For those of us a long way away…

The things you find in old boxes:

July, 1977

The joys of rummaging around:

Been away, almost back, but in the meantime, this is a giggle…from the usually unreliable All Music Guide (most of their NZ band bios are quite clearly written by hacks who have never heard the bands in question) comes this shocker:

Enemy was an obscure punk outfit that hailed from New Zealand. Formed in the late ’70s, the group is best known in their homeland for such singles as “Punks Alive” and “Fallen Hero.” The band’s full-length debut album, Gateway to Hell, was issued in 1983, and although it became increasingly hard to find over the years, was reissued on CD, containing ten bonus tracks (many of which were rare singles). The ’90s also saw the release of a pair of concert albums recorded back in May of 1978 — Pull Down the Shades and Iggy Told Me. ~ Greg Prato, All Music Guide

ahhh, ok….

perhaps Mr Prato would should’ve done a little research before sending in his biography and invoice:

For the real bio listen to Iggy Told me, but what you need to know is that they emerged out of Dunedin in 1977 then took Auckland by storm, broke up and mutated into Toy Love, which went on to become the dominant band in New Zealand before moving to Australia where no one cared and they broke up.

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

Winston Churchill

Here I go again, but something in all this nonsense in Australia simply doesn’t smell kosher (not the right word here I know but somehow, somewhere, we have to all coexist). Australian politics really holds little interest for me..it seems to be populated by scumbags on both sides of the political spectrum. I mean Hawke was a scumbag, Fraser was a scumbag, and I have trouble thinking of any politician of any note or of any political colour…maybe that guy from the Greens… who couldn’t, even in my most forgiving and generous moments, be reasonably described as a scumbag.

Honesty and a respect for the electorate and the office seem to be alien to the world’s dullest city, Canberra (although it has a massive sex and drug industry to alleviate that boredom).

My problem is that John Howard is a scumbag tour-de-force, pure and simple, and he leaves the rest in the dust. There is ample evidence of that. Look at the appalling Tampa incident and the children overboard incident when he was caught blatantly lying to the electorate (but still won). Then there is the shameful episode with the East Timor reserves. I genuinely believe the NZ Government went into Timor in a naïve moment, for the right reasons. Australia did no such thing, it was an oil and gas grab pure and simple and it served a double purpose in that it destabilised the Indonesian Government, something that has been at the core of Australian Foreign policy for a long time. That they seemed happy, no actually, to be more precise, totally unconcerned about the suspect legalities of the grab and the effect it would have on of the world’s poorest nations is more evidence of the real motives. Then there is Kyoto and the whole Iraq thing. Howard’s gutless toadying towards the Bush regime makes Blair (almost) look like a man of integrity. I have trouble attributing a rationale to Howard’s motives in all this beyond some self serving self aggrandisement. Certainly it was in no way in the best interests of his nation and if there is substance in this week’s raids that further illustrates that. No-one can seriously think that a fundamentalist attack would have happened on Australia’s self-described hallowed earth, if Howard hadn’t become Bush’s pembantu in recent years…actually that’s not fair on pembantus..they are usually hard and decent workers and are often well regarded by their employers. I really doubt whether, Bush and those that control him hold Howard in anything but contempt, despite the façade that greets him in Texas or DC. Anyway the point is, Howard is a proven liar and a person who, on past evidence is happy to manipulate events and human lives, regardless of the pain it may cause, to his own end.

And, despite the increasing “revelations” by the powers that be this thing stinks badly.

There is the scant evidence, now being held behind closed doors and leaked bit by bit to increase the public unease. Lawyers are being denied access and those arrested are being held “Guantanamo Bay style conditions”. There are the comments from a whole variety of “establishment” figures, not the least was this from an Australian police counter-terrorism chief:

“their motivations were the same motivations that terorrism has in its form all around the world” – but also as followers of Osama bin Laden. “There’s no doubt that this group followed that same philosophy.”

The pre-determination of guilt does neither Australia nor the victims any good and whips up the sort of scarily ignorant verbiage illustrated by many on this page.

Those arrested are an established, well known and convenient target, and if London showed us anything, the real threat (and I firmly believe there is a strong and imminent threat against Australia and this has done nothing to alleviate it) comes from a place you least expect it to…

Maybe I’m wrong and this bunch were about to take out Central Station during rush hour but it’s far too close to all those terror alerts that the DOHS have fired off in the US at appropriate moments. And with Howard aspiring to be a low rent sub Neo-con, it’s all too convenient timing wise, the evidence seems incredibly thin; and hopefully will cause Howard to suffer the sort of damage that Blair suffered this week. But I doubt it…the UK’s scumbag–to-politician ratio is much healthier than the Great Southern Land.

On a similar note, I read with increasing horror, several hate filled anti-Muslim (or anti anyone who isn’t god fearing (as long as it’s the right one) and freedom-lovin’) web-blogs this week in the aftermath of the terrible beheading of the three young girls in Sulawesi. The black and white hate therein belies the fact that in Indonesia, nothing is what it seems. That simple concept would be absolutely alien to those righteous armchair soldiers. So it is with interest I read this analysis of the recent events in Poso, which put a somewhat different light on it, a light which, having lived here for only a short time, already makes perfect sense in an Indonesian way. The ignorance or indifference that much of the world shows to this, the worlds largest Muslim nation is betrayed by the fact that Microsoft Word’s spell checker puts a red wavey line under Sulawesi….part of a chain of islands, along with Maluku (which also gets wavy lines, Bill) which drove the direction of the world’s history for several hundred years.

If someone had had told me when I was, for want of a better word, young, that I would be in Indonesia at this time in my life……

But what an odd thing it is for me see the punk generation, of which I am proud to be one, head towards fifty. Kerry Buchanan, whom I’ve known for 28 years, since he and a few mates turned up to Disco D’ora’s in Newton Road to see the Suburban Reptiles, told me he was about to turn fifty soon. It’s still there…D’Ora’s that is…if you stop at the Caltex Station and look up to the left of it, it was the top floor. I booked the Reptiles in there early 77, it was a failed disco, and we managed to pull an ok crowd plus the odd bemused disco kid. There was a broken mirror ball, a smoke machine and some bad dayglo graffiti. Perfect. The most memorable thing about it was original Reps drummer, Des Edwards, pulling a big hunk of raw meat out of his trousers (he was a butcher’s apprentice by day, and not a great drummer….last heard of he was a juggler in Australia..nice guy) and slamming it down on the snare, to some effect. Anyway, other big thing was a bunch of kids arriving from the North Shore for the first time. One was Kerry, another was John No-one. They later become Rooter and then The Terrorways.

So we punks are getting old. Some have been past the cusp of 50 for a while and I turned over a few weeks back. I guess like every generation we assumed we would never get old, that it would last forever, and we were the ones, but we had the perfect soundtrack to our assumption, the nihilistic self styled revolution that was punk rock. My Generation was never as fuck-you as White Riot..at least to us. But the initial burst of UK punk (as derivative as it was of the NY scene, it added a certain snottyness that the CBGBs crew lacked), as a musical revolution was incredibly short lived and the radical had turned to the cliché almost as soon as it happened. What broke new ground in January 1977 was stale and formulated by the time The Sex Pistols released the over-produced Bollocks album in August or so. The revolution had moved on and I like to think those of us there then rolled with it. Some of us anyway….

So, we are aging, and generally, fairly gracefully, even if I do say so myself. Bad drugs or the misuse thereof took a few early on but the survival rate to the half century, at least amongst those I associated with (god knows about those that disappeared back into the public bars of the North Shore and Avondale) has been pretty good and I get quite a buzz out of having known some of these people for so long. If punk did anything, it pulled the cream to the top…
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Songs in the sun today:

2 Phat C**ts-Ride….the last decent thing either Sasha (who did some great remixes at the dawn of his career…Urban Soul etc) and BT (who made two magnificent 12s for Deep Dish way back when but then immediately turned to complete shite) did…but what a record

James Brown – I Wanna Be Around…off the peerless Ballads collection…the GFOS goes schmaltz

Pashka -Island Breeze (Trentemoller Remix)….almost Balearic…the title says it all..not sure about the vox but the underlying swell is just fine

Theo Parrish-Falling Up (Carl Craig Remix)…ha! I’ve finally got my hands on this one sided 10” Japanese single. Deep as fuck…pure genius

Angie Stone- I Wasn’t Kidding…the killer new song off the Greatest Hits that’s going around and round in my head day in day out

Went to the Rising Sun in K Rd last night (I love that way, year in year out K Rd is the one reliable never changing Auckland vista….thankfully annual reports of its impending gentrification are always proven incorrect) to see The Scavengers do the reunion thing. Well kind of….

The Scavengers mutated over a few litres of bourbon into the poppier Marching Girls late 79 but this was hailed as the first Auckland Scavs gig for 26 years. That in itself was a stretch: firstly the endless Scavs farewell gig routine went well into 79; secondly The Scavengers, as The Marching Girls, toured these Isles several times in the eighties including quite an extensive jaunt in late 1980 to support the “True Love” / “First In Line” single I’d just released on Propeller; thirdly, the later day Scavengers were a trio of equal parts and Brendan “Ronnie Recent” Perry had other commitments and wasn’t able to travel, understandably, the several thousand kilometers from Ireland for a one off gig in a pub in Ak’s sleazy side.

So his shoes were filled by Dion from New Zealand’s best rock’n'roll band, The D-4, and (almost..it wasn’t quite the same) adequately filled with accomplishment by a guy who admits his band owes sooo much to these guys. After the show someone asked him if it was as good as singing with the MC5…Dion said the Scavengers meant far more as this was his history, the MC5 were just an American band he was heavily influenced by, and he’s right.

The show itself…short (12 3 minute songs), anthem filled (I was touched to be the only person to get a song dedicated to them), and loud (vastly better sound than I’ve ever heard the Scavs…we used to throw the vocals thru the guitar amp back then), but Mike “Lesbian” Simons’ duet with Dion on “Mysterex”, a song written in spite about Mike after he left the band to pursue a globally very successful advertising career (someone asked him if he regreted leaving………) made the show something more than just an old rock’n'roll band reuniting and just about compensated for Brendan’s absence.

Thing is though, it wasn’t just an old rock’n'roll band reuniting, it goes so much beyond that. When The Scavs came together out of the Ib Darlings at ATI, and Jimmy, Billy, Zero & I formed the Suburban Reptiles at the tail end of 76, it wasn’t with any great vision in mind, that part of it was accidental, it was simply an inadvertent part of a global desire to de-bloat popular music. None of us, when we formed these bands had heard much of this stuff (I had a Ramones album but you simply couldn’t buy any punk in NZ until mid 77), I guess we knew things simply had to change. For me I wasn’t as offended by the British prog rock thing, at least it had some sense of its own style, as I was by the post Warner-Elektra-Asylum-Little Feat-Steely Dan mush. Beautifully played, emotionally devoid, FM rawk.

That’s why we existed, it wasn’t to ape the Sex Pistols, who we really hadn’t heard but to knock down this status quo. Which is why the first gigs we sought out for the Reps and the Scavs was supporting these sorts of bands and taking our 20 or so supporters in to cause a little mayhem at clubs like Moody Richards in Airedale St.

And you know, I’m more than a little proud of our legacy. And more than a little grateful to John Baker and Simon Kay for being so passionate about preserving the legacy.

S’funny though, looking at the crowd last night…about 60% young and 40% older…how fucking polite they all were, with the young posse trying to do the pogo thang they’d seen on the DVDs ( don’t think I’d really seen pogo-ing in NZ until after AK79, a record which opened the punk floodgates here but really was the obituary of the original scene…it’s release signaled punk’s demise, in Auckland at least). The only abuse the band got… and 25 years ago they would have been mercilessly heckled, and would have expected it.. came from the Reptiles’ bassist, Billy Planet, standing next to me.

Someone had to do it……

But the real action last night was the extended after show in the public Casino bar next door. After parties are sometimes better than the gig. A mix of relaxed and aging faces who haven’t really seen each other for well over twenty years, and gobsmacked twenty somethings with records to sign.

It was, more or less, a class reunion, a private members club, the punk elite RSA, gathering for one last time, because it won’t happen again. We know things that others will never know and we did things that made a difference. Comrades in arms. There were missing faces, a few dead of course, but not many, surprisingly, considering the hedonism of the times. And cameras everywhere.

Fuck me, I had a great time, and fittingly the last to leave were John Baker, Simon Kay, Johnny, Des, Billy Planet and myself.