Monday, June 3rd, 2013 at
12:47 pm
I feel like I’m slowly coming out of a dark hole. Of my own making of course.
I blog mostly because I enjoy it - and because it provides a place where I can harmlessly vent and enthuse to my heart’s (and head’s) content. I like it and it’s an escape to a place that is mine, even if that mine is rather public. But it’s a public me that I can control and limit as I see fit.
I’ll never write as well as my friend David Herkt has for many, many years, mostly recently on this heartwarming — if conflicting — essay , and make no claim to do so, but neither am I ashamed of what I write now. I wish I could say that about then, but I’m not tempted to quick-edit to hide that messy past either.
Three or so years back I started obsessively pushing for the thing that has grown into AudioCulture. Why? Well mostly because I was increasingly aware that there was a hole, and it was a gaping and growing hole, in the way we (New Zealand — no matter where I live I am everyday a New Zealander) as a nation have captured our musical past.
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Saturday, April 27th, 2013 at
7:41 am
A guest post from Murray Cammick. Mo’ says:
This is the version of the James Brown story (that was published in the February 2007 RipItUp magazine) before I axed 300 or so words and a bit of the colour from the story.

Bryan Staff interviews JB, Auckland 1978
The Godfather Of Funk
We will need a new card for Christmas 2007, one that recognises the birth of Jesus Christ and the death of James Brown on December 25.
When you read Brown’s biography you wonder how he survived his childhood in a house of ill-repute and his imprisonment as a teenager. With no education, how did this wild and crazy guy become the biggest soul star in the USA and then revolutionise that style to invent funk?
I get pissed off when music writers choose the 1962 Live At The Apollo as Brown’s best live album. They are ignoring the pivotal achievement of his life, the fact that in 1965 he invented a new sound with the single ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’. This single was No.1 on the Billboard R&B charts for eight weeks. He should be called the Godfather of Funk not the Godfather of Soul.
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Saturday, April 20th, 2013 at
5:22 pm
I need to excise stuff.
Firstly I need to excise the the fact I’ve not posted here for 5 months.
A block? I guess so, mostly created and driven by the fact that my life since mid-2012 has been one of constant evaluation of other’s written words, pressure to deliver these words and an increasingly overwhelming panoply of extraordinary images, archival materiel and just stuff that Murray Cammick and I are trying to give some order to — with varying but increasingly pleasing degrees of success. All done under the canopy of an enforced and unhappy physical separation from Brigid (no we have not split — circumstance has put me in a different bed to the girl with whom I’m happily co-dependent, for much of the last six months and it’s bloody hard).
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