Another spo­radic post in a blog that I’m not sure any­one reads any­more given the lack of posts.

But, damn, I’ve been busy. Busier than at any time in my life. I’ve writ­ten more words than I’ve ever writ­ten — school and uni included — and yet I’ve more or less ignored these pages, where I’ve done much of my writ­ing in recent years because time is some­thing I’ve really not had options on squan­der­ing on the friv­o­lity of tak­ing time to relax by blogging.

And no, I’m not try­ing to be a mar­tyr or elicit sym­pa­thy. It’s voluntary.

What it is is this, which was announced a month back. And rather than expect­ing any­one to read through a press release issued by a gov­ern­ment related entity I’ll post the first few paragraphs:

NZ On Air today announced fund­ing for a new web­site telling the story of pop­u­lar New Zealand music. Made by the peo­ple who were there, Audio­Cul­ture will map the NZ music land­scape, con­nect­ing peo­ple, record­ings, places, scenes and record labels from the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury until today.
Until now there has been no sin­gle place to go to find out about NZ music. Infor­ma­tion, record­ings and his­to­ries are being lost. Led by site Cre­ative Direc­tor and music doyen Simon Grigg, Audio­Cul­ture will work with artists, his­to­ri­ans and music indus­try peo­ple to tell the sto­ries of our music over the last hun­dred years from the first record­ing in the 1920s.

Audio­Cul­ture will con­tain reviews, discogra­phies, inter­views, bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion, back­ground arti­cles, images, record­ings and music videos, dis­cus­sion and com­men­tary from fans and artists.

So, yes that’s me and appar­ently I’m a ‘doyen’ — I didn’t write it but the Free Dic­tio­nary tells me it means ‘A man who is the eldest or senior mem­ber of a group’, which I take to mean some­one who is about to put out to pas­ture — soon — and they need to find some­thing handy for him to do in the interim.

Yup, me, a ‘doyen’ (as defined) with time on his hands. For some rea­son, I hadn’t men­tioned this project in detail here before, the rea­son mostly being the mas­sive work­load I’ve hap­pily invented for myself and sev­eral other ‘doyens’ — not least Mur­ray Cam­mick who’s the edi­tor — and younger aspir­ing ‘doyens’ (it’s not just old men telling sto­ries I promise).

I talked about it all with Trevor Reekie here (link­ing to it as I’ve not done it here to date but I thought it was a good inter­view and I do rather enjoy talk­ing to Trevor about most anything).

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This is one of those don’t-know-where-it’s-going posts, par­tially because my life is in such tur­moil and upheaveal at the moment.

I have this ridicu­lous life­long habit of find­ing a com­fort zone — in this case a won­der­ful life in a won­der­ful, vibrant, sen­so­ri­ally excit­ing town in the global epi­cen­tre of East Asia — and then turn­ing it upside down. I’ve done it for years and each time I tell myself to stop: this time I’m to be sat­is­fied with my lot, this time I’m ignore the twinges.

Bangkok is home and I want to be. I’ve never lived in such an exhil­a­rat­ing place, one that sat­is­fies almost every part of my needs as it does: the human inter­ac­tion, the intel­lec­tual, the visual, the  unpre­dictabil­ity, the artis­tic, the per­sonal and, yes, the food.

So why? Why turn it upside down one more time and take on a project that may or may not gob­ble me and could — if it went wrong — trash the world I’ve built slowly for myself (with my won­der­ful Brigid and the gath­ered off­spring — human and hound)?

Of course, I just don’t know. I did the same when I went to Asia in 2005. Both Brigid and I had built our lit­tle empires in Auck­land. We had lives full of work and a leisure and we had — if we’d sim­ply car­ried on as we were — a likely secure endgame in a home sur­rounded by the nest of objects we’d gath­ered over the years, myself not least a huge col­lec­tion of books and music.

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It seems appro­pri­ate and timely to gather these min­utes together four­teen years later (Daniel took his life on March 15th 1998):

Still one of the most affect­ing and astound­ing record­ings in New Zealand rock’n’roll’s lin­eage, and bizarrely it only has some 72,000 hits on YouTube (6,000 here and 66,000 at the other upload) which really under­lines that tout­ing huge YT num­bers often sim­ply under­lines PT Barnum.

Trevor Reekie (amus­ingly — I have no idea how he knows this! ) claims it’s the most skipped song on Nature’s Best. That sus­pect sta­tis­tic — if it were true — alone is a vote in its favour. I guess the many of the Six Months In A Leaky Boat fans would per­haps reel.

And the famous MTV Havoc inter­view (which also reminds us what a great inter­viewer on the visual screen Mikey is/was) with addenda inter­spaced after Daniel died:

Plus a great — and very funny —  Dylan Taite inter­view for TV3 I’ve not seen before:

As Bill Ker­ton so cor­rectly says: utterly unique.