I thought the surge was the new plan? You mean that didn’t work? And now there is credible evidence that AQ is behind it all…….you mean like this credible evidence these same pricks used in 2002.

Why do they spend so much time making things up?

Is this the beginning of the endgame? Not really, it’s more like the raising of the curtain on the last act of the endgame. At least that’s the way it feels to me. Whilst it’s not over yet, and Warners are expected not to roll over, private equities’ impending purchase of EMI signals a fundamental, probably terminal change of course for one of the biggest record labels (and the oldest, with its roots going back to Emile Berliner, the granddaddy of the music industry, in the late 19^th Century)

In the same way PolyGram bought Island, Motown and A&M for their catalogues primarily (although they got U2 as a bonus with Island), and Universal then bought PolyGram for it’s catalogue (and the bonus of using the family jewels to turn young Bronfman’s lame plaything, MCA, into a real record company), the EMI purchase sale is just about that. And little more.

You have to feel for any artist tied into EMI now, those brokers and money men don’t want to be in the risky business of developing artists, providing tour support, making grossly overpriced videos that nobody watches but artistic egos and pushy managers insist on; or for that matter dealing with those bloated egos on a day to day basis.

All this in a market that has collapsed some 20% in the past year.

Nope, these guys want that largely passive income…that glowing catalogue of masters and songs, those little cash cows, and nothing else. Anything apart from that that requires any effort will be turned into quick cash by the new owners…perhaps with a sale to Warners, who’s Edgar Bronfman, still may want the odd thing, or contract as some sort of compensation, assuming of course his shareholders are willing to let him. But even Warners feels like its winding back its operation to little more than catalogue exploitation, with some 400 layoffs across the company (none of which seem to be at the senior executive level), and any desire to buy EMI was about that risk free cashflow.

It all comes at a perfect time for both EMI, and any potential purchaser, as Coldplay aside, they have virtually no signed acts of any consequence to the market place. Sure there is Norah, but her second album largely died, and there are lots of interesting bits and pieces, but most are licensed, rather than signed. When, as a label, your biggest assets are a couple of groups you signed decades ago, it’s time to fold.

What in gods name has happened to my sweet godzone in the two years I’ve been away? The dark side, the same dark side that used to be the exclusive domain of our artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers and musicians, seems to have bumped itself well and truly into the mainstream.

I leave the blogs for a few days and come back to extended threads about cops watching chicken fucking movies (about the time said cops were getting ready to truncheon a few of us up and down New Zealand it must be said), more murder and mayhem on the front pages of the dailies, and I scratch my head. And then there seems to be a perverse interest in the jersey of an arraigned (but no longer convicted…but also not adjured not guilty it must be said, and I was less uncomfortable with that conviction than several others, but so be it) mass killer.

This is not the nation we sell to the world. The simple fact is that New Zealand is very clean and green. It’s both cleaner and greener than any other place I’ve been, visited or lived in my years, so that part of the pitch does ring true. That aside, it’s also a dark, very violent, increasingly uncomfortable place with more than a few issues, some of which seem to have brewed long enough to be festering to the surface. I worked long enough in the hospitality and entertainment industries to have had my fill of the rugby, alcohol and drug (including pot) fuelled culture of acceptable social force, that seems to be the norm.

But slowly, in its only funny way, I think New Zealand is coming to terms with all this. As a society it is slowly maturing. The population seems to have reached a cosmopolitan mass, Auckland could almost be deemed a city in global terms…..we are almost grown up.

I wondered how long it would be before the attention shifted to our boys in blue, as it should. One of our national myths surrounds our Police force. Their reputation, in the massed public mind, has always been one of an incorruptible force working for the public good. And largely, it’s true. I’ve worked with and encountered many hundreds over policemen and policewomen over the past decades, working with bands, in charitable situations, answering calls, and, repeatedly, as the owner of several licensed establishments.

Overwhelmingly my experiences have been positive, and I’ve laughed and chatted with many a constable on the beat, or sergeant checking the street, at 2am. And I have had detectives as friends over the years. I went through an attempted extortion many years ago, and the police handled it well, albeit at the edge of their powers, but any other way of dealing with it may well have had a less positive outcome.

But despite all that, I’ve repeatedly encountered an unchecked brutality and arrogance that has existed right in the middle of the police culture and has, not only been unchallenged, but even been encouraged.

Any of us out and about in the late seventies and early eighties in Auckland will well remember Gideon Tate’s notorious Team Policing Units. The English have a term for the gang invasion of a tube train, where a bunch of thugs will enter a train at one station, and rampage and rob, only to leave at the next. It’s called Steaming…and the word is appropriate for the way the police would approach licensed venues, and steam through, inciting, and arresting, with batons, as often as not, out. We all saw it. I attempted to intervene at the old Kiwi Hotel about 1980 when an old Polynesian guy was being kicked and batoned for being slow to answer a question, after having been pushed off his stool by a young policeman. He also spoke little English. I received a baton in the stomach for my trouble. At least half a dozen were arrested, in what had, prior to their arrival, been a happy and convivial atmosphere.

My sister, who is not the sort to make a fuss (and may even be a National party voter…I don’t know) still tells horrifying stories of her years on the door of the Windsor Castle, of repeated and unnecessary police brutality and provocation.

The police used to arrive at clubs in the early eighties, and for no real reason, drag half the cliental out on the street for body searches and likely arrest. My flatmate suffered a broken foot from a boot when he was not clear enough in his response to a question. After he was released three hours later we went to a&e and, the next day tried to file a complaint to no avail.

I lived with it again through the years that I owned clubs. The brutality aspect had toned down somewhat, at least inside the venues, but the culture of arrogance was alive and well. The policing units, arriving as they did, on a regular basis were always rude, overwhelming in numbers in a peaceful, even exuberant atmosphere, very pushy (both verbally and physically) and generally unnecessarily unpleasant. Not only looking for trouble but actively wanting to engineer it.

I recent years I’ve not had many one on one dealings with the police, aside from an attempted burglary (they were very good), a car theft (they didn’t care and were rude), and when they arrested a client of mine on an assault charge (they lied, were rude and seemed more interested in his celebrity status), but I can’t help but feel that the culture of arrogance and thuggery which was an acceptable part of the New Zealand Police Force has yet to be properly excised.

This all feels strange, residing as I do right now, in a nation emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, with a police force that still can’t quite decide which side of the divide it sits on (and is plagued by endemic corruption) but the thing is, the force here has had less than a decade to work through these issues…..it has only been a civilian authority for some seven years, whereas the NZP have had a century and a half of non authoritarian rule in an affluent and democratic society, to develop and grow, but are still having these problems, and they seem strangely reluctant to come to terms with them.

And I think that is no longer acceptable for population as a whole.

Perhaps I’ve been here too long. Gone troppo seems to be a not uncommon affliction for we expats, if visual evidence is anything to go by…you do see some truly odd sorts wandering the back streets of Legian or Denpasar…too much sun, too many Bintangs, too many days sitting wondering. I may be, or I may well end up, one of them. I sit and wonder about that.

Because it concerns me that I was able to follow two guys on a motorbike the night before last for some ten minutes before it occurred to me that the guy on the back was carrying a kerosene lamp. It seemed not unusual to see anything on a bike. Then it also occurred to me that not only was this pillion passenger carrying a kerosene lamp but the damned thing was lit. So, on a bike, with a tank, I assume, at least partially full of gas, on the by-pass, which is as close to a motorway as we have in Bali, travelling at least 50 kph, was some guy carrying a container full of a very combustible liquid with an almost naked flame burning above. Then I noted he had no working headlight on the bike. This was his headlight substitute. Tidak apa apa…..

That made the motorcycle helmet, in the shape of the old German coal scuttle military one….its not an unusual shape on the roads here, but unlike many visitors, I’ve stopped noticing…on sale in a shop yesterday, albeit painted in a lurid bright pink…seem unworthy of comment, so I won’t bother.

After a week or three wallowing around in musical nostalgia, some of it albeit fresh, but nostalgia nevertheless, its time to move on…..2007 calls…

One of the disadvantages of living on the far side of the world, in a third world nation is the endless waiting for mail to arrive….and wait I did for the Dixon Body Language mix I’d been promised…waiting, whilst I read others getting all hot and bothered about this…the track listing was enough to make me go a little weak…..I love the drift towards a folkier, deeper sound in techno-ish house in the past year or two. The boundaries between deep house and techno are blurring quite nicely again. I have to be honest though…after all these years I still don’t understand what a techno record is and what a house record is, and, more to the point, where the line lies, not that it matters. It’s all jazz, it’s all soul, it’s all disco….

But three days ago Ketut from the Denpasar post office rang to say a parcel had arrived. It’s a nice touch…when did the Wellesley Street PO ever ring me to say a parcel had arrived. Then again he often asks, in a strictly non-official way, what is in the parcel. I smile and show him the CD or book and he looks puzzled and we go our ways until the next parcel arrives.

And I’ve played it over and over again since then, in a way I haven’t done with a mix since last year’s Henrick’s DJ Kicks set. I can live without the last track, a remix of Matthew Herbert’s Moving Like a Train, which is far too sub Derrick Carter bad flapper jazz bompity for my liking, but that aside, this is nearly perfect. Stefan Goldman’s mix of the unfortunately named Women in Toilet by It is minimal and pluckingly lovely and the mix from it into one of the best singles of the last year, Larry Heard’s sublime The Sun Can’t Compare, and then into the still-works-for me Where We At (the more subtle, pianoy Pt. 2 mix which I’ve not heard before) is quite something.

I never get sick of this stuff…

A few tracks I’ve also been playing a lot include (for a change) Carl Craig’s mid paced dubby remix of the Brazilian Girl’s no-wave-ish Last Call; Andres Trentemoller’s very bluesy, noodley, almost early Doors-ish (think Break On Through) An Evening With Bobi Bros; Stardivers’ Moroder-ish techno-by-numbers-but-it-works-especially-when-it-gets-all-rocky Another Moment of Silence; & Trusme’s Nard’s, a throwaway few minutes of inspired disco re-editing, all swirling and all, which I love to bits right now but have no doubt I’ll hate in a few weeks, that being the nature of these things. Kathy Diamond’s Over has just come my way too…almost (and I meant almost) Dusty-esque in it’s feel with a wonderful Hammond (?) solo that dominates the soft centre, quite incredible organic electro pop from the unerring hand of Maurice Fulton. Oh, and I’ve been going through another Mint Chicks phase, as you do….

Just thought I’d mention it….

Oh dear, Homeland Security has slipped from the paradoxically stupid to the paranoidly absurd in the US of A…

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters.

The harmless “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy — Canada‘s flower of remembrance — inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors’ accounts.

The supposed nanotechnology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy’s red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada‘s 117,000 war dead.

“It did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top.”

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors travelled through Canada…..

I’m speechless. Once again…..these people are allowed guns…

In my relentless pursuit of all things creaky and old, I’ve done a page on my site covering Bryan Staff’s absolutely legendary Ripper label, which existed from 1979 thru to 1983 and without which…….

Consider it both a tribute and an attempt to document….