I went to New Zealand and came back swamped in music, both new and old. After nine months away my wall of CDs in Auckland became a treasure trove. I looked, I touched and I pulled out a bunch to bring back here to Bali (quite a stack actually, but later trimmed by weight constraints).

My vinyl is another matter. God I miss it, but without ready access to a turntable, or the time to set mine up, all I could do was look and rub my hands and fingers across the spines. I spent a good half a day doing just that in my storage space…it’s an issue I need to resolve soon to stay sane. But that said, simply looking at them gives me real joy.

Yes I know its odd, but there are others out there who understand..not least of those being the staff at Conch Records and the swarm of disreputables (DJs) that I felt the need to gather outside with.

And going into Conch and pulling out kilos of vinyl (my shoulder tells me vinyl should be measured thus) I want but having to tell myself that I need to wait.

But, despite that, I came back to this isle with quite a haul. As I type I’m listening to some thumping Roy Haynes, and I’ve got myself a bunch of old Elvis Costello, a bunch of New Order, Carl Craig, Sinatra, John Cale, a couple of those wonderful Miles Davis boxed sets (including the Gil Evans sessions), old NZ garage thingies from the sixties, various early Atlantic collections, and a whole lot more, and now, for a spell, I’m happy again.

And even more so because I did quite well in the need-new-music I’ve not heard before stakes. From Conch came two retrospectively aimed collections that are really doing the trick. Firstly Good God, a collection of very bloody obscure (and I like obscure as much as I like in yer face pop more often than not) soulful gospel and funk tracks, some of which are so relentlessly tough you suspect Satan didn’t let go altogether.

And then there is the Gilles Peterson Fania collection. Somebody at V2 was smart enough to buy the legendary NY Latin label and we can expect a raft of reissues of this glorious stuff in the forthcoming months, to follow those already out. I hate pseudo Latino funk or most Latin rhythms in house, but Fania is the biz and this is so steamy afternoon Bali…worth the price for Willie Rosario’s street grinding take on that guide to the uses of butter (that Fonterra would rather you didn’t know about), the Theme To Last Tango In Paris.

And then there is the brand spanking new. Well, new to me at least. I love the Justice album….yes I know in pop terms its two months old now, but I’ve mumbled on the single D.A.N.C.E for months now, a blessed mashup best described as Daft Chic, so give me a break please. And there we have it, the inevitable Daft Punk reference, but that’s just daft…this ain’t Musique, this is good old fashioned wave yer hands in the air, hoover rave. For half an hour no prisoners are taken in the cerebral sense…this is nasty synth loud noise for a bunch of kids that are a hell of a lot younger than myself, and aging ravers like me. But who the hell cares. I drove around Auckland with this very, very loud in the borrowed battered Range Rover. It’s fantastic. My peers think I’m odd listening to this one too.

But they might kind of understand The L.E.D.s. Their album came out last year, via a home pressing in Christchurch, in New Zealand’s almost deserted South Island (the isolation helps add the necessary eccentricity to give this its alt-pop glitter), and a lot of people I respected talked about it over the months. But, could I get it in Auckland…nobody had heard of it. Instead I got NZ on Air’s Kiwi Hit Disc 95 in the mail. It was shockingly, gruesomely, awful, and I wondered what had happened to the edge in  NZ’s local industry (nobody is buying NZ records anymore…after tens of millions of dollars spent over the last decade by government agencies, it’s the terrifying truth that no-one will publicly admit to, although they are all saying it in private), until I finally found, via Smoke CDs in Wellington, a copy of …we are The L.E.D.s .

I’m in love. I love this album more than I can possibly say, or at least, put into words. This is legacy stuff. I understand this. Any album which references so well early NZ electronica (Car Crash Set and Body Electric), jangly almost early Flying Nun-ish, (although slightly more McGuinn-ish than that) guitar sheen, and yet sounds so absolutely, but simply, contemporary, works well for me. Soft, resigned, melodic and yet, at times, it’s gets resolutely noisy as well. It’s the first perfectly formed pop album I’ve heard from New Zealand this decade. Another album, I understand, is due soon and I’m craving it already.

The L.E.D.S are a garage band, they do it all themselves and almost nobody notices them in the establishment. And then I note that most of those awful records on that Kiwi Hit Disc are getting full signed releases by someone and I understand exactly why, at it’s most obvious level, NZ’s recording industry is in such dire trouble, and yet if you dig deeper, it most assuredly is not.

“I’ll have a Soy Chai, please”

Hearing that I knew I was back in Auckland. The joys of Ponsonby Road are sometimes every bit as insubstantial as Wellingtonians love to suggest they might be, especially when sitting in Bambina, café de-choice of swathes of young (ish) wanna be designer types who have their designer shades firmly on their foreheads despite the fact that it’s grey and pissing down outside.

It’s easy to be smarmy and condescending about Auckland. There are the overdressed bright (and as I said above, often no longer, like myself) young things who wear overpriced clothes they can’t afford (unlike me, I wear live in jeans and some old t-shirt most of the time), live in houses they can’t possibly afford (but the bank is happy to lend them money to buy…been there, and perhaps will be again), and drive cars that not only can’t they afford, have no practical day to day use beyond impressing the other clientele at Prego or Blake (ditto). Then there is Metro. I asked myself a week or two back if Metro had improved. Ah, no it hasn’t sadly. If anything it’s worse, much worse, if that’s possible. Fortunately Auckland really is not the vapid, grasping, overly pretentious swamp that you would think it is if that was your only stick to judge the city by. The odd worthy arts and music review aside (and yes Auckland has some of all of that…just remember when Kane Massey’s DeepGrooves was inventing the NZ downbeat that Wellie boasts about, most of the rest of NZ, the capital included, was still producing post Seattle cock rock), there is rarely anything between it’s cover that relates to Auckland in any fathomable way…and never has been.

This period, nine months, is the longest I’ve spend away from the city of my birth since, I guess, 1985 when I returned after 2 ½ years in London. I didn’t quite know what to expect, it’s a funny little town (and that’s all it is…where in gods name are all the people, the footpaths are deserted…how do shops pay those rents) but I love big slabs of it a lot. I so love its soul and the spirit and humour that I can find nowhere else in NZ. It’s the only town which doesn’t feel either dour and self important, with no good reason, or like some redneck hick town. It has elements of both of that still and it is far too self important (Fashion Week anyone?), but nothing on this planet feels as good as sitting with a bunch people I’ve known for twenty or thirty years, over coffee or wine at some hole in the wall café (not Bambina) on Pons, or in a penthouse overlooking the urban inner west; or talking shit about obscure German techno, and reminiscing with Nick D until 5am. I did all that and could do it forever. There are lots of people I love in Auckland town.

So Ak07, some thoughts, from an Asian visitor:

· Damn, it’s expensive.

· There is no traffic, get over it. The roads, by any reasonable international standards (and I include the motorways at rush hour) are deserted. Auckland’s traffic problem is the same one that afflicts the nation as a whole…anger. Contact ball sports are my theory…

· Talking of which….moving the school terms for the rugby…that’s truly fucked up….

· I love the infrastructure…unlike much of the rest of the world, everything works. The roads, the taps, the power. I guess you pay for it with stupid sized property taxes and regulations, which brings me to…

· The rules, the regulations, the rules and more rules…there are so many. Everything is regulated and half the population, when they are not discussing a contact ball sport which encourages young men to do GBH to each other, are, face to face, on the airwaves, and in forums, discussing ways to increase the regulations. Wellington exists for no other reason. I hate the phrase nanny state, but driving along the waterfront seeing signs and lightings for over a kilometre warning me about a looming closed shoulder (which I didn’t notice when I got there) makes me wonder how much all this bullshit costs. There are so many fucking rules. Now, I understand, you need a seltbelt for your dog otherwise your insurance is void. You could not make this stuff up…seriously…..the number eight wire is now only sold in metre lengths with a permit.

· Auckland Airport….when you criticise the unfriendly, over (yes) regulated quagmire that is Auckland Airport people defensively compare it to LAX…when that’s the standard you compare yourself to, you are seriously in trouble. From the smartarse Immigration guy making derisive comments about Bali, to the only in NZ, women who harass you about cabin bag weight on the way out…seriously, in my experience, nowhere else in the world…you feel like you are leaving Wanganui International. Sell it to the Arabs, they could not, and won’t, do a worse job.

· Where in gods name is the wi-fi. Y’know the sort of thing that any café, airport, food-hall, or mall in Asia offers as a free, or ludicrously cheap, service. Not in Auckland though. There is a clear and growing technology gap. Where are the IT stores and malls? And don’t tell me it’s population…

· Conch Records may well be the best record shop in the world.

· Ahh, the food…the good stuff is fantastic, and the good stuff is almost always at the bottom end of the scale price wise. Little KK in Greenlane offers the best Malaysian outside Malaysia, and indeed is very much better than much of the stuff you find there. And wonderful Indian, Dim Sim (we meet Chinese gourmets in Asia that rave about Grand Harbour), Thai and all sorts of other things found in cheap and cheerfuls across the isthmus. It has to be the ingredients…despite moaning, the nation is so damned clean and green, and its impossible not to taste that. New Zealand, however, does do high end dining very, very badly. Let’s leave that to the twats that put together Metro…..

· The Steak and Cheese Pies; the mussells and the scallops…and the chocolate and the ice cream…

· “Have you seen Sylvia Park??”..uh yes, and why would you bother. Bit sad innit….KL also has a cinema that claims the biggest screen in the (non IMAX) world…somebody is not telling the truth.

· George and 95bFm are the best radio you’ll find anywhere.

· Damn, its expensive.

From the NZ Herald today:

AT&T, the telecoms company with which Apple has teamed up to offer its much-hyped new iPod-cum-mobile phone, revealed that it activated 146,000 of the devices in the first two days – the last two days of June.

The number was mentioned as an aside in AT&T’s financial results for the second quarter of the year, but it caused an immediate reaction on the stock market, where Apple shares plunged 5 per cent.

Analysts had believed US sales of the iPhone that first weekend had been anything from 300,000 to 700,000. Even allowing that some iPhones may not have been immediately activated – either due to glitches at AT&T or because they were being purchased for resale on eBay – it seems clear that Wall Street had been taken in by the hype surrounding the product’s launch.

What a surprise…not….Apple’s Zune cometh…

This article, in the Observer, is a pleasure to read:

But something is happening that might just revitalise the original indie spirit: 21 years after C86 acted out its quiet revolution, the do-it-yourself ethic is back.

And

They think the term ‘indie’ has died but that something else is in its place – a new spirit of enthusiasm inspired by people who are fed-up of dull contemporary sounds, and who are buoyed up by the internet’s capacity to store and disseminate music using next-to-no resources

It makes yer feel all warm and cozy inside.

Of course the story misses two rather obvious points. Firstly the C86, a cassette distributed by the NME, did not act out it’s quiet revolution as she says, but rather acted as a banner for an ongoing, not so quiet revolution that had begun with quite some brash bravado decade earlier in London, and to a lessor degree, NYC, and had, by the time C86 appeared, gone around the world, without losing the original spirit, several times by then. The spirit of Stiff, Factory, Small Wonder, Fast, ROIR, Rough Trade, ZE and hundreds of others had been the driving force behind thousands of labels around the world, including my own label, Propeller, and others that came after us, including the already, long before C86, thriving Flying Nun. It’s an odd perspective to say that C86 heralded the beginning of anything. If anything C86 marked the beginning of the end of rock ’n’ roll’s first flirtation with indism (good new word, huh?). It was to return to the fold with some fervor a few years later, which bring me to second point, that being the way the spirit of the original indies was gathered up and pushed forward by that decade’s next major revolution, the electronic and rhythmic one that had it’s roots in gay clubs in Chicago and a trio of suburban obsessives in Detroit.

Over the next decade, dance, house, techno, dub, acid jazz and all the various rhythmic mutations were, despite the myth of C86, what drove the indies. The second major revolution of that decade was about six months away when C86 came out, and an incredible explosion in independent music accompanied it. By mid 87 the sounds on that C86 cassette were dated and staid.

The spirit of those early independents can thereafter be found in Wall of Sound, Strictly Rhythm, Warp and 1000 other labels globally. Even Factory and Rough Trade, the granddaddies of the UK indie scene (before they went under..indies often do that), and Creation, the flag bearer, made their pre-Britpop marks by mashing dance with the indie ethos.

What all these labels, across the genres, had in common, was that, unlike the earlier pre-punk indies, they had no desire to be majors. Motown, A&M, Virgin and Island all wanted to be EMI. Rough Trade and Warp could think of nothing they wanted less.

So thirty years after the revolution (not 20 as per the Observer story…I posted the above simply as a way of backgrounding the path), in 2007 we have reached indie domination. In 2007 only the indies really matter. In 2007 only the indies seem to understand the road forward. Sure, still, the four major labels have the lion’s share of the charts, of the sales percentages. But that’s really beside the point. Simply put, in mid 2007, as I type, it’s not an unreasonable overstatement to say that nothing of any importance that looks forward has been released by any major record label in any of the territories that I traditionally tend to look at (ie UK, US & NZ) unless it I via a distribution deal with an indie. In other words, the major record labels, in their panic (and rightly so) of the past five years have walked away from what made them record companies, A&R. It’s the lifeblood of what they are, where they have come from and what has always given them a future, and now the accountants in their stock panic, have slit the jugular. Seriously, have a swiz through the UK, US or NZ charts, and show more than two new acts, signed directly to a major, that matter beyond a short term sales burst designed to pay the rather large salaries of people who have less and less to do. In the US charts I can count Amy Winehouse, and, uhhhh, that’s about it. It must be scary to be in the employ of a major record label in a time when, more or less, their bosses have said, beyond our catalogue and our legacy signings, we don’t want to play anymore..nol contendere….

But, it’s fascinating and exciting to watch the rise and rise and rise of the thirty year young contenders, or at least their heirs. The number one album this week in the UK is by The Enemy, who, while they may have stolen the name from one of NZ’s finest, most appropriately appear on the rather legendary Stiff label, an imprint that inspired us all. There is a new empowerment and sense of control in the indie world, be it the rise of Justice, The Battles, or LCD Soundsystem, The Editors, Arctic Monkeys, or the squeeze that the understanding of the new media that the majors simply lack gives them, but at last, to partially quote JFK, the torch has passed…

Wait five years, and beyond catalogue, and a few acts who can’t exist outside the system, the big four, who have contracted and merged relentlessly to survive, but have forgotten what actually gave them lifeblood, will be almost irrelevant, if they’re not already.

You have to wonder, when UMIs CEO Doug Morris walks down the road, whether the neon that spells out dinosaur on his back comes on letter by letter or flashes as one word. It’s almost game over, it truly is.

Been away, almost back, but in the meantime, this is a giggle…from the usually unreliable All Music Guide (most of their NZ band bios are quite clearly written by hacks who have never heard the bands in question) comes this shocker:

Enemy was an obscure punk outfit that hailed from New Zealand. Formed in the late ’70s, the group is best known in their homeland for such singles as “Punks Alive” and “Fallen Hero.” The band’s full-length debut album, Gateway to Hell, was issued in 1983, and although it became increasingly hard to find over the years, was reissued on CD, containing ten bonus tracks (many of which were rare singles). The ’90s also saw the release of a pair of concert albums recorded back in May of 1978 — Pull Down the Shades and Iggy Told Me. ~ Greg Prato, All Music Guide

ahhh, ok….

perhaps Mr Prato would should’ve done a little research before sending in his biography and invoice:

For the real bio listen to Iggy Told me, but what you need to know is that they emerged out of Dunedin in 1977 then took Auckland by storm, broke up and mutated into Toy Love, which went on to become the dominant band in New Zealand before moving to Australia where no one cared and they broke up.

I went through major Masters at Work and Strictly Rhythm phases in the first part of the nineties. I still have these large portions of my vinyl wall devoted to each. I was indiscriminate as to which MAW records I bought…I bought em all, and I think I still have a fairly complete 1990-97 Ken and Louie collection. Even the mixes by numbers for the bucks, that became more and more common as the decade wore on I bought and filed (we obsessives are like that), but it became an addiction of diminishing returns. The good records became few and fewer, Louie moved off to an endless succession of increasingly light noodle house that I couldn’t deal with, and Kenny, well, it just became a recycling loop…old disco and funk records re-edited, or god knows how many disco mix discs. I stopped listening and haven’t felt the urge to try since.

Strictly I wasn’t quite so obsessive about. The first 100 or so I think I bought without question, and I at least checked out everything they released, but about 93 the shite ratio began to move in the wrong direction. Simply, they released far too much crap. Even the odd killer that filtered through couldn’t save a much sullied reputation, and, inevitably they crashed a few years back.

2007 has, of course seen Strictly revived by the UK’s Defected label. Now, I’m not going to go anywhere near the Defected is satanic theme rotated ad nauseum in the various house forums, but it is fantastic to see perhaps the greatest catalogue in dance music history revived again, even if I don’t need any on vinyl. But, as Chess is to Blues, so Strictly Rhythm is to house (and both labels are equally as influential, it’s just that Americans and the more trad journalists missed that slab of aural history) and more power to the re-issue campaign (and even some new releases, although I would question whether the world really needs a Todd Terry AllStars single).

You could also question some of the releases coming back in the reissue program, the crap-o-meter doesn’t seem to have been repaired at Strictly.

What I really wanted from the new program though was a bunch of intelligently complied collections, on CD, annotated and thoughtfully presented…

…..Like the one I got in the mail the other day which brings back together MAW and Strictly.

In a massive burst of club nostalgia, I’ve been annoying one and all with the Strictly MAW collection, a rather good, Louis and Kenny chosen collection of Strictly classics, both obscure and so obvious I though I’d not ever want to hear them again. I’ve not listened to most of these for many, many years …there is a dog here and there, but over three CDs (unmixed…I want the full versions not a party mix, it’s about the songs) its both a silly rush of nostalgia for house’s golden age and a journey back to MAW for me. I can’t ever see myself enjoying or even tolerating most of the slight mush that comes out of their labels these past few years, but this is a hell of a collection, from the Mole People’s epic deep Break Night (Van Helden for that brief moment he mattered) from 95, to the cheesy pop dance of Ultra Nate’s Free (in it’s Mood 2 Swing 12 minute mix that kept it deep enough), to the, tell me it’s not the best house record ever made, glory of Underground Solution’s Luv Dancing. I’d kill for a couple of Untouchables tracks or Northern Lights instead of a track or too that is actually on the album, but hey, that’s a whim. But the riff on Generate Power is enough to make me forget that, and, the full twelve and three quarter minute garage vocal (remember good house vocals before the horror of funky house trampled such things to death) heaven of Lil Louis’ (as Black Magic) Freedom is a forgotten gem (in that I’d forgotten what a great record it is), losing itself gloriously about two thirds of the way through…they don’t make em like that anymore (and we miss you Louis).

Seriously they don’t….

As hard as I tried to get The Battles, I couldn’t. I know it’s critically adjudged as the thing right now, their album that is. But try as I might it sounded like the bad end of ugly mainstream pre-77 prog. We fought running battles in the streets to allow, eventually, labels like Warp to release their edge of the boundary stuff over the years, as they have done (it’s one of the great British labels innit), and then they do this to us.

Ok, they weren’t running battles…more like cozy, smug fireside chats pretending we were staunch, but the point and the end result was the same

But now I get it, almost…I get the snarling DJ Koze mix of Atlas very very big time…very Warp, very bass tugging, favourite record right now.

I just thought I’d mention it.

Oh, and Tiger Stripes’ Hooked, and Rekorder 8.1…

I’m allowed to plug oldish records…I’m in Bali, ok.