Back in January 2006, on this blog, I posted a list of my favourite 12″ singles. It was picked up by quite a few other sites, not least of which was the godfather of all house and dance music sites, Jahsonic, and it kinda went around the world, which was a buzz. I them followed it with a list of 7″ singles and albums.

The list disappeared into the blog archives and when I changed the URL to my own (from a blogger one) it, along with all the earlier posts, lost all their images..and I was too lazy to spend days or weeks fixing it so I decided to pull this list from the archives and put it more permanently on my site. It can be found here.

I fixed a couple of typos and an mistake or two but it’s really as it was, with new images. Enjoy or criticise, whichever turns you on…

The albums and singles will follow at some future stage.

If you’d pulled me aside thirty years back and told me that this year I’d be watching the The Buzzcocks in Bangkok, likely I’d be inclined to verbally slap you a bit to bring some sense back into the conversation. Of course I wouldn’t have as I’m not a violent person by nature ( the last person I hit was Nicky Hager in the 4th Form, and I’ve felt guilt since).

But tonight there I was, in the rather agreeable but still fairly rockn’roll surroundings of Club Culture near Victory Monument (which wasn’t actually a victory at all) grooving along to The Buzzcocks. The fucking Buzzcocks….

We used to laugh at the 60s acts in the 1980s touring their handful of hits around the workingman’s clubs of the UK and periodically making it to NZ. The likes of The Searchers and The Hollies. And I’m still one to sneer at the poor old Human League and ABC, or for that matter most acts from the ’77 batch doing the traps three decades on. The only Class of ’77 acts I’d cross the road to see would be Paul Weller or Elvis Costello.

And the fucking Buzzcocks.

I mean, they had the tunes, and if the 2009 reissues of the first three albums gave us anything, it was that those are likely the best pop records of their generation, bar none. Tell me a pop anthem from the last half of that decade that tops Ever Fallen In Love or Promises. And they came, they flared, and they burnt out in a fairly gracious way. And, of course Pete Shelley gave us Homosapien which, in it’s 12″ dub, was both a dancefloor monster and, forgivably, the prototype for everything electroclash, twenty plus years on. Tune indeed (and the album is no slouch).

It was a mixed crowd of 1000 or so, about 50% UK expats, 30% Thai and the rest mixed. I loved the anonymity of it all, that being something I’ve enjoyed in Bali too. The nature of my history means that it’s hard to do these sorts of gigs in Auckland without some, admittedly often pleasant, closing in.

We had drinks downstairs in the open air bar before we went it. It was as much a show as the band was later one. Faded punks thirty years on are an interesting bunch.

And as Brigid said, being surrounded by the English on holiday does wonders for one’s physical self esteem.

There was a Thai Elvis impersonator playing to half a dozen people in the restaurant. We gave him a 20B tip and went in.

The support act, I have no idea what they were called, looked like Harry Potter and band but were actually really bloody good in a tight pop punk way. They looked like they had the legs to travel, and I mused that if they were anywhere in the Western world they’d likely be doing MTV & commercially rather well. They had the looks and the tunes.

A brief break, with some quite tastefully informed between band tunes (smatterings of 60′s punk, Big Star etc, plus a few 70′s and early ’80s tunes..there is something quite special hearing 500 increasingly drunken Englishmen, as they mostly seemed to be by that stage, singing Love Will Tear Us Apart as if they were straight off the benches at Old Trafford) and the arrival of the Thai punks and the confused blonde Swedish hairdressers, who, like about 30% of the crowd, would not have been born much before the band’s 1989 reunion. Some of the younger crew had their spiffing brand new Singles Going Steady or Sex Pistols shirts on (unlike a few of the more ancient folks who, despite the fact they’d doubled in size, had inadvisably decided to ignore any remaining style instincts left after all those Special Brews had done their work, and squeeze into that Adverts shirt one last time. Cheers for that..)

Then came the headliners. No fuss, no great announcement, they just wandered on stage, tuned up a bit, like the band at the local pub, and then blatted into Boredom which segued effortlessly, hardly surprising after all these years I guess, into the mighty Fast Cars.

I last saw the band in, I think, about 1990, and my first impression this time was that Shelley looked like a happy off duty bus driver (he seems to have shrunk vertically and grown horizontally..haven’t we all) and Steve Diggle, in spotted shirt, had something of the Bruce Forsythe about him. Who would’ve thought that in 1979?

And Brigid and I wondered too, what the very fat guys with cheap striped polo shirts tucked into their walk shorts would’ve looked like in 1979?

But, y’know, it was The Buzzcocks…..the fucking Buzzcocks, one more time.

And then the first Englishman crashed the stage and knocked over Pete & his amps and staggered up to a victorious meathead arms in the air yeah, before being politely, this being Thailand where even the punks say sorry, tossed off the stage by the bouncers. He deserved something firmer as the rest of the band hobbled vocals-less through the last half of Autonomy, and Shelley had to borrow an amp and swap guitars.

And the scouse wanker who had the poor Thai girl by the throat outside the toilets (people were intervening rather quickly, thank god) needed, and likely was, given the anger of the approaching staff, a swift explanation as to why his behavior was utterly unacceptable, which if he couldn’t understand, led to something sterner from the two cops standing outside.

Some people should not travel, or for that matter, leave their shitty council flat.

But, it rolled into What Do I Get and onwards, then Steve Diggle’s moment, a longish Harmony In My Head, where he had the same Man U fans singing the chorus en mass. It was well cool. I smiled and sang a lot.

We wandered out after the encore of Oh Shit, Ever Fallen in Love (in which the Swedish girls seemed to finally find a song to know..must be the Shrek effect) and Orgasm Addict, to get a taxi before the masses swamped them.

So, yes, it was nostalgia (which, sadly they didn’t play..and no Love Battery...no Love Battery), and it was a bunch of old folks mostly singing along with the tunes one more time.

But It was The Buzzcocks…the fucking Buzzcocks.

Yay.

Those promises..ohhhh…are made for us..ohhh….

This week I’ve uploaded (or to be exact, asked to have uploaded) a 2009 remaster of the, if I say so myself, classic 1982 Screaming Meemees album, If This Is Paradise, I’ll Take The Bag . We’ve added a few extra tracks, the singles and one off bits that helped define one of the biggest New Zealand bands of the 1980s, including See Me Go, the first NZ single to go to number one.

It’s available on Amplifier, and shortly on iTunes and eMusic. And maybe in a physical format at some stage, but that’s increasingly unlikely.

There is a bit of a history of the band and my involvement with them here.

When I first looked at remastering this album some three years back (and talked to a couple of band members about doing it, with a very positive response) I considered that this album would come out in some sort of rather attractive CD package, with a secondary role for the digital release on iTunes, Amplifier and eMusic. Even, I, a reasonably, I hope, informed observer of the recording industry naturally assumed a physical format would be the primary format.

How things change. Today, the CD format is really only loosely required on a package like this..ask anyone who’s done one a reissue of recent..even the beautiful and highly desirable ones like the New Order or Buzzcocks re-masters if they sold any appreciable quantity (and the reissue market is the one niche where CDs might still have legs) and the answer will likely be predictably depressing. You are more likely to see a return from a reverently packaged and pressed vinyl edition in 2009 than a CD.

In the US this week EMI announced that the new Robbie Williams album will only be available in digital formats. There will be no physical format release at all, which, even if Robbie is not the star in the US he is everywhere else, is quite a thing. No physical. No requirement.

Indeed the forthcoming Beatles remasters are widely being spoken of as the format’s last gasp, it’s last major release, in the US at least, and even if that’s overstating things a little, the fact that it’s increasingly hard to even buy a CD in many big American cities means that it’s relevance to the marketplace is shrinking at a faster rate than even the hard-format optimists predicted.

It’s almost over, or at least you can see over the horizon to a land beyond it, and with it goes the album and thus the last vestiges of any hope the major record companies have of surviving as they are. Without the dollar value of the album, the record companies are, to put it politely, rather fucked.

Which brings us to the CMX, the new wunder-format that the record companies have spent god knows how much money inventing over the recent years. Not only is this supposed to be the saviour of the format the record labels, or at least the big ones with their bloated infrastructures and rather hungry shareholders, need to survive, it’s also, and one must assume rather arrogantly (who, the majors? arrogant?) and unwisely, taking on of the few growth areas the recording industry has left for it’s recorded masters, the digital store owned by Apple, which we all know as iTunes, as Apple have their own proprietary format in the wings and are unlikely to roll over in response to what is clearly a power re-grab from the big four.

Yep, everybody is trying to reinvent the album.

And you can’t help feeling that’s like trying to give CPR to a stuffed Dodo. It’s another don’t you bloody well get it moment? Like Napster, like the law suits, like the rise of iTunes.

Well clearly no, they still don’t.

They album rather rapidly died this decade, primarily because that’s the way the buying public wants it. They want tracks, they want songs, they want the digital equivalent of the old 45rpm single, but instead of being told that ‘this is the single’ they like the ability to choose which personal single they want. Which is why, despite the much touted gloom, which really just translates to ‘our dollar sales are down’, unit sales of tracks and, yes, CD albums..i.e. The sale of one unit, as desired by the customer, are up last year driven by mostly non-album sales.

And the UK music industry was up 4.7% in 2008. Which is probably a more important, and vastly more credible, figure than the billions of lost sales touted by industry bodies year in and year out.

So back to the CMX. Boy does this feel last ditch and desperate, almost like a suicide note from a broken and largely unfixable business model whose only answer is to try and quickly reinvent the past. Banging a bit of artwork and a whole album in a single file is really not going to fix anything, nor, I think is it going to prove exceedingly attractive to a generation who is now accustomed to getting their add-ons to the music they are listening too from a web site, or via their wired held-held device as they may choose, without having to listen to the extraneous tracks they really don’t want.

Of course people of my generation, myself included, still crave long players, and bemoan the loss of the enjoyment of delving into an album to find that lost gem, but I feel our time is almost passed. And now you find those gems on blogs, on a myriad of sites or from word of mouth. Which is where I mostly get my music from now and I very rarely want or need to play an album despite the need of the record companies for us all do do so.

Tom Yorke agrees.

In the meantime, The Screaming Meemees sound rather wonderful again right now. Any track you want, or the whole damned album…

Big hat tip to Stuart Page, Johnny (who knew him well), does Elvis:

And Elvis does Johnny:

Going thru old cuttings I found this (abridged) review of the Screaming Blamatics Roadshow written by a Tim Brown for Salient:

When one considers that he was writing about Blam Blam Blam, The Newmatics, and The Screaming Meemees at their prime, and the songs he was dismissing include such iconic titles as There Is No Depression In NZ, Marsha, See Me Go and Riot Squad, one wonders if Mr. Brown has yet crawled out from under the rock marked embarrassing cultural missteps.

Revenge is a dish best served etc……

*yes I know I’ve misquoted

As far as I know this is the only shot of Freebass playing at Cause Celebre, or for that matter anywhere.

The Take Me Back gig has forced me to dig around a few old boxes of bits and pieces and I’ve found all sorts of stuff that I’d either forgotten or thought I’d lost. One of which was the one-off Karen Walker Box jacket whcih I wore last Saturday night and could’ve sold a dozen times or more. I mused about Trade Me-ing it but wiser voices told me to think better of it, so I’ll hang on to it.

But this photo really jogged my ongoing paranoia that we are, in New Zealand at least, slowly losing so much of our musical heritage, even relatively recent stuff like the Freebass album I profiled a few weeks back here.

The disappearance of the the Flying Nun catalogue is one thing. It’s mostly no longer available in any format, physical or digital but the reality is that it likely will appear again at some stage, once Roger’s purchase of FN becomes a fact, or somehow someone knuckles down to sort it.

It has that sort of cultural momentum.

That’s great, but history has largely rewritten, or been rewritten to exclude the other 95% of New Zealand audio releases from the pre-digital era which is a huge crime.

Just looking at the era I’m rather involved with, from about 1977 through to the the current day, although narrowing that down to the pre-1995 part of that span, there was a vast body of NZ music recorded for labels that were not Flying Nun, and it’s not unfair to say that after about 1987 FN was rather conservative in it’s outlook and that many acts moved mountains to distance themselves from the “Flying Nun Band” tag. In the North Island at least the most innovative music from that era, and most needing preservation in 2009, or in danger of forever disappearing into the abyss appeared on labels like Pagan, Deep Grooves, Southside or on a raft of smaller indies and artist owned labels.

Sure large slabs of popular music are being archived in places like the Sound Archive in Christchurch, but unlike Australia, Canada, the UK, or just about any developed country, where efforts are successfully made to keep much of what has been recorded available to the public via reissues, digital and so on, much of what was released in New Zealand, no make that most, looks likely to disappear into the abyss in the not too distant future. And the Sound Archive is focused primarily on radio and Maori archiving, rather than the history of our recorded music, thus they don’t always know what things are, or what they need to prioritize. An attempt to initiate a focused recordings and master tape archive was rather ruthlessly shot down by the last Labour Government.

It rather feels like time is running out for a lot of stuff, and there is much which has already gone from the pre-77 era, which, given the disbursement and passing of many of those involved, it probably is, so I guess a large part of our musical heritage in NZ will quietly slip into the past forever in the years to come.

After record labels and the album, then next victim of the digital age:

“Now, records can be made in a bedroom. With an Apple Mac, two good microphones and a few other bits and pieces, you can be more powerful than Abbey Road was 20 years ago,” he said

[From The day the music died for studios - Times Online]