Careful where the huskies go...

Frank Zappa in The Monkees. I love The Monkees. This is 'king wonderful

Fixing a hole where the rain comes in

New signs on the by-pass road between Sanur and Kuta

We may laugh but this is actually quite a step up. Until last week all roadworks in Bali consisted of large numbers of minimum wage Javanese workers with a rudimentary hand-painted sign, although sometimes none, often working at night with no safety gear or warning lights. As of this week they have flashing lights, orange jackets, road cones, and helmets. I wonder who paid for it..Japan? Australia?

Still swinging their picks and shovels in jandals though....

Ohh, now tell me where can you party, child, all night long? / In the basement, In the basement, yeah

In the spirit of all things High Street, Auckland, and Cause Celebre (including this post on Public Address from myself), I made a point of tracking down a copy of the very rare, and rather wonderful (and, to the point, fairly important in the scheme of all things musically AK in the 1990s) Freebass album, RAW: Live at Cause Celebre.

Freebass were important for a number of reasons, but not least because it was one of the early vehicles for the Haines brothers, Joel and Nathan. Nathan's next band was The Enforcers, who went on to record the globally released Shift Left ..the only NZ recorded album ever to appear on Verve.

I remember the night fairly well. Chris Sinclair had miked up the room and he and Mark Tierney taped it struggling against all sorts of adversity. They had to battle with odd acoustics, inebriated folks repeatedly tripping over cables and staff who really didn't care who or what they were, they had to get that case of Mac's Gold to the back bar without delay.

But it worked out pretty well, it was a landmark album at the time and, as I recall, sold pretty well. Released on Mark Tierney and Kane Massey's quite crucial Deepgrooves label, it's long been unavailable and quite sought after. My (signed) copy had walked somewhere in the past 19 years so I was forced to buy a new copy this week. I sourced it on EBay, from Sydney, and, with the blessing of a couple of the musicians who may or may not own the rights (who the hell knows), I thought I'd post a track.

I've always thought that Thinking Of Riccardo may be about the Chilean guy of the name who was around the scene. He was, as I recall, busted for coke importation around this time and we were all rather taken aback. I've been meaning to ask for 19 years.

Freebass - Thinking Of Riccardo (DeepGrooves, 1990)