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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I’ve been to Welling­ton heaps this year. I like it lots.

I’d not done Welling­ton much for of a decade until 2011. In fact my last visit to the city (aside from a sin­gle point­less — to the utterly hope­less Indone­sian embassy, for a visa I later found I didn’t need — 3 hour visit) was in 2002. I used to come through six monthly or less before that, mostly on band, label, NZ on Air or polit­i­cal busi­ness but then the rea­sons dried up and I didn’t anymore.

And then I didn’t really go south of the Waikato, not from intent but more circumstance.

The result was I guess I rather Auck­lan­dized, and then I moved to an Indone­sian island and had no real rea­son to visit the cap­i­tal, the Indo Embassy jaunt being the exception.

Of course, I laughed at Damian’s wonderful/infamous “I lived in Welling­ton and sur­vived to escape” story in Metro — and so I should have as it was freak­ing hilar­i­ous. How­ever I always felt — qui­etly and with a lit­tle, very lit­tle, unspo­ken shame — that I was doing so as a con­temp­tu­ous Auck­lan­der, not just because it was sim­ply a mighty fine piece of very funny writ­ing. That pissed peo­ple off when it really shouldn’t have.

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For­get the (utterly fab­u­lous) live album, the buzz of a packed Real Groovy (and other record stores) — the very best thing to come out of Record Store Day is the huge beam­ing smile on Chris’ face:

Filmed by NZ Rock’n’Roll his­to­rian Simon Kay and via Cheese on Toast (of course)…