The story in The New Zealand Herald yesterday about the health of the NZ music industry, or otherwise, elicited this response from a reader. I post it without comment or any editing:

El Sid signs on…..

Couple of years ago we were hearing that local music has never been so healthy. At every NZ Music Awards.

I cant wait to hear what they’re gonna say this year!

It was bullshit then and its bullshit now. It’s hardly any form of revelation that artists have had to take second jobs. Most of them should never have left them (if they indeed did-Zane Lowe never left his!) in the first place. You seriously want me to believe that the Bleeders expect to make a living from their music in a country this size. They are the type of band that will sell more tee shirts than cd’s. Blindspott are hardly a hard working band and their sophomore album with German producers was probably not aimed totally at NZ anyway. They must have had at least one eye on trying to consolidate on their much trumpeted Asian success, and bloody good on them … so why are they are wasting their time and money at SXSW recently …. trying to nurture interest in the US Industry that is already 20% down on last year’s dismal results. Why aren’t they back in Asia?

Bic is an interesting phenomenon. Campbell was handed Bic on a plate and all credit due, they put the hard yard in overseas. Back then Campbell said that Bic on p2p sites was the best guerrilla marketing they had in certain territories. Sony NZ and International poured in the marketing but they can’t do that anymore. It doesn’t work like it did back then. It’s a whole new ballgame! The majors know that better than any of us. They know any business that is in the business of trying to create demand instead of cater to demand is in trouble. All those old marketing paths don’t deliver any more and the serious suspicion is that maybe even the baby boomer public have wised up! Their kids certainly have. The only time kids listen to the radio is in their parents cars, TV viewing drop off can be measured in the deteriorating production standards of TV commercials. To kids Cd’s are like ‘things’. … It goes on. It’s back to basics. Realness. Playing live. Treating your fans as special. Getting educated and getting smarter! Creating new promotional paths and exploiting the Net and working with people who can be all things to the artist. By artists measuring what they become by their art instead of how much they get for it. The irony technology has created ! Campbell’s management company was nearly all things to the artist, but he couldn’t (back then) not work with the labels . But, with his manager’s hat on, I bet he’s bloody not thinking that now!

If I was Bic I’d be thinking that dragging her brand (which is very credible) thru this latest outburst is seriously uncool. Altho she will be cool. She has catalogue and cred here and overseas. One license of ‘Drive’ to a car commercial will set her up for another year. Bic should be pissed off being treated like this. Its like EMI trying to save their sinking ass by pouring all their eggs into Norah Jones’ basket. You think the daughter of Ravi Shankar believes she should be at number one globally, let alone generating enough income to bail out a seriously failing corporate – no way jose. The MD’s of our local companies know the writing is on the wall and that the present model has got to change or die. Mike Bradshaw is a very smart guy. Campbell is a very smart guy. They know they should have attempted to work with Napster and learn to monetize P2P years ago, but instead their respective bosses tried to blow it out of the water and sue their customers. Dumb and dumber. The problem of scale and distance has ALWAYS been the problem for local artists, and the Net is part of a working solution. If the labels and RIANZ spent the time, money and energy of working with the same technology as they have trying to control it, local artists might be able to have more confidence in these same people. NZOA is in a prima position to be a source for all local artists to be posted on one website that could have international prominence, positioning and profile but MIC still persevere in sending a select number of artists to attend select festivals that are still aligned to a redundant model. Forget it. No one is home.

NZOA is the best thing that ever happened to local music but they need to upgrade their criteria and re vamp their role. They gotta pick up the ball. They long ago got into bed with radio programmers who became A&R consultants to an industry that hardly had any A&R. Now radio and TV aren’t what they were. Local A&R was always the domain of local indies who never got much airplay anyway. And it’s still the same old same old. Problem is all the Indies are more flat ass broke than ever. Some of the artists themselves are as much to blame. At WOMAD you saw high profile artists doing autograph signings for their public in the pouring rain for up to an hour after their gig. I cant remember the last time I saw local icons meeting and mingling with their public, except at the private bar

The next thing that will start hitting the major labels, here and overseas is that major artists wont re sign once their deal is up. And I can bet your lunch, that Campbell, with his manager’s hat on (again) is considering this one! Oh Yeh! The majors are in a terrible position. They can’t be all things to the artist, and that is what the artist needs. Managers can. Already the majors aren’t developing new acts. They don’t have the resources viz time/money. The A&R vacuum being created now is only being balanced by the next Coldplay album. That’s all the majors can do. Wait for the new Metallica or whatever. Soon as Coldplay and their ilk say ‘see ya’ (and they will) the majors wont be able to plug the hole in the product gap. Delivery of product has always been the key to their cash flow. It’s here guys! Right under your fingertips. Technology has accelerated to the point that it changes faster than big companies can move to address it, let alone try get the cd out in time!

If youre in a young touring band, get out of here. If you’re relying on cd sales, get a job . If you’re smart, start treating your fans better. If you’re a song writer, treat your catalogue well and you will be sweet! Synchronization, touring and merchandise is where its at … but most of all. . . u gotta BYOB !

El Sid…..

update: Bob Daktari, a long time industry insider, has more

Some years back, at the turn of the nineties, living in a house on the cliff in Auckland’s Parnell, we had no terrestrial television. In those days that meant no TV One, Two, or Three. Why, I don’t really remember, but think it was something to do with no clear signal from any relay station. It had been that way for some years and I very vaguely recall my flatmate, Tom Sampson, crawling around the rooftop, three stories above Awatea Road, trying to find a signal so he wouldn’t have to go elsewhere for his rugby.

Instead, we were early adopters of the Sky Channels. There were three at the start as I recall: sports (which we only watched for the bizarre ESPN exercise shows beamed out of Vegas); movies; and news, which was essentially CNN, the American version which is quite different to the international variety now broadcast in NZ, with a smattering of BBC news tossed in. Really, we only watched the news channel, and, in those Turner owned days it was rather more questioning and less compliant than it is now.

I used to watch Crossfire often, and got to know the various personalities, none of which impressed. On the left there were usually Mark Shields and Michael Kinsey. Kinsey was shrill and unconvincing, whilst Shields held his own rather better, but both were a little wet. On the right Pat Buchanan veered between obvious lunacy and the sort of slow self assured rationality that so scares me on the fringes of the right.

That said, in 2007, he seems to be one of the very few right wing commentators in the US with any grasp of reality.

His partner was something else. Bob Novak was a cold, pointedly nasty creature who had an uncanny ability to completely ignore any argument he didn’t absolutely agree with, regardless of the evidence or logic presented, and bulldoze everybody. And he had a complexion that suggested he had just crawled out of a grave. Which must have given him a psychological advantage over the others.

The other clear advantage Novak so obviously had, was that he was most obviously a Republican insider of some standing. He knew people, they knew him, and he had a grasp on what exactly was happening, or the way it was going to happen in the Capitol GOP.

Move forward 17 years or so, past the Plame scandal, and Novak is still so obviously a Republican insider with ears in the sorts of places most other “insiders” can only dream of. I don’t like him anymore but when he writes about Congress or the Senate you should read.

So when Novak writes a piece like this one in the Washington Post, which is astounding on any level, you need to sit up and take notice. Anyway you look at it, it’s quite incredible.

Witness….

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI’s misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. “We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,” one House leader told me. “How can we claim that anymore?

And:

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress — not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

And when you couple that with the refusal of the senate to shoot down the timetable attached to the funding bill, thus forcing a veto from Bush, and pushing the public dismay at the war back firmly into the Presidents’ lap, you know the gap between the two branches of power in the Republican Party is both massive and growing. And the desire, leading into 2008 for the Republicans to distance themselves from the disaster that is Bush / Cheney. It’s a wholesale desertion of the elected members of the Republican Party away from the Commander in Chief, who still has close to two years left in office. And it won’t, as the refusal to back Gonzales shows, get any better.

And as it becomes increasingly obvious that the surge as such seems to be having little effect on the ongoing violence that rush will turn into a stampede I’d imagine

But, then you have this fantasy stuff from John McCain on CNN, with the quite forthright and rapid dismissal from the guy on the ground. CNN would never have broadcast a response like this a year or two back. They would’ve slipped and slid around and have taken no clear contrary opinion unless it offend somebody important, or buck the script.

Osama must look at Washington DC and smile. It worked…

An update:

Sidney Blumenthal plays an intriguing game of follow the emails at Salon

The rise and fall of the Bush presidency has had four phases: the befuddled period of steady political decline during the president’s first nine months; the high tide of hubris from Sept. 11, 2001, through the 2004 election; the self-destructive overreaching to consolidate a one-party state from 2005 to 2006, culminating in the repudiation of the Republican Congress; and, now, the terminal stage, the great unraveling, as the Democratic Congress works to uncover the abuses of the previous six years.

I was accused in a comment to a previous post of living in the eighties. It’s not true, I swear…this last week I’ve been living in the seventies, and with some glee too, I admit.

What I’ve been doing over the last few months, on and off, is trying to document a little bit more of the punk explosion that hit Auckland, New Zealand, along, of course, with much of the rest of the world, back in the last part of that decade.

I’ve been wanting to do, with mixed success, to get a piece wrote for Rip It Up magazine’s quarterly offshoot, EXTRA, in mid 1980, onto the internet. The item in question was a family tree of the Auckland punk movement, with the links that joined all the bands, as convoluted as they were, indicated. It was, clearly, inspired by Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees, which I had across several books and had spent god knows how many hours studying, enthralled by the nerdy detail.

To be honest, I’m also trying to circumvent the regular requests I’ve had in recent years for a photocopy of my (lesser) version of Mr Frame’s masterwerk, which stretches across two broadsheet pages, and is full of graphics and as much trivia as I could fit.

That is not an easy task on an A4 copier, and the scan I spent two hours trying to do, was a complete disaster. So I decided to put it online, or at least a replica of it.

The story of the actual piece is on the page, but the key to it was clearly to try and include a graphic to cover the information in a web accessible way. I decided, in my web amateur way, to put the band’s bios (which I would not change from the 1980 original, complete with unfinished endings…the Marching Girls, as Brendan rightly pointed out to me, is particularly incomplete when you look at Brendan’s post MG’s career….but if you change one you need to them all, and I’ve tried to cover what I know in this page) in pop up layers, which did so when you did a mouse-over of the band’s name.

And so I tried and tried. I actually got it to work for one day, and then I applied the Dreamweaver template to the page, and all sorts of odd things happened, including the layer with the bio opening new tabs; then the layer opening at the top of the editable region and refusing to close. Removing the template didn’t bring back the working layer visibility and positioning.

And since it seemed I might have to learn another program (Flash) to make, what Dreamweaver tells me is a simple procedure, work….I gave up.

And so, here is the Zwines Family Tree (and a brief history of the club, and the scene around it), and, in a new page, here are the original bios from a bunch of mostly long forgotten New Zealand rock’n’roll bands…some brilliant, some truly awful, most just ok, but all crucial in their own way, to the direction popular music in NZ would go in the next few years.

Oh…and as an extra…here is a fairly rare live recording (from the Globe?), rough as guts but how it really used to sound:

The Terrorways – Never Been To Borstal

Update:

My friend Sara Leigh Lewis, in London, has this wonderful page of photographs taken around Auckland in 1979 /80. There are people there I’ll sadly never see again, and, as she said, it made me rather misty eyed. Oh the youth of it all……

I’m currently in the thrall of four longplayers…..

James Holden..The Idiots Are Winning (Border Community)…..from late last year, but I’m a slow adopter in this case. I’m always a little scared about saying anything about an album like this. Partially because there are those who say it so much better; partially because, unlike say the Eddie Kendricks album below, what it is and what it sounds like eludes words; but mostly because of the accusations that one only likes a record like this, as someone said the other day to me, because it’s the right thing to like. This is also an album that confounds the theory that the album as a cohesive unit, either on or offline, is dead. With The Idiots are Winning, it most definitely is not dead. For better or worse, the tracks on this record simply don’t work in isolation of each other.

Can you dance to it…hell no, not unless you have three left feet (which may be me), but you can shiver with pleasure to the damned thing, and that’s the way to approach it I guess.

Sadly I’m flailing around trying to find words for this album, as I though I would ….. write… delete… write…. delete.

Ummmm….a majestic electronic album, from a producer I’ve never rated before (his early work is a bit big room cheesey and not me at all) and of its time, that doesn’t really sound like anything else….that will have to do.

LCD Soundsystem…Sound of Silver (DFA)….yes we all know it by now, but if any album illustrates a record that doesn’t need to exist as either a physical format or a cohesive “album” it’s this one. I play this a lot, two or three times a day right now and I have for a wee while…at home, in the car, at the gym….and it ‘s one of those oh fuck yes albums (or collection of songs) from beginning to end. It may well end up as the best pop / rock / pop album of the year. Who cares if it wears it influences so brazenly…its pop and its mighty fine….oh fuck yes…I’ll get sick of this as an album fast, but there are songs that will stick for a very long time.

The Good the Band and The Queen (Parlophone / Honest Jons)….a record for old people but I’m an old person, so yes…..I like this a lot. Nobody under 35 should bother…it won’t make sense.

Eddie Kendricks..The Thin Man (Tamla)…. I’m a late comer to the joys of the ex-Temptation. Whilst I was furiously buying up funk albums in the pre-house eighties, I missed him. I bought other former Temps (Dennis Edwards, David Ruffin) and the band itself, but, for no other reason than his NZ sleeves looked shitty, not EK.

I have a single Motown Greatest Hits I bought from Real Groovy about 1990 (when they were further up Queen Street, 492 I think), and have long known the big disco tracks of course, but the depth of material on his actual albums escaped me until I found a copy of the Norman Harris produced He’s a Friend (“he” being the lord almighty in this case) some years back and fell in love with it in a very big way. But I had to live with it, and all the other solo albums I acquired subsequently, in the form of very, very battered vinyl copies. Which is fine, but a remastered copy of each, whilst there may only be a limited market for them, was what I really wanted. And, then, bang, there they were…two very limited remastered sets of the complete solo works of, perhaps, The Temptations finest voice (it’s a close call with Ruffin), and, without question the greatest male voice to grace the Motown empire during the seventies. Which is saying something when you look at the competition, but it’s true.

So with the appropriate cajoling I managed to acquire both (and somehow ended up with two of the second). I’ve not even delved into the first set yet but the second, listed here, is simply incredible. When I grew up in New Zealand in the seventies, black American albums got a rough deal. Unless they were infused with the unlikely radio hit then they were shoved out as second rate releases with shitty covers, and quickly deleted as if they were embarrassing. Nevertheless, in the mid seventies I acquired a fair few. But what that release pattern meant was that they were both hard to find in later years if you missed them the first time around, and when found, of terrible quality. So for me, albums like these are a rediscovery because they never sounded like this on those initial vinyl releases I’ve lived with in recent years.

I really don’t know if that make any sense, but the thing is the four and a bit albums on The Thin Man might sound familiar to me but this is like discovering these all over again. And what a joy it is, from the Harris produced Philly styled sensuality of those two middle albums in this set, to the two slightly rawer albums that bookend them (and the unreleased bits at the end). But the real thing that simply dominates these three CDs is that voice, that, almost celestial, fragile voice that says so much by saying so little. On tracks like Happy where he almost pulls back from the word as he sings it in the chorus, so that you find yourself afterwards if actually sang it or simply meant to. Or the way he can turn a lyric about wagging (Skippin’ Work Today) into four and half minutes of latent sexuality so effortlessly. Or that incredible vocal quiver in From Me To You….

I think I’ll live with this for a few weeks then delve into the first volume….

That there is, after so many years of digging, so much still for me to find never fails to amaze me.

……………………….

On a completely different note, I’m really enjoying the new TVNZ on Demand site…..I even found a terrible old almost-interview with myself that I’d long forgotten existed.

Oh and head over to Peter Mac and read the wonderful Trevor Reekie Womad adventure. It explains why music will survive the music industry

I’m not supposed to be writing this. Its just hit Nyepi here in Bali, and as such, the use of all things like a laptop, or even a television are technically banned. But, being as how we have high walls, and I’m no Hindu, I guess I’ll type away and hope that the spirits and ghosts around our house don’t get too annoyed with a slightly irreverent bulé..

The link above describes the day better than I could ever do, so that will suffice, and I only need to add that Nyepi provides a welcome rest from the relentless whirr of sepeda motor’s (motor cycles to most of you) past the front gate day and night. It does, however confuse the poor dogs somewhat, as they wait at the gate for someone too bark at….hour after hour. The ogah-ogahs (by the hundred) around the streets are still, after two years, something to behold, especially when the proud kiddies gather round their creations. Guy Fawkes? Bah…..

I bought myself a hair-clipper the other day. It made absolute sense. After all hair is not something I have a vast association with these days (or for many a year to be honest) and I like to keep it very, very short. God save me from comb overs, or, especially bald men with ponytails (or for that matter any men with ponytails (except the always wonderful Trevor Reekie who suits it perfectly)). We follicley challenged souls are always best to keep it as close to Gandhi as we dare, at the very least so we don’t offend those in visual range.

In the recent past I’ve trekked into Denpasar every few weeks for a trim. This was not enough though…in Auckland, courtesy of my old friend Trevor Potter, I received a complimentary Friday afternoon trim for years. I had a tame guy just up the jalan who spoke better English than I did Bahasa Indonesia (although I get by these days) for some months. When I say tame…I mean, my cut didn’t need explanation each time I visited…I sat..he cut. Not only that, he’d been to Ponsonby in my city of birth. Its very rare in Bali (or anywhere) to meet someone who’s actually walked the streets of my nest. Sadly he upped and got a job on another cruise liner so I was stuffed. I hunted around and found one guy who was ok, who charged the normal Rp6000, but the cut was a tad rough. And he didn’t say a word…ever..

So I looked again and wandered into this cleanish looking place in off Jalan Sesatan, sat down, and said, with a smile….nomor satu. The guy, mid twenties-ish, said precisely two works back….you American?….tak, dari Sekandia Baru I said, and sat back as he began to cut. As he finished the trim he pulled out the cut-throat razor usually used in these parts to give a nice edge to a cut. I happened to glance up at the same time to see a huge portrait of the long missing Osama Bin Laden high on the wall above me, and then noticed a similar portrait on the barber’s t shirt, albeit very faded.

Ahhh..tidak mau, I quickly whispered, rising swiftly from my chair, and proffered a Rp10,000 note to cover the Rp5000 indicated on the door.

No change was offered back.

I bought myself a hair-clipper the other day…

Vinylmania, the dance institution in New York City is to close this weekend. Now if that isn’t sad enough….check this, from Keith Thompson who sang on, what to me is one of the most perfect house records of all time:

… but Vinylmania sold close to 13,000 of “Break 4 Love” when it first came out on Grove St. in 1987

13,000! From one, very small rekid shop…..few dance records on vinyl sell 1000 worldwide these days. Aly Us’ classic Follow Me is reputed to have sold in excess of 100,000 on vinyl in the early nineties….how things change…I feel old…

Ok I’m over that now…

Then there is this…..

It seems the much mooted death of the album is being talked about again (I guess the discussion never really stopped). I’ve been there several times in recent months and here I seem to be again. There doesn’t seem to be much more to say, except when I talk to record companies, as I do from day to day, its seems the message is still not simply getting through….you release three singles to radio, do a MySpace site and talk nicely to retail…..no, no no………not any more….

What triggered this was an email from Bob Lefstez the other week, entitled simply Album Last Rites wherein he said:

We’ve got to kill the album.

Actually, it’s already dead. It’s just that the artists and labels don’t know it.

And he’s right…well almost.

In pop terms the album is past creaky, it’s on its last legs. To my daughter, aged almost 13, the album is a non-event. It almost doesn’t exist, in the way that it didn’t exist before The Beatles released With The Beatles and in one swoop, invented the rock and pop album (without telling EMI what they were actually doing of course). Capitol USA didn’t quite get it for some years, as is evident from the way they treated every Beatles album up to Revolver, and The Beach Boys. Indeed the audience knew about the album there for years before moribund record company execs twigged to the change…shades of the last few years.

Before that pop albums didn’t matter at all. Nobody knows the name of any of Fabian’s albums I assume he released at least one…I’m not sure if that thing on the left is an album or a single), or for that matter, raising the credibility stakes a tad, Chuck Berry’s or even, outside the hardcore fans, Elvis’ longplayers…they were simply places to collate hit songs with the odd filler. And here we go, full circle, back to artist and the hit song. The mp3 player (can we stop saying iPod, because globally they don’t dominate, it’s a myth) or the Walkman phone is the new album. It has already replaced the long playing compact disc as the pop and rock delivery medium of choice, of convenience.

But before pop, and George Martin, and his young band, almost unknowingly (it was instinct rather than intent) invented the long player, there were still, of course, albums in other genres, just as there will still be albums, in hard formats after digital has wiped the pop, and rock album off the radar. And I don’t just mean the likes of those awful show tunes film and stage soundtracks that Americans were so fond of. I’m talking instead of then contemporary, and absolutely essential releases such as serviced the whole jazz market…and lets be real, Kind of Blue was essentially the Blood on The Tracks of it’s age, it targeted and was bought by a similar demographic.

The album, either in a small vinyl run, or, more importantly, a much larger CD or DVD pressing, is going to be here for a long, long time. Simply because there are certain demographics that will never feel satisfied with an mp3 and a sheet of printed liner notes, or even a facsimile of the sleeve. I think of the people that bought the first Arcade Fire album, with the definably groovy sleeve, which was a part of the excitement that greeted, and surrounded the artist. It was integral. The second album no longer so, as they’re not so hip anymore, the earlier adopters have moved on and Arcade Fire, selling to now to middle America are perceivably no longer cool.

That’s a physical market that will need to be serviced for decades, or at least until we have the technology to deliver exact replicas, including the card stock, and exact print quality of the groovy package to the early adopters. Who, incidentally, also want the hard to track down mp3s doing the rounds of the blogs, as well.

Then there is the so called “Long Tail”….a strange, half thought out notion to be sure, for the overwhelming bulk of those on the end of the tail, it means little…but little is better than nothing. There is value in the online catalogue…of course it vastly increases the amount of music available to the consumer, and it should allow an artist to have all their catalogue available at all times, to all curious comers . I find the notion that Edgar Bronfman has the right to play political football with an artist’s career and income, however small it may be, as discussed here, by Russell Brown vaguely obscene. But that’s the industry we are in…..

Never mind Edgar will buy EMI and it will all be ok…..

But the real value in a back catalogue does not come from mp3s, from the odd track found on Emusic or the like…that is the bonus, the cream. The value in the catalogue, especially the more obscure stuff, is sourced by keeping that catalogue exciting, just like an artist…keep em exciting…they sell. And right now the best way to exploit catalogue remains the physical disc, and the packaging of catalogue. Two examples…firstly the Flying Nun Box set from last year. The concept caused an awful lot of excitement in New Zealand and further abroad. It was exciting, and it was the concept itself that was the catalyst. It was considerably more, you could say, than the sum of its parts. You have to be brutally honest and say that, overwhelmingly most of the tracks on the box didn’t sell that well on release and would not have elicited much response if placed on an online shop…the odd fan, the odd completist but that’s it really…as is the experience of almost everyone in the long tail outside the top selling couple of percent. The Flying Nun Box set existed as a box set, in that packaging (why are everybody’s jewel cases falling to pieces, and what was with the inappropriate punk stylings of the box and Cds…beside the point I know) and sold because of what it was..it was reinvigorated catalogue..and the FN catalogue is screaming out for more…

Example number two is the recent remastered double package of the best Style Council album….Our Favourite Shop…complete with a whole disc of demos, live bits and pieces. Now, I want this badly. I want the package, the double CD, with notes, gorgeous foldout sleeve and outer slip case. I don’t want the tracks per se, I’m a silly collector, I want the package, as I did with the All Mod Cons double from last year….

I am not alone, the sales of some of these catalogue revisits tell us that….but they don’t, regardless of how much one can download with them, work digitally.

There is life in the old plastic disc yet…….

The again, forty years ago, out of the blue, came an album that completely blew every pre-conception, every pre-established notion about what was and what would be, out of the water……and nothing was ever the same….this could all change tomorrow…..