Radio announcer Murray Inglis in 1978. Photo: Stuff
One of the country's best-known radio personalities, Murray "Muzza" Inglis, has died aged 80, after a battle with cancer.
New Plymouth-born Inglis had a career that spanned five decades.
He joined the state-owned New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in 1962 as a clerk, before a trial on-air in Palmerston North where he was told he sounded "too Kiwi" and let go.
Determined to be a radio announcer, Inglis moved to Sydney, starting a broadcasting career that would take him through dozens of stations in big cities and smaller centres on both sides of the Tasman.
His heyday in New Zealand was in the era of the big independently owned commercial radio stations, such as Radio Avon in Christchurch, Radio Hauraki and Radio I, the FM pioneers 89FM and 91FM in Auckland and Radio Windy in Wellington.
In 1977, Inglis won a United States award from Billboard magazine as the South Pacific personality of the year.
That prompted a thank-you letter to the Palmerston North manager who gave him his first break, then sacked him.
His most famous episode came in the same year, when Inglis locked himself in his studio at Christchurch's Radio Avon for two days.
He remained on air in apparent protest over a change to his contract.
The sit-in made headlines - Inglis believed it had been front page on the New York Times - although it later emerged it was a publicity stunt, coinciding with the re-launch of a state-owned music radio competitor.
The Press at the time reported Radio New Zealand formally complained that parts of Inglis' on-air sit-in were "unfit for public broadcast".
'Somebody came in and said, there's all these people out in the street yelling 'we want Muzza' and what was just a silly little prank turned into this kind of major thing," Inglis later recalled.
As long as the list of radio stations he worked on was the list of music industry stars he met and spent time with during his radio career.
Murray Inglis on Devonport Wharf in 2017. Photo: Lawrence Smith / Stuff
In a recent video, he reeled off names from British comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to stars such as Tina Turner, David Bowie and Elton John.
"I met Freddie Mercury and went shopping for a lady's bathing costume for him on Queen St - he was very funny," Inglis recalled.
In 2016 Inglis was recognised at the New Zealand Radio Awards for Services to Broadcasting.
Inglis lived out his teenage dream of being a radio announcer well beyond his career in mainstream commercial radio.
He had a show on Devonport-based station The Flea before switching to an online station in 2018.
He then moved to his own www.muzzapower.net until his health declined, following a diagnosis of the blood cancer myeloma in November 2021.
Inglis celebrated his 80th birthday four months early in January at his waterfront Auckland flat, with a large turnout of friends and radio industry figures who had worked him over the decades.