The summer of 1987-1988 was like an economic “phoney war” similar to that we just experienced, 20 years on, with the 2007-2008 financial crisis. In the months following the 1987 share-market crash, we were waiting for the impact to hit. One of the casualties was surely the Neon Picnic rock festival, which went belly up hours before show time.

That’s Chris Bourke, across at his Distractions blog, which, I’m thrilled to say, is back in action as he has delivered to the publishers, and I am hugely anticipating, his book on NZ pre-Rock’n'Roll history – slowly, very slowly, we document, despite official ennui, our social past.

He also links to Andrew Schmitt’s fascinating history of Rock’n'Roll Festivals in NZ at the NZ History site.

I was one of the few who had a good story from Neon Picnic. My partner in clubs (we had The Playground at the time), Tom Sampson, had been asked to work on the festival, doing stage sound, by Oceania Audio, who had the main stage contract. Which left me in Auckland running the club.

I was gagging to see James Brown again. I’d seen him in London in 1980 (and had always kicked myself for not going over the Harbour Bridge when he played at Shoreline in Takapuna in 1977 or 78) and wanted more.

Mo Cammick, one of my best mates, the editor of Rip It Up and huge soul fan who had introduced me to volumes of Black and Soul music over the previous decade, said he was going to see James play in Australia the Monday and Tuesday before he was to fly to NZ.

Thus a deal was struck. Tom would take the weekend off from The Playground, to work side stage for Oceania (which meant seeing TGFOS from the stage!) and I would work in the club.  To compensate, I would, with Murray, fly to Melbourne the week before, and catch James’ gigs at the Metropolis.

This would make up for missing the NZ show.

I flew out, and with Murray and my other mate, designer Terence Hogan, who lived there, went to JB two nights running. Maceo stood next to me in the crowd and played an instrumental Soul Power, and I was flying. Still am….

I flew back to Auckland on the Thursday and..well the rest is in Chris’ post.

Before Scribe, before Dawn Raid (although its roots are here), before Chains, before the Otara Millionaires Club there was, contrary to common wisdom, a huge hip-hop scene in South and West Auckland going back to the early 1980s. There was even an album (cassette only) AK89: In Love With These Rhymes (which seems to have disappeared..does anyone have a copy? I’d love one.) put out by Simon Laan and bFM in 1989.

And if any further evidence is needed, here is some archive footage, newly discovered, of the 1989 Hip Hop Battle of the Bands, held in Manukau City Centre, which is quite brilliant. I was a judge and was fairly heavily involved with a few of these acts on and off. I’ll try and find the photos and scan.

Meanwhile….

Thanks to Grant ‘CRC’ Kearney, who really was as young as he looks in these back then…

I’ve just read Johann Hari’s blog-post about the death of god.

Or at least the recently ¹ surveyed fact (if that’s the right word, although research being as fine tuned as it is now, we can have some confidence most results from reputable MR companies, surely, in 2010) almost nobody in the UK believes in god anymore.

That’s 63% who openly think that it’s all crap.

However, given the the nature if the topic/question at hand, and that the don’t-knows on the survey (which I had at hand but have lost now and can’t be bothered finding) are only about 2% (on a question about believing in god!) you can make a fairly comfortable assumption that a large part of the remaining 35% have only said yes because they a) believe from a lifetime of habit (i.e. are old) or, b) are scared shitless that they will be condemned to an eternity of hellfire (or an iPod playing random Dire Straits tracks on repeat forever, which is probably worse) if they say no and god gets to hear about it from his/her endless prying into our minds (i.e. they are hedging their bets).

Johann’s major gripe, aside from the fact that he clearly thinks anyone who believes in the almighty has a spot in their head on the downward side of dim (it’s not a hard argument to successfully make in 2010, despite Francis Collins, but this post is not an anti-believers rant) is that the botherers get an unreasonable shake of the tax and privilege tail when put against their numbers.

It’s, of course, an historic thing – Great Britain actually had an official national day of prayer in 1940 to try and ward off the Nazis. Myself, I think the few, and the decidedly irreligious Winston may have played a bigger part, but it gives one an idea how entwined the whole myth was with the national ethos. God didn’t save the empire sadly and it was all over for England’s green and pleasant land. Or at least it was until they stopped spending money on vast overseas armies and plonking churches all over the world whilst stripping natives of everything they owned of worth, and upped the education spend. It’s arguable, and I’ll do just that, that a newly non-believing Great Britain, where god is now seen by many as little more than something to teach in anthropology, is slowly getting its national mojo back.

And the most corrupt, miserable and broken nations on this earth all seem to be the most religious ². In Indonesia I wanted to yell out daily, as you see misery after misery, “It doesn’t work”, but I bit my tongue. They now have an excuse having worked out that they’ve been praying to Somalia for god knows how long. But all is okay because:

“God understands that humans make mistakes”

Either that or he’s holding his sides at the endless dimwittery that seems to exude from the mouths of that nation’s woeful religious and secular leaders.

Back down in New Zealand I applied for a grant that, on paper, it seemed I was entitled to as an offshore citizen (a boarding grant for a child..I pay taxes you know and don’t use the roads). It was a very cheeky longshot, but I thought I would give it a go. The response from New Zealand’s education ministry was that I would, as a New Zealander abroad, only be eligible for this if I was a working missionary spreading the lord’s nonsense around the world. As a non-ministering supplicant I was not entitled. This was policy from the Education Department..the Education Dept.

So, it seems the UK is not alone. And here is the thing: as a kid growing up I knew a few practising Christians. I went to school with a few..nice but mostly not fun. But I knew them. Over the years, at least until a decade or so ago I knew a few, mostly musicians. Now I know none ³. I understood that as one grew older, and closer to the not so desirable endgame, people tended to put up their hands and surrender, just in case.

Not true, the few musicians I knew who were practising have walked away from the lord. All they have left is Brooke Fraser. Lord help….

Which is neither, here nor there, except the NZ Ministry of Education is showing preferential treatment for religious educators abroad, when New Zealand may have some / many religious people but is anything but a  Christian / Muslim / Hindu nation.

Then, having mused that, I remembered the first line of our national anthem. And it occurred to me that given the number of times I heard the word recession in NZ last month (you don’t hear it Asia anymore) maybe a national day of prayer is in order there too.

Is The Sky Falling on The Content Industries?

A must read from Stanford Law School’s Mark A. Lemley found at The Social Sciences Research Network:¹

Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition of the theatre business is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Believe me, to be closed by the plague is a bagatelle in the ups and downs of owning a theatre.
Fennyman: So what do we do?
Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Fennyman: How?
Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery

We’ve talked about this at work, where you might spend the time to do a cool package, it just doesn’t have a disc in it. And instead of a disc, you’ve got a little piece of paper that says “go here for your download.”

So says Jeff Kleinsmith, Sub Pop’s Art Director, who muses the idea that you buy a piece of art and the audio comes free with it (thus, of course protecting his job whilst theoretically providing the music an outlet).

Whilst the idea is not anywhere nearly as radical as the blogger suggests, the notion of tying music as a downloadable sync with a higher level of art and design than acts who have in the past given away their music with newspapers of magazines as a download (and there are a few) sounds like yet another potential value-added way to sell music.

But is it any more radically inventive than selling a video with a song as the soundtrack? I’ve bought Anton Cobijn videos of bands I dislike simply because they offer me something I wanted to enjoy visually ¹:

However, this scurrying around to try and preserve an industry that is still not doing too badly still strikes me as odd. Yes albums sales are down, but overall unit sales, even if there are some hiccups, are roaring ahead.  And performance income, as I’ve stated before (yes I know I’m a stuck record) is at record levels and growing.

If you are a writing musician it really ain’t a bad time to creating right now. 5% growth…in a recession.

But what is just as odd is the idea that music, if it needed saving, can be saved by packaging it with a bit of art.

Very, very odd.

I’m sure many is the music consumer (not music lover..that weird phrase so used by the NZ media..what does it mean? ‘Music Lovers queued up for tickets to…’ was, typically, on TV One’s news a month or so ago – no people that like that particular artist may have queued up, music lovers, whoever they are, did not en-mass) who likes a bit of art or design, cutting edge or otherwise. However, passion for music being what it is, I doubt if swarms would be driven to to purchase that music solely, or even primarily because it came free attached to a cool package.  I’ll leave that to the artlovers. Isn’t that what the album cover is all about? And many many album covers are already works of art..some quite extravagant. Anyone remember the Santana Lotus packaging? It must’ve almost bankrupted CBS.

Or maybe I’m the odd one. I buy music because I’m likely to swoon to it; to dance to it; or mostly, because it makes me feel fucking wonderful, even if that wonderful is miserable sometimes.

If those booming unit sales mean anything they show us that music is about music, not the way it’s packaged: those sales figures are dominated by sequences of 1s & 0s that have no sleeve or artwork.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing, but it simply is. So sorry Jeff Kleinsmith, you are actually a hell of an Art Director, responsible for all sorts of iconic bits and pieces, but the music will and does speak for itself mostly.

“There’s a great underground soul scene bubbling with artists you may not have heard like … Paul Randolph, among many others in [Detroit] …Stevie Wonder

Is it too fan-boi to say that I’m absolutely besotted with the recently released collection of remixes of tracks from Paul Randolph‘s 2007 album, Lonely Eden? The original album was a wonderful, warm, journey through organic Detroit soul, from this Techno second-waver (his credits go back to 1993 and he was a part of Carl Craig‘s legendary Innerzone Orchestra).

A bass player and vocalist, I was a huge fan of his This Is… What It Is album on Moodyman‘s Mahogani Music, an album (mini-album?) so deeply beautiful it defies words on screen.

Whenever I feel jaded by house music and it’s various mutations, I put this mighty disc on and shiver a little again.

Released over a series of 12″ EPs across 2008 and 2009, the mixes on Echoes (Of Lonely Eden) mostly take me to this same place. The original long player was / is a lovely jazz edged soul album, full of killer deep urban grooves – the sort that only appear on independent labels now, as the majors seem to have forgotten about the music that drove the world for so many decades and made their empires what they are – but the remixes take these songs back to the place inhabited by that earlier mini album, and that remake of The Stylistics’ People Make The World Go Round, that Paul voiced so movingly on the Innerzone Orchestra album in the late ’90s.

Recloose, Deetron, Zed Bias, Charles Webster and others all provide majestically deep mixes but the stonker is the Underground Resistance mix, from Mark Flash, of GPS,  an epic and sad soldier’s ballad on the original album, dominated by stabbing strings and a mountainous ending, now lifted into another eerie place altogether closer to the centre of Detroit around 4am.

I toyed with posting a track, but, nah, buy it…

A disclaimer: I was given this album by my good friend, Phillip Kelly, who was responsible (in collaboration with Simon Endres) for the art direction, typography, layout, design and the fabulous photography (as seen above) on both this and the earlier Paul Randolph releases..none of which, you can be assured, influenced my non-corruptible mind.

The Features, Mascot Studios, May, 1980

It was an odd feeling, but June marked the 30th Anniversary of my Propeller label. In mid June 1980 I released two singles on the same day, City Scenes by The Features, and Feel So Good by The Spelling Mistakes. To my surprise (and even more to the bands’) both singles jumped into the NZ Top 40, and were the first of some 40 Top 40 entries over the next three years across Propeller and various sub-labels.

All that, of course, is covered on my website in some detail.

However, back in Auckland last month I was, along with my friend Paul Rose, who was a partner the label from mid 1981 onwards; and my long time buddy, and the person without whom we would not have a New Zealand recording industry, Murray Cammick, interviewed by Trevor Reekie on Radio New Zealand’s networked Saturday afternoon show.

The interview was about 20 minutes long, cut down from an hour and a half of us rambling. Of course it’s on the RNZ site but because of the sorts of licensing restrictions which encourage piracy you miss out on the songs. And it was always about the songs….

Thus I’ve uploaded the whole thing, or at least most of it – the first minute or two is missing – to my site and linked to it here:

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