New Zealand’s fiery sixties icon, Sandy Edmonds, on a just discovered OZ TV show clip from 1966, doing Bobby Hebb’s Sunny.

To check what she was really capable of, check this garage stormer.

At the top of her game, she disappeared without trace at the end of the sixties, and nobody seemed to know where or what she’d become. The early days of the internet even featured a ‘Where’s Sandy’ site. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that the mystery was largely solved: she was a designer in Melbourne, Rosalie Edmondson-Corner.

Graham Reid details the journey here.

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And they were vaguely contemporaries, but on the other side of the planet and a galaxy apart, however I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention Ziggy’s 65th year yesterday. There are dozens/hundreds of sites covering it and there is little more I can add, aside from humbly pointing out that the old bugger changed my world forever. And he changed yours even if you don’t know it.

My first serious date was to a school ball in 1973. My girlfriend at the time, the late and missed Jane Wilson, had an Aladdin Sane stripe on her face. When we formed punk bands, Bowie was the conduit that almost everything that initially inspired us – Iggy, Lou and the Dolls – was funnelled via.

This was a man who in 12 months created, co-created Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Raw Power and Transformer. He then took a brief breather before inventing post-Apocalyptic rock, for better or worse Plastic Soul, and offering up an inventive reworking of Krautrock with Eno that helped define the post-punk landscape probably more than any other artist, and thus the audio landscape we live in now.

Every single album he released or worked on between 1971 (we can forgive most of the two albums called simply David Bowie, from 1967 and 1969, although London Boys from the first is a fabulous pointer towards the future) and his last major work before a 90s rejuvenation, Scary Monsters, was a landmark that, as only The Beatles in rock history have also done, changed the way everything of interest was done thereafter.

So happy birthday, David.

65, fucking hell, do I feel really old…

A couple Three vids. The first is a simply wonderful live version of Paul Simon’s America, done in the aforesaid London Boys style, from Paul McCartney’s post 9/11 gig. ¹

And, from the last album, Reality:

And finally a 2002 remake of London Boys from the unreleased Toy album:

Edit: one more I’d not seen before, the unbleached original of Life on Mars. This was a hit a couple of years after it was first released, on Hunky Dory, hence the post Ziggy look and imagery on a song that was recorded before Bowie had reinvented himself as the doomed glam icon.

Mostly I’m not one for reunions but this was fun on the night. Symonds St., 1998.

Rena followed with a roaring rendition of her coy urban tale, Reena - and bought the full house completely down….

Maybe I don’t mind the occasional reunion.

I had a wonderful lunch with my friend Chris Bourke a week or two back, sitting in his grand living room up in the hills above Wellington. The day was blue and gorgeous as only the capital can turn on -on those days, not as rare as we Aucklanders would like to think, when it supplies the sort of weather it loves to boast about when it repeatedly says ‘you should see me on a beautiful day’.

Chris has a magnificent view, almost beyond words. I’d love to post a shot of the man standing in his balcony – overlooking the harbour and the rugged undulations of the hills that roll down to it – but he made me promise faithfully when I took several not to put any online, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Before, over and after lunch Chris pulled out books and boxes of items, many of which were used by him when researching his groundbreaking book, the Book of The Year winner, Blue Smoke, an incredible, inclusive, history of pre-Beatles New Zealand popular culture.

They included a box of old 78s which he’d been gifted – including the first recording ever made New Zealand, and a bunch of those Australian pressed Parlophone issues from the 30s with the fabulous New Zealand labels:

A national treasure.

Not Chris, that is – he is too young and still has far too much to contribute to be lumbered with such an onerous tag – but the book itself.

It is, of course, a book about music, or at least that is the raison d’être it hangs itself around, and I guess it probably needed one, not least to convince publishers who, in New Zealand, are rarely adventurous folk (this is published by the University Of Auckland). It’s subtitled ‘The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964′ and it methodically and joyously tells that story in a way that not only draws the reader inescapably in, but also takes you to the world that surrounded the music and those that made it. It talks extensively and details, but never boringly – quite the opposite –  the people who made it possible for others to make music or were pivotal in the dissemination of the sounds that shaped what we listen to now.

I’m thinking of people like Arthur Pearce, who, via his radio shows based in Wellington but broadcast much further afield – across years when radio showed active disinterest in anything contemporary - educated, informed and entertained generations of eager ears. His (as linked) biography on Te Ara, well written by Chris, is very thorough but it is hardly likely to excite anyone given that it sits in a general online encyclopaedia of New Zealand bibliography.

It takes Chris’ book to do just that. I think it’s one of the most important New Zealand works to be printed since… well, since I don’t know when. Let’s use the word ‘ever’.

I’ve read Blue Smoke twice, and given a copy away to somebody I knew needed to own a copy but was unlikely to ever buy one (he did and said so repeatedly after he’d finished it).

However, what makes this crucial work so different to the vast bulk of the many, many New Zealand non-fiction works I have on my shelves is that it doesn’t just tell us the factual parameters of our past. It doesn’t just document and record the music made and the music makers, it instead broadly opens up for us, excitingly in both visual and written ways, how we entertained ourselves for the best part of three quarters of a century.

Blue Smoke is an extraordinary work and we’ve never seen the like of it in print before – that I know of at least. The words, the layout, the imagery and the the overall style all contribute to its uniqueness.

The pages on Johnny Devlin – never before documented or written this way with such life – not only tell the story of one of the most astounding frenzied phenomena ever in New Zealand, but – more – what it felt like to be a 15 year old in big town and smaller town NZ at the time.

You feel as if you are one step away from the stage at The Jive Centre when Devlin first arrived in January 1958.

How we entertained ourselves and – more – how we interacted with and those being entertained drove that entertainment, because we did – Devlin was a public phenomena long before Phil Warren and Graeme Dent took that to the next level, and kids were screaming at him simply because he was Devlin – is as much who we are as any stories of war (they’re in here too but in a way they’ve never been told before – the war stories alone make this book worth the admission price), social demographics, politics or the nation’s traumatic upheavals.

All of which are included here as well of course, as our entertainment reflects, reacts and then influences.

The story of the Maori Community Centre in Freeman’s Bay (extant until a few years ago – in most of the world it would’ve earned a plaque on the wall, in ours it’s now a glass block unmarked) says more to me of the Maori exodus from the country into the ‘smoke than any number of words on paper or screen full of statistics. Kiri Te Kanawa used to share a rickety stage with Charlie Tumahai once upon a time.  That, to me, is fabulous in so many ways, but until now, until Blue Smoke, who that wasn’t of that era knew?

Hell, you even begin to like Sir Howard Morrison as a person. Almost.

I get in huge trouble sometimes because I’m not traditionally patriotic. I hate national anthems (who exactly is defending New Zealand and from what. Given the last twelve months or so the endless request seems to have fallen on deaf ears, besides it’s an awful minute or two of stodgy music). Flags turn me off. All these things cause wars. They kill people.

If we lose on the weekend it may take more than a faux-deity to save the nation, at least in the short term.

That said, I’m very culturally patriotic. I love and am completely enthralled by where I come from, and by the places that the stories in this book will indirectly take those who come after even if they don’t know it at the time or ever – because all on a personal and national level that is driven by the cultural stories we have created in our islands. And no matter where I am in the world that stays with me.

It’s why expats away for decades still call New Zealand home. It is. It is who we are.

Chris’ book tells me so much of that and I love it.

Have you read it yet?

Three shots, taken by Chad Taylor, of Auckland band Ballare, who were one of the new wave of NZ electronica that flourished in the early to mid 1980s. The images were taken in their Eden Terrace practice rooms sometime in ’83.

Their only release was the track Dancing, which appears on the Propeller new artist comp, We’ll Do Our Best, in March, 1983. A kind of cult has grown up – mostly offshore in places like Germany – around that track over the years and the band’s leader, Eric Roulston, has been long talking about a collection of their work. Perhaps….
Somewhere I have an mp3 of Dancing, which I’ll upload to this post when I find it.

In the interim, Eric Roulston is still active, as The Association, on Soundcloud. I’d also recommend this quite lovely track.

Edit: Dancing:

Chris Moody – ex-Toy Love crew and a man with some taste, worried that this might sound like Green Day playing at a wedding. He needn’t have….

His opinion of the finished album: Fanfuckintastic.

If it shakes your rattle – and it very much should – you can sort yourself here.

A Sunday rant:

I’m a passionate advocate of the noise that emanates from the digital music explosion. It thrills and excites – and as Russell Brown says here

The internet revived and reinvented my relationship with music.

I don’t think I ever lost my relationship – it was, after all, a big part of my job to maintain that link. That said, I don’t think he’s at all alone in that, and I wonder what sorts of sales of some items – especially the more eclectic and edgy stuff that really make the musical planet revolve – we’d be seeing in 2011 if the internet hadn’t given renewed and ongoing life to catalogue oddities. When I was a wee lad, a record rarely had a lifespan of more than 10 years, unless it was Sgt Pepper or the ilk – and even then it was tenuous: Sgt Pepper had been two years deleted in NZ on the day John Lennon was shot.

In Auckland in 1975 it was impossible to buy the Velvet Underground or Stooges catalogues – some six or so years after release. CBS had deleted all the Dylan albums pre-1970 and Phonogram had done the same to all The Who catalogue. There was not a single James Brown release for sale in New Zealand – not even a hits collection. Marvin’s Let’s Get It On and What’s Going On lasted some three years in the NZ EMI catalogues.

NZ local catalogue suffered even more. In that same year, 1975, EMI had not a single 60s NZ album for sale – of the dozens they recorded in the period 1962-1972.

Of course the CD was the crucial item that changed that – record companies made a small fortune reissuing everything they could get their hands on – full price versions of things that they had sat on for years – or at least many of them – not all by any means: large chunks of the music made by people for record companies over the previous decades remained – and remains – in tape vaults. Sometimes the artists themselves pleaded with the labels to release items just to have the pleas fall on deaf ears – and were usually met by a similar refusal to let the artist reissue their own recordings ¹ when the label refused to.

The reissue frenzy, though, largely died out in the physical world as CD sales plummeted and it was harder and harder to justify the cost of a beautifully packaged and annotated reissue of obscure bits and pieces. I, myself, have been trying to find a way to do a physical Propeller retrospective, but the simple fact is that it would be easier and less stressful to take out a large wad of cash and give it to someone in the street. Things like this sell in the tens now. It may end up as a deluxe digital package – with a CD sampler – but my dream of a perfectly gathered Propeller box is likely to remain just that in the near future.

Enter digital – and slowly but surely the availability gathers pace again. I really liked this article in Slate by Bill Wyman (no not that Bill Wyman, this Bill Wyman) about the end of rare:

Fast forward a few decades, and we’re approaching a singularity of sorts—one in which the digital convergence, in a gradual warm flash, is nearly complete. If you were born to this it’s an unshakeable, seemingly permanent feature of the world. The rest of us marvel that a significant part of everything out there that should be digitized and made available has.

On one hand of course it celebrates piracy of sorts, and is the kind of story that would perhaps have the Universal Records exec who blocked repeatedly the Comsat Angels issues until these enthusiasts managed to force them out in fits. In the interim UMG launched something called Lost Tunes which was at best half baked and now seems to have ground to a halt.

On the other hand, it celebrates a big part of what Russell means when he says:

The internet revived and reinvented my relationship with music.

I’m no slouch at collecting music – I have a ridiculous – Brigid might use the word obscene – amount of music but the digital world has allowed me to fill all sorts of gaps and thrill at items like the incredible Revolution 1 (Take 20) which links together all the various Revolutions as a semi-coherent work:

That article celebrates the discovery of the lost or the misplaced, and such is a huge part of this digital thing of course. However, more than that, music has been reinvigorated by the buzz of the new – by the crazy remixes or re-edits – or simply by having so much new, fascinating and absorbing sound pushed at you all the time. The frenzy gives life.

The argument goes that it’s harder and harder to make money from releasing music – I don’t know if that’s true as it was always almost impossible to make money from making recorded music. Almost nobody did. The mythology of the artist who no longer gets the royalty cheque he or she once would have because people are stealing his or her music is mostly just that: a myth.

However, what isn’t a myth is that a vast percentage of those who now make music and put it into the marketplace – the ones who supposedly can’t earn a living from it – would never have had the opportunity to do so ten years ago. The sheer volume of music issued now is staggering.

In 2000 there were 35,000 albums issued in the USA. In 2008 that had grown to 105,000 albums. In the UK the figure was some 30,000. Who cares if only 6000 sold more than 1000 copies. They were made. It’s a flurry of activity and it can all be blamed on the internet. It’s momentum. And such momentum is a major cause of the renewed thrill that music giving to so many. The last time the music industry had that sort of vibrance was in the post-punk period when the every two-cent band issued a string of 45s and caused an explosion in inventiveness that still resounds today. Or when the early hip-hop and house records were tossed out by the hundreds.

Don’t let anyone tell you that good music gets drowned in noise. Musical invention is the result of extreme noise, of activity. Another example was the garage band / first-punk flurry of thousands of singles in the years after the Beatles – around the world. It gave New Zealand it’s rock’n'roll golden age in the 1960s. It gave the world the good and the bad parts of the late 196os and the 1970s. No garage band explosion=no Bowie, no Velvets, no Iggy and so on. They didn’t spring from a quality controlled stream of releases.

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As an aside – there is a thrill I miss and it may be one that others – leftovers from a recording industry that was filled with black vinyl and even silly little silver discs like myself – also miss, and that’s sometimes the joy of holding a brand new copy of an item that you’ve overseen from day one – you’ve watched it being written, sat in the studio all the way through, mastered, directed the art and then sent it off for manufacture.

Yes I know that many – most – releases still come back in a finished form at the moment but singles have all but disappeared as physical items and the percentage of albums that are going to exist only as a series of ones and zeros – especially compilations and reissues as they become less and less viable – in the next few years is, from my silly sentimental vantage point – upsetting.

I’m off to find some new noise…..

Another video bought back to life by Rob Mayes

Directed by Jonathan King.

There was such a huge buzz about the Grace album on High Street when it was being recorded, and the reality exceeded the expectation. These three were almost like family to so many of us and we all felt we owned a small part of what they were doing.

We didn’t, of course – it was unique and it was theirs.

RIP Paul…