A renegade rocker from Palmerston North is the newly-appointed dean of Otago University's School of Business.

Now 52 and a professor of public policy, administration and management, Robin Gauld was the instigator of the Skeptics, formed in 1980 at Freyberg High School for a music option.

The group have since been described by critic Grant Smithies as making "some of the most intense and original music ever to issue from these shores", and by Shihad's Jon Toogood as "Motorhead played on lots of mushrooms and acid by a Flying Nun band".

Supplied Skeptics guitarist Robin Gauld played in the band from 1980 to 1985, before becoming an academic and one of New Zealand's foremost analysts of the heath care system.

"We were a group of young people with a desire to do something of our own, and couldn't play our instruments very well," Gauld said.

"We were an awful, noisy and heavy, original outfit to start with, but were a very hard working band ... there was nothing to do in Palmerston North ... so we got better at what we were doing."

Not fitting the standard issue folk, hard rock and blues musical landscape of the city, they faced a lack of venues and hostility.

"As a young person it was a pretty rough place, you had bikey gangs all over the place and their followers, and you either became a follower of them and heavy metal and aggression and fighting, or left town.

"We built quite a following of people who hadn't left town yet, and it took off."

Gauld remembers seeing a small group of Mothers gang members arrive at a gig, and bracing for trouble.

"But they'd come because they liked the music."

From 1983 to 1984 Skeptics ran Snail Clamps - a venue in an old warehouse just off The Square.

It attracted a steady flow of other underground Kiwi acts, many from Flying Nun, and hosted a lot of theatre, he said.

"It was a pretty interesting place ... the byline was Gallery of Human Exhibition."

So how did this lead to academia?

"Like all young people I was really searching for something ... I'd been playing music, and working at Centrepoint Theatre as a stage manager, and then spent a year travelling.

"And I thought 'I want to go to university' ... for young people these days they go straight to university, no question - but in my era you went there for a particular reason."

Gauld enrolled in politics which he was interested in, but soon switched topics.

"And I've never left."

He's excited now about redefining the strategic advantages offered by the Otago School of Business.

"To young musicians I'd say follow your instincts - it's a point of strategic difference. It's the same in business, that difference - how are they different from other businesses?

"You could become a middle of the road band, play bland songs, and you might end up getting that one hit, or you can define yourself very differently from others - that's what we were, and who we were. Follow your passion, and don't get caught up in the mainstream dross."