when the heat gets so tropical / and the talk gets so topical

Just A few things that tick my box right now

• Ice cream….some years ago, whilst in London town, a few English friends offered to drag me across the north of the city, to what I was told, was without question the best ice cream I would ever have, tasted. I don’t know why I bothered. As a New Zealander I should’ve instinctively known that nothing dairy, be it ice cream, or the most expensive cheese in the UK can hold torch to even the cheapest cheddar or Tip Top found in a New Zealand corner dairy. Apart, of course from butter, the NZ variety comparing very unfavourably with those almost white and far more subtle Danish and French varieties. I was happy in my belief in our dairy supremacy until I came to Bali and discovered the multitude of places that serve, on the street, magnificent Italian gelatos and sorbets that demolish anything else I’ve found anywhere in the world, even in New Zealand’s dairies. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the something else that Bali seems to put in virtually anything, but I’ve had to resort to an extra half an hour daily at the gym to counter cravings for a half and half Tim Tam / Bitter Yoghurt & Strawberry from the little taverna on the corner of Jalan Double Six and Jalan Blue Ocean. However, waving the patriotic banner (see below) just a tad, New Zealand still has, absolutely beyond any question, the finest fish and chips on the planet. In Kawhia actually, oh and the Herne Bay Fish Ship, and Ahipara, and about 400 other wonderfully unique little shops. And the scallops……damn I miss the scallops….All this brings me to…
• Double Six Beach… about where Kuta Beach loses the Australian enforced ugliness of its better known southern strip and mutates firstly into the more graceful Pantai Legian, and thence into Pantai Seminyak, it briefly becomes the Sunday afternoon haven that is Pantai Blue Ocean, or, more commonly, after the legendary club at its northern end, Double Six Beach. After a set breakfast at Ku De Ta, a few hours on a hired lounger, under an umbrella, with the kids in the surf is the bomb. Followed of course, by an ice cream from that taverna. Decadent, hell yes, but do I bloody care…you’re just jealous. On the iPod I’ll likely this week have…
• Booka Shade – Movements…. I’ve been living with this for a month or two now, and, simply put, I love it big time. I’m sitting outside right now, as I write, in the office with the gorgeous Take A Ride slipping out of the laptop’s speakers. I love minimal German techno and I guess I have long before the twists of fashion bought it into our faces so completely in the past couple of years. There is so much understated, simple grace in a track like Body Language. There was a passage in a very funny late Victorian book, Three Men in A Boat, which described the German and French attitudes to streams (the water kind you find in forests and the like). The Frenchman will admire the beauty of the bouncing, uneven flow and enjoy its place in nature; whilst the German will think it’s offensively untidy and rebuild the sides to redirect it in a more orderly way. So it is with techno, the Germans extract beauty from the order of it, in a way that no-one else can. And it also sounds so perfect in our car, which is a new…
• Toyota Avanza…whoa, oh dear, I never thought I’d say that. You see, I’ve driven a variety of German cars for over twenty years. They build cars as they make techno; elegantly, with supreme precision and extract a beauty from that precision that no-one else can approach. The BMW three series is still the finest production car bar none and a beautifully kept late eighties 325 is a thing of much wonder. It has an atheistic that something like a Lexus can’t ever aspire too. And so it is a very strange place to be in, in mid 2006, writing with joy about a cheap faceless Japanese box, with such pleasure. But, if being in Bali has done one thing, it’s removed the material urges a little and replaced them with a new sense of reality. And that reality is also reinforced by the fact that for the past twelve months I’ve been driving the Indonesian equivalent of the Ford Model T, the ubiquitous and necessarily rugged, Toyota Kijang. As I taught myself to drive all over again, as one needs to if you are to navigate the unregulated mayhem on the roads, I understood what it was like to exist on appalling roads in a car with at best rudimentary suspension. And no bloody sound system. No bloody sound system. I endured it because it made sense to do so. But no longer. I have suspension and a reasonably good car stereo and I’m happy, happy, happy and I love the soulless little beast, although, in a perverse way now I miss the blue Kijang. My bum had become so accustomed to the way it ricocheted off every corner of a pothole, it felt like family. I hope whoever has it now, gets the same education from it I did. As an aside this is also the first time I’ve experienced the decidedly un-western feeling of selling a car for the same as I paid for it a year earlier.
• Kites….the last real drive I took DK1690XY (for that was the Kijang) on was down to the northern end of our rather beautiful Sanur Beach. Its a place I see far too rarely…is a funny thing, you move to paradise and yet sometimes you get so very complacent and let it slip right past you. But here we were, for the semi final of the annual kite completions. A defining feature of this island during the dry season are the literally hundreds of kites, from the small ones flown by local boys, to the massive, perhaps fifty metre long ones, flown by villages and banjars. These dominate our skies and they come together in July and August for a competition, the semi final of which was on our beach. There were, I was told, about 50,000 people present, but it felt like more, all gathered in community groups, complete with catering, taking turns to take their particular creation into the blue against others in their category. And there were flags and colour and banners and more flags and immense waving swathes of cloth in the wind. The Indonesians love flags….
• Flags…and they have quite a good one too. The simple red and white one is such a recognisably strong banner, and right now its everywhere. I didn’t know (and why would I) until I came here that the flag was symbolically created as a defiant gesture of independence when someone tore the blue stripe off the oppressing Dutch flag in 1945. And so it is that on the anniversary of that hard won independence, every August 17, for a couple of weeks before, this country is almost literally covered in red and white fabric. Cars, buildings, trees, businesses and just about everything that moves or doesn’t gets the patriotic sash or flag. I’m a New Zealander, and try as we might, we don’t have a massive flag bound patriotic thing going on. Our flag is a nothing for a start, But we also don’t like the exhibitionism thing that such blatant national pride demands. And yet when I hear Andrew White’s quite dramatic and very moving That Lange Track, I get a patriotic shiver, I can’t help. But that said, I have a problem with patriotism. The line between it and nationalism is too thin to make me comfortable. However, there is something about the national pride that you see here in Indonesia that works. This isn’t the ugly patriotism of the USA, a pride that has long since passed its use by date and has a rotten aura about it. This instead is a pride, like that of the US a long, long time ago, about what the nation was created from and how that creation came about. It’s a benign patriotism, and I’m enjoying the fluttering everywhere, quite a lot.

Watch out young love…

I’ve had a fair response to my last post, more than I expected, mostly from people I know fairly well and overwhelmingly in agreement with the concerns I raised therein and the question I asked myself.

One point that was, however, thrown back at me, several times, with some justification, was “but look how far we’ve come in such a short period”. And there is that of course. Except its not such a short period is it…

With advancing age, comes some ability to reflect a bit further back than those who are lucky to have a few less years on the clock (until of course, that same age causes one to forget altogether what in gods name happened yesterday let alone thirty years ago).

I still have enough functioning memory cells to talk about a time a long time ago when the New Zealand pop industry was strong, when the airwaves were full of “our” music and the stuff sold the sort of quantities we can still only dream of in 2006. Admittedly it was primarily on single but not all, and it was also primarily pop. And that’s a word that suffices for me…dress it all up in whatever niche or sub genre we like, it’s all still pop music.

The era, as distant as it is now, was the period from the early sixties through to the early seventies. There was a period before that of course when Johnny Devlin claimed to have sold hundreds of thousand of records nationwide, but his manager and label owner, my much missed old friend and mentor, the late Phil Warren, happily admitted to me before he passed away, that those figures were somewhat, shall we say, exaggerated for the press.

As only Phil, who was a truly great man in any sense of the word, could.

But the golden age that I’m remembering (and the early part of it is at best vague as I was very, very young) came a little later, heralded as much as anything by a swag of great pop tunes that touched the nerve of a young country hungry to be itself. That coupled with a state television monopoly that was happy to fill its schedule with bands and performers on variety shows and the monumental beast that was the Loxene Golden Disc. Plus radio which, when it played pop, played a lot of the big local stars. For all the fuss about the Scribe hits, the sales of How Many in all its forms are dwarfed by the big New Zealand hits of not only that era but the seventies, eighties and nineties too (there are at least twenty local records I can think of which sold three or four times as many copies).

As a kid in the late sixties I sat, doing my homework, glued to the hit parades coming out of Wellington’s studios, filled with local hits and wannabe hits, all of which were a part of our aural landscape and gobbled up by a massive and overwhelming cross-section of our populace. The acts pulled tens of thousands live, and the annual Loxene album sold in the hundreds of thousands.

And yet by 1974 it was all over. It was as if the monumental hits that were Space Waltz’s Out in the Street, and Blerta’s Dance Around the World were the swansongs for an industry. It was almost a decade until New Zealand’s pop managed to get on the airwaves again and a lot happened in that gap. There were, now, iconic records by Toy Love, Hello Sailor, Split Enz, Dragon, The Suburban Reptiles, Th’Dudes and others. None of these managed to get any airplay at all, and indeed, sold diddly squat at the time (with the exception of the fourth Enz album, driven by the crossover single I See Red, pushed onto a reluctant radio by rabid public demand).

What had happened had nothing to do with what was being produced. The seventies produced some of the strongest, and, more to the point, commercially viable music that the islands have ever produced. There was a large and healthy live scene and, later in the decade, quite a musical revolution. No, what happened was TV2 and commercially driven state and private radio. Auckland saw Radio Hauraki and the rise of 1ZM, and commercial radio and TV takes far less risk by its nature unless it’s forced to. So the music almost overnight disappeared from the airwaves. It could of course be reasonably argued that the disappearance of radio from the equation allowed the artists themselves conversely to take more risks, with the positive flow on from that leading to the likes of Split Enz, but as a result of the lack of exposure and sales, the once thriving local recording industry virtually ceased to exist by the late seventies.

And what that means to me is that any momentum and any currency NZ’s music might have right now means little in the bigger scheme. A change of government for example could (and many might say, certainly would) wipe away the airplay gains. The fragility of New Zealand music’s place in such a commercially driven environment cannot be overstated, especially with the major record companies staring so paranoiacly at the abyss. What happened thirty years ago can happen again, so damn easily.

And, as an aside, attempting to shelter it in the straightjacket that is the odd, parochial phrase “kiwi music” does us no favours either. At least give our popular form of musical expression the dignity of being called by it's correct name.

There are no sheep on our farms

A rather respected name in the NZ music industry said to me, in the middle of a conversation the other day, about the commercial potential of a record, that sales of NZ music are in, and I quote, “complete freefall” and unlikely to improve in the near future. That, coupled with other informed comments on National Radio recently mentioning drops of some twenty percent or so this year, raises one big question. At least from where I’m sitting, several thousand miles from the action.

Namely, what in gods name happened?

Of course I’m absolutely aware of the on-going global downturn in sales of compact discs and the inevitable flattening out of digital sales.

Especially from acts represented by the major industry organisations such as the RIAA, or their equivalents.

But the percentage drop in sales, from labels represented by RIANZ (and that is a major qualifier) of NZ music, far exceeds the global trend and the word why flashes in neon rather brutally.

Two years ago the country was feting the rise of New Zealand music, and the media was full of it as was the radio. I have no idea as to breakdown of radio figures now , and the sad irony was that the music was always there, just ignored by those that happily leapt all over it when it seemed wise or convenient. It was only the work of more than a few unstinting believers over several decades coinciding with the threat of quota legislation from the Labour government that forced the sea change of the past six years or so. And what can be embraced so easily, with such little real belief, can, I imagine, be discarded just as easily.

Having been away from NZ more or less for 18 months, I have an odd, skewered, almost half baked perception of what is happening there I guess. You get little news of the gilded isles outside the country itself unless you actively search. I’m only vaguely aware of what is happening politically and socially, even with the casual, but now irregular, look at the Herald. It used to be my browser’s homepage but has since been replaced by a personalised Google news page, which is both handier and more relevant to where I am now. Much of what I do get comes from the odd look at Public Address and the stream of valuable emails I still get from the nest.

But, having been intimately involved with New Zealand indigenous music (and I mean the stuff made by or in NZ, not music of the Tangata Whenua) for close to thirty years I’m still keenly wanting to know what is or is not happening in an industry that I know, and I suppose, love, so well. It’s in my blood. Most of my information, as detailed above, comes from arch cynics, both inside and on the side lines of the industry. All of them have been or are players in recording the stuff that we like to puff our chests out about and say “this is ours!”

And so to them too, I genuinely ask, what happened. True, this week sees twelve NZ albums in the Top 40, many admittedly in the lower regions where retail bias and negligible real sales are the rule rather than the exception. But that said, they still exist in, what, until a decade ago, was a very rare place to find any NZ albums, especially independent releases.

But you look closer and note that The Black Seeds, who’ve been at number one for two weeks, is still not certified gold, and that Bic Runga’s rather highly regarded current album is only, after all this time, triple platinum whereas its predecessors had sold, at a similar distance from their release dates, three times that figure. That coupled with the relative failure (dare I say flop) of more than a few albums by hitherto major selling artists or acts with huge expectations placed on them in the past year or two, bodes ill for an industry that sits on knife thin margins for their local music in a tiny, tiny market. A market where major record companies only release local music because of a personal passion one or two people at the top of a company may hold. I hate to think how much Universal have put into their local repertoire in recent years, often with mixed results, but that they continue to do so says more I imagine about the absolute and laudable belief and vision of the MD, which goes far beyond the relentless bean counting so often required of the big four in their drive to survive, than commercial realities. Then again, having signed the only two real domestically signed international success stories of the past two decades, I guess the potential returns are more evident at that company than elsewhere.

So, to the current scenario, I’m really not putting forward answers, although I have my theories, most of which I’ve gone into before here and elsewhere. One factor though is evident. Sadly New Zealand seems to have been somewhat left behind in the digital rush. The psychology of the digital world is ingrained throughout the rest of the developed and, even, the third world, where online booths in stores (not just record stores either) and the digital culture are a long established reality. Where the CD is an increasing aside aimed at the aging consumer rather than new generations.

But not in New Zealand.

The rise of such a culture in the NZ mainstream has been, and is, stifled by the lack of access to online services; the non penetration of wireless hotspots which are a lifestyle necessity to so many; and a host of other factors. But pass NZ by, it most clearly has despite the best efforts of the likes of the wonderful Amplifier, which still remains the only real option in-country to access digital indigenous music.

There are other things I could easily mention, such as they damage the drive to fulfil radio quotas at the expense of the artist and an indigenous identity, the time wasted trying to blame blank CDs and ruminating about format shifting, and such like but I’ve been there before and see no need to repeat what I see as obvious.

I don’t for a moment think all is doom and gloom. Look at the IMNZ newsletter or the chart percentages I mentioned earlier and tell me that there is not momentum. It’s just that right now the momentum seems to have a reached a crucial place where what it is, how it is defined, and who by is being decided. And there is a thought that the place the industry was in two years ago was perhaps somewhat unrealistic and this may just be, in the scheme of things, a natural correction process.

I guess this post really was more of a question to myself, rather than a desire to look at try and analyse too much, especially as I am doing it from afar, as more of an interested observer than a day to day participant now. The next twelve months will be interesting.

We're havin fun and doin time/ Sucking on our samovar and lime

I’ve been keeping to myself a fair bit recently, working on project for my site, which is due to go up in the next few days, all things willing, not least of which is my understanding of, what may be to some, simple concepts in my, just read, FrontPage book, but to my basic mind are comparable to Mathematical Philosophy or some other alien discourse.

In the interim, I was please as hell to find that Jane Walker has just put up the brand spanking new Toy Love web site, and damned wonderful it is too. Lots and lots of information and trivia, history, a nice link to my Propeller page, and so much more. Why can’t all band sites be this good? No over reliance on Flash or gimmicks, no fucking songs that launch without a how’s yer father and take over the system, bashing themselves up against the perfectly selected piece of minimal German techno that you may be enjoying at the moment of entry.

That, changing the subject somewhat, in itself, is reason to avoid Myspace as much as possible. That and the fact that I don’t feel comfortable giving someone as historically unscrupulous as Rupert Murdoch too many ins to my life. There is, with that ownership, something unsettling about the site and I simply don’t trust Newscorp to do the right thing with all that power. I’m there, but only just.

And I’m listening to, today, mostly:

Fujiya Miyaki – Transparent Things (quirky pop on the eclectically mighty Tirk label)

North by Northwest (Paul Morleys’ rather fantastic boxed set of Northern UK post punk, complete with a couple of gems I’d completely forgotten, rough as hell, but that’s the point)

Deep Disco Culture Vol 1 (underground as fuck but soulful disco gems that most people have never heard of, and unless they are as obsessive as me, don’t really want to..)

You Better Believe It Soul Vol. 2 (more obscure old Warner, Elektra and Atlantic 45s)

Oh, and a bunch of bump bump bump singles that I won’t go into now

Just like Pagliacci did...* *its the obvious line to use ok?

The second part of the album thing I started here……

Smokey Robinson and The Miracles - Make It Happen (Tamla 1967)…the great Motown myth is that Stevie and Marvin took the company into the era of great albums, with the label fighting all the way. That’s not strictly true, but, yes, I guess it adds to the mythology somewhat. Those wondrous Norman Whitfield albums from The Temptations predate the era of Music of My Mind and What’s Going On and so do the two finest albums from Motown’s greatest songwriter, William “Smokey” Robinson. One of those, Sings Smokey is another Temptations album from 1964, complete with My Girl. The other is this record is this glorious album from 1967. Reissued in 1970 with the last track, the now iconic Tears of a Clown as the new title after it was a massive hit. But this record stands squarely on its own as one of Motown’s finest releases, ever. We all know Dylan’s famous line about Smokey, it’s over quoted but still stands as the gospel truth and the evidence is herein. Ever the most, superficially, facile, intent seems to flow like some of divine moment But the magic of this record is not just the majesty of the songs it’s the execution, and more that, its Smokey’s astounding production. His arrangements and mix absolutely redefine the use of space in a song and his instinct as to what to use and what to lose at precisely the right moment is pure genius….on My Love For You, for example, the strings are used with such economy, drifting around the hint of a piano and the simple snare. Not one song here has an element that is unneeded or overstays its welcome. Put it one, turn the lights off and float away…

Mantronix-The Album (Sleeping Bag 1985)…oh, yeah I guess it sounds a bit dated now but this is another album that, in its own humble way (ok, its hip hop…its not that humble) changed the face of popular music. And toss any track from this album on within the earshot of any old B boy and watch the involuntary tears of joy. When this first hit the streets back in ’85 nobody had heard, or for that matter expected anything like it. This was electronic rhythmic mastery from the end of the universe and with it half a dozen sub genres were invented, or at least a doorway was opened to, not least of which were the big beat boom and drum’ n’ bass. If this album had only included Bassline and Needle to the Groove it would’ve been enough to nail its place. It confused the fuck out of the hardcore hip-hoppers at the time (and lets face, they’ve often been the more conservative element in the post funk / disco universe and most resistant to change) but it signposted a clear path forward. Oh, and it rocks…still.

E-Dancer – Heavenly (Planet E 1998)..I said in the first part of this listing that house music is a genre that has produced few classic albums, and so it is. But not so its mutant cousin from Detroit. On the contrary Techno as a genre has produced dozens of great long players, but a few stand out, in particular this killer collection from Kevin Saunderson’s alter ego. Heavenly, many of the tracks from which, appeared as singles too, of course, comfortably bridges the gap between where techno had come from and where it was going. It has elements of the early rough core of Detroit’s rough machine soul and yet it also points to the more mellow direction the music was going to and works as well on a big dancefloor as it does on the headphones. The album drags in the likes of Carl Craig, Juan Atkins and Kenny Larkin, all big guns in the techno universe, and all of whom provide worthy contributions, but its Saunderson’s trademark keyboard sounds and moody swirls and dives, oh and his subtlety which are the real stars here. Techno was never, despite its reputation amongst non believers about being loud and banging. There are hints of Inner City but this record is far deeper than anything recorded under that name. A bunch of us played this album incessantly for god knows how long and I still grab it at least once a fortnight. Hard to find now, but if any album lives up to its title…

Various Artists – AK79 (Ripper 1980)..this about the vinyl release of this record, not the CD which I compiled a decade ago and stands on its own as a documentary of the Auckland Punk scene. No, they may contain many of the same tracks but they sound and feel a million miles from each other. No CD can ever re-capture the raw snarl of the thick PolyGram pressing plant dinner plate vinyl complete with sub standard mastering that was a feature of both NZ plants in the late seventies (PolyGram mastered stereo for months with only one speaker working and the other under a desk). But for all that, it sounded as shitty as it should and was just right, especially thru a battered Sony 3 in 1 system after having been walked over at a dozen parties by gatecrashers with Doc Martens’ finest on as they threw bottles at the confused and protesting host. No, that was the way AK79 was meant to sound and the way we listened to it. From the opening bars of the Zwines anthem, Mysterex (about ex Scavengers singer Mike Lesbian, who was proudly proclaimed by the wall at the club to be a C**t) to the last notes of The Toy Love Song, we knew every bloody word of every song (ok maybe not The Swingers who were the odd ones out and never that cool) many many months before this came out. This was our record and we fucking loved it…And you know what, that battered old vinyl copy still sounds better than the CD all these years later. Nothing to do with nostalgia, ok…

Blaze – 25 Years Later (Motown 1990)…once again, it’s about the vinyl which is a different beast to the CD, released simultaneously. The CD was reordered and had these annoying little talking bits between the songs. To be fair, the CD order and the story it told was as Blaze originally wanted but the label said no and talking bits between songs are always annoying, let’s face it. So the big black version works best. But with this album, Blaze, who had made some of the seminal early East Coast Deep House singles, gave us what may be the finest Motown album of its decade (if you place it in the last year of the eighties), and let’s not forget, the label still mattered then, in the years before it became just another Universal label. This is the most soulful, most delicate urban music ever produced by a house act, from the sensual, post Curtis of Lover Man to the yearning, Wonder-ish Missing You to the shuffling, reggae-ish We All Must Live Together, the best version of which is the remix on the 12” from co-producer Timmy Regisford. This album has an enormous, and much deserved reputation amongst those that know it but somehow got lost in an America which was awash with swingbeat and chicken dancing in harem pants at the time. That it is, and has been, unavailable for 15 odd years is a crime.

Lil Louis and The World – From the Mind of Lil Louis (Diamond 1989)..my favourite Lil Louis record is the US Epic EP of I Called U which I’ve mentioned before, but its hard to go pass either of his early albums, both of which still sound like the masterwerks they are, a decade and a half later. What I particularly love about this, the first of them, is the way it so successfully veers between the rather, at the time, off the wall almost nightmarish twisted oddness (but house had so much oddness in its first decade that it didn’t seem quite so odd then if you get the drift) of French Kiss, and I Called U, to the sweetly soulful Nyce & Slow and Insecure, all of which feel connected by the inherent jazzness (god, another word that definitely doesn’t exist, I guess it does now...its better than the god awful “jazzy”) of it all. What I’m trying to say in a very clumsy way, is that, for me, great jazz albums veer almost unpredictably all over the place, sometimes into uncomfortable zones, sometimes into easy warmth (think Coltrane at the Village Vanguard or Saxophone Colossus), and this album does all that, and seems part of that tradition. The uneasy noise of Blackout, complete with Biblical quotes into Tuch Me , co-produced by Larry Heard really sums that up. Once again, this album is, these days, predictably unavailable.