there must be a reason for everything in this world, surely? Over at Myk Reilly's excellent blog (Myk was our in house graphics designer back in the early Box days.."Myk I need a poster and flyer by tomorrow please, for Justin Robertson, two colour, 1000 posters A0 stuck up"..you know the drill..he was good and he was a fan which, aside from the obvious talents required, was one of the reasons he was good..get those flyers online please Myk (but lets forget the "100 % Pure Dance" comp we did for PolyGram..not because the cover sucked but because the record did)) he's done this absolutely hilarious ramble about the Big Day Out. Peter linked to it too, and that's where I first noted it. My BDO tale is insignificant next to Myk's, but... I haven't been for three years, as I've been out of town each January but I think the only thing I really regret missing is dear old Kraftwerk. I saw them in Sydney about twenty four years ago and they were astounding, especially to a young only-just post punker from the Muldoonistic gulag called New Zealand, where no-one was allowed an idea that took them beyond their station and records, unless they were sanctioned as acceptable by the record company kartel, because of the import licensing paranoia, simply were not available. But I digress...Andrew White recorded some of Kraftwerk at the BDO on his cell phone and sent it to my messages. I actually had no idea who'd sent it until a month or so ago when he owned up to it. I checked my messages in Bali at the time and listened to large parts of Trans Europe Express on the phone...it was clear as a bell but cost me $800 in Vodafone charges sadly... So the last time I went to BDO was a few years back and I have to be honest I was pretty lax in seeing the bands. I went into the boiler room to watch Greg Churchill ("Disco Hoopla" fer fux sake..my god) and saw Nathan Haines play a very odd and twisted set with Manuel Bundy. Unfortunately my whole world, had, for a variety of reasons best not gone into here started to go a little pear shaped by late afternoon. I discovered the FMR private room had cucumber sandwiches and Heineken (which was a major improvement over the DB Export everywhere else..how can they still serve this recycled cat piss anywhere in the civilized world. I guess in Australia they'd give you Fosters which is worse, but, as they say in Indonesia, Oz is the land that taste forgot). And it was the drunken Australian FMR management that forced me back upstairs to the more public vip area, where I made no sense to the likes of Greg Johnson (who understood my lack of sense perfectly). All good and well until we all went down to Feel with Placebo for their afterparty. Feel at that stage hadn't begun it's slide from the coolest, most pretentiously elite bar in Auckland to a slimy to be avoided hell hole. And things progressed as they do, until the band was leaving, crew and all and someone decided myself, and my good and reliable friend, Blake were, for some bizarre and unfathomable reason, the most trustworthy people there to look after Placebo's drummer upstairs, who, needs, we were told, a close eye, after a drink or too...he was a drummer after all. I'm sure we agreed to babysit but the next memory is Blake and myself talking gibberish to Paul Dean at The Grand Circle (Blake looks like Ian Pooley's twin we're told so its easy to blag into clubs with him, but that's an altogether different story)..text...where are you?....you better come back. So back to Feel to see the drummer from Placebo (lovely guy I'm told) disappearing in some car to somewhere with some Feel inhabitant (many of whom,as the years passed, were to be avoided, but drummers don't know things like that) , having been tossed in the street after he'd smashed up all the furniture upstairs. It went from bad to worse after that and the next memory is in some vip (??) room, with Glen, at Sinners with some girl telling me that she'd had a baby six weeks earlier but was already back on the streets..... I might venture back to the BDO this year but I'm not going anywhere near cucumber sandwiches .....
Friday, January 14, 2005
Thursday, January 13, 2005
A ranting we will go..
I felt like doing a list. I’ve always been a sucker for lists and a complete set of David Wallenchinsky, Amy & Irving Wallace’ s “Book of Lists” (and the densely trivia filled and grossly time wasting "People’s Almanacs”) including the sexual (see I managed to get the word in to get my hits up) book of lists, sits on my shelf. They’re well read (best loo books ever) and held together with various bits of tape and gum. Well read but not well made....
So I wanted to do a list. Everybody else on the planet did a best of 2004 list, including the best pizza, all numbered and nicely linked etc, but the best I could do was a rambling litany (one of my favourite words..I loved Justice Mahon talking about an “orchestrated litany of lies” all those years ago- it was a tragic event but a fine turn of phrase that I bet he was justifiably proud of) which I posted below. But, best of year..done, too late, and simply dull this far into 2005…
So I decided to carry on from the Fingers Inc thing below and list my favourite electronic records….ever…it may have been as grey as Wanganui on a good day, but it was a list..
The problem I encountered came when I tried to find a record to play whilst I was clumsily typing-I’m getting faster by the day-as I wrote. I realised pretty quickly that the E Dancer album, whilst I love it, and it would easily make my list, was going to piss off everyone else in the house on a Tuesday evening…so, I decided to try non list things. I dragged out my battered vinyl copy of The Flaming Groovies “Shake Some Action” ( bought a CD of it once but it sounded completely sad off digital), the happiest record I could think of, but, the sixties pastiche thing really started to piss me off tonight…so, to the real deal…20/20 by The Beach Boys, an astounding, warm and magical record that sits in the latter third of the unbroken streak of eleven peerless albums that began with “All Summer Long” in mid 64 and finished with “Surfs Up” in 71..the Beatles only managed six years and I can’t think of anyone who comes close in pop…most bands only have one half decent song in them if push comes to shove. But you can’t write electronic if you’re listening analogue…..out come the singles..I tried the Leftfield’s remix of Supereal’s “Body Medusa” on Guerilla (good, slightly forgotten label owned by uber-producer Willian Orbit..it’s time will come again when the nineties revival hits properly in a year or two), but its long been obvious that Leftfield were one of those acts that only had a couple or five, of good, actually completely great to be honest, tunes in them, and this ain’t one of them…on to The Junkyard Band’s double a side on Def Jam, back when it mattered. I went for “The Word” and that radically sloping synth bassline, was the bomb and with all those young kids bashing things sounds as vital as it did back then…they’re still going..they must be heading towards middle age now. I’m really not sure about bands that just keep going…the Rolling Stones simply are and haven’t mattered for decades, U2 haven’t made an interesting record since about 1990…guess it’s a well paying job, but do the rest of us have to suffer crap like Vertigo. But, to the matter at hand..
I played my favourite singles this week, Closer Muzik’ s ”One Two Three Gravity”…I like the Ewen Pearson acid mix because it has faceless teutonic vox over a tb303… a winning combination and commendably soulless; Herb Martin’s percussion fest “Soul Drums” on Jerome Sydenham’s unceasingly wonderful Ibadan- I’ve not heard of Herb (not a cred name Bro..) before but this thing is fucking ace; the Soulwax mix of “Daft Punk is Playing at My House” by the LCD crew which is noisy and really pissing off the DFA purists (funny and inevitable how a label that took the piss out such nonsense now attracts it); another Ibadan thingy, “ Road to Calabar” from the label owner, Sydenham and Denis Ferrer, very much in the style of the Sandcastles and Timbuktu, albeit a bit techier; and Kerri Chandlers’ retrospectively old school “Back to the Raw”..best thing he’s done in years and much better than all that conservative trad house from labels like King Street, Soulfuric and MAW that does my head in these days…those guys have been churning out the same old shit for years now and its really time to move on………..its a rut that he's been in for some time but this shows Kerri still has the edge when he's not treading water ..and it inspires me to drag out an
So to the list..actually by this time I’d well and truly realised the pointlessness of the list, a fatuous and egotistic exercise to begin with…if such a list exists it should stay on my hard drive…. and decided to let (the artist formerly known as DJ) Hell indulge me in his fantasies
the vinyl version of course...
and I'll take a cup of warm fat with that order please Just found this good piece on KFC at Richard Phelps blog. How can anyone eat this shit...it's beyond me. Actually I met Colonel Sanders once (true!)...I was working at KFC in Pamure in my last year of school to raise money to buy a car and he visited. All the brown staff were sent home that day as the Colonel was a good old fashioned southern racist......
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Extended Play On George FM 120105
Felt like playing a bunch of new records today but the sun was finally out and I reckoned I had some sort of odd obligation to keep it reasonably flowery, so I stayed soulish, mostly..plus I had a migrane....
Norma White-I Want Your Love (dub)-Studio One / Soul Jazz-2004
The Joneses-Summer Groove (dub)-
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Furthermore.... If you only buy one album this year, or ever more, make it this one. Seventeen years after it's release, Another Side still stands as the greatest album released under the tag "house music"
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