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 Records, Queen St, 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.

I worked in several of these shops over the years myself and have huge memories of scaring the fuck out of quiet Parnell with the New York Dolls, or the joy of turning someone who’d never bought jazz (and actually asked for Kenny G) onto Miles and then watching him grow into Coltrane, Bird, Gillespie and beyond over the next few years.

Now where is that copy of Neat, Neat, Neat I bought at Direction Records in 1977….

Lost Record Stores In Auckland

Record Warehouse

One of the major players in central Auckland retail from about 1977 to 1987 when it went under. It was originally owned by Mike Dow and Guy Morris, and, later, Roger King amongst others and grew out of the collapse of the Direction chain. It’s major branch was in Durham Lane West, with the best 7” selection in Auckland, thanks to the wonderful Kerry O’Connor, and at other times had branches in other locations in the city, including The Corner (the old Peaches store) and in Lorne Street (which they called Rio for some odd reason). Record Warehouse went the way of most record retailers and ceased trading after the stockmarket crash. It’s staff included Trevor Reekie, who worked there when he was playing his huge part in inventing the indie label in NZ. Roger King also managed Dave Dobbyn for many years, and later managed Don McGlashan. In the interim he spent time in Wellington working for the Alliance Party. Mike Dow was instrumental in bring FM radio to NZ, and later sold real estate in Omaha. He died in June, 2009. Guy Morris passed away on 3 Jan, 2011. He was one of the true pioneers and visionaries of the NZ music industry. Respect.

Sounds Unlimited

Sounds Unlimited began life in Newmarket in a small shop in Remuera Rd in the early 1970s, owned by Henry King. He opened a second store with his brother Jim running it in Panmure about the same time. He quickly expanded to 101 Queen Street, Papakura and into much bigger premises still in Remuera Rd. They also opened a second store in Broadway (see Broadway Records). In 1982 Henry sold the chain to Gary Nuttall (the Newmarket stores), Terry Anderson (Queen Street) and Jim Lum (Panmure). Nuttall and Anderson kept the names and traded as a unit for a brief time but fell out, with Anderson keeping the name and Nuttall rebranding as Tru Tone. King moved to Sydney where he opened Chelsea Records, passing away a few years back.

Sounds Unlimited eventually expanded across Auckland but went under in the early 1990s. Out of its collapse came the Sounds chain, which also went under a decade and half later, costing the record companies millions. It had, at other times, stores on the corner of the Strand Arcade and Queen Street, 256 Records (see below), and a store in K Rd, infamous for it’s big coke bust in the early 1990s. Robin Lambert, the group’s sales manager was perhaps the best salesman I’ve ever seen in a record store. His famous refusal to sell a customer the third Iron Maiden album, because he didn’t own the first two and would not understand it, was typical (the guy left the store with all three, very happy).

Under Henry King, Sounds Unlimited revolutionised music retail in NZ and paved the way for a new generation of aggressively fronted, with loss leading items, and discounting, record stores. For better or worse, it paved the way for the current dominance of The Warehouse, whose music retail, appropriately, is headed by Terry Anderson. Henry’s name survives with King Exports, an independent distributor. Sounds Unlimited’s buyer, Steve Morice, also managed Push Push, which can’t have hurt their chart returns.

Tru tone

Gary Nuttall, with his wife Allison, rebranded his stores as Tru Tone (with the exception of Broadway Records, which kept it’s name) after the fallout with Terry Anderson, and expanded into the malls and ‘burbs. Of note was the St. Lukes store, staffed by Phil Bell, Jason Howson, and Andrew, the drummer from Garageland. Under their management it became a centre for imported dance music, both house and hip-hop. Tru Tone went under in 1999, and many of the stores were taken over by either Sounds, with some irony, or ECM.

Direction Records

The first of the alternative stores of the post hippie era, dating from about 1971, and owned by Guy Morris, Direction was quite an empire for a while. It had stores in Darby St, Swanson St, Queens Arcade, and outside Auckland, and sold hip records in recycled brown paper bags. Direction ran a record label, which not only released local bands but licensed overseas labels like Casablanca, and they were also tied to Hot Licks, the alternative music

magazine edited by the late Roger Jarrett, which is the blueprint and granddaddy of all NZ music press since. The shelves were often full of imported pressings of hard to get underground records from the US, but, like all NZ indie chains, it inevitably went bust, in the late 1970s. From it arose The Record Warehouse.

Peaches

Peaches was owned by industry veterans Brian Pitt and John McCready, and was essentially the retail arm of the RTC operation, which had NZ rights to Virgin Records and a few other labels. It operated from the mid 1970s in The Corner (formerly John Courts, and now Whitcoulls, Queen Street), and for me is remembered for all those well priced Virgin reggae imports, and, especially, as the place where I managed to pick up my EMI pressing of Anarchy In the UK. Record Warehouse took it over around 1980 and it closed shortly thereafter. They also had a branch in the old Direction store in Queens Arcade.

Taste Records

Taste was, with Direction, the other post hippie retailer, moving into the punk era. Taste was owned by David Perkins and, for a while, Rhys Walker. Rhys had worked for Pye Records and David had worked, in the 60s whilst at university, at a store upstairs in Vulcan Lane, called The Loft. Taste opened first in Lorne Street in the shop under what is now The Lorne Street Lofts, and had a special listening booth with extraction fans to allow the listener to get him or herself in the right state of mind to listen to that new Yes album. It was extraordinarily hip and moved early 1975 into the Southern Cross building in High Street (leaving the booth behind sadly), where along with the rock, it imported jazz and underground music. I was there one day in 1975 waiting for that first Split Enz album to arrive, and I bought one of only two copies of the first Ramones album in NZ there in 1976 (Johnny Volume bought the other). In 1979 it took over Professor Longhair’s in Parnell (acquiring me in the process). I managed the shop briefly in 1980 and ran my first label out of it, but Dave Perkins had lost interest and shut it in September that year. He later ran Snake Screen-printing studios which dominated NZ music merchandising for years, and died in 2004. His funeral was like a who’s who of the NZ record industry of the last three decades. RIP Dave.

Professor Longhairs

Professor Longhair’s was an offshoot of Richmond Records in Melbourne and owned by Nadine Huru, an Australian who had come to NZ with her husband in the mid 1970s and opened the store in small space just up from the Alexandra Hotel (now Iguacu). The shop was, from late 1977, the only shop which really stocked and played the punk and new wave sounds in Auckland, thus became one of the epicentres of that scene, which was helped by the fact that not only was it the only record store open on Saturdays in Auckland City, but was 150 meters up the road from The Windsor Castle, which was home to many of the Auckland punk bands on Saturday afternoons from late 1978 onwards. I ran it for Nadine from early 1978, with the legendary graphic artist Terry Hogan (the man who signed Toy Love to WEA, and did the AK79 sleeve) as my weekend staff. It was taken over by Taste Records in 1979 and I went as part of the package, before moving to Sydney for six months.

Basement Records

A second hand shop in the basement of The Corner in the late 1980s. They were, as I recall, briefly in the old Record Warehouse space in Lorne Street too for a while.

Rock’n’Roll Records

Jan, the owner, opened Rock’n’Roll Records in Symonds St, on the corner of City Rd, in the early 1970s, as the first dedicated second hand store in the city. It moved to Queen Street, just down from where Real Groovy is now, in the middle of that decade, where it’s staff included Simon Mark-Brown and Kerry Buchanan. It was a mecca for the vinyl obsessed (yes, guilty) and the shop’s rare records auctions were huge drawcards. I remember outbidding Graham Brazier on a Stooges album about 1979. I loved the huge boxes of 7″ EPs and 45s behind he counter. In 1983 I sold much of my record collection to Jan & Kerry before moving to London (their prices were never less than fair but damn, not a day goes by when I don’t regret selling what I sold). It moved to Fort Street, in a space next to the small Fort Lane, in the 1980s, and added Kirk Gee to the staff. Jan sold out to Real Groovy in the late 1980s and they closed the site, moving the staff up to the Queen Street store. Phat Wax took the site briefly and it’s a laundromat now.

Record Exchange

Along with Rock’n’Roll Records, Record Exchange dominated the second had market for years. At one stage it took up much of the end of St Kevin’s Arcade in K Rd. Neville Lynch and Chris Hart opened it in 1976 and it soon became a second hand mecca with thousands of copies of everything imaginable and tons of rarities. Neville bought Chris out later in the decade (he then opened Real Groovy) and eventually bought in his son, Liam, and moved in the 1990s to K Rd itself, near the Queen Street intersection. There was another shop too, briefly, further along K Rd. The retail shop has gone now but Neville and Liam continue to trade successfully via TradeMe and Ebay and claim to have 200,000 records in their catalogue. I don’t doubt it…

Quaff Records

Owned by Phil Clarke and UK DJ, Roy the Roach, Quaff initially took over Bassline’s shop before moving down the road to a space in O’Connell Street next to Zambesi. It lasted some 2 years from about 1994.

The Big Orange

This was not just a record shop but the best example of that long forgotten artefact, a head shop. It sold music, incense, clothes, posters, and accessories of all sorts (including bongs and the like). It was around from about 1970 for a year or two in the Canterbury Arcade.

Criminal Records

A well regarded dance specialist in Symonds Street owned by Nick Collings, it traded for 8 years and specialised in hard dance and trance.  It opened on April 14 1998 and ceased trading of December 2008. [Thanks for the update, Nick - see the comment below for some pretty cool links]

Revival Records

This shop began life in the late 1980s as a second hand shop in Victoria St, about where the Sky Tower is now, moving in the 1990s up to K Rd, before closing down later that decade. The stores, in which I spent many hours trawling, were owned by Colin Cleave.

256 Records

At 256 Queen Street, this store was owned at various times by a couple of guys, Godfrey Woods and Kit Kingston, and also by Sounds Unlimited. I’ll always be grateful for the gross underpricing of the 18 volume Philadephia International boxed set, which I picked up for $50 one day. 256 was the first shop to import dance music as a speciality and amongst its staff were Grant Kearney and Sam Hill who went on to found Bassline Records (see below). It’s staff also included Kerry George and Mike Haru.

Broadway Records

A Sounds Unlimited / Tru Tone owned shop in Broadway, Newmarket, that specialised in Classical and Jazz. I worked there for about three years part time to support my record label work, in the early 1980s. It was managed by Mel Moratti, a record industy legend who knew literally everything about classical music and the world’s classical releases, and is still employing that knowledge at Marbecks at the time of writing. It was the first shop in Auckland to have a CD player and stock CDs, when the local record companies were still rather nervous about this new tech.

 

246 Records

On the first floor of the 246 Shopping Centre in Queen Street (where, incidentally, the mezzanine café had the best Iced Chocolate in the city). It was partially owned by Dennison Smith’s in Rotorua and was renown in the 1970s for having the best annual sales in the city. I’m unsure exactly when it opened but it closed some time in the early 1980s. Derek Fletcher, who ran it at the end, assisted by Joanne Middlemiss, later opened a health food shop on the site of the old Direction Records in Darby Street.

HMV Records

In about 1994 the HMV chain re-entered the NZ marketplace and rented the space on the corner of Vulcan Lane and Queen Street. They opened with a huge band, putting some $10,000 on the bar at Cause Celebre. However they closed about two years later and the space is now occupied by the National Bank.

The EMI Shop

EMI was owned, of course, by EMI Records, (originally trading as HMV) and at one time sold all sorts of things like Fridges and Washing Machines as well as vinyl and cassettes, dating back to the 1940s when they dominated the NZ music industry. In the 1960s and 1970s they had a large store in Queen Street about where Burger King is now, near Victoria Street. They carried a huge stock and later moved up to where 256 Records was. In the late 1970s EMI upgraded the stores and opened one in the Downtown Mall. This was staffed initially by Peter Hewitt (who was later manager of 256), and then by Chris Caddick, who was later to become MD of EMI NZ, and Adam Holt, who is now MD of Universal NZ. EMI closed these in the late 1980s and a Sounds store was in the Downtown site for a while. EMI briefly re-entered the retail world with HMV in the 1990s.

Bassline Records

Owned by Sam Hill and Grant Kearney, both ex-256, Bassline was Auckland’s first dedicated dance and DJ store, and was DJ central for some years. Situated in what is now the Karen Walker shop in O’Connell Street, it was famous for Grant killing the records being played regularly so he could listen to the horse races through the PA. And the mad rush as the imports arrived. It opened in 1989 and closed about 1993 when Quaff took over the site. Grant Marshall provided the staff and the shop was often filled with friendly record company staff on Fridays filling out the chart return to pad NZ’s eternally and completely inaccurate charts.

George Courts

In K Rd, had, for years, a record bar just inside the door, with a smallish selection, but great sales bins. Closed well before the store closed in the 1980s.

Lewis Eady’s

In Queen Street, next to Whitcombs and Tombs (now Whitcoulls) near Durham Lane East, Lewis Eady had a multi-floor store with sheet music, instruments and a massive but almost impenetrable record selection, which nobody in the staff seemed to know or care about. Although it had been there forever, and in Queen Street selling music since 1918, it closed in 1980 and moved to the ‘burbs, where it remains now, albeit without the records. They also pressed vinyl and had their own label at one stage in the distant past.

Cyberculture

Heath Burgoyne ran Cyberculture and sold alternative and electronic music from K Rd for most of the 1990s. The shop was a heaven for the eclectic and the leftfield.

Arthur Eady

One of the seemingly endless number of retail offshoots of Lewis Eady, Arthur operated until the late 1960s at 112 Queen Street, on the lower side of Vulcan Lane, selling instruments, sheet music and records.

Crucial Records

Crucial was owned by Miles Kuen and Matt Drake, upstairs in Canterbury Arcade from the late 1990s until about 2003, selling a huge range of techno and house vinyl and CDs.

Beautiful Music

In K Rd, near the Newton Post Office, from the mid 1990s, Gary Steel’s Beautiful Music offered his personal selection of interesting, the eclectic and the plain desirable. Amongst his clients, famously, was the late John Peel.

Phat Wax

Tony Young, an Australian DJ, opened a record store in a house in Jervois Rd, moving it to the old Rock’n’Roll Records space in Fort Street when Real Groovy bought them out. He later moved to a space in Victoria Street East just up from Lorne St. The shop had a range of Italian house to begin with, which rather confused NZers, as the style had never really crossed the Tasman, but later expanded to cover other styles, although it never really worked.

Lamphouse

The Lamphouse was an appliance, and lighting store, with a mezzanine floor that stocked records. It was a great place to pick up long deleted obscurities that had sat in the racks for years. Closed in the 1980s after being in the same spot for several decades, on the corner of K Rd and Queen St.

Bond & Bond

I have vague memories of a Bond & Bond with a fairly healthy vinyl department in the Dilworth Building in Customs Street in the 1960s

John Court

Where Whitcoulls is now, John Court once had their department store with a smallish record department. Closed in the early 1970s.

Rendells

Another department store that had a record department, just inside the door and to the right as I recall. They shut the record dept in the 1980s.

Farmers Trading Company

And another. The record dept in the Hobson Street store was at one stage quite large but mostly full buckets of Zodiac and Viking Peter Posa or Pacific albums with half naked girls on the cover. I guess that was their market.

Milne & Choice

And another. They had records for sale in both Queen Street and Remuera Rd, until they closed Queen Street in the 1970s, and Remuera a few years later. I remember buying David Bowie’s Pin Ups there in 1974 (and, yes, I still have it).

Second Hand shops Q St

For years there was a row of bric-a-brac stores on the eastern side of Queen Street, about where Mayoral Drive cuts through now, full of ever changing boxes full of dusty vinyl, with loads of 7” singles and sixties soul and pop.

Sounds

Sounds, the last of the mega chains, with it’s roots in the Sounds Unlimited chain, had, amongst it’s dozens of stores in NZ, the huge one in the old Whitcoulls shop on the corner of Queen and Durham, one in the old 256 store (now a games shop), one in the Rialto mall in Newmarket and one in the old EMI shop in Downtown. Probably lots more but they were largely faceless…

 

Record store in Little High Street

There was for a year or two in the 1990s a record store in the mall called Little High Street, a shop packed full of imported US cut out and new release hip-hop and r’n’b vinyl. It didn’t last but was a goldmine, but perhaps better suited to South Auckland. The name escapes me.

The Vulcan Lane stores (updated!)

The names of both of these escape me too, although they were quite different. The first was upstairs between the two pubs, and I think was simply just called Upstairs Records, and closed about 1970. It’s staff member, Dave Perkins, later opened Taste Records. The second was owned by RCA / Pye at one time (it was tied into the RCA Record Club) and managed by Lorraine Tennant (later of Peaches). It was downstairs in part of the space now occupied by the CD Store, next to the city branch of the Pancake Parlour (the chocolate and banana pancakes were delicious..this becoming a theme I think). Update: It was Music City..thanks to Jock Lawrie who bought his first album there (Beatles Hard Days Night in ’74…not a bad way to start…).

Update: Nige Horrocks says the one upstairs in Vulcan was Gordon’s, and that rings a bell, but the one I meant, Chris Bourke rightly recalls as The Loft. And Nige reminded me about another one:

Beggs Wiseman

The national chain had a store in Queen Street, between Durham Lane East and The Canterbury Arcade, although I’m unsure when it stopped selling vinyl

Woolworths & McKenzies

There was a McKenzies, which was kinda like a NZ owned K-Mart, in Queen Street, which ran between what is now the ANZ Bank and Vulcan Lane, it sold vinyl near the Vulcan Lane door. I used to like the grand portrait of the founder, Sir Something McKenzie, on the staircase. Woolworths, before they became just a supermarket, bought them up around 1980, and closed the Vulcan / Queen Store shortly afterwards. The Woolworths store near Queens Arcade continued for a decade and a half, rebranded as DEKA, and it too sold music but very mainstream

Current retail outfits old locations…

Real Groovy was intially at the top of Richmond Rd, then the top of Mt Eden Rd and then on the corner of Queen Street and City Road before it moved to where it is now. Conch was in the Canterbury Arcade for several years before it moved to Ponsonby.

Crawlspace

In the Lagonda Arcade in the 1990s, had it’s own record label

Play Records

Another K Rd store, in the Lagonda Arcade, specialising in dance, in the first years of the 2000s. It was later Lopass Records and is now Uptown, specialising in dubstep and grime.

Central Station

An Australian dance store that opened in Durham Lane East in the late 1990s. Like Phat Wax it missed the mark because NZers really had a more developed musical taste than the cheese that sold so well in Australia. It moved briefly to the top end of Vulcan Lane before closing.

 

Bizarre Beats

Another on K Rd, which started in St.Kevins Arcade in the early 1990s, then moved down to O’Connell Street in the mid 1990s to share with Quaff, before heading back up to K Rd where it shared a space with Virus Clothing. They stocked alternative and industrial and still can be found via the Club Bizarre website, run by owner Mark Wallbank.

BPM Records

yes I’ll get to that…

And an update…a word from the legendary Terry Hogan :

Hi Simon .. nice work. There was another Eady store (was it Sydney Eady?) on the corner of Queen and, I think, Swanson, where I got a brand new copy of Love’s “Forever Changes” for a dollar from a bargain bin one day in the late 60s. True, a buck was still worth something then, but still..! And I bought it on the cover alone but sometimes that works out fine.

Your mention of the second-hand places up the top end of Queen Street calls to mind a real treasure trove that used to sit just below City Rd where I picked up a lot of US stuff that I still have, Stooges, MC5, and a personal fave, the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “Mendocino”. Can’t remember the shop’s name but the LPs were $2 and $3 (I never figured out how that distinction was made) and the guy was friendly and I dips me lid to him.

And yep, fond memories of working Prof Longhairs .. but go easy on the “legendary”.

T.

Once upon a lifetime ago, I bought a record by a trio with the less than wallet extracting name Chunky, Novi & Ernie.

I suspect I was the only person in New Zealand who bought this record. I know that how? Well, WEA had declined to release the record and Direction Records had imported just the single copy. The guy behind the counter said it was weird.

I bought it sound unheard because of the name on the rear – John Cale (as in Produced By).

I took Chunky, Novi & Ernie home and, yes, it was weird. Gothic viola and keyboard driven jaunts through the underbelly of pop, with clear references to the Cale strands of the Velvets and his own early 70s solo work.

I struggled at first and then one day I fell in love with it.

I’ve loved it ever since.

Nobody else has ever heard of it.

Tonight, we went to a party in a pub. I rarely, if ever, got to parties in pubs, but we had the invite and it’s in the street we live in so somewhat reluctantly both Brigid and I did the neighbourly thing and went down for  the free Asahi, Tiger and Grey Goose (not quite getting to the latter, but you try) and found the only free table in the place – in front of the band which, in a pub, is rarely the place I’d put myself voluntarily.

However, this is Bangkok and the unexpected is to be expected. And the unexpected can, more often than not, astound.

So it was tonight. In New Zealand, in a suburban bar in a fairly middle class (not that the phrase means very much in the Thai capital where classes mash so, and so easily) ‘burb I’d expect a pretty awful band turning out clichéd feel-good covers in a workman like way as they do all over first world suburbia.

This, though, is Bangkok and you simply don’t get that¹.

Instead I was pulled back to that wonderful Chunky, Novi & Ernie album by an unnamed duo playing six string acoustic guitar and cello, revisiting, often quite radically, modern and more aged classics in a manner that Cale, in his most baroque moments, would have proudly claimed as his own.

The set ranged from Bill Withers to Bowie (a deeply somber take on The Man Who Sold The World which drew from the much darker original, not the lesser Cobain cover), to the most astoundingly radical rework / rebuild of Radiohead’s Creep which gave it an almost Gershwin-esque aurra

And then there was Careless Whisper – a song, if asked, I would say that I’d happily never hear again – a song that has been beaten mercilessly to near extinction by ever two bit lounge balladeer, easy listening program director and muzak hack over past thirty or so so years.

They did Careless Whisper.

It took a few minutes for the melody to register completely as the cello tugged at and extended the opening bars into something more epic and then I found myself saying, without thinking,  to Brigid ‘I love this song’.

It slipped out. I said it. And I did. Just then.

George Michael’s most offensively three minutes of schlock had become an achingly beautiful melody that, at that very moment, seemed, as performed by the long haired guitarist in the baseball cap, and the leather jacketed punk with a cello, to have become a song worthy of Weil or Styne.

They finished and I gushed. I asked them what they were called.

‘We have no name’

Where do you play?

‘Just bars’

And that was it.

And perhaps it was just a moment, but I’m wishing that my Chunky, Novi & Ernie album wasn’t sitting in a concrete storeroom in Auckland right now.

Then, it is Bangkok.

I promised, swore to, myself that I’d not bother with this in 2010.

For over twenty years I’ve either provided or simply published a best of the year list. In the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, when I contributed a dancefloor column to Rip It Up magazine, I was tasked by Murray Cammick with the best dance and hip hop records list each year. I was also, most years, asked to give other mags a best of the year list, mostly a top five.

When I did bFm, between 1989 and 2002, our ten best records of the year was an annual feature, and indeed, twice we were actually offered a one off spot outside the ghetto that the station gave electronic and hip hop back in those days, to broadcast the chart to a daytime audience.

On George FM I compiled and broadcast the best of the year in 2003, 2004 and 2005.

Since then the list has been blogged only and, to be honest, I only did it last year out of habit.

However, here I am this year again writing a list. I’m doing this not so much in the belief that what I list here really matters (although I was chuffed at having my list last year picked up by at least three US compilers of the year’s charts) but as a way of documenting to myself what I really enjoyed this year.

And with that, it’s not a best of in any sense – in 2010 with the massive amount of music now released each year (yep – music is dying folks) such would not only be impossible but something that reeks of ego. The other barrier I now have is that I’m older. I may love and be enthralled by all sorts of music, but I know there is much that I don’t quite get in the same way a 19 year old would. I guess I have to accept that. That said, I get to have a history that a 19 year old doesn’t have and hence I’m able, with some comfort to toss in a couple of records by old folks. It’s a bonus I enjoy.

So, yes, not a best of 2010 – I have no idea what that would look like – but instead a list of the records I’ve thrilled to this year.

house music all night long…

Teengirl Fantasy – 7AM

Have you heard Cheaters? Of course you have – everyone has. Or at least it’s one of those songs that drills itself into your head and you assume everyone thinks it’s an anthem for the ages – like Joe Smooth’s Promised Land, Ten City’s Right Back To You, or Sterling Void’s It’s Alright. Cheaters is one of those. Big, Big, Big and soaring. I love it even if it sounds like it was made some 25 years ago. The album though is absolutely nothing like it. Yes it has another ‘song’ – Dancing In Slow Motion – which is lovely rather than huge and perfectly placed two thirds of the way through an album that, as much as you would expect, from Cheaters, would explore the roots of house, does quite the opposite and takes you on a trip through a post minimal dub infused vista. If that sounds silly and pretentious, it is and that, I think, is the point of placing Cheaters at the end – it washes that all away and you are, or at least I am, back on the floor of a big early 1990s dancehall again at 5am.

Altered Natives – Tenement Yard Vol 1

If the last album promised to look backwards and yet didn’t, Altered Natives, really one guy, Danny Yorke’s, first album of 2010 (he did two) did quite the opposite. Reading the reviews I don’t think everyone quite got the references in this album which pointed back, perhaps unintentionally but I doubt it, to so many classic house records so faithfully. It works because that’s all it does – in a warm affectionate way it references rather than parrots or relies on those roots, and then strips those references into a record that sounds surprisingly contemporary. From Todd Terry on Body Gal and Oh My Zipper, The Burrell Brothers on Afterlife Riddum to tracks which echo Larry Heard, Wayne Gardiner, Tenaglia and mid 1980s Chi Jacking loops, you get the starting point almost immediately but then have to go where Yorke takes you with that. Killer track: I’m Just A Crush, all banging keys and 808s on a record that sounds like it should have an early Strictly Rhythm catalogue number. Blissful but noisy.

DJ Nate – Da Trak Genious

DJ Roc – The Crack Capone

Whilst the commercial centre was going all gaga over Kanye’s album (which I quite liked even if it was far less adventurous than oft claimed to my 30 year jaded hip-hop ears) out on the edge the Chicago cut’n'pasters in the briefly hip as hell Footwork / Juke scene were turning out discs that made that album sound as radical as a German schlager collection from the late 1960s. The first of these two albums was a compilation of independent singles from the still-in-his-teens Nate, going back over the two or three years, whilst the second is an album in its own right. Both however were simply astounding. The drama, raw bravado, sheer audio inventiveness and the gall made me smile repeatedly. The disrespect shown for just about everything that passed in front of the sampler and the fusion of hip hop, bootie house, rave and the whole damn kitchen sink of sounds available to anyone with a computer shows there is life in this creaky old thing called house still. The sort of records that Iggy Pop or George Clinton would be making if they were 18.

Paul Randolph – Echoes (of Lonely Eden)

I reviewed / plugged this a few months back. I had a lovely message from Paul Randoph as a result. I’ve found no reason to make any changes to the words in that post.

the smoke machine…

Jimmy Edgar – XXX

This was fun. It gets the most fun award and also the best album Prince Should Be Recording of the year award. I’ll toss in the the best butt wagging basslines of the year too, not that I do huge amounts of that – so lets make it the best chair wobbling basslines award.

Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers

I watched a BBC documentary on Krautrock last night and felt an urge to play this godchild of that movement (or series of movements) immediately afterwards, which I did. House music and techno, during their first creative surge in the 1980s and 1990s produced so few worthy long players so it comes as a surprise that the dub infused heirs of those years are now, year in, year out, producing so many. I’m guessing that’s because the disco roots are now almost subsumed by things like Neu! and Can via Brian Eno and the dub that has been part of the urban European aural landscape since the 1980s. Whatever analytical cast you put on it, this is a pretty astonishing album which, as the cliché goes, takes you on some journey.

Pariah – Safehouses EP

Prism, a lovely song which wrapped an ethereal diva-ish vocal around a flitting acid bassline was the key track on this but the balance of it was rather glorious, and yet another pointer that the divisions between house, techno of old and dubsteppy type things are now irrevocably blurred. Vaguely epic stuff.

Ikonika – Contact, Love, Want, Have

I keep on coming back to Cybotron when I listen to this, perhaps because, by nature I have trouble leaving so many records I grew with behind as we all do. However despite the contemporary smart-kids nature of this album the ghost (or aurra – he is, after all, still with us) of Juan Atkins looms large, and also, despite the words that surrounded its release, this is hardly the first record to use old game noises to make music. But it made me smile a lot and six months on it still does. I do dig the way the very best electronic records draw in so many disparate threads and then, unlike traditional rock’n'roll when it does the same, irreverently reinvents rather than just restating as guitar-bass-drums inevitably does. Sara Abdel-Hamid does that by stripping back the Kraftwerkian elements and adding a lightness that Magic Juan missed. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it all. I do that. I love this record.

James Blake – CMYK EP

James Blake – Klavierwerke EP

I guess these should really be in the pop part of this, below, but they found themselves moved up the page for two reasons – firstly because they appear on the justifiably famous (revived) Belgian techno label R&S – and secondly, because the second EP is a jump back to a sound that fits that classic label’s tradition rather the appealing almost crossover pop-esque of the title track of the first. Regardless, both EPs were big stuff and the guy is going to find fame and fortune in 2011.

the pop machine turns you on…

Phoenix Foundation – Buffalo

Ok – best album I’ve heard from New Zealand in years. Seriously. I fell in love with Buffalo in a way I haven’t with a New Zealand release for many a year. I like many NZ records on their own merits (although I’m aware there are some I give extra leeway to simply because of where they come from) and every now and then one plonks itself in front of me and I play and like it a lot. Given its relatively low international profile I have to work really hard to find New Zealand music. However few have had the impact this has had on me – I’d happily list it in my five greatest New Zealand long players ever. It’s a Mental Notes of its time and, for me at least, that praise doesn’t come higher. I absolutely dug the way it seemed to reference back to our psychedelic past and perfectly built on that – listen to The Fourmyula’s UK version of Home then this album’s Golden Ship and tell me they don’t share blood even if the latter is somewhat more epic in design. I’d not played the album for a month or two and went back to it when I was writing this. It has grown in stature. Faultless.

I swoon to this record.

Caribou –Swim

It’s the record that everybody seemed to talk about for a month of two and if I’m being honest I’m thoroughly sick to death of it at the time of writing- or at least I thought I was until played it again just now and understood yet again why Kali and Sun are two of the most affecting and timeless pop records I’ve heard this year. I liked the live album too and liked just as much how it confused US reviewers who’s first exposure to Sun Ra was the PR sheet that came with it.

Autre Ne Veut

Wow this is an odd, wonderful record. A pop record drenched in (lots of) soul, dub, electronica (Pitchfork called it ritualistic avant-pop which works for me although I’m still not sure quite what that exactly means, but then I’m often not sure what this long player exactly means) and the kitchen sink. There are times I think I’m listening to a record Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis made at the tail end of a bender in the early 1980s – the next moment I’ve got Arthur Lee banging into Sylvester Stewart and yet none of this could really have existed even a couple of years ago. A gamer changer? Sure, but there is a lot of that going on right now.

Darkstar – North

Pop, pop, pop – and from a much hyped underground label (Hyperdub). However pop it is and as that it is quite something. I’ve played and played this and still do, but was forever bemused by the endless reviews telling me that the album was drawing heavily on the prototype electronica records of the early 1980s. Really, it has a Human League cover but that’s about it. Nothing here sounds like the League’s albums, or others by Numan, OMD, BEF, Foxx or any other act from the era I can think of. I guess one writer tags it thus and the sheep follow. Ten perfectly formed airy songs that if anything owe a slight debt to the fragility of soundtracks by the great Roy Budd, although they’re more concise than Hudd’s grim Northern landscapes were ever allowed to be. They have words too.

Forest Swords – Dagger Paths

An odd and eccentric release that I’m still coming to terms with (it came to me late in the year) but strikes me as the confused sibling of the aforementioned Darkstar. Wow – there are some fabulous sound explorations underway as we head into the second decade of the century. The removal of the distractions of record label pressure by the imploding industry has just, as I hoped, loosened the ties in the same way arrival of labels like Rough Trade and Small Wonder did 30 plus years back. Like the Autre Ne Veut above (with which it shares an indie imprint, NYC’s Olde English Spelling Bee) I really don’t feel ever feel totally comfortable with or understand exactly what this is but it intrigues every time I play it. And I really love the way albums have become concise again. It is quite brilliant. I think.

Guido – Anidea

When put next to many of my favourite records in 2010 this is a very easy record to like or even love. Bristol’s Guy Middleton has gathered twelve heavily melodic compositions which, often obviously but never overwhelmingly so, blends modern r’n'b, the more spacious jazz of the seventies, the deep moodiness of the likes of Fingers Inc, and best of all refers strongly to his city’s native traditions most especially one of my favourite bands ever, Smith & Mighty (this is on the same label, Punch Drunk, as that duo’s Rob Smith). And the gorgeous Beautiful Complication should make a hell of a radio single. But of course it won’t.

Tame Impala – Innerspeaker

My rock’n'roll album of the year. As I touched on above, I think rock’n'roll in its traditional forms has long since stopped reinventing. Instead it restates now and has done for twenty plus years. But, hell, this is fun and as much as it adds nothing new to an oft restated idiom which seems to go in circles, it’s a great record with huge slabs of just about every late 60s UK psychedelic band you can name mixed in there – as The Guardian said it’s as if no new music has reached Western Australia since 1969. I doubt this will be a record for the ages, or even 2011, but I liked it in 2010.

slow and low…

Aloe Blacc – Good Things

Aloe Blacc fills the same hole that Mayer Hawthorne did a year earlier which, given that they are on the same label, is hardly surprising. There isn’t a radical nor a revolutionary moment on this record, but that’s the point and it’s all the better for it.

José James – Black Magic

James’ name appeared on two albums in 2010, this very contemporary reworking of the idiom he’s working in, bringing in the likes of Flying Lotus and Moodymann, and covering (with added vocals) Benga; and the much slighter (and later) For All We Know with pianist Jef Neve, which revisited American standards with less success than the venerable Brian Wilson (below). You have to hope that that second album wasn’t the beginning of a retreat back to the safety (and, I guess, bucks) of the Norah Jones market, but it’s concerning. I don’t begrudge the guy the dollars but one can but sense that the lush modern sound he was finding on the two Brownsville albums (this and the 2009 album, The Dreamer) offered a career path that would not only have more longevity but would arguably be more rewarding not just for the listener (meaning me) but Jones. I get the feeling I’m assuming too much.

The collections…

Walter Gibbons – Jungle Music

You’ve not a heard a disco record until you’ve heard Gibbons mindblowing 12” mix of the first record ever to appear commercially in that format, Double Exposure’s Ten Percent on Salsoul. Lush, swirling percussive sex on vinyl that nags at you and tosses you around for the best part three minutes before dropping into a chorus and then drawing you back away from that. There are times when I think it is the finest record ever made, although other times I conclude that the balance of this compilation is even better.

Bob Blank – The Blank Generation – Blank Tapes NYC 1975 – 1985

Monster selection. I guess I could live without yet another copy of Fonda Rae’s Fat Rat, and the Gladys Knight is also on the Gibbons comp (albeit in a longer mix) but the Sun Ra, Lydia Lunch, Aural Exciters (early August Darnell) and James Blood Ulmer tracks are worth the price of admission to this killer comp documenting a small part of the extensive catalogue of productions by this hugely important but mostly unhailed NY producer/engineer. And if those tracks aren’t enough, the compiler has been clever and used the B side mix of the much compiled Wax The Van by Lola. Originally on Jump St in 1986, every other comp this appears on uses the A which is fine, but any DJ who’s ever filled a floor with it knows the wigged out Jon’s Dub is the killer. It’s here.

The elderly….

Gil Scott Heron – I’m New Here

Why is this so short? 28 minutes and you are left wondering where the rest is. The master, who few would have believed would last this far into the next century, returned with an album that may have been slender time wise but was massive any other way you measured it and is, to my ears at least, his best since the mid 1970s. Wrapped in contemporary urban flavours, the UK sort, track by track – this has to be played as a single work like the Wilson below – it’s an album that almost a year after it’s release, I still find myself finding new things in everytime I play it, despite its length – and I play it almost every day. Given his personal past and recorded history, you’d forgive the guy for simply walking through this. I guess he doesn’t know how to do that.

Elvis Costello – National Ransom

Every year I list an Elvis Costello album and every year I realise that I’ve not played last year’s one for a year. That said I like a habit and I have a habit of not wanting to break it. An album that rewards in places. The best bits are, with one exception, the slow tracks but perhaps that’s just me – I’ve not ever really enjoyed a hoedown but I’ve always melted at the Macmanus balladry that used to fill his B sides in the early days but slipped onto the albums themselves as time passed. That’s Not The part of Him I’m Leaving is maudlin, depressing and all the better for it. Five Small Words, the only up track I like, shimmers like The Byrds do Merseybeat. You Hung the Moon is the song your grandmother listened to on the Sunday afternoon request session, and quite lovely for it. Bullets For The Newborn King, just bass, voice and guitar, is an heir to those early 7” flipsides, that made those singles so desirable. Best of all is the devastatingly beautiful All These Strangers . Its initial slightness belies the fact that it’s the key track on an album, once I’ve programmed out a couple of those less attractive stompers and rockers,  I’ve played and loved a lot this year.

Brian Wilson – Reimagines Gershwin

This shouldn’t work. It sounds horrific on paper and I’ve had to put the thing on again to reassure myself that I’m not making a fool of myself by touting it. It works. It’s charming, it’s lovely, the two new songs, co-writes from half finished Gershwin works, are gorgeous and are the best thing Wilson has done since the early 1970s (allowing for the fact that 2004’s Smile was a recording of an earlier suite), the voice which has been a weakness in recent years is just fine and he brings new life to songs you thought you’d likely never want to hear again, simply by opening up and accentuating with a very soft touch their native melodies. Not once does he overplay and yes well… a simply wonderful album which demands that it’s played in one sitting from beginning to end. Who would’ve thought…

“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.

Hugely recommended, this interview with Martin Mills, owner of the most important independent record label in the world (and the bloke who released some of my favourite records ever and still does):

The internet has revived interest in music, thinks Mills, by encouraging people to experiment.

“It’s made so much more possible – a greater and deeper love of music. It’s re-stimulated my own involvement in music generally, rather than just my business. The links people send you allow you to go off down a path and discover something great.

“People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You’ve got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You’ll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links. I think that comes from the integration of the laptop into both our working and our personal lives, the internet is so great at spreading the word.”

[From Indie music mogul: The net's great for us • The Register]

This post, originally from August, 2006, in reply to a question from Robbie Siataga on an earlier post, linked, still seems to work for me. I thought I’d repost it for NZ Music Month, and because of the ongoing discussion on Public Address:

————————————

This was a question I received from Dubmugga;

where do you see New Zealand music going and what measures would you implement to ensure it’s continued relevance in the standardised global media market ???

This is not somewhere I really wanted, as I said, the previous two posts about this topic, to end up. I don’t want to dig myself a hole here I can’t easily get out of, but I suspect I’m about to.

So a qualifier again: this post is not trying to offer definitive answers, rather it’s a series of random thoughts, written as they occur. My opinion is just that and I don’t pretend to have any answers or pretend to be able to predict anything. I’m no seer, and I’m no self proclaimed expert.

DM…you expressed your fairly strongly held, feelings about NZ on Air and the way they administer the brief they have from the people of NZ, via the current government, to promote the nation’s music across the broadcasting spectrums. Your opinions are not uncommonly held and are regularly expressed on various forums and elsewhere.

Whilst I have my problems too with some of this they’re not nearly as pronounced as yours and others’ are. It is a topic, however, that a lot of people, musicians especially, feel very strongly about.

Myself, I think NZ on Air is trapped a little between the need to promote something with a strong indigenous flavour (i.e. the cultural side of its brief) and the commercial radio stations who, despite lip service have no desire to play any real percentage of New Zealand music and would, if the political environment was right, drop most of it as fast as they possibly could. It’s a tough place for Brendan to be and for this reason, and a few others, I am of two minds about the concept of a quota. On a clear downside, and evidenced in NZ recently, the quota (and I’ve said this many times) strips the music of its identity, especially its cultural identity, in the mad drive to get songs on a radio system that is obliged to play a percentage but only wants to play songs that fit easily.

They don’t want songs that quirkily stand out, they want songs that blandly sell ads, songs from acts like Breaks Co-op, the new Stellar and Brooke Fraser which are facelessly unthreatening. I’m not saying they’re bad…Breaks Co-op are quite pleasant. But that, sadly, is not what the NZ music industry, if it is to thrive and survive, needs. It needs raw and rough originality, music that sounds different to that global mass released daily. I think Scribe had that, it was so wonderfully Newzild despite its pretensions to being otherwise.

However, I have to say, it’s an ominous sign that his new, massively overdue, album is being recorded (partially with DJ Premier, a bit of a hero of mine) in NYC. But that’s what the soulless bulldozer that is Australian A&R (which has had a shitty record in recent years) does I’m afraid, as I know from personal experience.

The US music industry is in massive trouble and yet these acts strive to sound like it, where the hell is the logic in that. The most influential NZ music in recent decades, the music which has had an international presence (with the exception of Haley, but that’s another whole thing) is music that sounded drastically different to everything else out there, and was, with the exception of How Bizarre, deemed to be decidedly radio unfriendly (and HB was deemed to be unsuitable for radio in NZ by every programmer but one originally). I’m talking about early Split Enz and the Flying Nun catalogue of the eighties. Nothing else out of NZ has had the musical influence of those three outside the country.

Up against that is the need for hits. Pop music is driven by hits which traditionally are driven by radio and video, hence the two main targeted focal points for NZOA. And I agree with that focus generally. Without hits, underground or overground, no sales. You can’t survive on credibility, as Flying Nun found, being forced to bring in Mushroom as a partner (which started the process where NZ’s most important catalogue disappeared into an American corporate which will inevitably eventually forget it exists).

But that formula…radio, video, hits…is changing and will change in future years (and not too future…very few predicted Youtube five years ago, although the pointers were there) in ways we can’t imagine yet. How the hits will come will change and that change has already begun. Digital access to everything, unbelievable interactivity in our entertainment and the sheer amount of material available to each and every one of us is inevitably going to force a sea-change in musical entertainment as radical as the one the planet endured when recorded music first became widely available about 90 years ago.

Already one thing is obvious. The album as such is more or less in its death throes. It’s going to take a while but it’s inevitable. The song, which is where this all started, is where it’s all going back to, and the delivery medium is a form of digital or the suchlike. It’s easy to forget that the album as a force is less than 40 years old. And there are very few successful albums that haven’t been driven by one or two key songs. Even the iPod and its equivalent is just an interim step…already music capable phones are dealing to standalone MP3 players in the more technologically advanced societies of Asia.

This inevitable step makes the major record companies largely redundant. All they really offer now is the means of distribution and the money to record and make videos. The last two requirements have more or less already slipped out of their hands as the means to do both are to a releasable level are within the means of virtually anyone.

The video delivery process too is in the process of being democratised. The means of distribution offered by the majors will still be a strength as long as people want to buy CDs from brick and mortar shops, but the end of that is in sight too, perhaps not in the next couple of years but sooner than most people realise. And any requirement for physical CDs will be fulfilled by central warehousing linked to shops that are little more than ordering and listening booths, mostly in Wal-mart / Warehouse type operations. Already the hardcore artist fanbases are almost exclusively catered for on-line.

The only other thing the big boys can offer traditionally is marketing muscle. Once again the digital revolution, right now the likes of MySpace and the p2p sites and MP3 blogs are removing that from the domain of the majors and placing it in the hands of the artists or their switched on management. Ever wondered why the big boys are so violently against the P2P sharers. They’ve been screwing people for decades without a conscious ethical murmur, so the righteousness of their position is questionable. No it’s because it removes another layer of control, of need for their services. The majors will soon be reduced to little more than catalogues to be licensed, and a few mega acts that can’t survive outside the machinery of those companies.

In 2006 over 20% of the music sold globally now comes from sources outside the majors. As that creeps more and more on-line it means that a larger percentage of the return from the sales of music will return to the makers. A record or CD will no longer need to have a massive comfort zone in the pricing (about $10 per CD on a full priced NZ disc) to cover the majors’ bloated costs, or the “warehousing”. The artist will, hopefully, no longer have to suffer punitive recording contracts. Even the role of the publisher is reduced to little more than a bank and a sync negotiator as the digital age and various performing rights organisations provide all the services a writer really needs. The balance shifts.

So what has this got to do with the future of NZ music. Everything, actually. It’s a reasonable assumption that in the medium term multinational labels will cease to invest in local music. Australia has already seen a huge drop in local signing in the past couple of years and the same is evident in NZ.

In my previous post I talked about the digital divide between New Zealand and the rest of the planet. On the NZ Radio list I was lambasted a while back by someone for saying that NZ has no hotspots. The argument was that NZ did not have the population of support such technology. That, of course is nonsense. Here in Bali, with a population of 3.5 million, they are everywhere, in the tourist areas, in the domestic areas, in the malls, the food halls; and it’s the same across much of the world. That’s a little thing but it’s important as it signifies the gulf that has developed between New Zealand and much of the world. I now reside in a third world country but I feel that, visiting New Zealand regularly, as I do, I’m going into a technology vacuum there. The technological gulf has tempered the music buying habit that we took so much for granted in previous years. And for kids to buy music, especially NZ music it has to be two things, exciting and accessible. The quota has largely removed the exciting bit, and the difficulty of getting local music beyond the traditional means (which means buying an album, not the songs you want) has dampened accessibility.

As the digital move is made away from majors and multinationals, so NZ on Air’s role will have to change. How exactly I’m not sure, but a return to their grassroots seems obvious, supporting the smaller, cutting edge, more innovative music being made at that level. I think the export drive, the funding of such and the relentless talking, committees, and reports are and were a waste of space and time. Unless of course you have something viable to sell. No one was doing Fat Freddies abroad but there are 200 Brooke Frasers. Which one makes more sense to push. And yet the whole NZOA system has been dedicated to the likes of that latter because it made our radio happy and worked for the quota. FFD on the other hand were made by the fans, both in NZ and abroad, and, like Split Enz, in 1979, driven to radio by the public.

So as I said earlier, the mad rush to radio removed the things that made so much music identifiably ours. The industry got caught up in the whole “kiwi music” thing and “kiwi music month” so much that it lost track of what was special in the first place. I think we do our best musicians a disservice too by putting all “kiwi music” on such a pedestal, forever saying that we have so much talent in NZ, implying that it is somewhat more advantaged than the rest of the world.

Of course we have talent, but no more so than a city of four million people anywhere else in the world. There are some, no make that, many, truly awful musicians and bands in the country too. Being “kiwi” doesn’t make the 50% of stuff on most “Kiwi Hit Discs” that is un-listenable, any better than it is in the real world.

Our edge and the ability to sell New Zealand music elsewhere doesn’t rely on where we come from, to most of the world, it matters little. They don’t care and don’t want to care when they hear Six Months in A Leaky Boat or How Bizarre, on the radio, where it was recorded. Lets not be parochial and arrogant about this. Our edge comes from the fact that these songs sounded completely, radically, different to whatever else was on the dial. A difference that the quota has dulled, with tangible results now.

Ok, that’s enough from me…I’ve said my bit, probably a bit too much. Some of the opinions expressed are probably rather crudely put and need fleshing out somewhat but I think I need a Bintang……

In honour of New Zealand Music Month, from Otaki (and a huge hattip to Yvette Parsons, without whom we may never have seen these):

or the live version:

With the upload comment:

only thing the annoys me is the sound person did not know how to do the sound correctly, so…that’s why I was off pitch. sorry guys, but I did do the best I could under that situation.