A Trillion Shades of Happy

Delet­ing Music is rel­a­tive­ly newish and yet has a res­o­nance for me that goes much fur­ther back. It touch­es on some­thing that I, as a fair­ly long­stand­ing, one might say elder­ly, mem­ber of the New Zealand music indus­try, albeit semi-retired, feel quite strong­ly about, and that’s our quick­ly evap­o­rat­ing musi­cal past.

In par­tic­u­lar the quick­ly evap­o­rat­ing New Zealand musi­cal past.

I’ve writ­ten about this here before (and am too lazy to find the link but it’s there and gar­nered quite a few com­ments the last time, per­haps some two years back) but we seem to have not moved ahead much, at least pub­licly, in the inter­im. That said, I’ve not been inac­tive and some things are skip­ping ahead in small incre­ments with like mind­ed people.

Three things have made me decide to post again.

First­ly there is the release of Chris Bourke’s mon­u­men­tal his­to­ry of pre-and ear­ly rock­’n’roll musi­cal his­to­ry, Blue Smoke. Buy it please. Enjoy it — you will. Immerse your­self in the music — you can’t. Nope almost every­thing he writes about in the book is unavail­able. You can’t buy it. You can’t even steal it online. The same is true of the over­whelm­ing bulk of the music I list­ed last year on my Zodi­ac page. And much of John Dix’s Strand­ed in Par­adise.

Sec­ond­ly, two friends died. One, Ian Mor­ris, has parts of his lega­cy in cat­a­logue. Late last year I made the remas­tered Scream­ing Meemees’ album he pro­duced avail­able again. How­ev­er, the two albums by Th’­Dudes are unavail­able as is any col­lec­tion of their work, includ­ing the anthol­o­gy I put togeth­er with the band in 2002 (delet­ed after Steb­bings lost the rights to the band and sim­ply nev­er reis­sued). Huge parts of Ian’s work is sim­ply MIA.

The oth­er friend, Tony Peake, who I post­ed about here, has only one track avail­able, on a com­pi­la­tion put togeth­er by the tire­less Rob Mayes. Rob, who real­ly deserves a knight­hood (which he would nev­er accept of course) for his work in pre­serv­ing New Zealand, and in par­tic­u­lar, Christchurch cul­tur­al his­to­ry, has been work­ing on a col­lec­tion of Tony’s work with an unspec­i­fied arrival date in the far future. How­ev­er, right now, and every day since it dropped out of the charts in the ear­ly 1980s, The New­tones’ Paint­ing The Town Red has been unavail­able aside from the fact that it’s become a Christchurch live anthem I’m told — a Louie Louie of its gen­er­a­tion. But you can’t buy the bloody thing. You can’t even steal that one despite the fact it was a hit just before the dig­i­tal age.

The third rea­son was the launch of this, a his­to­ry of the Inter­net in NZ. Why can geek­dom (many of whom I admire immense­ly before any­one gets defen­sive about the tag) get it togeth­er, whilst what is one of our most tan­gi­ble and indi­vid­ual cul­tur­al gath­er­ing points and iden­ti­fiers, sim­ply can not.

The fourth rea­son is to prod my per­son­al ennui on this. The longer we wait, the more we lose. I’m in Thai­land but giv­en the dig­i­tal small­ness of our world there are no longer excus­es and one thing I’ve always been rather good at is tak­ing on sil­ly projects and try­ing to make them work.

Just to make the point stronger, the fol­low­ing albums, from 1974 onwards, all impor­tant musi­cal land­marks (and some are rather good too) are either unavail­able or only out there in shit­ty first gen­er­a­tion CD issues with appalling sleeves:

• Car Crash Set
• The Dance Expo­nents (the Mush­room albums are in print but almost unlis­ten­able, the Ze Disc one has nev­er been on CD)
• The Body Electric
• Grace (won­der­ful sweet soul from the Ioasa Brothers)
• Fue­m­ana (parts of it are on Amplifier)
• The Deep­grooves Double
• The Dunedin Dou­ble (will no doubt turn up as the Fly­ing Nun reis­sue pro­gram takes hold, but has nev­er been on CD and has been unavail­able since the 1980s)
• Hel­lo Sailor (there are a cou­ple of comps out there, but all the orig­i­nal albums are unavail­able and have been for decades)
• Th’­Dudes (as above)
• Mil­town Stow­aways — Ten­sion Melee — and the rest of the Unsung label catalogue.
• Urban Dis­tur­bance — 37 Degrees Latitude
• AK 89 — In Love With These Rhymes (the very first NZ hip hop col­lec­tion — it may be awful — it may not be, I don’t have a cas­sette deck and that’s the only way it exist­ed — but it’s ours and it’s a part of what we are)
• Rag­narok
• Schtung
• Push Push — A Tril­lion Shades of Hap­py (the 1991 Band of the Year). Unavail­able since about ’95
• Sula­ta
• Waves (huge­ly regard­ed NZ Folk Rock album in its day and a band that were a major part of the same scene that gave us Split Ends/z)
• DD Smash (all albums, there but in shit­ty sleeves and cov­ers — as JP Hansen points out, the Live album — an NZ num­ber I recall — has nev­er been on CD!))
• Herbs — Great­est Hits only avail­able — not the sem­i­nal mini album or any­thing else
• Don McGlashan & Ivan Zag­ni ‑Stan­dards
• Lava Lava (3 tracks only on Amplifier)
• DLT — The True School  (the album that gave the world the num­ber one NZ sin­gle Chains) & Altru­ism (I was shocked to find these two off the catalogue)
• Nathan Haines — Shift Left (don’t blame me, blame Uni­ver­sal for that one) & Sound­kil­la Ses­sions Vol 1
• Neme­sis Dub Sys­tems (a pret­ty major release at the time — gone for at least 15 years)
• Jor­dan Reyne (the first few albums)
• 3 The Hard Way (the first album and the first big NZ Hip Hop album)
• The New Lounge­head — Came A Weird Way
• and Split Enz – yes the albums are avail­able and they’re remas­tered, but the pack­ag­ing is appalling. In fact, the same could be said of all Warn­ers NZ cat­a­logue reis­sues. The care tak­en is insulting.

Remem­ber The Wastrels? Prob­a­bly not if you are under 40. They were a real­ly big live band in their day, from the South Island, influ­enc­ing a whole bunch of oth­er acts and fill­ing bars and clubs. Peo­ple that did see them talk very fond­ly of them, and they head­ed quite a healthy and briefly impor­tant region­al sub­cul­ture. Wan­na buy their records? Wan­na find an image of the band? Sorry…

How about the healthy dub/alt-hip hop scene in Auck­land around the end of the 1980s? Miss­ing any and every­where. No images, no doc­u­men­ta­tion, no sto­ries, no music. Gone. It arguably helped pave the way for the whole down­beat scene from the late 1990s and beyond.

And there are lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of sin­gles, like The New­tones’ two 7“s, sim­ply AWOL (and, yes, I’m as guilty of that as any­one, but I’m aware of it) with relat­ed art­work and imagery, plus the sto­ries that sur­round­ed them just gone.

That list above took me all of three min­utes to com­pile (and I may need to be cor­rect­ed on a few of those, but there are lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds more). EMI’s New Zealand office, when it was still more than a mar­ket­ing office for Aus­tralia, made a rea­son­able stab at the 1960s a few years ago, but the 1970s, 1980s and large parts of the 1990s have sim­ply dropped off the radar.

The awful part is not only are these records dis­ap­pear­ing but most are also gone from the pub­lic con­scious­ness — for­ev­er. They may sit in a dusty cup­board in a library amongst a col­lec­tion of a mil­lion oth­er non-relat­ed cul­tur­al arte­facts, although many do not, but unless this cul­ture is pre­served and offered back to the nation, it may as well be dead.

The venues are for­got­ten. Who knows where the Jive Cen­tre in Auck­land was? ¹  It was the dom­i­nant venue which shaped rock­’roll in widgie and bodgie Auck­land. A whole gen­er­a­tion spent their youth there.

The orig­i­nal mas­ters, too, often old ana­logue mul­ti-track tapes, are often either gone or close to gone. A cen­tral depos­i­to­ry for these things is also required — cli­mate con­trolled and secure.

The only bright spot is Ampli­fi­er and its aggres­sive­ly active man­age­ment, who, in con­junc­tion with small labels like Ode, are, steadi­ly fill­ing gaps. There are all sorts of bits turn­ing up on Ampli­fi­er and some I would have deemed lost for­ev­er. How­ev­er, as wor­thy as that is, it still exists in a vac­u­um of sorts and it’s beyond a pri­vate e‑commerce site like that to archive everything.

It’s too much and unrea­son­able to expect the bands and artists to be respon­si­ble for their record­ed and cul­tur­al lega­cy. Many of course have sim­ply died, and we are now see­ing many of the bands of the fifties and six­ties thinned. Almost all the impor­tant pro­mot­ers and cru­cial movers of those decades — Eldred Steb­bing, Ben­ny Levin, Phil War­ren, Dave Dun­ning­ham amongst them – are gone.

Many, most, of the music made in the last decades in New Zealand, was made by small inde­pen­dent stu­dios, or for tiny record­ing stu­dios. The own­er­ship of these record­ings is at best grey. Who owns the count­less record­ings issued on New Zealand’s first indie label, TANZ (which stood for To Assist New Zealand Artists), or Ben­ny Lev­in’s Impact? How about the John­ny Devlin mas­ters? They were released by Phil War­ren on his Pres­tige label and for a while, Fes­ti­val was licens­ing these before they worked out they only had rights in Aus­tralia and even that was dubi­ous. The Phil War­ren Estate now claims these but has no way of cat­a­logu­ing or pre­serv­ing. How about the 50 or so releas­es on the tiny, but impor­tant Rob­bins label from Christchurch in the 1960s. Jon Doe’s Hit Sin­gles label? Audion Records run from Auck­land Uni­ver­si­ty around 1960–61?

And so it goes on.

We have a film archive. We have a TV archive. We archive papers, doc­u­ments, books, news­pa­pers and just about every­thing else. Is it ask­ing too much for a ded­i­cat­ed NZ Music Archive.…..