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.

In the spirit of all things High Street, Auck­land, and Cause Cele­bre (includ­ing this post on Pub­lic Address from myself), I made a point of track­ing down a copy of the very rare, and rather won­der­ful (and, to the point, fairly impor­tant in the scheme of all things musi­cally AK in the 1990s) Free­bass album, RAW: Live at Cause Celebre.

Free­bass were impor­tant for a num­ber of rea­sons, but not least because it was one of the early vehi­cles for the Haines broth­ers, Joel and Nathan. Nathan’s next band was The Enforcers, who went on to record the glob­ally released Shift Left ..the only NZ recorded album ever to appear on Verve.

I remem­ber the night fairly well. Chris Sin­clair had miked up the room and he and Mark Tier­ney taped it strug­gling against all sorts of adver­sity. They had to bat­tle with odd acoustics, ine­bri­ated folks repeat­edly trip­ping over cables and staff who really didn’t care who or what they were, they had to get that case of Mac’s Gold to the back bar with­out delay.

But it worked out pretty well, it was a land­mark album at the time and, as I recall, sold pretty well. Released on Mark Tier­ney and Kane Massey’s quite cru­cial Deep­grooves label, it’s long been unavail­able and quite sought after. My (signed) copy had walked some­where in the past 19 years so I was forced to buy a new copy this week. I sourced it on EBay, from Syd­ney, and, with the bless­ing of a cou­ple of the musi­cians who may or may not own the rights (who the hell knows), I thought I’d post a track.

I’ve always thought that Think­ing Of Ric­cardo may be about the Chilean guy of the name who was around the scene. He was, as I recall, busted for coke impor­ta­tion around this time and we were all rather taken aback. I’ve been mean­ing to ask for 19 years.

Free­bass — Think­ing Of Ric­cardo (Deep­Grooves, 1990)