gareth Shute

New Zealand musician and writer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ25340788
Source-derived summary

Gareth Hal Shute (born 1 September 1973) is a non-fiction author, musician and journalist from New Zealand.

Career

Shute's first book, Hip Hop Music In Aotearoa was published in 2004, and won an award at the NZ book awards in 2005. He went on to write four more books: Making Music In New Zealand, Insights: New Zealand Artists Talk About Creativity, NZ Rock: 1987-2007 and Concept Albums. After taking a break from writing books for over a decade, in 2025 Shute returned with Songs From The Shaky Isles: A Short History Of Popular Music In New Zealand.

Shute has also been a music columnist for New Zealand Music Magazine and continues to write for the music history website, Audioculture.

Over this time, he was also a member of a number of local bands including: The Tokey Tones, The Ruby Suns, The Brunettes, The Cosbys, The Conjurors, Dictaphone Blues, and The Broken Heartbreakers.

Editorial summary

“Gareth Shute” enters the record as new Zealand musician and writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gareth, Shute and Zealand can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1973, 2004, 2005, 1987—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1973-09-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Gareth, Shute and Zealand.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Gareth Shute” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Gareth, Shute and Zealand provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25340788. VIAF identifies the subject as 38778437. The Library of Congress control number is n2005007333. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 2004, 2005 and 1987.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Gareth Shute”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Gareth Shute primary sources, Gareth Shute archive and Gareth research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Gareth Shute”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Gareth Shute” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.