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.

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…

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.

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:

Download audio file (propeller_interview.mp3)

I like this one:

“When I was a kid of 15, I would put ‘Revolution Number 9’ (The Beatles) or John Cage (experimental composer) on the turntable, and put as many radios as I could find in different stations round the room, turn the TV on, turn all the lights off, and lie on my back in the middle of the room and listen to this smorgasbord of noise. That was a little ritual I did on a Saturday night when my parents were out!”

But I would….

Coming back from Kanchanaburi on the bus the other night, the sky opened up. The four of us, Brigid, her parents and myself, had wandered around the mostly deserted tourist trap with an even darker past under the shadow of huge black clouds which dribbled a little but didn’t really belch out the hot rain until we got back to the bus, the local Kanchanaburi to BKK Express, which we deemed fortunate.

The fortune was tempered by the breakdown, as far as we could tell, of the windscreen wipers at some bus-stop in some rural Thai town, complete with the endless tractor and pick-up showrooms, which remains still nameless to me, and the seeming inability of the bus driver to turn the air conditioning below sub arctic, so much so that the hot air was condensing on the outside of the glass as we roared through the endless motorways into inner-outer Bangkok and the Southern Bus Terminal, which, not really oddly since we are in Asia, is not South but West of Central BKK. People in the bus were plugging and covering the air vents increasingly desperately. Few in Thailand carry a cardigan, just in case.

At least only in the Thai winter, when it drops down to 25 or a week or so in the Bangkok region, and people shiver and wrap up. However this wasn’t it.

There was an odd, surreal, moment when the rain completely stopped and for about ten minutes it was dry outside the windows. Not just precipitation-lite, but  completely bone dry and it looked as if it hadn’t rained for days outside the bus.

Then, just as quickly as it stopped, it rained again. And it pelted furiously and relentlessly down, until the moment came for us to alight, when, bizarrely, it completely stopped again, long enough for us to get a cab, after when it rained again.

Which all almost seemed almost as odd as the Thai language Queen (the band, not a royal person)-soundalike CD the driver played for much of the trip, or the strange young man with the odd under-chin whispy facial hair and heavily permed rolled over artistic mop who, I had convinced myself to distract from the rain, was a fan of whatever Thai lookalike Freddie Mercury fronted that band.

Who actually sounded quite good. Better than Queen aside from the few songs from that odd band I quite like as guilty pleasures but will never admit to.

I tend to be a random traveller. I like to get on an underground train system, randomly choose a station from the map, preferably as far away as I can from where I am, and simply get off. It’s worked all over the world: Sydney, Paris, Guangzhou, Shanghai, London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and more. Mostly, that is aside from those dreary dormitory ‘burbs north of London, like Watford. And it works in big Bangkok. You can do it on a boat here too. I have.

In some cities with no reasonable public transport to speak of, Auckland, and most of Australia mostly, I tend to drive randomly instead. Beyond the fact that Brigid has claimed from time to time that my driving is almost always random, what it really means is that I find a road and simply turn down to see where it ends.

I tried that in Bali but the fact that the roads are almost always awful and the driving universally much worse took the fun out of it. Besides, business demands meant that I drove down almost every quarry-pretending-to-be-a-road across that island usually more than once over the years. I discovered what away from the tourist hordes really meant and that was enough exploration of that rugged island to keep me happy.

Why am I saying all this? I’m really not sure, aside from the rambling novelty of the writing the first proper post on my newly rehosted blog.

Or perhaps I’m inspired by truly intrepid travellers like my friend Graham Reid who’s two travel books I’ve enjoyed immensely in recent months. I don’t buy travel books, tending instead to laden myself with hugely ponderous books on dead people or the wars they fought, or, if I need cheering, slightly less ponderous books on mostly dysfunctional music makers or the equally, at times, dysfunctional business that surrounds them.

This time, however, Graham, who I go back some thirty years with as a friend, mailed me his two most recent books, both of which are award winning in their native New Zealand, the most recent, The Idiot Boy Who Flew, won the Readers Choice Award at the Travcom Awards 2010, and the earlier, Postcards From Elsewhere, was Whitcoulls Travel Book of the Year in 2006, and in both cases it’s hard to dispute the award.

I’m not a big travel reader, mostly because I would rather go places than read pages and pages about them, often from the perspective of someone I really would rather not be, which includes many of the travel writing names.

And it’s the same with travel TV. When I was a lad I used to enjoy two silly shows, both from the BBC. One, from Johnny Morris, and one from the iconic Alan Wicker. I’m not entirely sure that I would enjoy either these days but I liked, in both cases, the ironic clumsiness of both when I was about ten. They were hugely fish out of water and they bumbled badly and openly. They dressed badly. They were not cool.

Which was cool.

On the other hand shows like Anthony Bourdain‘s travel-chef series make me vaguely puke as they try so hard to be down with the locals and there’s an implication that everyone else he meets is supposed to know he’s really, y’know, cool. Oh, Tony used to be a chef in NYC. Oh, Tony used to be a junkie. Oh, how cool.

I feel vaguely embarrassed for those that have to encounter this self important but often misinformed buffoon.  Sure he’s been a lot of places I’ve not been but I usually feel less inclined to go where he has after a show than before.

And so it is with the likes of Paul Theroux who reek of pomposity and a stand-above arrogance centred around their accidental place of birth.

Graham, on the other hand, is the first travel writer I’ve read in many years that entices me. And he does so in a the same charmingly honest way that I remember those BBC shows to be, albeit far more concisely (and Graham is much better dressed).

Graham writes enticingly as a fish out of water in odd climes and the not quite so odd (I loved his post on the Customs and Immigration at Auckland’s airport. It remains a mystery to me how a supposedly educated nation can confront its visitors with such an inappropriate and parochial first impression year in and year out. I hate Auckland’s horrible wee airport) and does so with a succinct brevity that doesn’t let the intriguing and often simply weird, wear out their welcome.

The first book, Elsewhere, tells very brief and funny stories about odd and obtuse places, where the odd people (who are only odd to us because we are not them, not because they are always odd, although some really are if that makes sense) are just characters that live in those places (or in the case of Dali, used to, and not elegantly nor charmingly), and the stories are rarely more than five or six pages long.

I loved the book, and wondered why it took me so long to get around to reading it, knowing as I do, and liking as I do, Graham’s way with with words.

However it was the second book that truly intrigued and made me want to randomly travel more. The Idiot Boy Who Flew is even more concise, with few stories running over more than three tight and targeted pages, at least in the first half. It deftly side steps placing the focus on the places to concentrate almost purely on the intriguing, and yes still odd to me as another clumsy foreigner with a narrow preconception base to begin from, people. In this book the places are where the people live rather than the other way around.

Like the tough men in the first story who sit bellowing in bars in backwaters USA, and, despite their arms being built like torpedoes and their histories of fighting politically incorrect wars in Third World counties, they spend their days hunting tiny squirrels; or the guy in Singapore who dedicates much of his life to the wonderfully imagery of old Chinese Singapore taken by his father (which I too have seen and was intrigued by in Chinatown).

And I loved the way he weaves the wonderful and much missed Dalvanius Prime into the last, extended, short story, which provides the title to the book.

So thank you Graham. It was generous of you to send both of these to me, and I’ve loved them, finishing the last on that bus from Kanchanaburi this week, with the Thai soundlike Queen CD playing in the background, which seemed oddly appropriate.

I’m off to find a subway stop, any one will do.