Yesterday morning I made caught the Garuda flight from Denpasar to Yogyakarta in central Java. Nothing to special in that really. I came back on the late evening flight and arrived back about ten at night to a friendly but quiet Bali. I’ve done it a few times in recent months and I guess what was once quite an adventure has become rather ordinary. Alan Whicker…remember him? I used to love him on the telly when I was a lad…all walk shorts and knotted hankies…I could never figure out whether he was gay or not, not that it was any of my business and not that it mattered in any way it simply was one of those things you wonder…I still don’t know and it still doesn’t matter at all…once said, quite recently actually (I thought he was long dead and there he is popping up in the Guardian pushing his new book), that the first time you arrive in a town you should write down every thing that astounds you because the next day it starts to become ordinary and everyday. And that’s the way with Jogja, the first time I visited, less than a year ago, I took about 75 photographs, and walked, somewhat warily keeping to the busy roads, rather gob smacked.

It’s not Grey Lynn.

That’s all gone now, I’ve spent the best part of a year in this country, speak a little of the language, and although I’ll always be foreign, I’m not a stranger in my mind.

Yesterday I had five hours to kill and did a walk through the markets and the back alleys of central Jogja which I enjoyed more than I expected to. I found a street the length of K Road that sells only pirate DVDs and CDs and to honest, I bought a couple of CDs…a Santana CD with every track they’d ever released pre 1990 on MP3, simply because I wanted to format shift Soul Sacrifice off the first album from the vinyl I own to digital..it was NZ$0.80 for the lot…mea Culpa! I love the Department stores full of Xmas glitter above Muslim shawl displays, the dozens of bent over old men, backs long ruined, down dirty gangs weighing precious stones and the groups of giggling school girls that could be anywhere on the planet if it wasn’t for that cheeky Indonesian grin that you see everywhere here and nowhere else.

Some of the awe came back

And Garuda..yep, it’s a flight like any other Garuda flight which means it really isn’t like any other. The runway at Jogja International Airport is a piece of work and you tend to bounce around and across it rather randomly but you get there. The woman next to me was down praying feverishly to her god. I’d rather put my faith in the maintenance crews but that’s a not a comforting thought on this 737, which had life jacket instructions in Russian stencilled on the back of the seats. I guess they were stripped from an Il-18 or something back in the day. The broken ashtrays were superglued shut. I once flew business class on Garuda for six hours with every light on the plane. It was the middle of the night and the inflight entertainment system crashed at the same time. It rocks your faith in any systems, the completion of any of those rather important checklists that may or may not be in required before take off. The crew seemed to have no idea what exactly to do and smiled before hiding. But Indonesia comes with a degree of acceptance of these things.

On the other hand, trying to explain to a Muslim cabin crew that the wine is corked is fun too.

As usual I killed the hour and a half with a book and the iPod and decided to listen to Neil Diamond’s 12 Songs as I’d been given a copy. To be honest I had found it rather hard to get enthused about it but there is that Rick Rubin factor. The spectre of Rick riding to the rescue of some American icon who had lost their way and were ripe for the Rubin touch; whose careers are saved by his rekindling what was always there but had been smothered by the machine, is part of the contemporary US rock’n’roll wisdom.

He did it, rather successfully, to Johnny Cash. But Neil Diamond is no Johnny Cash and I was right to have reservations. Diamond has some fine songs to his credit, he was quite a Brill factory tunesmith, although never quite in the Goffin-King league, and had his moments. Unfortunately his moments were all more or less over by 1970. I’ve yet to see any one list Neil’s post 1970 killers. Since then his high points have been an album about a bloody seagull, a massively successful double live album of his pre ’70 highpoints and a duet with the odious Barbara Streisand complaining about a lack of flowers.

A record company person who knows more than most of us told me some time back that Neil smokes so much puff these days that its all something of a vague mystery to him anyway.

And a mystery to me..why am I writing about a Neil Diamond record?????

So the Neil Diamond thingy is bound to get Grammies and it’s already had critical plaudits everywhere…critics love this sort of shit, but shit is what it mostly is. Mostly…I’m On to You is ok in an average sort of barroom way, as is We. The rest shudders under its self important affected unpretentiousness and I’ve done the only decent thing and recovered the space on the hard drive for a better purpose.

And I got rid of the Sony BMG spyware.

Lots of old people made “comeback” records in 2005. Some were ok…like, and I though I’d never say this, but the Rolling bloody Stones who had one killer song (Rain Fall Down complete with an Ashley Beedle edit) even if the rest was a bit naff, some were good, like the Paul Weller one which I played quite a few more times than I expected to, and two were great. New Order’s Waiting for The Siren’s Call is and was a great guitar pop record which dwarfed much of the new wave of British guitar pop; and Sir Paul McCartney’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard which sounds like an old Beatles record, or at least a part of it. Bits and pieces sound like they were written for the Get Back sessions and then finished 35 years later. And songs like Anyway and How Kind of You are simply lovely songs and as good as anything he’s ever done. Or any pop musician for that matter, especially one in his mid sixties with more money than he could possibly ever know what to do with.

McCartney might have released a very large number of truly appalling records over the years, and as often as not been a prize twat, but I’ve got an unassailable soft spot for him. I mean he was a Beatle and they were the reason I ended up spending most of my life involved in popular (and peripherally popular) music.

Guilty pleasures…I’ve got a few…..

The killer record:

Terry Brookes featuring Aaron Soul…City Life (Carl Craig vocal mix)… single of the year right now hands down. I don’t know where brothers Terry and Aaron are from, Europe I guess since this is on a Dutch label and Terry has released a couple of singles on European labels, but Carl Craig does something special again in a year when he’s done it over and over again. In the same way he nailed 2003 with Angola, right at the end of the year and redefined the tribal techno, this drags his sound back to Detroit circa 1993 when KMS were doing all those wonderful Chez Damier tracks and bangs Motown back into the mix, but a more contemporary Motown personified by the likes of Kem…

I have, happily, refrained from commenting on the recent Sony BMG spyware mess for a couple of fairly good reasons. Firstly others have done a much better job than I could hope to and I’m happy just to sit back and follow the story and the way it evolves. I love the comments from my friend Simon and think he nailed it pretty much. All this fuss really is simply a blip on the radar that warns of the impending storm…the real crime here is in the list of albums affected. Ok, the Dion album is excluded but simply releasing the rest is a crime against good taste. This brings me to the second part of why I haven’t bothered commenting until now.

I think I’ve used the term “suicide note” before but this sort of desperation really reeks of a scorched earth policy..if we can’t will then we are going to take the whole thing down with us. The record industry talks of doom, of downloading, of burning, of anything that pushes the blame away from their doors for the collapse in sales in recent times. But just look at that list, what a bloated ugly bunch of records they really are. In a craven desperate run for profits they forget, as always the reason they exist…the song and the passion that song brings out in a human being. We all feel it. I’m not afraid to die but I’m scared to death of never being able to hear music again.

The glory days of the eighties, widely seen in the industry as a golden age, a time when record sales rocketed worldwide, but especially in the USA, which drives the global music industry were largely a result of two things. A quick look at the US charts of 1980 or so is a pretty depressing thing. Bloated, turgid, for want of a better word, shit, like Kansas, Journey, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon dominates the album charts and the only memorable things on the singles chart are black.

Pretty scary stuff and not an industry showing signs of a healthy future but by the mid eighties that all changed. The most obvious thing that saved their bacon was the CD. But the other thing, which revolutionised everything was British pop, the stuff that raised its head in the aftermath of punk, the Culture Clubs, the Whams, the ABCs etc which in an odd way represent as much as anything the true legacy of Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon (Johnny, Johnny…..you released half a dozen of the greatest singles of all time and one of the finest albums ever then ended up parodying yourself in 1996 with that sad Pistols reunion..to quote Blake Baxter, What the fuck happened?). MTV and British pop came crashing together and the rest, as they say…. If you don’t think Van Halen’s Jump isn’t that band trying their damnedest to sound like Flock of Seagulls then you are wrong.

And it’s the failure of the record industry to embrace the song again, especially in the rock’n’roll world, which is killing them. The MP3 is the 7” single and just as disposable, and so it should be. Download, burn and delete…it’s not destroying record sales, it’s the only thing keeping them alive. The number of blank cds sold is no indication that burning is destroying the industry as these are ultimately disposable items (I’m more worried about the landfill problem). The assumption that every song downloaded or burnt is a lost sale is so obviously flawed I won’t even go there. As soon as the industry embraces the technology, encourages the future, then they might have one….once the industry gets its head around the passion that this piracy indicates again then it can move forward.

The other thing which Simon goes into in his blog which I’m gonna touch on briefly is this whole Fallujah WP thing. What really gets me is the fucking stupidity and arrogance. If you really need to see how arrogant these pricks are check out Cheney today. From the most corrupt dishonest American politician since Nixon, this really is rich, paraphrased as: “we lied and fucked your country and I became a lot richer in the process as did many of my friends so now its time to roll over and take some more”.

It’s not about the Democrats and the Republicans for god’s sake. The Democrats have blood on their hands too. It’s about those poor begotten people in Iraq who have had their country ruined, their lives taken, their world turned upside down to suit the grand purposes of the US government and their generally compliant populace. Despite all the bullshit about freedom, tyranny, democracy and all the other Kentucky Fried Clichés, the place is immeasurably worse off than it was three years ago. Saddam’s tyranny is replaced by another (oh…you only tortured seven…that’s ok then), Chalabi, Cheney’s buddy and just as odious, looks likely to return; death is random everyday as terror organisations, which were given a happy breeding ground to replace Afghanistan, kill with regular impunity; towns are destroyed from the air, just like Saddam with chemical weapons of questionable legality (and its got nothing to do with the letter of the law legality you idiots, you are the liberators, remember, this is the very thing you claimed you wanted to liberate Iraq from…) . Its about our world and how the United States has fucked it…Democrats and Republicans. So, forgive me if I sneer at your blame game….

Oh and Link Wray died…sad.

I need to mention some songs that hit a nerve today………

Ok….Sonny & Cher-Just You….Sonny hung around with Spector and learnt a lot. This one, from about 65 is pure homage and glorious it is too. Sonny might’ve died coked up as he skied into a tree and Cher might be a bit sad around the edges (although I like her and she’s made a good record or two), but check out the bit about 30 second in when Sonny drops in…whooo…which leads to The Ramones-Danny Says…off the much underrated End of The Century. I know Spector’s a nutter and he probably killed that poor girl but what I wouldn’t have done to have heard a Spector produced Joey Ramone solo album…Independent Movement-Slipping Away…a tip to Bill Brewster for this one. From 1976, one of those, is it funk, is it disco records that evolved in to the boogie sound off the early eighties. I played it five times yesterday….fits nicely with Lee Douglas-Same Changes…on Rong, very Levanish, bubbly, funky, glistening, …all the clichés but I like it. Roxanne Shante-Have a Nice Day….Marley Marl on the board and pure genius. She’s an academic now I believe but she made at least half a dozen killer singles in her day…Kerri Chandler-Six Pianos… lush, very late eighties Detroit, with more than a touch of the likes of Mathew Jonson. One of those records…well, well one of those records that leave me a little speechless. I really like Happiness by another old trooper, Ron Trent (who has made more than a few dull noodlefests in recent years) and Quentin Harris. Nothing special, just pleasant old school vocal house but it works. Finally Patti & The Lovelites’ oddly named Love Bandit on Cotillion from the mid seventies, very Barbara Mason. There seems to be an endless supply of these one off gems…check this….click

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

Winston Churchill

Here I go again, but something in all this nonsense in Australia simply doesn’t smell kosher (not the right word here I know but somehow, somewhere, we have to all coexist). Australian politics really holds little interest for me..it seems to be populated by scumbags on both sides of the political spectrum. I mean Hawke was a scumbag, Fraser was a scumbag, and I have trouble thinking of any politician of any note or of any political colour…maybe that guy from the Greens… who couldn’t, even in my most forgiving and generous moments, be reasonably described as a scumbag.

Honesty and a respect for the electorate and the office seem to be alien to the world’s dullest city, Canberra (although it has a massive sex and drug industry to alleviate that boredom).

My problem is that John Howard is a scumbag tour-de-force, pure and simple, and he leaves the rest in the dust. There is ample evidence of that. Look at the appalling Tampa incident and the children overboard incident when he was caught blatantly lying to the electorate (but still won). Then there is the shameful episode with the East Timor reserves. I genuinely believe the NZ Government went into Timor in a naïve moment, for the right reasons. Australia did no such thing, it was an oil and gas grab pure and simple and it served a double purpose in that it destabilised the Indonesian Government, something that has been at the core of Australian Foreign policy for a long time. That they seemed happy, no actually, to be more precise, totally unconcerned about the suspect legalities of the grab and the effect it would have on of the world’s poorest nations is more evidence of the real motives. Then there is Kyoto and the whole Iraq thing. Howard’s gutless toadying towards the Bush regime makes Blair (almost) look like a man of integrity. I have trouble attributing a rationale to Howard’s motives in all this beyond some self serving self aggrandisement. Certainly it was in no way in the best interests of his nation and if there is substance in this week’s raids that further illustrates that. No-one can seriously think that a fundamentalist attack would have happened on Australia’s self-described hallowed earth, if Howard hadn’t become Bush’s pembantu in recent years…actually that’s not fair on pembantus..they are usually hard and decent workers and are often well regarded by their employers. I really doubt whether, Bush and those that control him hold Howard in anything but contempt, despite the façade that greets him in Texas or DC. Anyway the point is, Howard is a proven liar and a person who, on past evidence is happy to manipulate events and human lives, regardless of the pain it may cause, to his own end.

And, despite the increasing “revelations” by the powers that be this thing stinks badly.

There is the scant evidence, now being held behind closed doors and leaked bit by bit to increase the public unease. Lawyers are being denied access and those arrested are being held “Guantanamo Bay style conditions”. There are the comments from a whole variety of “establishment” figures, not the least was this from an Australian police counter-terrorism chief:

“their motivations were the same motivations that terorrism has in its form all around the world” – but also as followers of Osama bin Laden. “There’s no doubt that this group followed that same philosophy.”

The pre-determination of guilt does neither Australia nor the victims any good and whips up the sort of scarily ignorant verbiage illustrated by many on this page.

Those arrested are an established, well known and convenient target, and if London showed us anything, the real threat (and I firmly believe there is a strong and imminent threat against Australia and this has done nothing to alleviate it) comes from a place you least expect it to…

Maybe I’m wrong and this bunch were about to take out Central Station during rush hour but it’s far too close to all those terror alerts that the DOHS have fired off in the US at appropriate moments. And with Howard aspiring to be a low rent sub Neo-con, it’s all too convenient timing wise, the evidence seems incredibly thin; and hopefully will cause Howard to suffer the sort of damage that Blair suffered this week. But I doubt it…the UK’s scumbag–to-politician ratio is much healthier than the Great Southern Land.

On a similar note, I read with increasing horror, several hate filled anti-Muslim (or anti anyone who isn’t god fearing (as long as it’s the right one) and freedom-lovin’) web-blogs this week in the aftermath of the terrible beheading of the three young girls in Sulawesi. The black and white hate therein belies the fact that in Indonesia, nothing is what it seems. That simple concept would be absolutely alien to those righteous armchair soldiers. So it is with interest I read this analysis of the recent events in Poso, which put a somewhat different light on it, a light which, having lived here for only a short time, already makes perfect sense in an Indonesian way. The ignorance or indifference that much of the world shows to this, the worlds largest Muslim nation is betrayed by the fact that Microsoft Word’s spell checker puts a red wavey line under Sulawesi….part of a chain of islands, along with Maluku (which also gets wavy lines, Bill) which drove the direction of the world’s history for several hundred years.

If someone had had told me when I was, for want of a better word, young, that I would be in Indonesia at this time in my life……

But what an odd thing it is for me see the punk generation, of which I am proud to be one, head towards fifty. Kerry Buchanan, whom I’ve known for 28 years, since he and a few mates turned up to Disco D’ora’s in Newton Road to see the Suburban Reptiles, told me he was about to turn fifty soon. It’s still there…D’Ora’s that is…if you stop at the Caltex Station and look up to the left of it, it was the top floor. I booked the Reptiles in there early 77, it was a failed disco, and we managed to pull an ok crowd plus the odd bemused disco kid. There was a broken mirror ball, a smoke machine and some bad dayglo graffiti. Perfect. The most memorable thing about it was original Reps drummer, Des Edwards, pulling a big hunk of raw meat out of his trousers (he was a butcher’s apprentice by day, and not a great drummer….last heard of he was a juggler in Australia..nice guy) and slamming it down on the snare, to some effect. Anyway, other big thing was a bunch of kids arriving from the North Shore for the first time. One was Kerry, another was John No-one. They later become Rooter and then The Terrorways.

So we punks are getting old. Some have been past the cusp of 50 for a while and I turned over a few weeks back. I guess like every generation we assumed we would never get old, that it would last forever, and we were the ones, but we had the perfect soundtrack to our assumption, the nihilistic self styled revolution that was punk rock. My Generation was never as fuck-you as White Riot..at least to us. But the initial burst of UK punk (as derivative as it was of the NY scene, it added a certain snottyness that the CBGBs crew lacked), as a musical revolution was incredibly short lived and the radical had turned to the cliché almost as soon as it happened. What broke new ground in January 1977 was stale and formulated by the time The Sex Pistols released the over-produced Bollocks album in August or so. The revolution had moved on and I like to think those of us there then rolled with it. Some of us anyway….

So, we are aging, and generally, fairly gracefully, even if I do say so myself. Bad drugs or the misuse thereof took a few early on but the survival rate to the half century, at least amongst those I associated with (god knows about those that disappeared back into the public bars of the North Shore and Avondale) has been pretty good and I get quite a buzz out of having known some of these people for so long. If punk did anything, it pulled the cream to the top…
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Songs in the sun today:

2 Phat C**ts-Ride….the last decent thing either Sasha (who did some great remixes at the dawn of his career…Urban Soul etc) and BT (who made two magnificent 12s for Deep Dish way back when but then immediately turned to complete shite) did…but what a record

James Brown – I Wanna Be Around…off the peerless Ballads collection…the GFOS goes schmaltz

Pashka -Island Breeze (Trentemoller Remix)….almost Balearic…the title says it all..not sure about the vox but the underlying swell is just fine

Theo Parrish-Falling Up (Carl Craig Remix)…ha! I’ve finally got my hands on this one sided 10” Japanese single. Deep as fuck…pure genius

Angie Stone- I Wasn’t Kidding…the killer new song off the Greatest Hits that’s going around and round in my head day in day out

Other Fine albums from our Catalogue you may enjoy…..

I know its only a record company and record companies come and go but I feel the need to say something about the twinge of sadness I feel with the passing of Festival Records…..sorry… FMR…but I guess to those of us who have been around for a year or two, they will always be Festival.

Yep, a record company is just a record company, and this one has been controlled for most of its existence, at least in Australia, by the not-user-friendly Rupert Murdoch, who bled it for much of its life. But Festival, at least on this side of the pond, was something else. It was, for years, half locally owned (by Kerridge Odeon and before that by a series of entrepreneurs) and it had a freedom of spirit and a drive, by virtue of the people who worked there and the fact that it was small and relied on its deals with offshore indies and its suss in the local market to survive. In the eighties most of Festival’s major indies, Island, A&M, Arista, Jive, and Chrysalis, were bought and effectively turned into little more than names by multi-nationals. Whilst under the wing of Festival, all those companies enjoyed better success in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. Even Mushroom jumped ship for a while, although its subsidiary, Flying Nun stayed in the fold. Things were tough after that and never, despite the best efforts of some pretty talented people, never really recovered. The surprise is that it took Murdoch so long to offload FMR…rumours having been rife for years.

Trips to several conferences in Australia over the years confirmed pretty much what had been obvious to many for a long time, that a&r was not a strength in the Australian operation, and hadn’t been since the golden years of the sixties. Indeed at one of those conferences, at some hellhole in Coffs Harbour, MD Roger Grierson stood up and announced that whoever had signed that “last piece of shit, was fired”. Sadly things didn’t improve much, and they even neutered pretty much Mushroom after they absorbed it. It’s a tough call trying to think of the last act signed by FMR in Australia that couldn’t be generously described as toss. Anything vaguely interesting on their books right now comes out of NZ.

And I would guess that if Warners are smart they have bought the company as much for these as its glorious catalogue.

New Zealand’s operation was different. For much of the past three decades Festival was a cornerstone of local music, giving a home to those that needed one, pressing and distribution facilities, and a place to store all those unsold discs. Much of the history of New Zealand’s popular music is tied to the company, especially in the era before the multi nationals showed much interest in NZ music (with a few exceptions, in real terms about six years ago).

The lineage of New Zealand labels and artists that owe their (often brief) careers to Festival is astounding. Think…Th’Dudes and Dave Dobbyn, The Exponents, Deep Grooves, Wildside, Mikey Havoc, Scribe, The Screaming Meemees, The Blams, Hello Sailor, The Chills, Tall Poppy, Headless Chickens, D4, Mar-ve-elle, Upper Hutt Posse, MC OJ and Rhythm Slave, Bats, Car Crash Set, Carly Binding, Coconut Rough, Ngaire, 3 The Hard Way, Look Blue Go Purple, The Clean…damn, the whole bloody Flying Nun catalogue…and that list took about 2 minutes..there are hundreds more, major and lesser….

I took Nice’n’Urlich to FMR and I doubt anyone else could’ve seen the potential in that. We sold over 40,000 albums across the series. It was a perfect FMR record. In a similar way, does anyone really think that Dirty, as talented as Callum is, would’ve had the success they had with Scribe without FMR’s talents and understanding of detail. Or with anyone else…..

With Festival, then FMR, every sale counted, it had to, and they took pleasure in taking a record to a few thousand sales. A Festival success would often be counted as a failure anywhere else. But it wasn’t.

When I had my clubs, it was Festival who turned up week in and week out with new records, with rare remixes. Thus Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full was a far bigger hit in NZ than anywhere else in the world. Likewise Womack & Womack’s Teardrops.

When I first when to Festival, at the instigation of Victor Stent, in 1980, I’d released a few singles, sold a few thousand, distributing effectively out of my flat and had several hits but had hit a brick wall. I found an independent synergy with Festival that I guess others did later.

The company, then, was run, like a fiefdom, by Ray Porter. It was Ray who used to put ads on the back of album covers for other records in his catalogue, without making any effort to consult the acts involved, so a an album for, say, Traffic might have four Shirley Bassey albums advertised on the back (in fact they always included Shirl…Ray had a thing about her). By the time I arrived these were, thankfully, in the company’s history. Although Ray did try and insist, when The Screaming Meemees’ See Me Go became the first NZ single to enter at number one, that we put the band in a club that week to quickly record a live album to add it to. I resisted. He also gave me a golden licensing deal with Propeller, offering me 25% of retail, a deal that was to cause Festival major headaches in the future after Ray left (he knew he was leaving when I signed) when it was realised that a most-favoured-nations clause in the A&M contract (they were on 20%) could cost the company millions.

That problem was covered with a side handshake deal between me and Ray’s successor, the large, in every sense of the word, Jerry Wise, a man who I still regard as a mentor and whom I miss to this day. Jerry was English and used to work as an accountant for The Who and as such I guess he really had seen it all and took everything in a gracious stride.

Jerry and I always got along fairly well and he saved my label’s and my bacon several times and took our dealings very personally. He was open, honest, generous, both in spirit and financially. We had a run in with a studio that had gone back on its word on a deal and Jerry took them to task over this, which was something he didn’t have to do. In fact Jerry, over the years, did an awful lot for a lot of people that he didn’t have to do, and there are many of us who owe a great deal to this giant of a man. Friday nights at Festival, with Jerry’s open door policy, became quite an institution, something which survived him to the end of the company. I respected him immensely and his, far too early, funeral, in Dominion Road, indicated that I was in no way alone.

I guess the personal side of Festival was what really made it what it was. There have been quite a few comments over the years about Festival being neither an independent or a major, sitting more or less in between. It wasn’t a major because, despite failed attempts over the years by the Australian office, it had no multinational operations supplying product. And yet it wasn’t an indie because it was owned by Newscorp. Rather, it was an indie trying hard to be a major.

But it was the independence of spirit that defined it and that spirit came from the staff and management over the years. There are too many to name one by one, but Festival and later FMR often had a team second to none and provided quite a training ground….the manager of a major US label started in Newmarket. I haven’t many business dealings with FMR in the past couple of years but, clearly, the tradition has continued through to the likes of Jonathan Hughes, Dylan Pellet and Darryl Parker, often regarded as the nicest guy in the industry, and the others at FMR at the end.

From Carlton Gore Road, where Jerry had to ring me to get the skinheads designing their album cover out of the stairway during a retailers conference, to the damp end of Nikau Street, to the rather odd offices in Scanlan Street, to the final resting place in Freeman’s Bay, Festival Records contributed something that was often un-catered for elsewhere. Over the past forty years, they provided something that no-one else did and it’s hard to see where the interesting little labels with something quirky and vital will go now. But then again, perhaps its time, like the record industry as we know it, is past. There is no doubt however, that without the support, drive and belief exhibited by the management and staff of this wannabe major, the indigenous NZ industry would not have been in the position it was in 2000 to make that jump to where it is now.

A minor but cruel irony….Flying Nun quickly ended a disastrous deal with Warners years ago and now end up owned by them, indeed such a large slice of our national musical heritage is now controlled by a listed American company. It’s like Coca Cola owning Bastion Point…..

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aannnnd……The tunes that worked for me today…..

Donald Byrd-Love Has Come Around…pure exuberance…one of the happiest songs I know.

Darkman-Annihilating Rhythm..wild pitch, I love wild pitch

Patrick Chardronnet-Eve By Day..lovely sparse old school techy thing. Favourite new record…

Kerri Chandler- Sunset…Kerri’s on a roll…again…

Luther Vandross-Apologise (Quentin Harris mix) ..I guess it’s a bootleg, dunno, and I don’t even know where the original comes from and this is just on blank CD-R, and the new whizz kid takes no real risks however its kinda nice to hear Luther sound contemporary…even if he is dead

EPMD- Listen to my Demo..off the second, quite frankly, brilliant album from Eric & Parrish, a wry rhyme about getting a deal, over Faze-O’s Riding High

Tyree Cooper-Acid Over (the Piano mix)..prototype acid house complete with an exquisite blue funk piano line (from Marshall Jefferson?)..

Patti Jo-Make Me Believe in You (BSO / Asher mix)…one of those songs, that, truly, unless you Kid Cremed it or something, it would be impossible to mess up. And they haven’t……

John Davis & The Monster Orchestra­-The Theme From Kojak..big band orchestral disco complete with a lollipop….not a million miles from….

Louie Ramírez-Do It Any Way You Wanna.. a sultry Latin spin on the T Connection tune,

My life is a series of coincidences. I know that’s a fairly obvious statement, hardly the thought of the epoch, but it still confounds and amazes me sometimes. But I am firmly of the belief that once ones ceases to be amazed and confounded by the unexpected or the new, its time to go and it scares me to think that I may not be able to make that decision for myself one day. Then I guess its up to those around me to do it for me…whoa, this is getting to grim and it wasn’t where I wanted this to go at all.

Coincidences…yep , I’ve actually had some fairly good fortune from coincidences. One of the best was the fact that a little radio station in Buffalo, NY, which had picked up “How Bizarre” and had red hot phones, just happened to be affiliated to Z100 in NYC and passed on the information after the record company had lost interest. Is that luck or coincidence..I’m not sure, but it worked for us.

I don’t know if it is a case of luck, a small world or coincidences, but I keep on bumping into people I know in big cities (read: really big, not large towns like Auckland or even Sydney…a city only becomes a big city when it stops looking up enviously at other cities and Sydney is a poor man’s LA…Melbourne is a big city as is Denpasar which only has a population of half a million but is self confident, and is not obsessed with any other metropolis). I turned a corner in NYC and literally walked into Simon, an old friend. Whilst we were discussing this unlikely meet, our mutual friend, Debbie, walked around the corner. None of us knew each other was in NYC at the time. I was waiting for Harry who knew all of us but was late…spooky.

I walked into Camden Tube station some years back and sat in the carriage, head down as you do, trying not to get the shitty ink of The Evening Standard on my hands, only to hear my name called. Across the way was Valo, my Chilean friend from Auckland. He was staying four doors from me in Islington. I had no idea he was in London. He had no idea I was in London.

I had just left Auckland and went out for a meal (ok..honestly, it was a dozen frozen Margaritas but it was was a Mexican restaurant) in NYC (ok Harry was involved again). At the bar were various members of Pop Will Eat Itself. I had last seen them three days earlier at the bar of Cause Celebre.

I could go on and on, but I won’t..

Ok.. one more. This is from a small town, Auckland, but it’s a goodie. I was sitting in Vulcan Lane as I have from year to year, having coffee with my old friend Adrienne Winkelman, getting nostalgic about the days when we both though we punks, about the narrow pink tie she gave me in 1977 (I still have it….an Adrienne Winkelman original!) when she said “Whatever happened to that Johnny Volume?”) Johnny, of course was the guitarist in the Scavengers, the wonderful bloody Scavs, and my flatmate, when Adrienne had an unrequited crush on him.

As she finished the sentence, John Cooke (for that is he), walked around the corner out of O’Connell Street, looking like he did when he left our lives in the very early eighties, back into it. The endgame was a late night or three in my club and a not inconsequential bar tab but that is another whole mess and irrelevant to this.

What is relevant in 2005 seems to be the whole Avain Flu thing. Now call me sceptic or an optimistic or whatever but I’m having problems with this one. I live in an “at risk” country (and don’t the Australian media love pointing it out over and over again…the half truths, the outright lies and the horror stories that even the reputable media flaunt daily indicate that racism is alive and well to the south of me) and I’m aware of the possibility that this thing may mutate but damned if the conspiracy theorist and disbeliever in me isn’t wondering, like SARS, if this isn’t just the west playing a few games with us yet again. We have a global pandemic with us already, its called AIDS and its not only obliterating Africa, its firmly into Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific, China, South Asia and is killing millions. And the west is doing little more than playing lipservice to this as we speak.

I’m not usually a conspiracy freak, I mean, I don’t think the shooters in the Kennedy case had help from Cuba, but this bird flu thing is a little unreal. To date, over quite some years, less than a few dozen people have allegedly died from this, some unconfirmed and more than a few had been drinking duck blood. And the population of Asia is..how many billion?, most of whom live in crowded, poor conditions with their poultry all around them. It doesn’t ring true. Anyone who has worked with birds in closely knows that birds dying from seemingly random circumstances is more than common and is as old as mankind. We are told it might mutate into something.

More to the point this has a two fold benefit to the west, it pushes vast amounts of cash into the western economies…Australia is threatening to inoculate its own population and the buffoon in the White House is rolling out the War on Influenza type clichés he needs to pacify those still to stupid to wonder why they voted for him. And it keeps Asia, ugly old Asia, full of diseases, and terrorists in line, just when their economies are booming and threatening to overtake the first and second world. Oh, and it keeps the people ever so slightly fearful and subservient..

I’m just waiting for someone with some influence to point out that the emperor has no clothes…..

Ok some records of the day…..

• Led Zeppelin-Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You…..I have a soft spot for Zep..yes they were a bloated old monolith, ugly as sin and they deserved punk more than most, but they had a couple of songs…for every bloody Stairway there were two killers like this and you watch how an educated dancefloor reacts to Dyer Makyr. There was a great house bootleg of his by PQM many years back..apparently Page loved it.
• The Merseybeats-I Stand Accused…the old Sam & Dave song, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter was also covered in a perfect fashion by Elvis and The Attractions back in 1980. I discovered this banging scouse remake on a compilation about five years back. A perfect song, perfect in any version.
• So to another Elvis Costello B side….Nick Lowe and His Sound..What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding.. on the flip of a Nick Lowe single and credited to the above. If you ever wanted to explain to anyone why Elvis Costello and The Attractions were so bloody fantastic..play them this. Then play them..
• Brinsley Schwartz- What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding..which is just as good but completely different. Nick Lowe was /is cool. Full stop.
• Patti Labelle- More Than Material… a house by numbers mix from 2004, by veterans Darryl James and Fred “Somebody Else’s Guy” Macfarlane that I love…lush warm and big and a record that owes a lot to..
• Inner City’s Whatcha Gonna Do with My Loving (Morales and Knuckles vocal mix) from about 91, a time when Frankie and David were untouchable. I told Morales how much I loved this a couple of years back and he said it was one of his favourites. From the opening piano to the loping groove, Its brilliant until it drops down into the slowed down Jack your Body / Let No Man refrain on dense strings, and then it gets much better.
• Roxy Music-Out of the Blue.. my early Ferry fixation, off the underrated Country Life, which was the album where Bryan, years before he became a pratt, stripped off the arty pretensions and made the first, and only, great Roxy pop album (although Manifesto had its moments). A song that soars…
• Andres Trentemoller­­-Le Champagne…off his first EP, on Naked and the best thing Naked have released in years…a record to play in the garden
• I’m desperate to hear the Carl Craig remix of Theo Parrish that’s out right now, but in the interim…R Thyme-Use Me (Carl Craig’s piano groove) from about 94 or so is just fine
• The Features-City Scenes..I play this whenever I get a little down as I did this morning. I released it in 1980, and it was the first. It’s a record I’m immensely proud off and it cheers me up always

2 September, 2005

Open Letter Planet E and Carl Craig Supporters

Dear Friends,

I first would like to thank you for the years of support, the support of my company, Planet E Communications, Inc., and the support of my music.
I am so happy and proud to have had a wonderful career making music that I love and to play it around the world.

I am reaching out to you today to tackle the issue of unauthorized releases of my material, mainly the Audioslave reedit of my title “Darkness”. I’m not happy to see this and other unauthorized releases of my material, including the release of “Poontang”, “Intergalactic Beats” and of my remixes. Though it is endearing that fans would be interested in owning this material, the purchase of these releases isn’t supporting Planet E and our music at all. By purchasing these releases it gives less of a chance for Planet E to officially present this music in a way that fits our vision, such as Designer Music and various other productions. So friends I ask that you avoid these unauthorized versions.

It light of this current release, Audioslave has been kind enough to send me a cd-r of their re-edit, months ago of course, which now gives Planet E the opportunity to release this product as well. We will also offer this release at a price that is as close to our cost as possible.
So please consider that we will make this release available a.s.a.p.
Please cancel your order or return the unauthorized copies to the manufacturer or distributor of purchase. Also, I ask that you send all information concerning the origination of these unauthorized copies to me directly at ****** so that we may take the appropriate action to stop this activity.

Thank you again!!!

Peace.

Carl Craig
Planet E Communications, Inc.

I think he means Radio Slave, not the bad US rock band