Despite the con­tem­po­rary dub­step flavours to the pro­duc­tion,  this, from the crim­i­nally under­rated Jamie Woon, sounds like some­thing that could’ve hap­pily arrived on Island in the mid 1970s.

Extra­or­di­nar­ily lovely.

Since I’m on a Woon tip ¹ I might as well throw this gem/golden oldie in as well:

I’m writ­ing a lot at the moment. I’m writ­ing stuff that prob­a­bly won’t appear for a long time. Hell it might not even appear at all. But I’m writ­ing, and get­ting things off my chest which sat­isfy me and scratch an itch, if you will.

But I think I need diver­sion, so I’ll tell a story. It’s a story I’ve long wanted to tell but to be hon­est it was only after a bit of prod­ding from Brigid that I decided to put pen to screen. I guess its been long enough now.

It was a wed­ding. A huge wed­ding and really, to toss an overused turn of phrase in the air, not just any wed­ding. A celebrity wed­ding. And not just any celebrity wed­ding but a wed­ding between an All Black (for any­one not liv­ing in New Zealand, France, sev­eral small Pacific nations, the honky bits of South Africa, small parts of New South Wales and smaller parts of sev­eral other Euro­pean nations, that’s a male who plays a game a lit­tle like a bas­tardised mutant fus­ing of Amer­i­can and non-American football..you won’t have heard of it but it’s huge in New Zealand in the way that Basque Pelota is huge in Cen­tral Amer­ica) and a mem­ber of a man­u­fac­tured pop quin­tet who, for a very brief moment were big­ger than Bar­bie with ado­les­cent females and house­wives across New Zealand (and who’s exis­tence directly paved the way for the global Pop Stars and Idol franchises).

They were called True­B­liss and I some­how found myself in the mid­dle of the whole thing.

I’ll try to explain although the whole thing, the pop thing, not the wed­ding which I’ll get to, was an incred­i­ble haze and would take more than a few para­graphs in a blog to cover.

I man­aged Anthony Ioasa, song­writer extra­or­di­naire, music pro­ducer and a man who now, for his own rea­sons, calls him­self Anthony Gold.

Ant was approached by Jonathan Dowl­ing, a film­maker, to work on a con­cept he had. He wanted to cre­ate a pop group, five girls, and film the process from audi­tion to group to record­ing stu­dio to record label to video shoots to gigs and their lives in between. It was a new con­cept, called real­ity TV.

Jonathan didn’t invent the for­mat or invent man­u­fac­tured bands. What he did do first was to meld the two things together and it was a stroke of bril­liance that should, when one con­sid­ers how far the con­cept has been taken, have made him rich beyond his dreams. But some­where along the way he lost con­trol of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty in the con­cept and, for want of a bet­ter word, was screwed.

And yes, that’s another story.

Yep, True­b­liss (the art­work spelled it tRue­B­liss but this far out I’ll pass) were mas­sive. Jonathan and his part­ners took it from a rough con­cept through to a TV series that dom­i­nated the nation’s TV screens for two and a half months in 1999, then filled New Zealand’s town halls and the­atres for the next two months with sell-out dates.

The album, quickly pro­duced, writ­ten and mostly recorded by Anthony, with a select bunch of musi­cians, includ­ing Joost Langveld, did rather well sell­ing some 40,000 copies in just over a month, with a num­ber one sin­gle that went plat­inum two times over.

And then it all fell to bits. Inevitably. The con­cept was the TV show and the band was always going to have a brief life.

I really liked all five girls and got on with them all pretty well, most espe­cially Jo and Carly but the end loomed, even if it wasn’t obvi­ous to the five at the cen­tre of it.

After the num­ber ones and the sell-out tour it stopped like a maglev train hit­ting a brick wall. Sin­gle three didn’t even chart and the money, which was always tight, ran out.

And the recrim­i­na­tions began.

There were sorts of media reports that these poor girls had been screwed by the TV show’s pro­duc­ers, one of whom, Jonathan, not Peter Urlich who was scripted into the show as man­ager but never had the role out­side that, was also the band’s manager.

In Novem­ber 1999 they fired Jonathan as man­ager, although he still con­trolled just about every­thing, and I was asked by the girls to act as man­ager, which all par­ties agreed to.

Time went by and in the nicest pos­si­ble way we tried to ease them into a quiet under­stand­ing that it was, unless a mir­a­cle hap­pened, over. We tried to engi­neer that mir­a­cle via their Sony deal and indeed we worked towards that with a new album full of Carly Bind­ing authored songs, and an Amer­i­can pro­ducer. Then Sony pulled out and Carly decided to leave the band, for her brief solo career.

We sat in their lawyer’s office one after­noon and tried to tell them, the audits had been done, Jonathan was squeaky clean and it was over. One, Jo Cot­ton, looked at us and asked “Can’t we just do it again?” (Iron­i­cally some years later Jo got her wish when she won some TVNZ tal­ent con­test, now forgotten).

But in early 2000 one of the five decided to get married.

Megan Cassie decided to marry her long-time boyfriend and father to her daugh­ter, Pita Ala­tini, who was, I’m reli­ably informed, an All Black (not that I would know one if, as seems to be the case as often as not, one ran­domly punched out some­one in the street in front of me).

The invites, for Brigid, our daugh­ter and myself, arrived in Jan­u­ary for a wed­ding in Feb­ru­ary with a ser­vice in Otara and a recep­tion at the For­mosa Coun­try Club out on the east­ern perime­ter of Auck­land and a place I’d never heard of.

Carly wasn’t invited.

We were offered an option to rent a chalet at the club for the night and duly did exactly that. It was, I guessed, going to be the celeb wed­ding to end all celeb wed­dings in that nether-land par­tially occu­pied these days by truly bizarre sites like this grue­some odd­ity (why would you want to be any­where near it…) but in 2000 was the exclu­sive domain of the weekly gos­sip rags.

And so, we suited up and packed our­selves into the car, and headed off to the church.

Some­body, I’m unsure whether it was Pita’s agents, or Megan’s fam­ily, had done an exclu­sive deal with The Woman’s Day for pics, for, and this may be an incor­rect mem­ory this far out, but it was a big wad, $40k cash plus a fair slice of the cost of the wed­ding, and there they were there, snap­ping away at famous guests as they arrived (famous peo­ple like to hang with other famous peo­ple I dis­cov­ered and you only have to be famous for a Woman’s mag cover or two to be one of them).

And they were, I guess, bemused and increas­ingly pissed off at the other lot, from the Woman’s Weekly, doing exactly the same thing.

Whichever party had sold the rights to WD hadn’t told the other party (and no-one at all had both­ered to tell me) who had then sold the same rights, both exclu­sive of course, to the other magazine.

It was frac­tious but the bride arrived and looked duly fab, The groom looked sharp and another of those All Blacks (don’t ask me which, but he seemed to have an aura of desir­abil­ity about him, given the looks and drools from both sexes that fol­lowed him) was best man.

The wed­ding went off with­out a hitch, all tears and that, it was quite lovely, and the best man looked bemused by it all.

Out­side there were hun­dreds. A smat­ter­ing of True­b­liss fans and lit­er­ally hun­dreds of mostly Ton­gan (the groom was Ton­gan) folks who, in what I was told was a very Ton­gan way, were openly invited to the ceremony.

Cool. The folks out­side seemed to be lov­ing it and proved to be pretty colour­ful sub­jects for the com­pet­ing cam­era crews.

After the wed­ding we jumped in the car. I had Jonathan and Anthony in mine and we headed east. And east and east. Even­tu­ally we found the venue, after ask­ing at a shop or two, and found our­selves dri­ving up the long wind­ing approach to the grand be-pillared reception.

And it was odd. Very.

I’ve not been to Palm Springs but I’m guess­ing that it’s full of these sorts of mutant pri­vate clubs where the riff raff are kept out and the rich old folk go to drink far too many cock­tails, and even­tu­ally die. Except this one was tar­geted at the rich old Chi­nese folks, as the name sug­gested, and looked like it came in a kitset..build your own coun­try club box com­plete with dozens of fully mature palms, twee lit­tle bridges over twee man-made ponds, and a beau­ti­fully preened golf course for the stink­ing rich to wan­der around on the plen­ti­ful golf carts whilst the less priv­i­leged watched from outside.

Hey, it’s their money, but it did feel a lit­tle like we were sit­ting in some tacky priv­i­leged zone on the edge of the outerworlds.

I was, I have to say, impressed by the chalet. Not really the chalet as such, but the mas­sive bath­room which was about the size of our whole house back in South Herne. And we were given our very own own golf cart.

It was, when we checked in, early after­noon, about 1 I think, and we took a cou­ple of pic­tures of the pri­vate golf cart (I don’t play so it was a nov­elty) then, leav­ing it parked out­side, wan­dered over to the gath­er­ing storm.

Peo­ple had begun arrive, the sun was beat­ing down and the kids were all ush­ered away to a sep­a­rate zone where they would be enter­tained by clowns and fed vast amounts of coca cola and McDon­alds. As a respon­si­ble par­ent I wan­dered off to get a drink myself.

A beer. There were a range but I took a Stella. And the sun beat down. We wan­dered around look­ing for shel­ter but there was lit­tle so we had another drink and the sun beat down so I moved on to the Pinot Gris.

An organ­iser of sorts told us that the main event would begin around five in the big mar­quee, a huge mar­quee actu­ally, and we all con­ve­niently had names on tables. Handy, since it was get­ting blurry.

Inside the tent was a huge table run­ning down the west side (I think) set up for the offi­cial party, who now, I was told, included big parts of the All Black squad, par­ents, and guests from South Africa (Megan’s fam­ily is Zulu).

And there were lots of fab and famous peo­ple wan­der­ing around..TV folks, the odd Short­land Street bod and All Blacks.

So we all had another drink and the sun got stronger.

I looked around for food. There was none. Just aggres­sive wine wait­ers offer­ing top ups. The few pack­ets of crisps that were out when we arrived were long gone, so I went into the kids room and stole two cheese­burg­ers from the dis­trib­ut­ing Ronald, hand­ing one to Brigid. It was something.

It’s incred­i­ble what hunger, mixed with Pinot Gris and Stella will push you to do.

Around 4, we were stag­ger­ing a bit under the weight of all this and I watched the kitchen folks putting out the suck­ing pigs. Along the front of the offi­cial table they were laid out, with one per two peo­ple. Lit­tle fat ones (this far out I can’t recall through the blur if they had an apple per mouth or not) that sat in the heat and starred blankly out en-mass. So we had another drink and the musos puffed on some green stuff (I don’t do that, and haven’t for many years: I start think­ing my friends are policemen/women so it’s best to pass).

It was start­ing to fill up. The guest list was, I was told, offi­cially about 300 peo­ple, but many of those who’d arrived unin­vited at the church had made their first foray out to the For­mosa Coun­try Club and had parked their vans and cars in a large, pretty, grassed area behind the tent where they were pulling out the pub pets.

Their num­bers had grown to about 400 I guess.

The secu­rity guards looked itchy but they were unsure what to do.

Around five, as the sun still pum­melled us, and we were almost crawl­ing, the announce­ment came to enter the tent.

And we did. Brigid and I found our­selves seated with Jonathan, Mal­colm Black from Sony, and three Ton­gan fa’afafine from Syd­ney. A prime table right in front of the happy cou­ple. We started to chat to the trio from New South Wales. You’re with the Ala­tini fam­ily? Oh, no dear. Oh, you must be with Megan then? No, we’ve never met either of them. So who invited you? No-one. We just thought we had to be here so we booked a flight and here we are. But you’re seated on one of the best tables in the house. Oh god..we just waited until every­one sat down and were pointed by an usher to these seats.

We actu­ally hit it off rather well with these three, as we dis­cov­ered, dress­mak­ers, from Syd­ney who had no con­nec­tion to the wed­ding but had the best seats in the house.

Okay, we were seated but the speeches began..and we had a new batch of wines..red this time for me, deliv­ered to the tables.

The talk­ing car­ried on, and in a very Island, and I found out shortly, Zulu way, every speech demanded sev­eral extended responses.

There was no food. There was no ven­ti­la­tion and the tem­per­a­ture was rising.

Three hun­dred com­pletely ine­bri­ated, leg­less, guests, at least a dozen now froth­ing dead pigs that had been in the Feb­ru­ary heat for about 3 hours and ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and noise were head­ing to a climax.

I went for a wan­der to check on daugh­ter and found the hun­dreds of unin­vited guests behind the tent had started dig­ging up one of the gor­geous golf greens for umus to cook the bas­ket loads of food that were now being unloaded from vans. Pub pets (they’re the plas­tic beer con­tain­ers that brew­eries sell their cheaper brands in, in bulk) were being tossed around the course and all over the beau­ti­fully man­i­cured gar­dens where they were now stick­ing out like mutant gnomes from the New Zealand hinterland.

Isabella was fine and it was head­ing towards 8pm. The whole place was com­pletely shit­faced. The two sets of pho­tog­ra­phers were glar­ing at each other across a divide of angry, hun­gry, loud peo­ple. The odd scrap was break­ing out and nobody was pay­ing the slight­est bit of atten­tion to the bride, groom or whichever offi­cial guest was mak­ing the umpteenth response to what­ever response. All Blacks were chat­ting with girls who lined up to be chat­ted to, and every now and then one or two would wan­der outside..for a breath of fresh air of course.

And then they announced the din­ner would be served table by table as they were called.

Imme­di­ately there was, from every table, a mad demented rush to towards the food. The cater­ing man­ager leapt at the claw­ing mass of com­pletely oblit­er­ated guests, abus­ing them and phys­i­cally push­ing them back.

And then the power went off and a table full of food col­lapsed as 100 starv­ing drunk peo­ple forced their way to it in the pitch black.

After about 20 min­utes of claw­ing and scrap­ing, the power came on and peo­ple forced them­selves back up and found their way through the mess and con­fu­sion to their tables.

The tent slowly wound down as food calmed the masses and the tap on the free-flow booze was, smartly, turned off by some­one. And of course a few peo­ple sim­ply passed out, drunk in the over­pow­er­ing heat.

I went out­side to see how the umus were going and the secu­rity guards were doing their very best to get the old Corti­nas and the rest off the golf course before they set­tled in. As I watched two golf carts, with peo­ple hang­ing off the roof and sides, wheeled past and onto the next green where, as much as you can with over­laden carts, they tried to do wheel­ies and drifts.

It was time to leave and we crawled back to our wee chalet and promptly passed out.

The next morn­ing I wan­dered down to the recep­tion past the tent. There were bod­ies every­where, mostly the unin­vited masses who pitched their own pup tents or sim­ply slept where they fell. A golf cart was in the garden.

We paid and left as quickly as pos­si­ble. I’ve not been back, although Isabella was keen.

The next day Woman’s Day tried to demand their money back, but, caveat emp­tor, it was done and gone.

Both mags ran sto­ries about the gor­geous celebrity filled wed­ding and printed end­less shots of famous peo­ple and Peter Urlich.

I read some­where that they, in 2009, renewed their vows.

Some­body quite recently referred to this blog some­where and called me a ‘tastemaker’. I was rather taken aback…for a few rea­sons. Firstly I think tucked away in the wilds of rather iso­lated Sanur, Bali, my days to being a tastemaker are long behind me (although I’m not unaware, and appre­cia­tive of the fairly ded­i­cated lis­ten­er­ship I had in my years on 95bFm and George FM.…I’m quite proud of 19 years on Auck­land radio, but that’s kinda ancient his­tory now); sec­ondly it puts a bur­den on my shoul­ders that I don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to have..hell I’ve just played the music I like..nothing more, noth­ing less; and finally, as you get older you do tend to find your­self reach­ing back­wards more and more, and it’s a tough call to be a tastemaker when you are look­ing back­ward.… but I see that as the luck, or joy of hav­ing had forty years of musi­cal explo­ration to delve back into.

With that thought, espe­cially the last bit, in the back of my mind I’m always wary of writ­ing too much about ‘old’ records, or ‘old’ artists.

That of course is stu­pid and the thought only crosses my mind for a brief inse­cure moment, but it was accen­tu­ated by a com­ment I read some­where about those aging Pub­lic Address com­men­ta­tors who try and pre­tend they are still hip!. Per­haps that is me, as I’ve been known to com­ment on PA from time to time…but once again com­mon sense rears it’s pro­tec­tive head and raises a big finger.

So with that in mind (or cast out of my mind) let me say some­thing about three records that I’m lik­ing quite a lot right now.

My friend Danielle emailed me and said she’d not really much liked the new-ish (we old folk remem­ber when a record was still new 6 months after release, now you have a week’s grace before it’s passé) Elvis Costello album, the oddly named Momo­fuku (some­thing to do with instant noo­dles I think). I replied and agreed, but noted that I really liked the first and last tracks, so that at least was some­thing. Then some­thing happened..at the gym of all places. Elvis clicked on the cross-trainer and I feel in love with Momofuku.

I’ve had a strange decade with Elvis Costello. I’ve always been a huge fan, ever since I’d heard Less Than Zero on a Stiff Records sam­pler many years ago, but since the mid nineties it’s not been easy as he careers around gen­res, some­times embar­rass­ingly pre­ten­tiously, and some­times with mixed, rather wooden results. Through­out all that I’ve been quite loyal and there have been moments, such as the alt-countryish The Deliv­ery Man, his last ‘proper’ album, from 2004. But the road for an Costello-phile has not been smooth.

Which is why this album is such a pleas­ant sur­prise and even more so when it hit me with­out warn­ing that morn­ing on that bloody cross-trainer.

As an aging punk, it’s a plea­sure to say Momo­fuku is his most punk album since…well since This Years Model, if you will. What does that mean?…not much to most I guess as the term ‘punk’ was usurped years ago and he was never totally accepted by the unwashed gob­bing masses, but to many of us he encap­su­lated the ethos of the times more than most lat­ter day three chord won­ders. Punk was sup­posed to raise a fin­ger and be smart at the same time and Elvis was just that.

So unpre­ten­tiously for the first time in many years, he snarls and vents his way around songs like the sear­ing Amer­i­can Gang­ster Time and the mighty opener No Hid­ing Place.

I’ll hand­ing some­body a box of matches / and car­ry­ing the can of kerosene

He hasn’t sounded this bru­tally con­vinc­ing or this ven­omously melodic for decades. And he tosses in cute lit­tle throw­aways like Harry Worth which work because they hold together the album as a whole

Unlike the Tou­s­saint col­lab­o­ra­tion or his last ‘rock’ out­ing, When I was Cruel. His vocals don’t sound strained, they don’t sound uncom­fort­ably placed in strange surroundings.

And unlike those ear­lier albums, this is the sound of a guy who has noth­ing to prove. On When I Was Cruel, and The Deliv­ery Man he felt like was des­per­ately try­ing to prove he still mat­tered, and on The River In Reverse he was try­ing to prove he could stand next to Allen Tou­s­saint (miss­ing the point: he can, but only on his own terms, as Elvis Costello, not Tou­s­saint, and he shouldn’t need to try but I guess part of what he is, is that he does).

More please.

And more Paul Weller not try­ing to sound like a work­man rocker and get­ting his sense of humour, & sense of adven­ture back again as he seems to have done with 22 Dreams. Whereas Elvis needs to be less pre­ten­tious, Paul needs more of it. He was always at his best when being an obnox­ious pre­ten­tious magpie..like the for­ever per­plex­ing but always engag­ing Style Coun­cil or the best Jam albums where his influ­ences were obvi­ous but mutated through Paul’s self obsessed lense.

Hap­pily the ever so slightly pre­ten­tious Paul Weller is back and the glum rocker of recent years cast aside, and even if he misses ever so often (God is a huge miss) at least he has some edge again.

No-one could ever accuse Den­nis Wil­son of not hav­ing edge but his prob­lem was, like brother Brian, he sim­ply walked too close to it. I bought Pacific Ocean Blue in 1977 when it was first issued. I think I was one of per­haps a dozen who both­ered in New Zealand as it sat on the shelf oppo­site the till in the shop I was work­ing in as i tried to sell it, with­out luck, to count­less folk. The Beach Boys had long since stopped sell­ing beyond the hits col­lec­tions (even the gig I attended on a sunny after­noon in Auckland’s West­ern Springs around the same time was only sparsely attended..although the day’s after­math is well doc­u­mented as a Den­nis Wil­son burn out, and Brian was so wasted he walked off the stage mid song and didn’t return). The last thing that was going to set New Zealand’s charts on fire was an intro­verted selec­tion of songs from the drum­mer, even if his name was Wilson.

I fell in love with POB on release. And even­tu­ally quite a few boys did…girls never warm to The Beach Boys post surf, and rarely before, they are mostly a male thing….enough to push it into the lower reaches of the US album chart and guar­an­tee its rep­u­ta­tion as a lost mas­ter­piece (since then it’s been largely unavail­able for decades with one brief CD issue in 1991, although plen­ti­ful bootlegs). But now it’s back, in a beau­ti­ful dou­ble pack­age (the sec­ond album is an unre­leased, and also much boot­legged, sec­ond solo album..it was unre­leased for a rea­son, so I’m gonna stick to CD1) and thirty years on it still sounds as dark, con­fused, ragged, hope­ful and beau­ti­ful as it did back then. And the mood of course is tinted fur­ther by the events of the years after and Den­nis Wilson’s death…but then The Beach Boys’ his­tory is one of the more tragic in the rock’n’roll story-book.

It’s not all wonderful…there are gri­mace moments, like the ‘save my rock’roll’-isms of What’s Wrong. How­ever that’s The Beach Boys..every album has those moments. But mostly Pacific Ocean Blue stands up as one of the few high­points in the post 1976 Beach Boys cat­a­logue (non of which appear under the BB name). And it’s rep­u­ta­tion is justified.…if you’re a boy.

I know a car­pen­ter who had a dream / Killed the man but you couldn’t kill the dream / Who said it was easy