I tend to find that a blogging ennui sets in when in New Zealand. I have no idea why – perhaps the weather, the heavier food, the extended social routes, the lack of a personal working space, or perhaps just because.

In 2012 I’ve spent some 2 1/2 of the 4 months to date in the country and blogged very sporadically.

I think i’m just making excuses.

So, here I am back in South East Asia and you immediately get the urge to scribble again. I guess sitting in the midst of a aspiring cold war with the potential to go hot on the edges does focus the mind somewhat. I don’t think it will – go hot that is – but you do sometimes wonder if there are those beyond the region who would like nothing more.

Two things came at me – both Asia centric yet globally significant – which I had a mind to say something about, and to link because they’re clearly related.

Will Robertson sent me this piece from the Australian Marxist Left Review – not a site I frequent often but perhaps should  - written by Tom Bramble, entitled Australian Imperialism and the rise of China.

Setting aside the intertwined talk of class warfare and the like (and in particular the last couple of headlined sections in the piece) it’s a pretty decent analysis of the rise and future rise of China, with more analytical substance than most of the supposedly informed bluster found endlessly in the digital and physical pages of Bloomberg, The WSJ, The Economist and other more centre-right Western journals.

Most especially I like the way it looks at the Australian military posturing towards China and the way it conflicts badly with its necessary economic stance, and the impossibility of the place the anointed land finds itself in as it tries to reconcile the past with the accelerating reworking of the future by the Asian explosion.

The money-shot in the piece is this (and, once again, you can treat the class conflict notations therein as you wish):

Nonetheless, the fact remains that Australia is currently not forced to choose between the two sides. The US and China are not about to go to war with each other. Why then is the Australian ruling class positioning itself so aggressively towards China? At some level this question cannot be answered by reference to material facts and interests which would suggest a more balanced approach or some hedging of bets. Australia’s hawkish posture can only be understood at the level of ideology and the ruling class’s perception of itself as a white redoubt in Asia defined by its dependence on another “white” power. As Hugh White argued, even pressuring the US to make more space for China would involve a confrontation with Australia’s “oldest and deepest foreign policy principles”:

We have always believed that our security required the domination of the Western Pacific by an Anglo-Saxon maritime power… We can hardly imagine what it would be like to live in an Asia that is not led by the US. All our history and instincts therefore incline us to push the US to contest China’s challenge and maintain the status quo for as long as possible. Yet our interests and our future should incline us to push the other way.

To the extent that even today the ruling class conceives itself, and thereby promotes amongst the population at large, the notion that Australia is essentially a European country, while the vast bulk of trade is with Asia and an increasing proportion of immigrants come from Asia, is testimony to the resilience of ruling class ideology even when faced with changing facts on the ground.

This doesn’t end seem to end well for Australia at the moment, as it confronts but refuses to recognise the impending reality that is Asia in the next few decades.

Thinking about that, I returned t0 this story a few days ago in the Bangkok Post. It’s pretty important, partially because it doesn’t beat around the bush and indicates a growing regional pragmatism that the west seemingly misses. We don’t do pragmatism that well, but it’s the essence of Asian interaction – that and face.

The essence of the story is that the three Thai military chiefs, plus the Minister of Defence went on a dedicated trip to Beijing last week.

Thailand has, since the end of WW 2, been a solid US ally in the region, but:

“We wanted to convey the message to China that the Thai armed forces assign importance to China. We’re like a close relative. As for the United States, we are a close friend. We cannot pick one over the other. We still keep close ties with all the superpowers for the balance of power. But under the present circumstances, we have to stay closer to our relative than the close friend who is far away,” a high-ranking source at the ministry summed up the trip.

Of course there are other reasons for the journey – the Thai/Cambodian scrap for example, but the greater significance of this trip lies with the fact that Thailand has been named repeatedly by the US as one of the nations most nervous about supposed Sino military flexing – such flexing being a prima-facie given reason for US counter-flexing, not least with Australia as a partner. The Western flexing – a modern Third Opium War in the making – is to nobody’s advantage aside from perhaps the military-industrial monoliths and those that benefit from that (perhaps I’m edging closer to Tom Bramble than I thought). Certainly nobody in Asia including China gains an advantage. It’s not pragmatic. Here, we just lose no matter who wins the war.

I wonder what the Wall Street Journal has to say about this…..

Filmed by NZ Rock’n'Roll historian Simon Kay and via Cheese on Toast (of course)…

Says Peter: A couple of NZ media outlets have got a little over-excited about the chart placing.

Setting aside the gratuitous reworking of a shortish guest spot to the status of a ‘duet’ by TVNZ, several outlets have now decided to anoint Kimbra (who I hope gets there – she deserves it) with a mythical status as, to quote Stuff:

the first New Zealand artist to be linked to a number one on the United States music charts.

or (TVNZ)

the first Kiwi to make it to number one on the US music charts.

both of which are factually incorrect statements of course.

The first New Zealander to make it to number one in the US music charts was OMC, featuring Pauly Fuemana, with How Bizarre, a record written in New Zealand, recorded in Freemans Bay, Auckland, New Zealand and released worldwide on a New Zealand owned record label (distributed by the Dutch PolyGram company). It was, as anyone reasonably knows, quite a feat and something that Pauly and everyone else involved worked rather hard to achieve. We were told before that that it could not be done – and we did.

And Pauly was, as was I and others in the mix that got it there, rather proud of our achievement. It also reached number one in another 14 countries and was lifted from the US platinum (almost double platinum – that’s 2 million copies folks) album of the same name.

In the US the decision was made by Mercury, a US branch of PolyGram, to issue the single only to radio and use the airplay to drive album sales = more money. This was industry standard at the time and many acts did it. The Hot 100 was no longer regarded a reliable reference to what was truly hot as a huge percentage of records were, because there was no physical single, ineligible

But – I argued – we wanted a physical single so we could top the US Hot 100. Mercury came back and said the Pop Chart, based solely on airplay, had the same standing in the industry, and – more – was the thing that decided the other important charts, American Top 40, and Rick Dees, which most Americans heard as the US chart.

We agreed and waited – between June and August we totalled some 560,000 radio plays on US top40 radio (it passed a million later that year) and some 1o,000 video plays (most played US video of 1997 – 15,000) and finally I had a call from New York on August 16th, 1997. “You’re number one, number one!” screamed the woman from Mercury.

And so it seemed we were – we’d knocked off Meredith Brooks and we were number one, although ineligible for the Hot 100 (which is often seen as the premium chart by outsiders) because there was no physical single. We were also number one on American Top 40 and Rick Dees.

The irony was PolyGram Canada had taken advantage of the lack of a released single and shipped 300,000 across the border, which – if they’d been counted – would’ve allowed the record to top the Hot 100 too.

We had a fax later that day confirming the chart, and a few months later a plaque from Mercury for a number one.

The album was stickered with “Featuring the number one single “How Bizarre”.

The Billboard site records it this way:

Jump forward 15 years and how we forget. Pauly is no longer with us and reporters have decided that history needs a tweak to make a handy headline. After I saw the story linked above, I tweeted the Waikato Times reporter, Belinda Feek, and suggested that she was a cub reporter who was recycling a press release. She denied both – which of course made it worse: it was just very sloppy reporting.

Edit: Having talked with Belinda, I accept that her mistake was the result of misinformation on the net, not sloppy reporting.

The NZ Herald and TVNZ didn’t bother to reply, which is their usual style when called up, and the Entertainment Editor from Stuff emailed me trying furiously (albeit politely) to redefine what a “US Music Chart” is – and not doing that very well.

So, who to trust? Billboard, American Top 40 and Ricks Dees and the US record company, all of whom listed it as number one, or a lazy ill informed reporter or two desperate to create a story?

Dunno – you judge.

But either way, I think it’s beyond shabby to try and strip the credit for his achievement – something his family, friends and much of the nation was enormously proud of – from the late Pauly Fuemana. It’s completely wrong, which is why, I guess I’ve put finger to keyboard here.

…. the Commerce Commission in New Zealand earlier today invited interested parties to make submissions to its inquiry into Universal Music’s proposed takeover of the EMI record companies.

As reported here, the New Zealand Commerce Commission is to make a decision by May the 13th as to whether the EMI/Universal merger will be allowed to proceed. Now, unless you’ve been swimming underwater for the last six months or so, you are likely to be aware that the very large multi-national media corporation, Universal Music Group – headquartered in France –  has decided it wishes to purchase the smaller multi-national media group, EMI – headquartered in the UK.

This may or may not go ahead.

The decision that decides this will likely be made in Brussels, at the European Commission (the US equivalent is more likely to green-stamp – anti-monopolistic law seemingly long dead in the water in the USA). It will not be made in New Zealand. Nothing that is considered or decided in New Zealand will have any bearing, nor will it even be noticed.

Maybe this is the Kim Il Dot Com effect – we think the world is watching (they’re really not, at least not beyond Kim).

And consider a couple of potentially ludicrous outcomes:

1. The NZ Commerce Commission says no merger. The EC says yes. Do the two companies really merge everywhere aside from New Zealand?

2. The NZ Commerce Commission says yes. The EC says no. The two merge fully – but only in New Zealand?

Perhaps they’re obliged to look at this – if so one could reasonably argue that law is ridiculously broken. Either way, it’s an extraordinary waste of New Zealand taxpayer money.

It’s also really embarrassing.

Okay it was a phase, but it was one I remember with some warmth and – more – it’s neither a guilty pleasure nor one that the wash of tacky synths that accompanies many of these records can demolish. I’m talking about the era of the great electric-soul men.

Their stylistic godfather was Teddy Pendergrass, both with Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes and solo on the still blissfully timeless Philadephia International label – and I’ll get to that – but it was Luther (do a I need a surname? I still remember large groups of white sox and loafer clad lads roaming London in the mid 1980s chanting ‘Loofa.. Loofa..’) who heralded the arrival of the classic 1980s styled big soul men, men whose producers melded together big, soaring male soul voices, post-disco funk and burgeoning studio electronica. It was Luther who made it acceptable for so-called hard men to break down to the huge emotional soul ballads and epic synth-filled anthems that defined a big part of the edge of the 1980s.

He also had Marcus Miller - and others, like Doc Powell (pictured above). That helped. It was to Luther’s bands that Miles Davis turned in the middle of the decade.

In Auckland at least, it bought together a generation of white kids rolling away from the tail of the post-punk era and a whole new generation of South Auckland Polynesian kids who both grabbed it as central their to soundtrack.

By the end of 1982 the hipper clubs were filled with men – of all skin tones – dressed in double breasted suits, some immaculate, some simply garish ¹

It was both fun, and it offered a happy respite from the standard male club uniform of denim and (T) shirt. Looking onto a dancefloor around 1986 one saw a sea of style – even if we laugh at those suits and shoulders now.

And yes, many of the the lyrics – romance, sex, fast cars, expensive anything and so on – made us all grimace as much then as we do now. But it was, to borrow, about the vibe…. and the voice. And nobody grimaced to Luther. Nobody.

We swooned to the music, and – more – Luther and the rest changed the way we sang and constructed vocal tracks in the much of the music we made thereafter, such being the nature of urban soundtracks, whether we knew it or not at the time. The stylised soul vocal had really made little impact in New Zealand before the 1980s – we hadn’t really bought large quantities of the deeper styled male soul in the years since the end of the 1960s and even then the experience was largely blues or pop-soul (Motown). I well remember Philly albums sitting unloved and unwanted in the 50c bins in the mid to late 1970s. Bobby Womack? Who?

Luther and the soul men played a big part in changing that.

And then Luther died – quite some years after the scene was gone – but, still, I had one message from an old friend who simply said “He really was why, wasn’t he?” And he kinda was, and – more – the broad cultural reverberations that Luther and the soul men bought to the city I was a part of when they bought us all together still remain largely unrecognised. There’s more to this – much more – and it’s one of the crucial elements of Pasifika as it fused with Aotea that still remains unexplored. It was about the music.

This isn’t the time to pursue that, but for no other reason that I had a Luther an extended Luther YouTube flashback today I thought I’d throw up a few videos for and of the eighties soul men…..

Tashan recorded a couple of albums for Def Jam in the middle part of the decade, when Russell Simmons decided that if Rick could sign metal, he could sign soul.

The first album was the one, and this, the title track from it, Chasing a Dream, is a bonafide lost 80s classic.

From the same album, Got The Right Attitude.

There was a time when the name Lillo Thomas was almost whispered. He was the man – and true soulboys simply nodded in quiet agreement when records like I’m In Love were talked of. Never a big star, his records were hugely sought, but none more than:

Downtown. If you didn’t get this – or even know of this – you weren’t a true member of the clan. The 12″ was semi-sacred and awfully hard to get hold of. This, sadly, ain’t it, but it’s still a monster of the genre in any format.

Will Downing managed one listenable album before heading off into 90′s schlock but here, with a vocal reworking of Coltrane’s Love Supreme, he’s quite something.

This is obscure as hell, and opens with a ridiculously tacky  ”Sweet and tender lady” line before moving into a vocal that owes a hefty debt to Al Green. Will King came out of the same stable as the mighty Gap Band and you can hear that too here.

I’m not sure if he really belongs in this post, given that I have no idea what or who he was beyond that, but it has the obligatory vocal swoops half way through and for that reason it stays.

Eugene Wilde arrived with a couple of dancefloor hits (as Simplicious) before releasing this song, Gotta Get You Home Tonight – a tune that was almost inescapable around ’85. Lyrical references to Dom Perignon gave it extra soulboy credentials.

I love Alexander O’Neal. To quote one of the wonderfully ridiculous interludes from his second album ‘Alex, baby, Alex’ was second only to Luther in the pecking order.

A former member of the same band that produced Prince, his Jam & Lewis produced albums straddled Minneapolis funk and deep soul. This tune, from his debut – with Cherelle – is best heard in it’s fabulous eleven minute 12″ mix. But this will have to do…

And another, from the first, self-titled, album. This Soul Train take of What’s Missing is pretty rough, but you get the suit effect – and it’s still a hell of a tune. Alex used a double bed as a stage prop. You can’t get much more soulboy than that.

Chuck Stanley was Russell Simmons’ second soul signing to Def Jam but large parts of his pretty decent debut album seem to be missing from the ‘net. This video, of a track off that longplayer, is worth it for the suit. Nice tune too.

Curtis Hairston jumped from label to label any never really managed any substantial commercial success – but in downtown Auckland this song kinda hit briefly and The Morning After became yet another hugely sought after 12″ single.

I loved the first Keith Sweat album, produced by the still-in-his-teens Teddy Riley wunderkid. This remake of the old Dramatics tune  In The Rain is still rather special.

To Luther. There are a million Loofa vids on the net so I chose a couple that reflect lessor known tracks first up. The radio (and 12″ mixes) of The Rush were remixed by David Morales in his classic organic Def Mix style and feature an uncredited pianist (maybe Eric Kupper or Peter Daou).

The 12″ mix of this rocks.

And Heaven Knows, perfectly re-produced by Morales’ legendary partner, Frankie Knuckles, with Terry Burrus on piano.

One more, just because I can:  Never Too Much live

Finally, for a bit of fun, a mini doco on the David Bowie and Luther Vandross connection:

As one of the talking heads points out, Young Americans actually sounds like a Luther Vandross record as much as a Bowie release, and you only have to listen to the Luther version of Bowie’s Fascination (from the Young Americans album), which Luther wrote and recorded as Funky Music, to get that connection even more precisely:

There were others of course: Freddy Jackson sold a lot of records but was just too lightweight and his producer Paul Laurence lacked substance.

Since I’m getting all watery around the eyes about retrospective old soul music that simply does it, I might offer a plug for the absolutely incredible Philadelphia International  Re-Edits collection, wherein tracks that any reasonable ageing soul purist would insist were sacrilege and untouchable are successfully dissected, reworked and reassembled by a bunch of relative unknowns.

Try the reworking of the grossly overplayed – it’s become a desperation tool for countless struggling bar or party DJs – Ain’t No Stopping Us Now (reworked by Noodleman):

Or the the absolutely lovely stroll through Harold Melvin’s Wake Up Everybody as reconstructed by DJ Apt One:

And if that isn’t enough, at the time of writing I’m eagerly checking the mailbox daily for the just released 4 disc set of Tom Moulton remixes, expanding upon the perfectly named 1977 album, Philadelphia Classics, itself about as close to perfection as it’s possible to get on double vinyl.

There go the post-punk credentials…

Yes I’m dumb.

Happily dumb I admit, but dumb nevertheless. This can be extrapolated from sequentially irrational behaviour on my part.

Firstly, and this is not necessarily the dumb part: I like walking.

I like walking in Bangkok (and other supposedly un-walkable Asian cities and towns) because it allows me to see the city as I would could never in a car or anonymously in the underground or Skytrain. It allows me to explore the grain of the city, and it, as a bonus, offers excellent and needed exercise in places that you, frankly, would have to be nuts to ride a pushbike in – and that would almost be my preference if it was at all a rational option, at least some of the time.

That said, with insane 24 hour gridlock traffic, cycling – so I was told when sitting in on a cycling discussion at Kiwi Foo 2012 – is less dangerous in congested cities than in faster flowing cities with less traffic like Auckland¹. However Brigid has quite staunchly told me that she’ll leave me if I a) do this, or b) ever open another nightclub.

I began walking in London in the early 1980s after I rapidly worked out that I would never begin to understand the geography and topography of the city I was then living in by sitting on a seat in the smelly underground. I took to riding buses as a preference and then to walking when time wasn’t an issue.

My A to Z bible had, as they all did, a grid of the city in the front and would use a yellow highlighter to cross out a grid-block once I’d explored it. It was an odd thing to do I guess, but then I do eccentric things (that being the point of this post) and over the next couple of years I’d yellowed 1/2 of the map of London. I knew more of the city at ground level than many people who’d lived their lives there – one woman I met, aged late 20s, had never been north of the Thames, despite having a car, because she was centred in South London.

I walked little in Bali, mostly because once you’ve seen one market selling machined wooden cats, Paul Smith knockoffs and Bintang singlets you’ve seen them all. There were also too many people from Perth – and massive holes everywhere in the footpaths that took the unwary into the local sewer system.

However, I’ve been known to walk really dumb distances in Singapore, various Chinese cities, Hong Kong, KL, Jakarta and various Central Java towns when the urge takes.

And Bangkok. In the Royal Swamp, like London, my habit is usually to go to a distant train station in this monster megapolis and just attempt to walk back in a vaguely homeward direction. Rarely do I make it all the way, but it’s not unknown for me to cover 5-10k depending on the heat and the energy I can muster.

Mad dogs and…

Arguably the dumb part….

But you see stuff. You see life. And they see you and of course wonder – sometimes loudly, sometimes you just know they’re thinking it and it will come up over that evening’s Tom Yum Goong - about the ridiculous glowing farang in a city where absolutely nobody walks unless it’s inside an air conditioned shopping precent or to and from a taxi.

It also allows me to bypass the endless and endlessly irritating vid-ads in the trains for skin-whitening cream, iPads/Tabs, various sugary fizz drinks and other mass market fodder, which has to be a bonus.

So I decided. I decided to walk from Fortune Town, a large IT mall with a new floor of second hand vinyl stores that entices me to look rather than spend right now given the very large room of shelved vinyl I already have to deal with in Auckland, to Victory Monument, a towering unattractive needle strangely dedicated to a ‘victory’ in the 1940s which was actually a draw or a defeat depending on who you talk to  - the generals who got trashed decided to lie a little and were able to do so since they were running the place at the time – around which are now literally thousands of market stalls, competing fortune tellers and more, drawn by the large university next to it and the huge numbers of buses that leave from here for all over the city and the country. On a Saturday afternoon up to half a million pass through and other days are only a little quieter.

This was Saturday afternoon.

Looking at the map (excerpted above) it’s pretty direct and not that far, and so – after an hour or more longingly touching Japanese pressings of old Motown, CTI, Philly and Impulse albums – I stepped out into the midday sun.

It didn’t start well. The hotel on the corner of Rama IX and Fortune Town, a big old musty Mercure with a very low-lit foyer full of Arab traders and their be-burka-ed wives drinking short sweet coffees whilst being told off for smoking, had shut the Rama IX gate – I say shut but it was blocked with a steel barricade and two dumpsters full of garbage – and I was forced to backtrack at least 300m to the Thanon Ratchadaphrisek entrance before finally escaping.

And I walked. Cheerily: I don’t mind being seen as the imported village buffoon as long as I get my exercise and get to see. On the map I assumed it was easy, with the normal local mashup of market stalls, a 7/11 or two and clusters of stores that looked like they had been there for a century of more, as they may have been. Like much of older Bangkok.

I was wrong. There were building sites: new upmarket condo sites with big signs filled with rendered images of lawns, pools and expensive cars designed to tempt, that were just strange, including one with a smiling kathoey lying (sexily?) on a lawn. The video on their website (and no, I don’t know why I did either) is even odder. And there were big emptied sites primed for impending monster luxury condo construction between the building sites. This was a road on the move socially.

This must be the only country in the world where ladyboys are used to sell prestige condos as a matter of course and nobody blinks. I like that.

There was traffic.

The traffic was, this being Rama IX and a major trans-city semi-highway, trucks, buses and more trucks, each one of which seemed to have escaped the clutches of the required emission testers. The air was filthy yellow, it was 40 degrees, there were no trees and the fucking road just went on forever.

I’d walk around a corner or over a bump only to see more building sites. Once I saw a tree.

I thought about stopping one of the passing stream of taxis but refused to be defeated and walked on. “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

I found a 7/11. You always, always, always find a 7/11 in Bangkok. Newbies will say ‘it’s near the 7/11′. Everything in urban Thailand is near the 7/11 – there are 8,000 of them. Every 7/11 is near a 7/11.

There were a couple of stalls selling food.

The bottle of water from the store washed the yellow stuff from my throat and I crossed over the road via an over-bridge. A small bunch of kids on the over-bridge pointed at me and started to laugh. I started to laugh at the crazy man too but walked on dazed.

I had poured a large part of the water bottle over my face but that wasn’t the primary reason my shirt had mutated from an article of clothing to a drenched rag. People in cars starred. I swam on, with sweat dripping onto my dark glasses from my brow blurring and adding to the spectacle I no doubt presented.

I looked at my phone. It refused to pinpoint my GPS location. Google’s mapping service had decided – at this particular moment – to blindside this particular square of greater Bangkok. I was, it seemed, in the only place in the metropolitan area without wi-fi.

I’d left the construction sites and there was a strip of shops – all bar one shuttered up for, I guess, demolition in preparation for a condo.

There was an obviously long closed Pizza Hut. It had a fresh sign outside, painted onto the window beside the broken door. I guess nobody had told the marketing guys it was closed.

The exception was a glorious feathery costume shop. Inside stood half a dozen ladyboys trying on their extravagantly sequinned and be-feathered showgirl costumes. Some stood looking in long mirrors – posing and strutting as I suspect (and no I really don’t know) they would for the lads down in Patpong in these same brief costumes later that night – whilst others just, again, starred back at me. One blew a kiss and I pointed at my camera questioningly. I’m sure these ‘girls’ rarely say no to photos but they waved me away and I crawled on.

I walked around a corner. I was at a huge intersection, with a network of pedestrian over-bridges, a motorway on-ramp and some 5 lanes each way. It wasn’t on the map and the GPS was still playing dumb.

Two guys working on a phone-box looked at me.

“Victory Monument, yuu tee nee?” I asked. One pointed me around to the left so I wandered 100 metres or so until the footpath died and I found myself standing on the edge of the road filled with oncoming trucks looking for the motorway on-ramp. I ran across the road. Two old ladies were grooming a black labrador which seemed to have been given yellow dyed streaks. It wagged its tail and one of the women told it off.

“Victory Monument, yuu tee nee?”

They both looked at me, thought for a moment and both pointed in opposite directions.

I took a gamble, less calculated than random and headed down the best groomed looking avenue running off the intersection. It went on and on. An abandoned apartment building had a few food stalls out the front so I splashed out another seven baht for iced water. Then there was a large school. And Ministry of something, even larger. Much larger.

Brigid rang. ‘Where are you?’

“I have no idea.”

“Where are you going?”

“Victory Monument.”

“When will you get there?”

“Soon, I hope.” And I said goodbye.

I looked up and saw a huge green road-sign, pointing towards yet another motorway onramp (Bangkok’s raised highway system is both vast and endlessly confusing – there is no end or beginning to it and they sell atlases devoted just to it). It said ‘Don Muang’, the old airport far, far, far from the centre of town. I’m fucked, I decided.

I walked under the motorway, having decided to seek a cab and admit defeat, and an old man offered me a green drink. I declined and shook the sweat off the phone. The GPS had found life and there I was, less than 200m from Victory Monument. I’d been walking parallel to one its converging roadways for a kilometre or so and, no, neither old lady, who – like the Londoners I met years before – may never have actually been to the monument coming as they did from the pre-Skytrain and Metro era when the traffic was so awful almost nobody left their ‘burb unless they absolutely had to.

Around the corner I was thrilled – no that’s not the word at all - ecstatic to see, peering through yet another on-ramp, the approaching distant needle. I sat for a moment and gathered myself.

I stank and was wrecked but I had no choice, I needed to get to the monument, clean up somehow and get on the train home.

Oblivious to much of what was around me I moved on to a crossing – with a green walk light – and was forced to find the energy to run to dodge a mini-bus which clearly had no intention of stopping – it may have been the same one. It was related.

That didn’t help.

Walking into the massive pressing crowds that gather all around the monument I noticed I was the only person who had space. A large hole quickly formed around me in the crowd as I walked through. There was an up side to all this – at least to me. I knew, however, that this was because I was grossly socially unattractive after two hours of extreme heat and fumes. The way I both looked and smelled was offensive.

Sorry.

A young girl and her boyfriend stood above me on the walkway and looked down.

They pointed at me – the wallowing, sweating white man who failed – as we always do – to heed the warnings of those who know better: we will never belong here, and our unhealthy, dairy produce primed, bodies will never learn to deal with their heat – and laughed.

I shrank and tried to be as inconspicuous as a farang can be in Thailand, which is never much.

I waited a discreet time in a quiet corner of an air conditioned mall, and invested in both perfumed wipes and a deodorant before I struggled towards the packed Skytrain.

On the Skywalk toward the train, a man tried to give me a bible. I’m not sure it would’ve helped so I smiled no.

I spent about 15 minutes on the walkway – a man was making a loud political speech on the moment foot although nobody was listening, and the multitude of moving advertising hoardings tried to sell me – yep – skin whitener, an iPad, fast food and a holiday in Australia.

I went home.

I’ve just noticed a warning on the above map: ‘Note don’t try and and walk to Thailand Cultural Centre from here’, ‘here’ being the similarly named Thailand Cultural Centre Station. The two look as if they are right next to each other – about half a centimetre – but clearly walking the distance is ill-advised. I feel dumb.

Still one of the most affecting and astounding recordings in New Zealand rock’n'roll’s lineage, and bizarrely it only has some 72,000 hits on YouTube (6,000 here and 66,000 at the other upload) which really underlines that touting huge YT numbers often simply underlines PT Barnum.

Trevor Reekie (amusingly – I have no idea how he knows this! ) claims it’s the most skipped song on Nature’s Best. That suspect statistic – if it were true – alone is a vote in its favour. I guess the many of the Six Months In A Leaky Boat fans would perhaps reel.

And the famous MTV Havoc interview (which also reminds us what a great interviewer on the visual screen Mikey is/was) with addenda interspaced after Daniel died:

Plus a great – and very funny –  Dylan Taite interview for TV3 I’ve not seen before:

As Bill Kerton so correctly says: utterly unique.

I’m reasonably certain they’re all previously unpublished.

From top to bottom: Dancers, venue unknown; The Terrorways at what looks to be XS Cafe; Bootgirls @ The Windsor Castle (I think); and Proud Scum, maybe Reverb Room.

And the legendary Trevor Reekie, circa 1985, complete with Marginal Era poster.

The luscious Joy Of Disco (in 4 parts):

I sound old as hell saying this, but the golden age of British future-pop documented perfectly by the BBC.

h/t: Sample Gee.