I watched some sad git attempting to do a cover of Foreigners’ “Cold as Ice” on that appalling INXS thing the other night…or at least the bit I saw before I flicked the remote…poor old Michael Hutchens must be rotating on his belt…

I met him twice…once in Sydney in the very early eighties when he was playing some pub with the then unknown INXS and once in Cause Celebre when he asked me to remove the offending Kylie (his girlfriend at the time I think) album cover on the wall behind the DJ booth with a nail thru her head. Mr Perry, in the booth at the time, simply spun it on the nail and smiled…

Cover versions are a funny thing…totally pointless or intriguing with no middle ground. I discovered Richard Hell’s live remake of Allen Toussaint’s “Cruel Way To Go Down”, a song I love unconditionally in its original form, quite by accident when I was downloading “Love Comes in Spurts” (the usual case of acquiring again what I own several copies of…just not here, ok?) from Emusic and grabbed it. Big fan of Richard Hell’s work, in any media but I’d not heard his stab at this. It was on, the surface, an odd mix, the angular punk and the delirious big production of the original but it worked…angular metallic funk would, courtesy of the likes of the mighty Gang Of 4 (been playing the Damaged Goods EP a lot recently.. fuck me, “Armalite Rifle” is such a killer song) become the soundtrack of much of the late seventies and early eighties and Hell was such a torchbearer for those that headed in that direction, it made sense …..another one I found this week on the iPod by random was the live version of Barrett Strong’s “Money” by the Beatles. I guess it’s off an “Anthology” or something and I’ve heard it a dozen times or more without listening properly but the headphones give the song a focus. The Motown original is a jaunty thing that helped establish the label; the version on “With the Beatles” (my favourite Beatles album) takes it to another level, gives it a meaning it never had before. But the live take is something else altogether. The threat in the Lennon vocal is just plain vicious and implies, with menace, grievous bodily harm if he or she doesn’t hand over the cash. The Rolling Stones for all their cartoon satanic majesty in their day never sounded this threatening. Ever…

The other one I found a few days back was a delightful cover by The Mighty Diamonds of the Chi-lites “Stoned Out of My Mind” which gave the chi-soul classic a pleasant, but less ethereal, Caribbean sheen…dunno where or when it came from (it was just on the hard drive) but it worked for me.

Despite the perceived distance between the two, punk and funk always had a linkage. I remember talking with Kerry Buchanan about the joys of George Clinton back in 77 and it was never far from the surface. The disco’s dead thing was more about the travesties of “Do You Think I’m Sexy” and Olivia Newton John than black music per se….

The record that does my head in right now is the bloody Magic Numbers…seriously…what whingeing post James Taylor shite. I really tried after all the critical raves…but go away please, you make me ill…

I’m trying to push this back in the direction of the punk / funk thang so I can mention my favourite records right now. The Juan Maclean album “Less than Human” has been a long time coming, and indeed, one of the tracks, the killer white boy p-funk workout “Give Me Every Little Thing” has been around for several years…but, worth the wait? Yep indeed… I’ve been playing the mutha over and over for the past two weeks. It feels like Clinton meets Neu meets the first PIL album meets a scalpel. Far more ordered but from the same camp is the Lindstrom remix of the LCD’s “Tribulations” which is given a Moroder-ish twist that suits it perfectly, removing the cut’n’paste discoid feel of the original somewhat and taking it somewhere into somewhere into the European hinterland in the early eighties. There’s a Tiga mix too which is more electro-by-numbers so I guess it will be big on George

The other tune I really like this week has no name…Tomorrowpeople’s unnamed demo hit me without warning…as did Andrew’s last two demos. Sharp without trying too hard and a lovely subtle swaying feel, almost an electro shuffle. Make a record, bro…..

Last night, sitting all by myself in a Bali evening I indulged myself in the DVD of Don Letts’ recently released docu-thesis, “Punk: Attitude”. I’d been quietly (I say quietly because most people around me these days seem would run a mile from a film about punk which is a shame…Harry suggested I get a bunch of older farts together to watch it, but I don’t know if there are many I know from the era concerned I’d want to spend that long in a room with) anticipating this, partially because Letts was there (and he gives himself the credit he is due in the film) as the DJ at the infamous Roxy, and as an associate of so many concerned has access to interviews and footage that most other filmmakers approaching this topic (which, to clarify is: “What is Punk?”) could only dream about; and partially because he is a self appointed social historian of his era, somewhat hit and miss but substantially more of the former.

His compilations, especially the superb “Social Classics” series for Heavenly (although the best of these, Dread Meets B-Boys Downtown ,is now, unfortunately, due to clearance issues, deleted and rare as hell) are beyond criticism and the exposure he gave reggae and dub at The Roxy had a monumental influence on popular music and the direction it took as UK punk died off, under its own weight and the arrival of followers rather than leaders, in 1978. As (I think) Henry Rollins says in the movie, Public Image Limited were far more interesting than the Sex Pistols and (the unspoken bit) Letts’ influence was a major part of that reason. I guess you could also argue that without Letts you may not have had The Police and the odious Sting would still be a schoolteacher, but you can’t have everything.

He also made all the Clash’s vids, and was in Big Audio Dynamite, so enough said….

So to the question at hand….filled with very rare and, at times, astounding, footage (James White & The Blacks contorting live, the Pistols watching themselves on the Grundy show and Howard Devoto with The Buzzcocks for example), incredibly lucid and sometimes hilarious (check out Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls, the movie is worth it just for him) interviews which illustrate as much as anything that despite the raison d’etre of punk being a raised finger “fuck you”, it was an intelligent, directed, movement and the protagonists, at least until the early eighties knew why they were saying fuck you to, for want of a better phrase, “the establishment”. The film grasps and elucidates that well, drawing a direct line from Chuck and Elvis, through the sixties sub-Rolling Stones acts and on to The Velvets, MC5 and The Stooges before the style (although there was never a punk style, just a punk attitude, which is what this film is really about), most widely understood as punk (those that made it never used the term until much later) arrived in the early seventies. But it also grasps the social and intellectual side of punk….the Warholian, Westwood and Mcclaren aspect, plus the clear trans-Atlantic divide that both drove and separated the two major streams (he touches on the fact that punk movements erupted spontaneously around the world without reference to each other…NZ is a case in hand- but the UK and the USA are the clear focal points of this film and even then much (Pere Ubu??) is excluded due to time constraints), making mention of the enormous impact The Ramones had at The Roundhouse in 1976.

Where the film loses its way and starts to drag a little…actually quite a bit, is the last fifteen minutes or so where he forgets the social focus and moves into the US hardcore scene, which as, yet again, Rollins says, was and is an enormously reactionary movement and the antithesis of what punk was about. Of course by 1980 the essence of punk had moved into the UK post-punk scene and the US no-wave movement (Simon Reynold’s “Rip It Up and Start Again” is essential reading here) which also mutated and cross fertilized with disco and early hip-hop. All and all an incredibly exciting mashing which reverberates today, still outside, in the US at least, the mainstream. I’d also question the focus on Nirvana in the last part of the film…to me Nirvana were nothing more than middle American youth, and corporate tamed rebellion coming to terms with and going to a place NYC and the rest of the planet had got to a decade earlier. A couple of good songs though, but nothing could excuse paving the way for the gruesome Foo Fighters.

If punk is an attitude, by the mid eighties there were far more punk things going on in the warehouses of Chicago and the backrooms of Detroit and the studios of Brooklyn, Manchester and Cologne than there were in Seattle. “Voodoo Ray” or “Queen of Rox” were as punk a record as anything by the Stooges.

But despite it all I loved this film…so many people that meant so much to me from maybe the last gasp of radical post Chuck Berry rock’n’roll until the rhythms and raw technology of the late seventies onwards transformed the cutting edge forever. It comes as a shock to me, and a sign of personal fragility, to see the likes of The Clash as wizened old men and I would’ve loved to have seen a little bit of insight from the likes of Maclaren and Lydon rather than the hardcore twats later in the film, but c’est la vie…

Fuck…this turned into an essay and I didn’t mean it to…so lighter moments…ten records that made me smile this Monday in Sanur:

George Harrison: Hear Me Lord…a wonderful faux gospel pastiche, produced by Phil Spector back in 1971. The choir sounds like it is in the next room with someone opening the door as required.

Public Enemy: Public Enemy #1….I remember playing this on the radio for the first time when I pinched the promo from CBS….the body snatchers had landed and nothing sounded the same ever again…

Neil Howard: Indulge….such a wonderful nine minutes of primitive, completely radical early techno without which…check out the delay on the snare. Pure sex….

Mu: Hello Bored Biz Man…I found this on the Idjut Boys collection on Tirk and it makes me smile a lot. Mrs and Mr Maurice Fulton can do no wrong. Nutty piano nonsense…..

LCD Soundsystem: Too Much Love…one of the best tracks from one of the best albums of 2005. I guess what I love about these guys is the rawness so evident, even when the stuff is well produced….it embodies a spirit and a passion that eludes so much rock’n’roll.

Stan Getz: Chega de Saudade….a bit of latin cheese from the late, and justifiably lauded Mr Getz off the latter day, and not highly regarded, “Big Band Bossa Nova” album which has its moments of which this is one…

Carl Craig / Alexander Robotnik: Problemz…..nuff said

Todd Rungdren: Hello it’s Me….tried to clear this for a compilation once but no-one knew who owned it. I spoke to Todd himself who said Warner Music. So I rang Warner Music (again) here and asked; they said they had never heard of Todd, his label or this wonderful plaintiff ditty. Shortly after the big axe came down on Warner’s NZ’s staff. I wonder why?

Brenda Holloway: You’ve Made Me So Very Happy…everyone knows David Clayton Thomas’s take of this but the original by this early Motown chanteuse, leaves it for dead.

Pere Ubu: Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo…….this must’ve scared the fuck out of downtown Akron back in 75 or so. It still sounds menacing and terrifying all these years later.

It’s amazing what sixteen hours in the air (using the laptop as a battery re-charger) can do for your ears. I spent the best part of my ten days in drab and grumpy old Auckland revitalising my iPod and left with close to 2000 songs, many of which were found in the boxes of old CDs out the back of the office, some of which haven’t seen my light for close to a decade or more. It was like making acquaintance with a bunch of long lost, and sometimes estranged friends…you know, you fell out but some time later you have no idea why and just put it down to an over familiarity some time back.

I don’t know if I really want to roll out lists of what I listened to…sixteen hours is one hell of a long list & beyond me… and, anyway, if it comes to iPod lists, Jen over at The Smacked Face does it so much better than me. But I did, as I said, revisit a few dark recesses which had no idea I was heading towards. I love shuffle and I have a fairly unbending rule that I don’t look at the display and I don’t fast forward.

Of course the shuffle process is marred by one obvious flaw…payola. Nothing on this planet will convince me that Quincy Jones and Steve Jobs are not, somehow, deviously, in cahoots. I had a Quincy Jones compilation (put together actually by my buddy Nathan Graves at Universal Jazz in the UK before he ran off to look after Gilles Peterson’s various ventures) on the pod and its now down to about five tunes left as I filtered the things off, but regardless of this, Quincy keeps on coming around every few songs. Day in day out, there is the bloody theme from Ironsides or Stuff three or four songs in…I’ve resisted deleting the lot as some sort of perverse experiment to see how long this keeps happening…..it must be some sort law, the number of plays per Quincy track is inversely related to the number of tracks on your pod or something like that…QJ=IPOD²

Nevertheless, the vastly enjoyable fact that I can be hit with Johnny Cash, then Quincy of course, then Fingers Inc then Timebox (the not as obscure as it used to be 1968 post-mod epic, “Beggin” from Mike Patto (I released a record from Ivan Zagni who used to be in this band, although not on this record…six degrees blah blah…) complete with soaring and crashing strings…who needs drugs when music is this good) then The Who (two tracks, in a row, off their best studio album, “Quadrophenia”…when Pete Townsend pulled all those strands together in one almighty peak before it all got a little sad) then Elvis Costello (of course) doing a “Radio Sweetheart” shuffle, then Barbara Tucker and the MAW dub of “I Get Lifted”, is the crucial upside of a digital player for me.

To be honest, I scribbled these ones down somewhere north of Darwin but got a bit moody on the next one and lost the plot for a spell.

Eugene Record did my head in. I love Eugene Record. As a kid growing up in New Zealand in the seventies I had no exposure to the mighty Chi-lites, or even less than none to the man’s solo works for Warner’s later that decade…we were all punkish and silly by then anyway and the afro-ed man in the flared suits and platforms would’ve made us run a mile then. How silly you can be. Sweet soul had a bit of traction in NZ….the Stylistics of course and the odd Philly hit, plus I remember falling in love to Blue Magic’s wonderfully understated “Sideshow” at age 17, but it was never more than the odd track. So it took Paul Weller to bring me to the Chi-lites, via The Jam’s cover of “Stoned Out Of My Mind” on the “Beat Surrender” EP. I tried to find an album around Auckland with no success until I eventually stumbled on a Greatest Hits during a raiding session of the samples in the CBS NZ boardroom in 1982 and was besotted, something that’s not changed since. I discovered the joys of his solo work (and as recently as a month ago found a hitherto unknown, at least to me, Impressions album from 1981, produced by Eugene and his longstanding production partner, Carl Davis, which featured a killer cut of “Fan the Fire”, which Eugene had done so well a couple of years earlier in his mostly not so hot disco phase). Eugene got the Lord a few years back and gave it all away, which is fine (you can find that side of his life here if you are so inclined…a graphic artist he clearly was not) as he did his bit and if the Lord was ever to judge a man on his contribution to the soul of mankind then….. I could go on and on about how wonderful Eugene and The Chi-lites were but there’s no need.

You could even forgive him for the lyrics to “Homely Girl”:

It must have broke your poor little heart
When the boys used to say,
You looked better in the dark.

So at 40,000 feet the little white rectangular machine spun across to “Overdose of Joy” and I read almost at the same time in the newspaper I had on my knee of Eugene’s passing from the big C (did you know Capsicum is highly carcinogenic…just thought I’d pass on that phobia) at the early age of 64 and I lost it… a grown man sobbing…I got an odd look or two before I pulled myself together. I’m just pleased he died a deservedly wealthy man, after “Crazy in Love” which is little more than a cover of his “Are You My Woman” with new lyrics (and Danny Krivit did a sterling job of mashing the two together on a “limited” 12”).

I was reading in Mojo about Bo Diddley sitting in his “modest’ house in the South and I thought “modest’??? What did Bo do? He invented Rock’n’Roll that’s all but gave his rights away to Chess (read: Universal, who could surely afford to give them back but show no inclination)…..

So, bugger it, Luther and Eugene in a month. It’s all coming of a time…more and more of my heroes are passing and (damn….Phuture’s “Acid Trax” has just come on the pod…now I’m happy) so hazard I’m feeling a bit vulnerable and aged. It happens I guess as time flows on but each one still pricks a bit. I got a bit sad about Joey Ramone the other day too for some reason, all that promise and then fifteen years stuck in a typecast prison with people you hate…and then you die…

I’m getting morose again…

And talking of time flowing, it’s a sobering thought that its twenty years since the French government, in act of terror that they’ve yet to really be held accountable for, blew up the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour and murdered a photographer.

I was, last week, fortunate enough to see a rough cut of Claudia Pond-Eyley’s forty minute documentary, “The Women Who Launched a Rainbow”. Made for less than $2000, and rejected out of hand by TVNZ who had their own Rainbow Warrior documentary which I’ve not seen (but I fail to understand how such an important occasion can’t support two pieces) and TV3, but fortunately picked up by Greenpeace globally and several festivals, the work focuses on several women who lived and worked with the ship throughout its decade of work and is profoundly moving, especially the final sequence as the boat slips below Matauri Bay with the recent remake of Don McGlashan’s “Anchor Me” as the soundtrack. The film is made with same passion (and this more than compensates for any budgetary limitations…in fact the way it is made is integral, maybe even vital, to the film’s spirit) that took New Zealand to the place it was in the nineteen eighties when, for much of the decade, after the Stalinism of Robert Muldoon’s misgovernment, the people of the nation spoke, firstly with the 1981 tour then the anti-nuclear movement when the overwhelming will of the populace was heard and listened to.

As a New Zealander I’m justifiably proud of my country’s stance then and most of my countrymen and women would agree something we need to protect and treasure but are, in 2005 in grave danger of losing as the National Party refuses to commit to such. Mallard’s comment about policy being made in Washington may have been unwise but the drift was not…senior National party members have already said in the past couple of years that they would unquestioningly follow the USA wherever it went. There really can’t be any doubt that Brash would happily align New Zealand with a US foreign policy that in 2005, as London recently found out, is not a happy place to be.

Brash’s refusal to answer the question about New Zealand’s commitment to Iraq under his administration is simply gutless and his dismissal of the question as hypothetical and historic is appalling. I doubt if many Iraqi’s would agree it is all historic. Polling today suggests many NZers agree…

You have to ask yourself too, how many New Zealanders would be dead now if NZ had been under a Brash administration in 2003.

As an aside, I’ve also been wondering, based on current reporting standards, when the NZ Herald ceased to to be a newspaper and became a National party auxillary as it now plainly is…the obvious twists and anti-government bias I saw whilst back in NZ in July were so blatant they would make The Sun blush…

And finally, sticking with old fogies…check out Danny Barnes’ fine review of Danse Macabre at The Kings Arms last week, on Peter Mac’s site. I got to spin a tune or two before and after and had a ball…….

a)God I dislike the Buddha Bar albums. When I tossed together my audio hate list a couple of weeks back this was clearly a major omission. I think my credibility was more or less shot to pieces by my admission about Elvis anyway, so what the hell.

The Buddha Bar, the bloody Buddha Bar, volumes one to fifty three or whatever, is everywhere here in Bali and I hate it with a vengeance. To be honest I despise any faux pseudo-chill-out styled new age-ish nonsense with a passion. I guess I just like music with a backbone and my punk legacy screams shite every time I hear Café Del Crap or whatever. Sadly every café, bar, restaurant, bar or western orientated warung in this paradise seems to think that playing a Buddha Bar CD gives them an air of sophistication.

Beep….wrong…..

Don’t get me wrong, passionate, soulful dubbed out downbeat forms are an addiction for me as much as the noisier forms of electronic music (as I type I’m getting tingles from Gregory Isaac’s sublime Slum), I just can’t deal with the fake, overpriced, badly packaged, sub-world-music plastic that is the Buddha Bar series…and the fact that it’s thrust at me daily.

b)Gordon Bennett…why am I saying this? I’m sitting in paradise, surrounded by boundless beauty, by wonderful people who really understand the word “smile”, by restaurants serving exquisite food that we can only dream of in enzild, by Indonesia, which I love so much as a country. I guess it’s the one flaw in this little dream…I miss my music so bloody much and I KNOW I have a whole bunch of new stuff sitting waiting for me in Auckland that I can’t get my hands on right now. Like the remixes of the new Juan MacLean single and the new Arnold Jarvis / Franck Roger collaboration and a killer new collection of songs from the sixties inspired by Phil Spector that I’m gagging to hear…despite the fact that he’s currently sporting the worst haircut since that twat from A Flock Of Seagulls, and may well have put a bullet into some girl. I guess I’ll have to wait a while…but it’s not easy. I wonder if I can convince Singapore Air that an SL1200 is legitimate carry on luggage.

c)Talking of convictions and Bali, thank god all that Corby stuff is going away. I mean, I feel sorry as hell for the girl, especially now the Knight in Shining Armour, Ron Bakir, seems to be asking her for half a million dollars as a payback, which is not that surprising when you look at him, and the parents and the obvious culture, or lack thereof, they come from. Yep, I feel for the girl, 20 years (or more if the prosecutor and Indonesian public opinion gets their way) is one hell of a long time, but she knew what she was doing (and nothing I’ve seen to offer anything resembling reasonable doubt…even most Australian legal voices opine that she would’ve been convicted under domestic law). But I guess what really offends me is the reaction from Australia. Firstly, the overwhelmingly anti-Indonesian explosion ignores the fact that she was, if innocent, the victim of an Australian drug ring…nothing to do with Indonesia. But the truly offensive thing is the racism so implicit in the reaction in Australia, from their rather odious Prime Minister downwards. The, as one poll had it, 90 odd percent of Australians who felt that she had been wrongly convicted seem to have made an assumption that, as a non-white, non Christian nation, Indonesia is incapable of dealing fairly with this…that the system is inherently inferior to the system practiced in English speaking “civilized” nations. Ignoring of course the thousands of years of developing civilization in this part of the world (and if you want, or need, to add a European element to it, four hundred years of Dutch, Portuguese and English contact…long before the penal colony of 1788). At Denpasar airport the other night it was sad, and funny, to watch the terrified arriving Ockers off the Brisbane flight with all their bags wrapped in sealed plastic. I wouldn’t be surprised if good old Ron had the wrapping concession at Brisbane Airport.

Of course the Australian legal system is impeccably corruption free….

What bought this on was the fat sweating slob outside an ugly RFL bar in Kuta wearing a “Free Schapelle you Bastards” T-Shirt and the thought of the ingrained racism I always have trouble dealing with in Australia. How dare they?

d)I miss New Zealand a little (but not that much…it’s more about certain people than the place, and there are people I miss all over the world, like my best buddy Mark in Sydney), but what I’m not missing is the ingrained aggression in much of the culture. The violence implied in conversation, in encounters, in written form…not physical violence, although there is that too…Auckland is a very heavy place at times, five minutes driving tells you that…but simply the day to day way many people approach their fellow humans. I don’t know whether it’s the Rugby (although I suspect it’s a big part of it) or the immature society or the booze or the weather but you can feel the unnecessary tension whenever you make contact. Scary, but I feel it as I get off an aircraft in NZ…bang into the paranoid unfriendliness of New Zealand Customs….

e) Fortunately a few days back here knocks that on the head….

This is what the onset of winter does to a soul….

Okay, okay…time to be a miserable old git. After god knows how many decades surrounded by black and silver bits of plastic and having paid for countless record company lunches at Prego out of my purchases, I’m going to indulge in a bit of negative self gratification by naming the artists I unreservedly hate. I’ve paid for the right. Not only financially but by the virtue of having suffered a lot as the likes of Radio bloody Hauraki rotate endlessly much of this guff, or having involuntarily been put in a position where my senses are viciously assaulted by the below acts and records. There are lots of records I don’t like which is neither here nor there. There are lots of records I love too and I get a massive buzz mumbling on about those, as I do. But these are the acts I hate, without rhyme, reason, or logic. I can see nothing that redeems their existence.

Its not all bad..out of some sort of respect for New Zealand Music month, I’ve not mentioned any local acts…..actually I’m lying here..there are no NZ acts that fit the bill. As I mentioned in my last ramble, Wayne Bell and I had tossed around a worst of NZ (which has now been honourably named “Nature’s Worst” by an anonymous commenter below…..a wholly appropriate name as there is a fair crossover between our list and the “Nature’s Best” top 30) but that is song based rather than artist based. Let’s face it, most NZ acts, no matter how lousy they are, don’t get to make enough albums to reach a truly despicable rating, a career F-; although The Narcs came close. And Mi-sex almost qualified but they were more indescribably average than awful, something we in NZ have always celebrated.….These guys just make or made records you simply don’t notice.

This being incredibly negative thing is quite a release actually.

So….to the venom…in no particular order apart from numero uno. I almost can’t bring myself to type……

• Dire Straits: there, I did it. My god I hate Mark fucking Knoffler and his whinging bunch of low rent money-for-nothings. I’ve never been able to figure out the appeal of these soulless, rhythmless, tuneless, faceless twats. Some acts develop a kitsch appeal from a distance. No such luck here. If the National Party were a band, they’d sound like this.
• Sting & The Police: Who in god’s name buys this stuff. Actually no one these days. Universal advertised a Sting album on TV for about a year and still didn’t manage to chart it. Not bad in a country where selling 20 copies nationwide in a week gets you in the top 30 for much of the year. An odious little school teacher with no obvious talent or charisma. No wonder his band mates hated him. Mark Knoffler is his mate……
• Bruce Springsteen: yep, I know he’s an icon and all that and he’s worthy, an artist and the working man’s poet but really, it’s all verbose pretentious crap. The working class man with millions in the bank, a model on each arm and too much to say. He almost redeemed himself when he came out publicly against GWB, but, lets face it, you’d have to have an IQ below that of the average piece of coal to vote for Bush…so, Bruce…sorry, no offence meant, but fuck off…..
• Bob Dylan: Up to about 73, Bob was cool…he was the man. He looked like nothing on the planet, wore shades better than any man ever has and he wrote sharp songs, funny fuck-you sort of stuff, culminating in the peerless “Blood on the Tracks”. But then it all went to shit. He became the nauseous, eccentric voice of an aging generation with nothing to say. Yep, I know he wins Grammies (nuff said) but seriously Bob…shut up.
• Fleetwood Mac: the first albums were okay (the Peter Green era), but, honestly, since then its been a black hole. Actually..more like an endless nasal cavity with a missing membrane. The cocaine addled soundtrack to suburban mediocrity. And now they’re hailed as “Balearic”. Makes you a bit ill really…
• Steely Dan: beautifully played, beautifully produced soulless crap. Miles Davis hated them and that’s good enough for me…
• Supertramp: largely forgotten now which is some sort of justice, but in my youth you couldn’t escape this nasal fluffy shite. The reason why large slabs of the seventies are best forgotten.
• U2: I’m eternally grateful for the massive bar tab these buys ran up at Cause Celebre all those years back, and I have a quiet soft spot for the first album “Boy”. But seriously, since then it’s been a spiralling descent into an ever growing void. To be honest, I feel more sorry than anything for this talentless foursome. Well I would if they didn’t have a higher GDP than most African nations. The sad, desperate, re-launch of the band with every album makes me cringe…remember the “Discotheque” thing…oh dear. Bono is a truly embarrassing self important dickhead and the rest are not a lot better. What sort of grown man calls himself “The Edge”.
• Coldplay: somebody give these guys a spine
• Bob Marley: now I’m in trouble. Bruce might be an icon but Bob is now celestial, especially in a country where the national day and his birthday are one and the same. Big, big fan of the Wailers and Bob up till about ’75 but the corporate machine after that leaves me cold and does my head in. Good gig though…..
• Bootlegs / Remixes: the dance variety where some old rock or soul track gets a four on the floor treatment from some hack like Grant Nelson or such and gets picked up as a floor filler by DJ no-hope. See Fleetwood Mac & Dire Straits above. Also Funky House.
  

And talking of whingeing: over at The Life of Riley, Myk has a fair old go at Auckland on a return visit and gets a bit of flack for it. Fair enough I reckon. How dare you have an opinion on the country that god chose as the anointed one, bro. What the fuck do you mean, heading overseas for a while, trekking around the planet, widening your horizons and then coming back with an informed view? How dare you criticize..do you like it or not. If not..on yer bike yer pommy wannabe…

To be fair Myk, the drinks are somewhat cheaper than Londontown in my experience..$7.50 is only $1 more than the clubs were charging a decade or so ago, and the ciggies in clubs ban gets my vote. But musically, bang on I reckon…viva la revolution. Fuck knows we need it.

And buy the Fat Freddy’s album Myk…its fairly representative of where independent music is at in NZ right now. It’s not my cuppa…it’s pleasant enough, and its hit a nerve in NZ, but it still sounds to me like a feral (what is it with the feral thing in NZ right now…can musicians no longer afford soap) UB40 infused with a touch of Stevie Wonder, which is better than The Black Seeds, who remind me of UB40 with Nick Kershaw on vocals. But I think its bloody fantastic that it’s number one, with all that implies for independent music and the future of musical expression in this country. You don’t have to like a record to support it..

I don’t think that last line is enough to keep me out of trouble sadly…I guess the dark side may’ve got me

I promise the next post will be really really positive……

so i’d better get to it pronto

The Positive Post

Ummmmm………

Six months into 2005 and its been a pretty astounding year for music. A pretty astounding year for debut albums too, despite the doom and gloom and depression that allegedly is swamping the music industry. The iPod and all the other players, and the ongoing online revolution, both legal and illegal, has given popular music a thriving new currency. So much music being listened to with so much passion by so many people.

I love the Plantlife album and can’t for the life of me see why it’s not the biggest record on the planet right now. The most exciting pop-hop record since the first De La Soul. Funny, sharp and that rare beast..a record that works from beginning to end…over and over and over again. Right now, its album of the year..this week

The Tussle album is a funky (a much abused term sadly) twisted left field disc that evokes the spirit of ESG and Liquid Liquid (Dennis Young is on the record), and the 12” mixes on one of my favourite labels, Rong, are simply the shizz. Big gnarly basslines and banging grooves that twist your spine.

And why are so many good records coming out of Norway. Todd Terje’s Jacko twist is pretty amazing, especially the middle bit and the way it bumps back in with the vocal at about 8 mins (question: if he’s (MJ, not Todd Terje) guilty..and I have my doubts…can we still play his records?), but it’s the Lindstrom and Prins Thomas stuff which does it. The ghost of a thousand amyl fuelled all nighters thirty years ago, mashed with Teutonic electronica and a lot of warm humour. Check out the amazing journey that is the Plague The Kid EP Pt 2, especially “Paaskeyld”.

The new Kraftwerk double live is one of the best soul records I’ve heard in years, and “Numbers” is still one the most sensual four minutes and 28 seconds ever committed to tape…

The fifth season of the Sopranos is out on DVD this month…at bloody last…I missed the second show in the series and pointedly saw no more in it, preferring to wait for the DVD since I’ve not missed an episode to date and wasn’t about to start. I know all the guff about whether each series is as good and the last and all that, but, really, who gives a monkey’s…it’s the Sopranos…the best TV to come out of the US small screen vacuum since Twin Peaks.

It’s a bit like Star Wars..is it as good as the last one..isn’t it cool to pretend you don’t care about Lucas….you’re above that thing. Bullshit…every man, woman and child on the planet, from the third world (who already have it on pirate DVD) to the first, is gagging to see Anakin turn to the Dark Side (good on him I say..that Jedi Council would turn anyone….and….when you think about it…as I do, with a bit of help from my Force obsessed ten year old…the ancient prophecy was right…Anakin was the chosen one (of course you care)…it was Darth who tossed the Emperor over the edge in “Return of..” (does anyone else think the new pope..the Hitler Youth one..looks like the Emperor?)). “Sith”…I loved it. Romeo and Juliet on an X-Wing.

This week there are two NZ pop singles in the Australian top thirty and an album in the top 30..this has never happened before. It really makes Don Brash’s mumbling on about hip hop tours look like the silly out of touch ramblings of an old man that they are. I thought Don was supposed to be an economist…I wonder what sort of tax return to NZ this success will bring?

And, after close to a decade, Alan Jansson and Paul Fuemana started work on a new OMC album this week. Any act (and these two were OMC) that sells four million records deserves the right to make a second album. It just took this long to get rid of the baggage……

On a completely different note, but positive in a sad way…wasn’t George Galloway good? The best first line ever in DC:

“Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice.”

He completely nailed his inquisitors, so much so, that they’ve pulled the testimony off the Congressional website. But you can find it here. It was just bang, bang, bang, one after another and they couldn’t stop him..live on nationwide US TV. Home truth after home truth..the sort of thing that no-one on Capitol Hill has ever had the guts to say. 100,000 plus dead and getting worse by the day. One of history’s great fuckups, and those sitting in judgement are totally complicit.

It must be a world record for CD re-issue gestation, problems with record companies, missing master tapes and a five way democracy all with the power of veto, but fifteen years after it was first mooted I finally have a CD reissue of the Toy Love album in my hand.

Yes…..I do have in my possession, courtesy of the outer reaches of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the mighty “Cuts”, a double disc set comprising the original album and singles on disc one, all remastered to some degree, and a second disc of bits and pieces, some released (like the AK79 tracks) and some unreleased. It comes out on Anzac Day I’m told (does that have some significance…if so I can’t figure out what it is but how does one release on a public holiday?) and it deservedly is gonna be huge and travel around the world. The record company woes for Toy Love go back to the early days, and, as far as I can gather no actually knows who owns this stuff. I would imagine Warners own the first single but probably have no idea they do and after all the grief, its warming to see that this album is copyrighted to the band.

Toy Love were a fucking wonder, they really were. I remember the day the Enemy arrived in Auckland…we all thought they were a bunch of bloody hippies but they changed the face of the city and the sound of the nation. There was nothing quite like the Saturday afternoons at The Windsor over the spring and summer of 79-80..hundreds of punkish looking teens invading main street of the pristine upper middle class Parnell every week and causing mayhem (not least to my flat..Chris had an unfortunate habit of announcing a party at my place on stage…). Terry Hogan, the man who signed Toy Love to WEA, and myself were running the local record shop, which, in the Stalinistic days of Rob Muldoon, was the only record shop open in Auckland on a Saturday..we closed at 2pm too. In mid 79 we were, thanks to Terry, the first to get the “Rebel” / “Squeeze” single and, with Toy Love playing down the road, we sold a truckload (we did a similar trick with the other great local single of 79..”Saturday Night Stay at Home”). It was a time when most local bands simply didn’t release records (sure Hello Sailor and Th’Dudes had stuff out but Sailor were cool but of a previous era and Th’Dudes simply weren’t ever close to cool at all) and this record was a mind fuck and to this day I can’t listen to it without shivers… the second single was just about as good, but the first was, and is the one. Funnily enough if any record the band released sounds unlike them live though, it was this one.

Legend has it that the Toy Love album was a disappointment. Little bit of revisionism going on there….I disagree. I hated the sleeve..still do (I was never a fan of Toy Love’s graphics but that’s’ neither here nor there..good videos though in an era when crap videos were the rule) but what was inside it worked for pretty much everybody at the time. It sounded rough and unpolished and the production was a bit ropey but that was Toy Love live..they always sounded rough as guts but it was about the show…nothing could hope to faithfully capture Mike Dooley’s machine like pounding or Jane’s incredible cascades of sound on vinyl. Toy Love, as a unit were simply uunbelievable live..every single one of them..but working as cohesive chaos with an obvious expiry date built in. No band could perform like that and last. I like the remaster on the disc (no remix as the masters are AWOL) but I pulled out the original vinyl and I think despite it all I kinda like the 1980 issue more aurally..it’s warmer and sparkles a bit more. But the band doesn’t like it and that’s fine with me…

The demos on disc two give you an insight into that and I’ve got a few live tapes somewhere (including one recorded by Nigel Russell and little brother Harry “Ratbag” which has a killer take of Shocking Blue’s “Venus” and another of the rarely performed “Positively 4th St”into “Yummy Yummy Yummy”…Toy Love did quite a few covers) which bring a nostalgic tear to my eye..although the tapes are rough and I think you kinda had to be there to listen to them

The influence of these five, working as a band, is massive….Flying Nun later on of course…but the influence went way beyond that. I’d done a record with the Suburban Reptiles but it was Toy Love that inspired a whole lot of us to start labels and you can draw a line from Toy Love to the likes of The Meemees, Car Crash Set and Body Electric and the whole indie pop explosion of the eighties. They changed attitudes, the way we did things and approached our lives…they added humour, anarchy and a fuck you to the next two decades and NZ would’ve been a lessor place without them

soooo….wicked…a brand new Toy Love Cd to play loud….my daughter has already asked me to take it off

Got a call today from Norman Jay today which is always cool.

I first met Norman back in February 1993 when we bought him and Gilles Peterson in to NZ to play at the Box. Norman did a couple of radio shows with me on bFm back then, introducing me to a number of soon-to-be-classic records that I will always associate with him (I associate a lot of records with certain people – for example Shay Jones’ “Are you Gonna Be There” is forever linked with Manuel Bundy, and I clearly remember the way he always used to touch it with such obvious reverence), we did a few days record and trainer shopping and generally hung out.

He played a set at the Box to less than 100 ecstatic punters (although the number of people who now claim they were there could now fill Mt Smart) – I mean, this is the man who actually coined the phrase “rare groove” in the eighties – betcha didn’t know that.

Sadly, I can lay claim to having coined the phrase “Future Jazz” for the tag line of my second New Groove comp back in 95 and, despite the fact it’s a totally naff tag (but by the time we did New Groove 2 “Acid Jazz” was even naffer), I’ve gotten some sort of perverse satisfaction from seeing how Mark de Clive Lowe took it to the UK and it’s been disseminated outwards from there (it’s even listed as a genre on Discogs fer fux sake)…but it ain’t in the same league, or even planetary system as “Rare Groove”…that’s a tag for the ages…

I’ve seen Norman on and off over the years and I’ve got some killer footage filmed on the stage at Auckland Domain on February 6, 2003. I just like him as a person, I love his soul, his passion and the obvious love he has for his music.

And for the fact that his passion has given us so much.

Today we met at Conch and went for a bit of a drive. Back in 93 we took a ferry ride to Devonport, however the weather sucked and we had coffee and came back. This year I drove and we went up North Head, which truly (and I’ve been to a fair assortment of fuckme places) is one of the most magical (and spooked – with all those unexplored tunnels – seriously, what on earth were our colonial leaders thinking when they predicted a bloody Russian invasion looming in 1888. Keeping the population tamed by fear obviously pre-dates the Dept of Homeland Security by some years) bits of dirt on the planet and Norman was justifiably gobbsmacked, wandering around with his camera in hand.

We then drove through traffic to Albany, across the Greenhithe Bridge and around the Northwest for a fair while. We talked about record shops (like the legendary Bluebird off Edgware Road where I used to buy far too many US funk cutouts complete with gorgeous gatefold covers and those big thick slab pressings. I found out that Norman was responsible for bringing many of those in from the US – never knew that till today), long lost record labels, the art of djing, the people he’d met over the years (one degree of separation today from Larry Levan), the righteous and deserving death of the superclub and the numbers of formerly “name” djs who are now scraping by with bar jobs, a few mutual friends, about knowing and enjoying your past but not being self-righteous about it, and exotic djing locations.

But mostly we talked about and listened to music. Old Philly records from Lou Rawls, Eddie Kendricks and a whole host of others, and lots and lots of Atlantic acts from the seventies, mainly because we listened to this twice, about Betty Swann, Ben E King, pirate radio, Major Harris, Skipworth & Turner, Kenny Gonzalez, the magic of hearing early Chicago jacking house and Detroit techno for the first time and how you never loose that passion for it once it hits you (I guess the thing about music is the ongoing need to strive to get that hit again).

And how important house and hip hop and soul and funk and reggae, electronic rhythms and indeed rock’n’roll are to us personally – and, I suppose how lucky we’ve been to craft some sort of career out of the stuff. Just stuff, y’know.

It really hit me how much I enjoy being in the company of people who feel as I do, and, fuck it all, how totally privileged I am to be in the company of someone like Norman Jay MBE discussing these things.

Oh, and post of the day goes to Peter Mac for:

headline reads: “Tsunami suffering may inspire Sting song”
headline SHOULD read: “Tsunami suffering continues – Sting writing song about Asian disaster”