The shots of the Asy­lum I posted here inspired me hunt through a few archives and boxes and I came across a few bits and pieces. Some have appeared before, on my 80s and 90s club pages, but many have not.

The ones that were up before I’ve res­canned and tried to clean up a lit­tle — although many are by their nature rough, and my Pho­to­shop skills are strictly ama­teur. Some on those pages are still in boxes in NZ — like the Soane one on the top of the first page — and will be upgraded in time. They show their age hav­ing been scanned a decade or so ago.

Mostly these are just fun and I thought I’d post a few here and add them to those pages.

Most were taken by myself or by Brigid when she was social pho­tog­ra­pher for bFMs mag.

I’ve always won­dered what the Auck­land City Coun­cil has against Auckland.

Over the past three or more decades it’s hard to think of a time when Auckland’s con­trol­ling body has entirely worked toward the bet­ter­ment of Auck­land. There are huge suc­cesses of course and I think the city is blessed with it’s parks, pools (although Par­nell Baths are a shadow of what they once were), libraries, Art Gallery and very much more.

But for all that I do think it’s been very poorly served by those we elect and those they employ, and I look at Welling­ton, or to Mel­bourne as exam­ples of how cities can be admin­is­tered and directed.

There have been mis­steps, many often benign in their intent, but mis­steps nev­er­the­less, like the recent upgrade of Queen Street, which was done, I believe with the best of inten­tions, but tens of mil­lions of dol­lars later left the city with a lit­tle less park­ing and a road that looked almost the same as before…more or less deserted apart from those look­ing for a bus, and full of large slabs of gray con­crete lead­ing to and from the var­i­ous face­less banks, fast food joints and phone shops.

Or the viaduct which is mostly a pedes­trian unfriendly quag­mire of medi­oc­rity, which Auck­lan­ders only seem to value because the rest of the shore­line of what has a claim to being one of the most beau­ti­ful har­bours in the world, is much worse. And was the last area the slacks-wearers at the coun­cil tried to develop as an ‘enter­tain­ment precinct’…

Or there is utter incom­pe­tence, such as the way Pon­sonby Road, one of Auckland’s poten­tial assets is kept half baked by stu­pid park­ing restric­tions that restrict its devel­op­ment as a boule­vard, and that fact that mostly it’s treated as a race track with often dis­as­trous results. Or the way the greed and stu­pid­ity of the city’s park­ing depart­ment, with it’s oner­ous restric­tions, which are applied at times when just about every other city in the devel­oped world is actively encour­ag­ing peo­ple to come and spend, ensures that most of the inner city is deserted and the busi­nesses there strug­gle to pay the out­ra­geous rates.

Then there is the plainly evil. I’m think­ing of the whole­sale demo­li­tion of the inner city, with the active con­nivence of the coun­cil in the 1980s, under the sup­pos­edly left­wing eye of Dame Cath Tizard, which ripped the soul out of the city to enrich a few select devel­op­ers who just hap­pened to have rather excel­lent con­nec­tions to well placed elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives; or the same hap­pen­ing around the Brit­o­mart a few years later, where an area which, whilst run down, was bustling and quite ready for revi­tal­iz­ing with­out an onslaught from, yes, more bull­doz­ers, and, yes, more devel­op­ers who just hap­pened to have good con­nec­tions to var­i­ous coun­cil folk, get­ting rich from the coun­cil cre­ated mess that ensued.

In the time that I’ve been actively aware of what’s hap­pen­ing in the city poli­tik I don’t think Auck­land City has had a mayor who can rea­son­ably put his hand up and say “I’ve done a good job and, because of my drive and vision, left the city a bet­ter place”, at least since the, still talked about in hal­lowed tones, golden days of Sir Dove-Myer Robin­son. His suc­ces­sor, Colin Kay, was the most insub­stan­tial politi­cian I’ve met (he kept a cig­a­rette case on his desk with about half a dozen brands so as not to offend). Cath I’ve men­tioned, and I’m try­ing to actu­ally remem­ber any­thing Les Mills or Chris­tine Fletcher did. The last guy tried but seemed bet­ter suited to mak­ing museli, and the cur­rent incum­bent is pretty much mostly con­cerned with loud-mouthed self aggrandizement.

Sadly Auckland’s inner city is an increas­ingly unat­trac­tive jun­gle of face­less blocks and archi­tec­tural drab­ness and you can point the fin­ger at most of those above, and the self right­eous and fun­da­men­tal­ists who have largely dom­i­nated the coun­cil for many years.

But I guess you get who you deserve and Auckland’s sweep­ing and gray ‘burbs seem to like the face­less and the mediocre. So we get David Hay and Aaron Bhat­na­gar who make wide-ranging pol­icy deci­sions about peo­ple and indus­tries they nei­ther under­stand or like.

Like the enter­tain­ment industry.

Which brings us to Aaron’s pro­posal on liquor licens­ing for Auck­land City.

For most of the 1980s and 1990s I ran or was involved in clubs. One was named one of the ten best clubs in the world by a UK mag­a­zine in 1991, and recently cel­e­brated a fairly large 20th Anniver­sary party. All well and good, but we spent most of our time oper­at­ing up against the coun­cil. They were, not because of any atti­tude on our part, or any intent, the enemy. We bat­tled unrea­son­able noise con­trols (and we know they were unrea­son­able because after hit­ting them with a legal opin­ion, they, despite end­less attempts to shut us down, backed down and agreed we were oper­at­ing within the law, unlike their staff who’d been try­ing to enforce some­thing they had no author­ity to enforce backed by coun­cil paid thugs), ever-changing licens­ing require­ments (once again often unrea­son­able and dra­con­ian in their appli­ca­tion, from peo­ple who’d never spent a social moment in a licensed premise other than Cobb & Co), demands for instant access for dis­abled in a pre­vi­ously licensed 50 year old build­ing (no the lift was not good enough, despite the fact it had been for years.…fix it or shut now), threat­ened zon­ing changes that would force us to shut a long estab­lished busi­ness, end­less road ren­o­va­tions nei­ther asked for nor needed by busi­nesses, which killed access (see below), and so on.

All of which is nei­ther here nor there except as way to illus­trate the way that we, and quite some other busi­nesses try­ing to pro­vide a rea­son­able stan­dard of inter­na­tion­ally accept­able licensed enter­tain­ment in a city striv­ing for tourists, were forced to work against the body that was elected to sup­port these things.

Go for­ward to 2009 and Auck­land has a stan­dard of nightlife, of bars, clubs, and live enter­tain­ment the equal or bet­ter of any in a sim­i­lar sized city any­where in the world that I’ve been. Across the nation’s only real urban area on most nights of the week you can find some­thing pretty damn good to do, to lis­ten to or to hang out.

Nor­man Jay and I were talk­ing a few weeks back about the first time we’d met, many years back, when we bought him to NZ. He’d said how much he’d enjoyed the wide and invig­o­rat­ing nightlife in the city after his time in Aus­tralia. We talked about the tal­ent our adven­tur­ous nightlife had nurtured.…OMC (out of South Auck­land but via the city), Nathan Haines, P-Money, Che Fu, Emer­son Todd, Mark de Clive Lowe and so on. It’s launched radio sta­tions that define large parts of the city..George FM, Base FM and fed tal­ent to 95bFm. Artists, writ­ers and design­ers have cen­tered them­selves around our thriv­ing nightlife indus­try. We have won­der­ful late night eater­ies and hang-outs that bub­ble and do so much for the soul of the city.

And all of this exists despite the Auck­land Council.

I’m going to leave it to oth­ers to tell you exactly why this pro­posed new law is so bad for the city but it’s shock­ing that some one like the Cit­i­zens & Ratepay­ers crew, who have absolutely no under­stand­ing of what is needed or what this indus­try is or what it requires are try­ing to draft this. But suf­fice to say that I can say with rea­son­able con­fi­dence that if Aaron Bhat­na­gar had turned up at the door of Cause Cele­bre we would have quickly turned him away as unde­sir­able. It’s a cheap shot, but I just need to look at his images on his site to know that. It’s not that he’s nec­es­sar­ily a bad guy, he sim­ply doesn’t come close to get­ting it.

And this all feels like yet another mis­step on the part of a coun­cil who as a whole sim­ply don’t get it and would do bet­ter to leave well alone when mostly its work­ing and has worked. Or if it is going to be revis­ited, is done so by, and in con­sul­ta­tion with, the largely respon­si­ble and expe­ri­enced folks who work in the indus­tries and know what is needed.

I’m also going to men­tion, with a quiet smirk that a friend of mine, whilst talk­ing to an Auck­land City licens­ing per­son recently had to explain who Dave Dob­byn was.

Dis­claimer: I have a grudge against the Auck­land City Coun­cil. I used to own a record store in High Street. It was suc­cess­ful and sold vinyl records and com­pact discs that oth­ers did not. We imported most of the stock our­selves, or used some spe­cial­ist importers. We made a profit but the mar­gins were very slim. In 2000-01 the coun­cil decided to under­take yet another major ren­o­va­tion of High Street..it had been 5 or 6 years since the last, so I guess a multi-million dol­lar upgrade, despite the protests of retail­ers (at a cou­ple of meet­ings in the Ellen Melville Hall) was due. After all, it wasn’t their money.

It went on for many (6?) months and the street, and all pedes­trian access was com­pletely dis­rupted. For weeks you sim­ply could not get into my shop, and when you could, you couldn’t get into the street. I turned up one day and a coun­cil worker told me to go and shop some­where else. In the midst of it they decided to increase the rates. I wrote a series of let­ters and the first few were ignored. Even­tu­ally one Nicole Haines from the coun­cil came down and yes, in front of sev­eral wit­nesses, said that the coun­cil under­stood and we would a) get rates abate­ment, and b) a rea­son­able pay­ment sched­ule would be drafted to take into account the huge losses we’d incurred. She advised us not to make any pay­ment until she was able to get back to us.

So with this in mind when the next rates install­ment came due I wrote to the coun­cil. I received a very terse let­ter from some per­son who was too insub­stan­tial to sign his name as any­thing but ‘Jef­frey’. The essence of it was: Get Fucked…pay up now. I wrote again, Jef­frey got ruder. I wrote again and then I received a let­ter from some­one fur­ther up the chain. I was told that Nicole Haines had not said such a thing…not only that but she was will­ing to put in writ­ing that she had never met me or been to my busi­ness. And I needed to pay up or it would go to court. Sim­ply put, she lied, and if her boss was to be believed, it seemed she was will­ing to lie in front of a judge.

I found the money but we didn’t ever recover from the, I guess, $70,000 or so we’d lost as a result of the council’s actions. Yes there were other fac­tors, the inter­net being one, but the money that the Auck­land City Coun­cil had cost us was the pri­mary rea­son we shut our doors a year later. Yes, I have a grudge.