Palace Music Revisited

Reporting on the death this week of Palace Music, the ANZ Bloodstock News made an innocent mistake when stating that the horse first shuttled to New Zealand in 1991. It was 1987 (Naturalism and Ready To Explode were both foaled in 1988). Palace Music shuttled to Australia from 1991.

I had started the negotiating process for shuttling both Palace Music and Dahar when I resigned from Waikato Stud in 1987. Those were the Wild West days of the Troy Corporation, a wooden horse for sure, Australasian Breeding Stables and a sad group of individuals, on both sides of the Tasman, whose egos and dubious business practices led to major investor losses and for giving the industry a bad name at the time. I’ve always thought the story of the removal of Zephyr Bay from Waikato should have been made into a movie. It was a little bit like Shergar except in Zephyr Bay’s case they still had the body! Some of the players from those days were never brought to account properly.

In 1987, Palace Music was installed at the then Troy Corporation controlled Trelawney Stud, fee NZ$40,000, and Dahar, fee NZ$50,000, at Waikato Stud. Considering that’s 20 years ago, those were hefty fees at the time for first-season sires but both were top class racehorses representing fashionable extensions of the Northern Dancer male line. Dahar, I feel sure, had only one testicle, the other having been removed whilst racing, which convinced me of the truth of the old adage, ‘one’s a necessity, two’s a luxury’.

In the early years of their stud careers, these stallions only covered half the number of mares their equivalents do today. Both were 'spotty', as the Americans say, meaning they were inconsistent sires of top class progeny. Dahar, who was by Lyphard out of Dahlia, ought to have been a better broodmare sire but Excellerator and Bocelli were the only outstanding horses produced by his daughters who, admittedly, were not great in numbers.

When I bought Emancipation for New Zealand clients when she was 15 years old she was carrying to Palace Music, then at the old Segenhoe (now Vinery). The resultant foal became the dam of Railings.