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.

Looking through a box of stuff at my parents I came across these images. I’m pretty sure I took the Trevor Reekie shot, the others I have no idea, so apologies if I’ve trashed someone’s copyright.

I’m reasonably certain they’re all previously unpublished.

From top to bottom: Dancers, venue unknown; The Terrorways at what looks to be XS Cafe; Bootgirls @ The Windsor Castle (I think); and Proud Scum, maybe Reverb Room.

And the legendary Trevor Reekie, circa 1985, complete with Marginal Era poster.

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.