In the spirit of all things High Street, Auck­land, and Cause Cele­bre (includ­ing this post on Pub­lic Address from myself), I made a point of track­ing down a copy of the very rare, and rather won­der­ful (and, to the point, fairly impor­tant in the scheme of all things musi­cally AK in the 1990s) Free­bass album, RAW: Live at Cause Celebre.

Free­bass were impor­tant for a num­ber of rea­sons, but not least because it was one of the early vehi­cles for the Haines broth­ers, Joel and Nathan. Nathan’s next band was The Enforcers, who went on to record the glob­ally released Shift Left ..the only NZ recorded album ever to appear on Verve.

I remem­ber the night fairly well. Chris Sin­clair had miked up the room and he and Mark Tier­ney taped it strug­gling against all sorts of adver­sity. They had to bat­tle with odd acoustics, ine­bri­ated folks repeat­edly trip­ping over cables and staff who really didn’t care who or what they were, they had to get that case of Mac’s Gold to the back bar with­out delay.

But it worked out pretty well, it was a land­mark album at the time and, as I recall, sold pretty well. Released on Mark Tier­ney and Kane Massey’s quite cru­cial Deep­grooves label, it’s long been unavail­able and quite sought after. My (signed) copy had walked some­where in the past 19 years so I was forced to buy a new copy this week. I sourced it on EBay, from Syd­ney, and, with the bless­ing of a cou­ple of the musi­cians who may or may not own the rights (who the hell knows), I thought I’d post a track.

I’ve always thought that Think­ing Of Ric­cardo may be about the Chilean guy of the name who was around the scene. He was, as I recall, busted for coke impor­ta­tion around this time and we were all rather taken aback. I’ve been mean­ing to ask for 19 years.

RAW!

Free­bass — Think­ing Of Ric­cardo (Deep­Grooves, 1990)

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