I know a Girl Called Elsa / She’s into Alka Seltzer

Public transport...its quite a thing isn’t it. Well actually in most of the world it is. Auckland of course is another matter...more or less it has none. I used to catch the bus when I was at University a year or two back but since then for me, more or less, its been the totally pervasive form of public transport in the Queen City…that being the four door sedan with one person in it, sitting in traffic. How sad, and I guess my only excuse is that I’ve always lived within reasonable walking distance of my working space and I meant to walk…honestly, oh and the fact that over the past couple of decades much of my working time has been when buses and trains don’t run. That’s as good an excuse as any. Yep so Auckland has trains too...it always has had as far as I know and there is a cool blog devoted to this at Slow Train Comin’, where Miles muses about his niche subject with humour and the inevitable frustration.

I’ve caught the local train in Auckland twice.

The first time was with my Grandmother back in 1967. I have no real memory of it…

The second time was last year when my ten year old daughter said to me last year “Dad…what’s a train ride like?”. I felt very guilty. She had of course caught a train quite a few times in Sydney when I took her there at age four, Australia having superb public transport in most cities; but she had no memory of it either.

So we trekked down to the new palace under the old Britomart car park (wasn’t that a shitty old building and deserving of smashing….unlike the wonderful and iconic building in Jean Batten Place that the BNZ wants to bowl for a corporate headquarters… didn’t Auckland learn anything from its Tizard endorsed gutting in the Eighties...I guess not, and the fact they would even consider it says more ugly things about the BNZ than I would think they’d like to say). I’d been there a couple of time earlier for a look…curiosity y’know, as to what we paid for, and to muse as to how much we almost spent and how much so many people walked away with. It really didn’t impress. It’s kind of like the Auckland Casino...when you’ve seen a real one its hard to get excited about something like that. But, hey, it’s a start and god knows we need one in Auckland. Now they just need to get trains that actually go somewhere, like the North Shore for example, and go often & on a regular timetable. I tried to get a ticket to Glen Innes and back but there was an extensive wait of an hour or so to come back on one of Auckland’s few lines. I inquired as to why so few bloody trains and I was told there weren’t enough people to justify the train. It seemed to me, thick as I might be, that the reason there were so few people wanting to use the train was that there was no train offered….

So we went to Newmarket, past my old flat in Parnell where Jonathan Tidball and I tried to lasso the Wellington night train with the other end of the rope tied to our uninvited lodgers’ shed…yes I know it was irresponsible of us but…………… a) he (Ted the lodger who had just moved in without invitation and preceded to terrorise our female flatmates) was at the pub, and, b) the state we were in that evening we stood no chance of successfully throwing the rope, let alone successfully hooking the choo-choo. What used to really worry me about Ted was his mate Bill Smith with a missing hand and a steel hook instead coming out of his old army jacket, which he used to drunkenly brandish in our direction of an evening.

Then we went Newmarket and bought a computer game (the complete Doom..the early ones, still the best PC game ever…end of story…I used to sit upstairs in the Box office at 3am with all the lights out, Roach Motel’s Wild Luv coming up from downstairs, all the lights off, the speakers on full, playing this….scared out of my wits) and came back.

The trains were dirty, uncomfortable and about half full and I think Isabella lost interest until I took her to Singapore and showed her a real public transport system….fast, clean, efficient and regular...everything Auckland’s system is not. And it actually goes places….

I love public transport and use it when I can. I like all subway stations (apart from the one in the South Bronx that Harry Russell and I got off at by mistake in 1990) and some buses. I always took the bus when living in London, upstairs with a walkman - I used to get the #159 from my front door in West Hampstead to my work in Norwood…enough time to read the Guardian or The Independent from cover to cover and do the crossword on the return with the added bonus of the London vista. I remember being stuck upstairs for hours surrounded by gridlock and cops the day the Libyans shot the WPC, and I’ll always associate Jah Wobble / Francois K / Holgar Czukay & The Edge’s mesmerising Snake Charmer with the lower part of Regent Street as that was where it kicked in for the first time.

That’s one of those records that seems to revisit me every few years. I never quite leave it. Quite a combination that lot…I think The Edge is one of those wasted talents. His earlier stuff (I mean his contributions to the first couple of U2 albums) had its moments and I guess the fact that he could contribute to a record like this (although maybe their mutual label, Island, when it used to be an adventurous indie, advised him it was a good credibility move..these things happen in A&R) means something. But to me U2 stopped being vaguely interesting, became an ever increasing self parody about album three and stifled the previously intriguing and astounding Brian Eno. I’ve always liked Jah Wobble too. I like the way that a completely untrained and musically illiterate bass player could revolutionise popular music in such a way...and he did…anyone who thinks that the first two PIL albums didn’t change the musical landscape forever, in so many different ways and so many different genres……………

Sadly we seem to have come to a place where people like this are no longer allowed by larger record companies (big indies like Island and Virgin…majors ceased allowing things like this many years back and have never done so in US) to make records like this. Richard Branson may be your classic offensive upper class English twat, but, all credit, he did allow so many acts to indulge their whims and without that you would never have had records like Metal Box or the first Human League album or all those Front Line albums or all those heinous Gong & Henry Cow records for that matter. Then again, it was a time when Joy Division and, indeed, The Screaming Meemees (thank you) banged their way to number one in the pop charts without a moments airplay. I guess the torch, as the majors gobbled up and neutered any large indies has been passed to the thousands of struggling little labels who continue to push the envelope. Just go and look at the releases on a site like Piccadilly and tell me music isn’t alive and well. It inspires.

Yeah, so as I said, I like public transport. Here in Bali we have these cute little bus type things called Bemos…a couple of thousand Rupiah and you get taken places…efficiently, regularly, but not comfortably, what with the roads, the motorbikes and the fact these things are not designed for a six foot bulé. But you can’t have it all….

Tunes today: Gangstarr-Take it Personal…fifteen years on / Oasis-Guess God Thinks I’m Abel…a great song…what Oasis really meant really hit me in a pub in Burnham near Slough in 96..I was pissed as a newt and for the last hour before we got tossed out EVERY bloody song on the juke was Oasis & every bloody person in that pub, young and old, knew every bloody word / The Casuals- Jesamine..big cheesy song for me when I was a young teen and I found it again on Paul Weller’s wonderful Under The Influence collection. There are so many things I’d want to thank Paul Weller for and this just adds to the list…..so…/ The Jam-Liza Radley

Stupid White Men again...

It’s not easy getting the gist of a political situation when you are a few thousand miles away from the action and the news media is as patently useless as it is in New Zealand. The NZ Herald is a one eyed waste of space and I read with some bemusement its piece in the weekend about political bias in the media. Today of course, on form, they provide the people of Auckland with a non-story about how crime figures are much worse than we are led to believe…no political bias in printing a story like that, as lacking substance as it is if you read it, so close to an election. What a rag it really is. The Fairfax site looks like it was put together by an intermediate school class as a term project. TVNZ is …well….even on a reasonable link its so overflashed or whatever it is, that its unviewable for the first few minutes. I tend to open it then head off to another site on another tab until it settles down.

Thank god for Scoop….I love the Lyndon Hood thing I found today and Selwyn Manning’s op piece on Brash’s most recent race card speech is a must read. In earlier times those of the same ilk as Brash a few thousand miles away used a system called Apartheid for their self perceived uppity darky problems. Brash has a far more efficient system planned…he’s simply going to abolish Maori. With a few swipes of the GGs pen he can cut Maori health, crime, and any other problem. They simply don’t exist...they are assimilated. Sadly any fool who has spent any time in urban NZ, outside a few gildered towers can see the idiocy in this. Walk through any street in Auckland and Hamilton outside the National Party’s strongholds and tell me urban Maori are happily assimilated into NZ (read: white) society. It’s ignorant nonsense. I guess anyone who listens to Brash and nods their head in agreement almost deserves what they get, but New Zealand as a nation doesn’t deserve the pain and anguish Brash’s policies inevitably must bring. For me, there is an upside, a project I’ve been approached to work on has, inherently, some element of Maori music, its history and its direction. Whilst this is only a part of the project, it’s an important element and a part which is going to cause most headaches…happily I will be able to forget that element if Brash abolishes the Maori race….so perhaps I should put my hand up as a stupid old white man and vote National for a perceived self interest as so many others seem to be.

Because that’s what it really comes down to….a government for, by and about stupid old white men, and a government for people who really don’t care if Brash would have unquestioningly sent their sons and daughters off to die in some foreign misadventure at the behest of a fundamentalist government, as long as they get the extra $40 in their pocket next week. And I don’t want any part of it…..so maybe its best I don’t know what is happening day to day as it scares the fuck out of me

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Songs that did the trick today: Patti Labelle’s “Get Ready (Looking For Loving)” re-edited with love by the mighty Ron Hardy / Kerri Chandler’s ..Bar a Thym…favourite single of the year no question / E Dancer- Heavenly….Juan Atkin’s mix

I Hear Michael wouldn't be seen dead Hanging around with this lot...

I watched some sad git attempting to do a cover of Foreigners’ “Cold as Ice” on that appalling INXS thing the other night…or at least the bit I saw before I flicked the remote...poor old Michael Hutchens must be rotating on his belt…

I met him twice…once in Sydney in the very early eighties when he was playing some pub with the then unknown INXS and once in Cause Celebre when he asked me to remove the offending Kylie (his girlfriend at the time I think) album cover on the wall behind the DJ booth with a nail thru her head. Mr Perry, in the booth at the time, simply spun it on the nail and smiled…

Cover versions are a funny thing…totally pointless or intriguing with no middle ground. I discovered Richard Hell’s live remake of Allen Toussaint’s “Cruel Way To Go Down”, a song I love unconditionally in its original form, quite by accident when I was downloading “Love Comes in Spurts” (the usual case of acquiring again what I own several copies of...just not here, ok?) from Emusic and grabbed it. Big fan of Richard Hell’s work, in any media but I’d not heard his stab at this. It was on, the surface, an odd mix, the angular punk and the delirious big production of the original but it worked...angular metallic funk would, courtesy of the likes of the mighty Gang Of 4 (been playing the Damaged Goods EP a lot recently.. fuck me, “Armalite Rifle” is such a killer song) become the soundtrack of much of the late seventies and early eighties and Hell was such a torchbearer for those that headed in that direction, it made sense …..another one I found this week on the iPod by random was the live version of Barrett Strong’s “Money” by the Beatles. I guess it’s off an “Anthology” or something and I’ve heard it a dozen times or more without listening properly but the headphones give the song a focus. The Motown original is a jaunty thing that helped establish the label; the version on “With the Beatles” (my favourite Beatles album) takes it to another level, gives it a meaning it never had before. But the live take is something else altogether. The threat in the Lennon vocal is just plain vicious and implies, with menace, grievous bodily harm if he or she doesn’t hand over the cash. The Rolling Stones for all their cartoon satanic majesty in their day never sounded this threatening. Ever...

The other one I found a few days back was a delightful cover by The Mighty Diamonds of the Chi-lites “Stoned Out of My Mind” which gave the chi-soul classic a pleasant, but less ethereal, Caribbean sheen…dunno where or when it came from (it was just on the hard drive) but it worked for me.

Despite the perceived distance between the two, punk and funk always had a linkage. I remember talking with Kerry Buchanan about the joys of George Clinton back in 77 and it was never far from the surface. The disco’s dead thing was more about the travesties of “Do You Think I’m Sexy” and Olivia Newton John than black music per se….

The record that does my head in right now is the bloody Magic Numbers…seriously…what whingeing post James Taylor shite. I really tried after all the critical raves…but go away please, you make me ill…

I’m trying to push this back in the direction of the punk / funk thang so I can mention my favourite records right now. The Juan Maclean album “Less than Human” has been a long time coming, and indeed, one of the tracks, the killer white boy p-funk workout “Give Me Every Little Thing” has been around for several years…but, worth the wait? Yep indeed… I’ve been playing the mutha over and over for the past two weeks. It feels like Clinton meets Neu meets the first PIL album meets a scalpel. Far more ordered but from the same camp is the Lindstrom remix of the LCD’s “Tribulations” which is given a Moroder-ish twist that suits it perfectly, removing the cut’n’paste discoid feel of the original somewhat and taking it somewhere into somewhere into the European hinterland in the early eighties. There's a Tiga mix too which is more electro-by-numbers so I guess it will be big on George

The other tune I really like this week has no name…Tomorrowpeople’s unnamed demo hit me without warning…as did Andrew’s last two demos. Sharp without trying too hard and a lovely subtle swaying feel, almost an electro shuffle. Make a record, bro…..

The Rekoning

I don’t know why I don’t feel the urge to post here as often as I did. Certainly my mind is in a more languid state since I moved up to Indonesia…actually, on reflection, languid is the completely wrong word to use. Languid implies listlessness and I’m thinking more than I’ve thought for years, but the thought process here in the tropics, here in this wonderful crazy ordered but irrational archipelago, is more relaxed and less battered by the endless unnecessary imputation of stressful moments. Here, a day is not measured by how many small fires you manage to put out or minor victories but rather a sense of satisfaction that each day you can, all things willing, achieve one more substantial thing and the pleasure you get from that victory. Around that little victory you can happily surround yourself with things that give you even more joy…creating things, thinking, reading, listening, and watching, without the pressures and aggression that Auckland forces on you. Fucking hell, just driving the length of Queen Street is more stressful than a week here. In one day my CD-Rom in the laptop died (courtesy of the firmware update that HP suggested and then don’t support despite the countless posts on the net suggesting I’m not alone in having my Toshiba SD-R6252 drive killed by the update) then I lost internet connectivity because Telkom here had lost all record of my payment a week back - although dealing with Telkom here is a happy breath of fresh air after Telecom NZ’s luddite ways…perhaps TNZ could spent a little of its vast profits bringing it’s technology into the latter part of the last century, then its only a short jump into the 21^st …I’ve just been battling my way through their online billing services for small businesses…unbelievably unlike their peers in virtually every other nation on the planet they have none. So, where exactly does the annual $200 per head profit for every man woman and child in New Zealand go to? If you ask Telecom, it’s into new technology. Beep..wrong answer..Telecom simply adapts technology developed offshore by other companies and it certainly doesn’t go into things like online billing which is at best, in 2005, rudimentary by international standards. I have no problem with a return to shareholders…but since Telecom has a state maintained monopoly charging some of the highest rates for phone and internet use on planet earth a little re-investment is not an unreasonable ask….and in my own fiscally naïve way I would assume that New Zealand’s economy would benefit somewhat if all those hundreds of millions of dollars were not being funnelled offshore each year.

So, anyway, my cd / dvd player got fucked up (it still is…thanks HP) and my net connection got nixed (and fixed in 15 minutes…thanks Telkom) but what would’ve resulted in a minor blowout for me in enzed was a non event here. A little bit of perspective. These things don’t matter at all.

What I do find scary is the number of people warned me about Indonesia back in New Zealand…”Are you sure it’s a wise thing to do?”; “Aren’t you worried?” and other such garbage..

Shut up for gods sake.

None of the warning voices of course have ever been here and I have to admit bemusement as to why there are government travel advisories to Bali but none to London, New York or, the obvious next target, Sydney (lets face it John Howard would unquestioningly have troops on the high seas to Santiago before Condi finished the sentence requesting it, if Bush wanted him to invade Chile...what a thing it must be to have a completely subservient foreign policy...then again I guess NZ will find out if National gets in).

The Fox /CNN-isation of the media doesn’t help…jingoistic narrowly focused stories presented in the most simplistic and superficial way and repeated over and over again with the overriding assumption being that you, the viewer, is a moron. And so the world must have its ogres and I guess 200 million Muslims presents a large and easy target and helps keep the required Bush fear factor in good health….

Tracey Dahlby’s engrossing Allah’s Torch is a worthy reflection on this, a journey through Indonesia looking for the real and not so real ogres herein, and offers reasoned thoughts as to the root misunderstandings and misreadings that have given us both. I read the chapter on the targeting of the Hyatt in Yogjakarta the day after I’d checked out……….

Walking past a TV shop in Denpasar today and saw the video of 3 The Hard Way’s “Nothing’s Changed” on the big screen in the window today...MTV or Channel V I guess. The only other NZ act I’ve encountered in Indonesia is Bic Runga…”Sway” seems to get a bit of video and radio play

Boredum…badum badum badum

Last night, sitting all by myself in a Bali evening I indulged myself in the DVD of Don Letts’ recently released docu-thesis, “Punk: Attitude”. I’d been quietly (I say quietly because most people around me these days seem would run a mile from a film about punk which is a shame…Harry suggested I get a bunch of older farts together to watch it, but I don’t know if there are many I know from the era concerned I’d want to spend that long in a room with) anticipating this, partially because Letts was there (and he gives himself the credit he is due in the film) as the DJ at the infamous Roxy, and as an associate of so many concerned has access to interviews and footage that most other filmmakers approaching this topic (which, to clarify is: “What is Punk?”) could only dream about; and partially because he is a self appointed social historian of his era, somewhat hit and miss but substantially more of the former.

His compilations, especially the superb “Social Classics” series for Heavenly (although the best of these, Dread Meets B-Boys Downtown ,is now, unfortunately, due to clearance issues, deleted and rare as hell) are beyond criticism and the exposure he gave reggae and dub at The Roxy had a monumental influence on popular music and the direction it took as UK punk died off, under its own weight and the arrival of followers rather than leaders, in 1978. As (I think) Henry Rollins says in the movie, Public Image Limited were far more interesting than the Sex Pistols and (the unspoken bit) Letts’ influence was a major part of that reason. I guess you could also argue that without Letts you may not have had The Police and the odious Sting would still be a schoolteacher, but you can’t have everything.

He also made all the Clash’s vids, and was in Big Audio Dynamite, so enough said….

So to the question at hand….filled with very rare and, at times, astounding, footage (James White & The Blacks contorting live, the Pistols watching themselves on the Grundy show and Howard Devoto with The Buzzcocks for example), incredibly lucid and sometimes hilarious (check out Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls, the movie is worth it just for him) interviews which illustrate as much as anything that despite the raison d’etre of punk being a raised finger “fuck you”, it was an intelligent, directed, movement and the protagonists, at least until the early eighties knew why they were saying fuck you to, for want of a better phrase, “the establishment”. The film grasps and elucidates that well, drawing a direct line from Chuck and Elvis, through the sixties sub-Rolling Stones acts and on to The Velvets, MC5 and The Stooges before the style (although there was never a punk style, just a punk attitude, which is what this film is really about), most widely understood as punk (those that made it never used the term until much later) arrived in the early seventies. But it also grasps the social and intellectual side of punk….the Warholian, Westwood and Mcclaren aspect, plus the clear trans-Atlantic divide that both drove and separated the two major streams (he touches on the fact that punk movements erupted spontaneously around the world without reference to each other…NZ is a case in hand- but the UK and the USA are the clear focal points of this film and even then much (Pere Ubu??) is excluded due to time constraints), making mention of the enormous impact The Ramones had at The Roundhouse in 1976.

Where the film loses its way and starts to drag a little…actually quite a bit, is the last fifteen minutes or so where he forgets the social focus and moves into the US hardcore scene, which as, yet again, Rollins says, was and is an enormously reactionary movement and the antithesis of what punk was about. Of course by 1980 the essence of punk had moved into the UK post-punk scene and the US no-wave movement (Simon Reynold’s “Rip It Up and Start Again” is essential reading here) which also mutated and cross fertilized with disco and early hip-hop. All and all an incredibly exciting mashing which reverberates today, still outside, in the US at least, the mainstream. I’d also question the focus on Nirvana in the last part of the film…to me Nirvana were nothing more than middle American youth, and corporate tamed rebellion coming to terms with and going to a place NYC and the rest of the planet had got to a decade earlier. A couple of good songs though, but nothing could excuse paving the way for the gruesome Foo Fighters.

If punk is an attitude, by the mid eighties there were far more punk things going on in the warehouses of Chicago and the backrooms of Detroit and the studios of Brooklyn, Manchester and Cologne than there were in Seattle. “Voodoo Ray” or “Queen of Rox” were as punk a record as anything by the Stooges.

But despite it all I loved this film…so many people that meant so much to me from maybe the last gasp of radical post Chuck Berry rock’n’roll until the rhythms and raw technology of the late seventies onwards transformed the cutting edge forever. It comes as a shock to me, and a sign of personal fragility, to see the likes of The Clash as wizened old men and I would’ve loved to have seen a little bit of insight from the likes of Maclaren and Lydon rather than the hardcore twats later in the film, but c’est la vie...

Fuck…this turned into an essay and I didn’t mean it to…so lighter moments...ten records that made me smile this Monday in Sanur:

George Harrison: Hear Me Lord…a wonderful faux gospel pastiche, produced by Phil Spector back in 1971. The choir sounds like it is in the next room with someone opening the door as required.

Public Enemy: Public Enemy #1....I remember playing this on the radio for the first time when I pinched the promo from CBS….the body snatchers had landed and nothing sounded the same ever again…

Neil Howard: Indulge….such a wonderful nine minutes of primitive, completely radical early techno without which…check out the delay on the snare. Pure sex….

Mu: Hello Bored Biz Man…I found this on the Idjut Boys collection on Tirk and it makes me smile a lot. Mrs and Mr Maurice Fulton can do no wrong. Nutty piano nonsense…..

LCD Soundsystem: Too Much Love…one of the best tracks from one of the best albums of 2005. I guess what I love about these guys is the rawness so evident, even when the stuff is well produced….it embodies a spirit and a passion that eludes so much rock’n’roll.

Stan Getz: Chega de Saudade….a bit of latin cheese from the late, and justifiably lauded Mr Getz off the latter day, and not highly regarded, “Big Band Bossa Nova” album which has its moments of which this is one…

Carl Craig / Alexander Robotnik: Problemz…..nuff said

Todd Rungdren: Hello it’s Me….tried to clear this for a compilation once but no-one knew who owned it. I spoke to Todd himself who said Warner Music. So I rang Warner Music (again) here and asked; they said they had never heard of Todd, his label or this wonderful plaintiff ditty. Shortly after the big axe came down on Warner’s NZ’s staff. I wonder why?

Brenda Holloway: You’ve Made Me So Very Happy…everyone knows David Clayton Thomas’s take of this but the original by this early Motown chanteuse, leaves it for dead.

Pere Ubu: Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo…….this must’ve scared the fuck out of downtown Akron back in 75 or so. It still sounds menacing and terrifying all these years later.