Here’s an anniversary some would rather forget:

……..2008 marks the 10-year anniversary of two of the first MP3 players, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, and the Rio PMP300, but chances are you didn’t listen to a first-gen MP3 player in 1998. With the first iPod still three years off, most of us were in the heights of our compact disc addiction 10 years ago, content to hear our music on portable CD players. Hell, some of us still listened to cassettes….

In early 1999 I was at a Festival Mushroom conference in Coffs Harbour, Northern NSW, with the Festival NZ team and all the discussion, well in between the stuff about how shockingly bad all the ocker bands were, was about the first generation players just hitting the market.

And about Rupert Murdoch (he owned the company and his son James ran it)  and Roger Grierson’s (he was MD) plan for an online database of music that one could download to these primitive machines.

Over a few beers, we laughed a little at the idea….

I had a day of two halves yesterday as I straddled the fairly wide gap between two wildly different worlds. One was real, the other slightly surreal.

At dawn I found myself in the grounds of the Australian Consulate, who also represent New Zealand’s interests (or, mostly, lack thereof based on the number of compatriots you see here now) in Bali. Our daughter, we found out earlier in the week, had volunteered to represent her home country as the flag raiser at the ANZAC Dawn Parade.

Sadly neither Brigid or myself are morning people, and squirmed a little at the thought of a 4.45am rise.

I’m not belittling the lost lives of those who are remembered on ANZAC Day. I’ve stood in the Auckland War Memorial Museum on several occasions and looked at the name of my great uncle, Julian Cornelius Brook, who was fatally wounded at Gallipoli (and who took the above shot), with a mix of respect and great sadness.  The profoundness of ANZAC day dwarfs all of us.

I explained that, as best I could to Isabella, but at thirteen, as the bulletproof years start, it’s not that easy.

And its still not that easy to throw the dogs off and pull oneself from a comfy bed before sunrise. But we did.

However to be honest, as moving the last post is at dawn, as the flag goes to half mast, it was all a little odd. Firstly we were in Bali, in other words, in Indonesia, where ANZAC not only means nothing but the country, for all its multitude of holidays, doesn’t have a great tradition of remembering young people lost in foreign fields for, often, long forgotten causes and what now seems like foolish leaders involved in petty political manoeuvring for pointless advantage (could WWI be described any other way?). Indeed, many in Indonesia, especially the younger, would rather forget their dubious military adventures and with good reason. The holidays here, instead, are either religious in nature or remembering the battles against the imperial forces partially being remembered by ANZAC Day. The Commonwealth forces are not well remembered here, as they were the bad guys in 1945.

With that in mind I was pretty sure that the Indonesian General placing a wreath was as confused about what was going on as he indeed looked.

Then we had the choir, Balinese, and in wonderful voice. But there is something rather bizarre listening to an Indonesian choir singing God defend New Zealand, in Maori, in Bali. Even in New Zealand the words to that strange song seem misplaced now, but here……

That bizarreness was accentuated by the consulate itself, which has been sculpted, behind massive security gates, walls and electronic devices, to look as much like a part of Canberra as possible. I’ve seen nothing like it’s rolled, manicured lawns in this country before…it was like walking into an expat’s misty fantasy memory.

And then we have the consul’s car…a new-ish top end BMW. Aside from the snarl from a leaving Ocker vet asking ‘why isn’t it a Holden’, it seems odd that, considering the massive security at the consulate, arguably quite reasonable when one thinks of the recent past, the head guy should drive a car that so obviously stands out from the masses on the jalans.

Of course, it was superbly done…the ceremony that is, and the consul and staff gave everything expected of them, and was followed by a good ocker breakfast barbie on the rolling lawns. In Indonesia? Who us?

So from Denpasar, after a bite with some friends, we then travelled north to a place somewhere between Giyanyar and Petak, to our gardener’s wedding. He, Gustu, is a lovely guy, not very good as a gardener but he came with our house and we’ve never had the heart to let him go. I just like chatting to him and seeing his smile. And now, aged just 20, he’s marrying his girl, Putu, aged just 17. We’re not sure exactly why, but his niece, aged 19, said ‘He’s too young’, and there is no doubting his worried expression.

It was a million miles from the ANZAC dawn and the rolled western styled lawns. This was the Bali that tourists never see, which, to be fair, is the bulk of the island. There was little English spoken, no tour buses and no hawkers. This was a trip back to the northern hills where nothing much has changed in over a century, apart from the click of a digital camera and the odd cellphone, to the family compound.

Change may be coming though, as we passed the workmen on the winding narrow road digging to install a small part of the incredible 58,000kms of fibre optic cable going through Indonesia under Project Palapa Ring, whilst first world NZ argues over its tiny infrastructure project.

And I guess, like China, that infrastructure is a part of the thing that will take this massive country to a completely different time and place. And like China, it will happen without anyone expecting it.

  But at the moment I’m still struggling through a country where, bugger the internet, most people can’t read a map primarily because the Dutch deliberately kept the populace uneducated for their own purposes, and successive governments have done little more, so there is no tradition of such. Thus we got very lost getting to Gustu’s upacara because the map on the invite rear bore no relationship to the actual route and we were, after we left the main road, in the hands of old people sitting on the side of the road, many of whom no doubt, had rarely left their village, pointing us in vague directions towards the next village. It was only about 40km from our house but took several hours and several stunning but incorrect roads before we stumbled upon the compound in Desa Babakan.

Tourists are always going on about the ‘real’ Bali (by which they often mean Ubud for gods sake) but here in the hills, off the roads, up the muddy trails is a world that few ever see, and yet that is how about half the population of the island still lives, and I always feel like a voyeur when I catch a small, but always welcoming, glimpse of what this island used to be like, and its little like the ‘real’ Bali sold to the masses.

How long this world will survive, as the likes of Denpasar more and more becomes the day to day reality of Bali for so many Balinese, and the villas and technology creep north and into the valleys and hills, I don’t know.

Grumpy old men are everywhere, it’s a part of growing old and I guess I’m one at times. However the music world seems to produce them in extraordinarily large numbers. Witness George Harrison, bless his guitar-weeping socks, complaining that Oasis was not real music.

And then we have Gray Bartlett in the New Zealand Herald yesterday. Gray is trekking around NZ celebrating 50 years in the business, which is quite an achievement. Not only 50 years, but in that period he’s done pretty well, selling a bunch of records in China before anyone else did, and, in recent years, having a fairly major input into the early career of singers Hayley Westerna , Yulia and a bloke called Will Martin. Hayley, of course, had a burst of success in the UK a few years back, although her star seems to have fallen a little since then, which may be because she’s more or less, because of the nature of what she does, condemned to repeat herself. Will Martin has an album out there of a similar sort of granny friendly songs like Danny Boy. I hope he does well.

So, hats off to Gray, and well done. But why does he need to sour the occasion and belittle both himself and the industry he’s been a part of for five decades by lashing out in such an unnecessary way. By whinging:

Why should someone who wants to finish an album in Hokitika get taxpayer funding? It’s great for the community interest, but let the councils look after it.

It all sounds like sour grapes doesn’t it, as if he is pissed off because he didn’t get the grants he applied for or thought he should’ve been offered. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps its not, but reading through he certainly comes across as a sourpuss and to my mind his arguments don’t even stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny.

I have my own issues with New Zealand on Air’s funding, mostly to with the way it’s been diluted and compromised by the perceived need to keep radio happy..It’s followed commercial radio rather than led it.

But that aside, thank god it’s there and thank god a man like Brendan Smyth has been there to guide it so devotedly. And thank god for the likes of Mike Chunn, his work at APRA and with his Play It Strange trust, working with the young writers and musicians. Gray takes a swipe at Chunn for doing just that for heavens sake.

So, lets go back to the world that Gray longs for, since he says, of government funding:

they’ve missed the boat over the last six or seven years

Really? Before the current government music funding was a fraction of it was and most of us in the industry felt fairly much forgotten. Aware of the fact that the music industry was craving a change of government, and a positive arts regime, National tried to rush out a youth radio network at a very embarrassing launch at Auckland’s Shortland Street Studios where the minister concerned was clearly out of her depth and unable to name any NZ recording artists beyond Split Enz when asked, although she was able to mention OMC in her speech (they’d returned some 10 million dollars to the NZ economy, but it was clear from the speech she didn’t know what or who an OMC was).

How have they ‘missed’ the boat..is it because they’ve funded dozens of grass roots level acts, writing and recording their own music…Gray says it should be about the artist, not the songs which:

New Zealand can’t hope to compete on a world market with

Tell that to Neil Finn whose had several million plays of Don’t Dream Its Over worldwide, or to Alan Jansson, who has two US BMI Million Play certificates on the wall of his office for a song he wrote with Paul Fuemana in Freeman’s Bay. To my mind, where NZ on Air has fallen over in recent times is because it no longer encourages the sort of individuality these songs represent…it doesn’t go far enough.

So, stuff creativity says Gray (at least that’s the drift I get) because the implication is that Gray is upset that the likes of Hayley, Yulia and Elizabeth Marvelly have not had funding he feels they so richly deserve, above and beyond these creative bods. He says at the end of the story after all, that the government should just give him the money to do it properly. And perhaps there is an argument that these people should be funded by NZOA but it’s really not strong. These people, with acceptable voices, generally provide pleasant cover versions of songs that others write. They could come from anywhere…there is nothing really ‘of us’ in what they do. NZ on Air’s brief, through successive governments is to provide a reflection of ‘us’.

It’s hard to argue that future generations will look back on Hayley or the others as seminal to NZ’s cultural development, as we now look back at, yes, Split Enz, Hello Sailor, The La De Das or Johnny Devlin (and incidentally, both of the last two also worked with covers, but added a little extra obviously enzeld that Hayley does not..or maybe that is a subjective judgement) defining just that. Nope I think in 2030 the name will elicit a Haley who response…

And I’m happy that he can say he has proved right his declaration that she would be bigger than Kiri. But I think there are greater forces at play than ‘bigger than Kiri’. There is little doubt that Dame Kiri Te Kanawa will be remembered by the ages, regardless of who is ‘bigger’ than her, as her achievement is bigger than mere sales figures. Kenny G has probably outsold both John Coltrane and Miles Davis too.

And Gray complains that we don’t recognize our country acts…forgive me but I think the likes of The Warratahs, Al Hunter and other original country acts are very well regarded in NZ.

I’m happy he pulls good crowds with Brendan Dugan and Suzanne Prentice, but neither represents mainstream contemporary creative NZ. Neither for heavens sake does John Grenell…in fact I doubt most NZers could even tell you who he is (3 clues..he’s the bloke who sang a Jim Reeves tune in a Toyota ad a decade or two back, was resident on many of those gruesome country shows the NZBC used to love and discreetly changed his name from John Hore many years back after he worked out the rest of the country was smirking).

The other inescapable fact is that, as any record exec or a quick look at the charts would tell you, country may put bums on the seats of country halls but, with the odd exception, mostly to the MOR market, it doesn’t sell records and hasn’t for decades.

So I wish Gray well on his 50 years doing what he so clearly loves doing and making a good living from it, but if he represents the music policy of an incoming National government he’s the best argument that the music industry could provide for NOT changing the government.

I’ve been listening to a lot of newish music recently, I’m feeling passionately excited by a few things. But before I get into that I’m going to post this rather lovely movie of the grand old gentleman of southern soul, Allen Toussaint, performing Southern Nights last year. The song is of course best known for the shallow bashing it received by Glen Campbell (although I’d image Allen liked the cheque) but the original comes from Toussaint’s 75 classic album of the same name.

Ok and since I’m on a roll, here’s the same man doing a Longhair-ish rolling take of Lipstick Traces, a song he wrote in the early sixties, charted first by Benny Spellman, in a version produced by Toussaint, and later in 1965, produced, as I recall, by H.B. Barnham on Imperial, by The O’Jays in their pre-PIR days.

And one more, an encore from the Allen Toussaint / Elvis Costello tour in 2006 (to promote the sadly patchy River In Reverse), wherein Toussaint takes Elvis’ I Want You and places it squarely in the Mississippi Delta

So onwards…

Jose James – The Dreamer (Brownswood)

  I’ve seen this guy compared by the odd reviewer to the likes of Michael Franks and Al Jarreau. Nothing could be further from the truth..it’s a little like the infamous description of Gregory Isaacs in Q some years back as a Maxi Priest soundalike.

Signed to Gilles Peterson’s (often hit and miss) label, the name I’d be happier drawing a tangent from is the late, rather great ,but almost forgotten, Johnny Hartman, albeit a dirtier, more expansive and at times noisier version. Recorded, it seems, almost live, with his band in New York City, The Dreamer is an extraordinarily gritty, haunting, soulful fuck-me-that-makes-me-shiver sort of record in a classic style. You almost find yourself almost waiting for the tragedy to hit. Because it always does…

Carl Craig – Sessions (!K7)

I was pretty reserved about this initially. Not about the contents…well yes maybe..I didn’t need Carl Craig’s career overview as a two CD mixed album. I’ve got many of these tracks on various mixed albums and I wanted just, well, the songs…from beginning to end. Long have I craved a full length digital version of Clear & Present for example, rather than the edited version on the Paperclip People CD (and transferring large chunks of my vinyl to digital is just too much of an overwhelming concept).

And then, lo and behold I discovered the iTunes version of this. Somebody, somewhere is thinking. Someone somewhere has gone beyond the pointless whinging about how downloading is killing music and done the sensible thing. The album, in its CD form retails for about US$18. The digital download, also on Amazon, Emusic (although that seems only to include the unmixed tracks) and Beatport, is about US$9 (or, predictably, gouged, in NZ the CD / MP3 differential is NZ$35 / NZ$25…what the hell is with that?).

The greatest electronic artist of the past 25 years offers a career retrospect, and even with obvious gaps (where the hell is the standalone track of Angola? It’s in the mixed version) what else is there to say?

Francoise K – Masterpiece (MOS)

I’m always wanting a mix album to put on, often rather loudly, whilst I do the interesting things in life, like the tax, or working on the endless screeds of paperwork that seem to come my way. Right now, Francois fits the bill quite well. Three discs of electronic sounds all with the trademark dubby (remember, the man virtually invented the modern electronic dub, and was a part of the small group who defined the form of the ‘remix’ as we now know it) techno tinge, the three being in order: big room, contemporary and heritage. One of the truly great producers, disc jockeys, and musical visionaries of the last two decades of the last century (his live in Japan in 91 set with Larry Levan is one amongst many on Deephousepages worth tracking down), much of this simply pulses and tugs the listener along.

The place where King Tubby meets Stockhausen.

Prosumer & Murat Tepeli – Serenity (OstGut Tonrager)

Electronic torch ballads from Germany. This one crept up on me. I own a 12” by these guys, The Craze, included here in a live form, from about 2005, which I played to death at the time. A rather reverent homage to late eighties Chicago House, complete with the almost clumsy vocals that were such a trademark or the era, and I’ve always found rather appealing, it points the way for the rest of this utterly charming and disarmingly beautiful deep house long player. There is a kind of purity in a record like this, almost everything is intentionally underplayed, nothing overpowers anything and space is the essential instrument.

Ok that sounds nicely pretentious, that’ll do…

One last word on China….from The Bulletin:

The Australian may be immoral, and very often is, but the Chinaman must be….
He has no alternative, for the utter lack of ennobling purpose and elevating ideal confines his every thought to the pleasures of his body. …

from September 1, 1886.

Looking at this page and the comments below the main piece, in 130 years not much has changed…..

You have to ask what Martha really learnt during that spell behind bars

China is a huge and seductive practical joke which defeated the westerners who tried to modernise it, the Japanese who tried to conquer it, the Americans who tried to democratise and unify it…and Chiang and Mao John Paton Davies

It was a long slow trek from Hong Kong to Denpasar…some 12 hours including a four hour stop-over in Brunei which we filled with a gratis tour of the city. Brunei seems  pleasant enough but less than exciting.

Our tour guide, after telling us that there is absolutely no alcohol there, smilingly let slip that many young people slip across the border on a Saturday night for a quick lager. He also showed us the massive Sultan’s place and gorgeous mosque as well as the brand new parliament building which seems to serve no purpose beyond window dressing given as the Sultan is one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchs in this rather dull, oil rich state.

And I thought of the double standards in the west..how we tolerate political ugliness in Saudi Arabia but not in China. Then I guess Saudi Arabia plays a compliant game and offers no real threat to a US dominance. China on the other hand not only threatens but increasingly dominates and controls the game. And that is very obvious when you are there, or in Hong Kong, which, despite it’s friendly face is very much a part of the People’s Republic.

I may, to those that have been there many times, sound hopelessly naïve, but here are a few more thoughts and comments about China.

· Even for a resident of Indonesia, with some experience of mega cities like Jakarta, the vastness and enormity of the country when you are there really hits and almost overwhelms one but as much as that, as per John Davies above, ultimately seduces you.

· There is something about the stream of container trucks transporting goods along the six lane highway carved into the mountainsides into Hong Kong that is very Silk Road and that is accentuated by the fact that the three biggest container gateway ports in the work are in servicing South Eastern China.

· Simple numbers like the fact that I’m told that there are more PhD students in Chinese Universities than students in the whole US tertiary system, or that China consumes almost two billion pairs of jeans a year, before, it exports any. Or that there are allegedly some 200 million people in the country not listed in official census numbers by virtue of those that slipped through the system because of the one child policy

· I was surprised in Guangzhou as to how many non-Chinese looking residents I saw. My friend from Hong Kong who does extensive business in the city tells me these are as likely folk from the western provinces. The oft quoted restrictions on internal travel no longer exist, the only restriction is that one cannot take ones social benefits from province to province. In other words, if you need the dole you need to come home.

· The Shanghai to Ningbo sea bridge is the longest in the world, and has been built exclusively by Chinese companies and engineers. Whilst the west was smugly sitting around, China caught up. And nowhere was that more evident than in the Tianhe area of Guangzhou, where vast tree lined boulevards around massive modern structures, often architecturally inspiring, looking like some immense sci-fi set, sit where I’m told dirt roads existed ten years ago.

· Whilst the old central train station looks like a Mao-ist relic virtually every other public facility we entered was absolute state of the art, and mostly at least partially privately owned. Make no mistake this is a market driven economy

· Both Brigid and I agreed that the people we encountered in China were, as a generalisation, the most friendly, considerate and open we’ve encountered anywhere on our travels, west or east. We were repeatedly amazed at how helpful and polite complete strangers could be and there was none of the pushiness we’d been led to believe was the norm.

· The term ‘one party’ state is a subjective one. One could reasonably argue that there is perhaps a wider raft of opinions in a huge party such as exists in China than the current please-tell-me-the-difference between them UK Tory / Labour split.

· I abhor capital punishment in any form and don’t believe any nation that kills it’s own can claim to be civilized but several people pointed out to me that on a per capita basis China is way behind ‘friendly’ nations like Singapore and Saudi Arabia. And the family paying for the bullet thing is a long past thing.  That said, it still revolts me and I can find no excuses to justify it in any form. When there the former Shanghai head guy was convicted of substantial fraud and sentenced to life in jail. There was much comment that such a crime would have meant a needle (as that is how its done now) a year or three back.

· At the back of one’s mind the whole time of course you have Tiananmen Square, although that was 20 years ago, and a raft of other questions but you can only hope that China, which has had a truly horrific past century is coming out of something. I found myself looking at old people over and over and wondering just what they had seen. The Chinese history I’ve been reading recently means something altogether more when you look at the faces. But, the simple fact that the modern urban China of today, and the wonder that is Hong Kong are happily tolerated speaks volumes about the future I would hope.

After close to a week in China, we then went to Hong Kong.

I’d not been to Hong Kong as an adult and it simply blew me away. We were lucky enough to be guided by good local friends so had a step up. But sitting in the legendary Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club drinking NZ wines felt rather good. As did dinner at the Peak Restaurant..it may be a tourist trap, but it too had a hell of wine list.

I’d always imagined it was a little like Singapore, but, no, this city, even with a PLA regiment sitting on the island, has soul.