Since we’re cel­e­brat­ing record stores and all things vinyl, I thought I’d repost this, orig­i­nally from August April last year — posted again for record store day (late) and NZ Music month (1 day early).

I’ve had a cou­ple of con­ver­sa­tions of recent with peo­ple about record stores in Auck­land — the lost sort — where was Record Ware­house? When did Taste close?

That sort of thing.

I guess its part of being some sort of aging vinyl buff, but the thought of all those places, many of which I spend end­less hours in as a kid, or older, still gives me some sort of huge nos­tal­gic buzz. I used to spend days trekking around the sec­ond hand stores and the junk joints, most long gone, look­ing for the hun­dreds of 45s that I still have in boxes in my storeroom.

Rhythm Method out­side Rock’n’Roll 1980

There have been count­less record shops in Auck­land over the years, we New Zealan­ders con­sume vast qual­i­ties of music, but I’ve only listed ones here in central-ish Auck­land (New­mar­ket, the CBD, K Rd and Pon­sonby) and shops that have closed down. The stores that are still open can tell their own sto­ries. And I’ve only men­tioned the stores I actu­ally per­son­ally remem­ber, and, yes, despite my best efforts I’ve clearly made some mis­takes (and missed a few stores).

These shops were often filed with pas­sion­ate peo­ple, both in front of and behind the counter (and more than a few snotty know noth­ing kids who looked down on almost all their cus­tomers and helped kill the stores) but despite that record retail­ing is an extra­or­di­nar­ily risky busi­ness and more than a few of these stores, most in fact, includ­ing some big oper­a­tors, went bust and dis­ap­peared from the streets of the city forever.

How­ever many of the most colour­ful and cre­ative peo­ple I’ve known over the years came out of record retail or sup­ported their cre­ative enter­prises on the rarely good wages paid in record shops.

Read the rest of this entry

Maybe it’s me, but it’s an odd-ish year musi­cally. I’ve gone through dull spots when I’ve con­vinced myself that 2012 mostly sucked or was very aver­age at best — and then *bam* some­thing comes along and knocks you over again. And like last year I noticed a fill­ing of the wow cup as the year draws to a close.

I liked lots and lots of records this year but — per­haps appro­pri­ately as you get older, a pretty good per­cent­age were records from past ages. How­ever, it amazes me just, despite hunt­ing and buy­ing vast amounts of music over the past forty plus years, there is still so much old stuff to still dis­cover. Mur­ray Cam­mick turned me on to my cur­rent favourite from years past, the George Faith album Super Eight pro­duced by Lee Perry. I mean, I knew and loved his cover of Diana, but never looked beyond it. Like­wise the two incred­i­ble Philadel­phia Inter­na­tional col­lec­tions, the 4 CD Tom Moul­ton remixes and the 10 CD 40th Anniver­sary box set have never been away from my player.

I really liked the last three tracks on the Beach Boys album and kinda dug much of the rest of it despite the fact that these tracks were deemed uncool, even the Mike Love track (I didn’t say that). I thought the crit­i­cism pointed in their direc­tion vis-a-vis surfing/beach lyrics was at best ingen­u­ous — really what on earth do you expect The Beach Boys to sing about? Third World debt? Espe­cially with an odi­ous old prick like Love at the finan­cial tiller, a man whose relent­less greed dri­ven thug­gery would cower emo­tion­ally far stronger souls than Brian Wil­son. It was the most sur­pris­ingly lovely record of 2012.

I bought loads of old NZ 45s, on labels like Zodiac, Peak, Impact, and La Glo­ria. Some I bought just for their sleeves and acci­den­tally dis­cov­ered they were quite good (The Howard Mor­ri­son Quar­tet — yes, seri­ously — the live rou­tines are absolutely hilar­i­ous and John Baker pushed me towards a really pass­able ’67 cover of The Spencer Davis Group’s Keep On Run­ning on a Howard (that’s SIR Howard to you boy.… as he once instructed me and Paul Fue­m­ana) Mor­ri­son solo album on arguably the most reli­ably awful label in NZ ever, Joe Brown — would you really call a label that unless you were being some­how ironic?). Many were not.

Read the rest of this entry

Now I’m back­track­ing some­what. Almost.

I blow hot and cold on stream­ing services.

Hot: I love them. In par­tic­u­lar, Spo­tify (Pre­mium — not sure how one can use this with the poorly tar­geted adverts for Justin Bieber et al.) is per­son­ally indis­pens­able for a vari­ety of rea­sons. One of which is the inevitable ‘oh! what does that sound like?’ I do that a lot and I think many peo­ple do (accept­ing that just as many also use it sim­ply for back­ground noise — like radio).

I don’t use it for pure ‘dis­cov­ery’ though and I doubt many do — I’m not dri­ven to ‘check out’ sim­i­lar artist rec­om­men­da­tions ever really, mostly because what­ever algo­rithm is being used to chan­nel these to me is decid­edly bro­ken. It does not fol­low that because I like The Clash and Wire, I’m demo­graph­i­cally likely to enjoy 2012 Swedish Death Metal. And yet that’s the sort of thing I get if I let it. This part of the mech­a­nism remains as bro­ken as the iTunes Genius. Lis­ten­ing to Lit­tle Willie John doesn’t mean that I should be forced to endure, god help — any­one help — a ‘radio’ sta­tion filled with Reo Speed­wagon, Dire Straits and Boston. I was.

I men­tally assumed it was white noise com­ing through the wall from the Sin­ga­porean stu­dents next door (spend time in a CD store in Sin­ga­pore — they love this shite). Then I realised it was me. The Spo­tify pub­lic log­ging remains OFF. To live that down — how?

Read the rest of this entry