How Bizarre and more
What a funny old year this has been. Good, I mean. Very good. I turned sixty. Who turns sixty? Only other people surely. I’ve travelled with Brigid – at last tally 2015 has seen us in Thailand, New Zealand, Poland, Sri Lanka, Japan, China, Hong Kong (several times), Holland, Indonesia (more than several times), Malaysia, Australia, France, Germany, Belgium, Cambodia and possibly 15 times in Singapore. It sounds impressive but 24 hours in a country is somewhat less than exciting at times.
I have friends who have created mindblowing works of visual, printed and audio art. My friend Alan Jansson wrote and produced an Australian country number one (which happily I co-publish). The website I created has established itself as a go-to reference point for all things New Zealand music history and is increasingly filled with pages of phenomenal writing from a range of the best music writers New Zealand has to offer. I’m very proud of it even if increasingly I think the task I set myself there four years back is done and I need my weekends and evenings back.
I’m also proud of my wonderful wife and daughter, both of whom also had a good year, with Bella hitting 21 and Brigid’s work appearing all over the planet.
And I wrote a book. Or at least I published a book I wrote in large part four and five years ago, via Awa Press.
Which may be as good an excuse as any to (slightly) resurrect this moribund blog, to list some of the things people have said about this (and apologies but the CSS seems impervious to my attempts to increase the font size).
The reviews of How Bizarre have been universally positive and some have been almost embarrassing in their fulsomeness. But, so be it – I threw myself into the open and as part of that one has to except the response, no matter the tenor, and if that tenor is good [great] I can hardly complain . One has to accept any brickbats too, but to date I’ve had but two – both of whom admitted they had not read the book and both then questioned my right to pen such a book. It was, one said, not my place to tell the story. I’m unsure why I don’t have the right to tell my story? The other – from a Maori politician of mixed reputation – said that the song belonged to the Maori people!? It [‘How Bizarre’] was co-written by a Greek/Scandinavian and a Tuhoe/Nuiean and released by me on my label. The lineage is perhaps cloudy but very much not one of racial singularity.
