Hard News by Russell Brown

Music journalism isn't really a career for grown-ups, but it can have bragging-rights advantages. When the name of a famous international pop musician comes up in conversation, you may well be able to say, "Oh yeah. I met him." And, to the extent that interviewing someone for 30 minutes is meeting them, yes you did.

So, therefore, I met Bobby Brown one time in London and he told me to stay off the drugs. Well, actually, I didn't know how to wind up an interview I was doing for New Zealand TV , so I asked him whether he had a message for the fans in New Zealand.

"Yes I do," he said.

Turning, and looking sternly down the barrel of the camera, Bobby Brown said:

"Kids. Don't do drugs."

Yeah, Bobby Brown really said that. I can't recall the name of the show it was for, but it must have been 1989 and Karyn Hay was directing. If by some chance this otherwise worthless interview remains in the TVNZ Archive, its stunning conclusion should be liberated and excerpted so that people can like it on YouTube.

Then there was the time I met MC Hammer. Countless (well, three) people have urged me to tell this story this week, so I will.

In 1990, I was among the freelance writers on the music weekly Sounds invited to move to Select, a glossy music monthly to be edited by Tony Stewart, who had been deputy editor of NME during its glory days. Tony was quite eccentric and I don't think I ever got on a wavelength with him, but it was an interesting crowd.

Most notably, there was a gangly young Irishman called Graham Linehan, a film buff with, even then, a brilliantly funny turn of phrase. In a scene where people could be a bit cliquey or up themselves, he was just a lovely, friendly bloke. Lord knows what happened to shape him into the hulking, imperious figure who stalks Twitter today ...

But anyway, early on, the chance came up to go to the US and interview MC Hammer, who was then at the peak of his megastardom. The trip had its hitches early on. I got pulled out of the check-in queue at Heathrow and grilled about who I was, who I lived with and what their politics were. Then the flight was delayed and the photographer and I missed a connecting flight to North Carolina, where we had been supposed to hook up with the Hammer roadshow.

After a few phone calls (I'm struggling to believe any of this was achievable before the internet), we were rebooked to fly to Augusta, Georgia for the next date on the tour. I recall arriving at a surprisingly small airport and stepping out into the debilitating southern heat to wait for our ride.

We were booked into a hotel near the venue, a big indoor arena, where I would interview the star. Later, we waited at the arena as it filled up. We might not have been the only white folks in the house, but it felt a bit that way. But while my exposure to black Americans had largely been via urban hip hop artists, this was a different crowd. People were mild-mannered and almost impossibly polite.

Eventually, the call came. We were hustled through the backstage area at  something approaching jogging pace by four huge security guards. Although the word on the tour was that Hammer ran it as a militarily-organised drug-free production, as we passed the dressing room of [support artist's name redacted], another guard knocked on on the door, said "This is [name redacted's] medicine," and passed through a small package. I got the impression it wasn't her asthma medication.

We arrived at Hammer's dressing room and were shown in. There he was -- in a tight, black knee-length leotard, on an exercise bike.

For the whole time we were there, he never dismounted the bike, or even stopped cycling. He pretty much just didn't stop anything. I can't recall much of the content of the interview (the mag is under the house somewhere, don't make me go there), but he reacted positively to a question about Al Green, sex and spirituality: "That's exactly what I'm talking about! That's it." 

Although Hammer was pretty much the king of the world at that point, he didn't really pull any star moves. He just talked very, very fast, without pause. I've never done an interview with anyone who was that high without being on drugs. It was a really unusual experience. After 20 our 30 minutes, we were ushered out front again to see him dance for two hours.

"Wow," said the photographer afterwards. "Those times you paused between questions seemed really, really long."

I knew what she meant. The handful of times I'd tarried to gather my thoughts had seemed achingly, epochally long -- to the extent that I felt like I'd fucked up a bit. It wasn't until I got back to London and transcribed the tape that I realised they weren't and I hadn't. They were just normal, everyday pauses -- in an interview conducted in Hammer Time.

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Speaking of interviews, Peter McLennan is launching his book, I Believe You Are A Star, from 3pm Saturday at Conch Records, 115a Ponsonby Rd. Dylan C will play an all-New Zealand vinyl set and Peter promises that the first 25 people to buy the book (only $19.95!) will receive his mix CD of recordings mentioned in the book.

And that's quite a few: Shayne Carter, Tigilau Ness, SJD, DLT and more, all from interviews written up by Peter for Real Groove, Planet, North & South and others. I'll be swinging by.

Earlier in the day, I think I'll try and make the 2013 Music Month Summit at Q Theatre -- or, more precisely, the 'Radio and the Online World' panel at 11.30am.

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You may know Nick Dwyer from his work in taking New Zealand music to the world in Making Tracks. Well, he does the cultural exchanges in the other direction too, via Weird Together, his collaboration with Dick Johnson and a bunch of Auckland musicians from all over the map. They've put together a really interesting-looking party called Weird Night Out at Victoria Park Market tomorrow night. They'll be joined by Boycrush and something Jeremy Toy is calling She's So Rad Special Disco Mix, along with many others.

Weird Together's track 'Chale' -- featuring vocals from Ghanaian Yaw Boatengalong along with Burundian drums, Sudanese vocalists, Fijian Lali players, and Japanese Taiko Drummersis -- is on TheAudience:

You can check out this fab video for 'Chale' from last year:

And you can download the 'Chale' EP, featuring remixes from Kids of 88 and She's So Rad for free via the Herald website.

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Woo! National tours announced this week by The Phoenix Foundation and Ladi6 with @Peace (you mean that wasn't actually the last-ever @Peace show I saw last week? I'm shocked).

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I recently mentioned Paddy Fred's 'You Belong', which turned a few heads at TheAudience. Well, the Wellingtonian now has a sweet new EP for $5 on Bandcamp, featuring contributions from Alby Love and Estere.

It's the kind of trippy electric-soul hip hop thing we seem to be doing very well in New Zealand at the moment.

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And finally, if you're planning to stay home and have a private party this weekend, Frankie Knuckles has done a lovely 70-minute mix for The Fader ...

Awww yeah ....

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The Hard News Music Post is sponsored by:

You're about to take a psychoactive substance with which you have no previous experience. You don't know how strong it is, but you know some people have had real problems with it. Do you (a) Hoe into it, or (b) Have a little and see how it affects you.

The answer, of course, should be the latter (given that you're already decided you're going to indulge). In the course of  his recent Radio Live stunt, Duncan Garner basically did the former.

He rolled (badly) a large joint of a synthetic cannabis product called Juicy Puff, and smoked the whole thing, on camera. Unsurprisingly, he seemed a little distressed afterwards. I actually stopped finding the whole exercise amusing when I saw him on camera. I was worried about him. When he kindly came in to be on our TV show the following week, I told him I thought he'd been unwise and I was glad he was okay.

Duncan did a couple of other things you wouldn't normally do after taking drugs -- being on camera and appearing on live radio. But that was his choice and the stunt wouldn't have had any meaning if he hadn't. Privately, I hoped his mode of consumption hadn't given anyone else ideas.

Last night I watched The Vote, 3rd Degree's debating breakout show, which argued the moot "Should soft drugs be decriminalised?" Soft drugs in this context meant cannabis and synthetic cannabis, and the conflation of the two was a bit unhelpful. On one hand, you have a well-understood drug, and on the other, a big cluster of poorly-understood chemicals with widely varying effects. I would, without a doubt, prohibit the sale of at least some of the chemicals now being sold as synthetic cannabis in dairies. I wouldn't make the use of them a criminal offence, because that would not help the people having problems with them.

But that aside, I think the The Vote is an ingenious, engaging format and I enjoyed the debate, which set Ross Bell's measured, patient argument for a change of approach against Mike Sabin's wild grab-bag of factoids in suport of prohibition. It's entertainment as much as it is information and I thought it worked well on the night.

Until, that is, Duncan rounded on panelist Grant Hall, a legal high supplier and spokesman for the industry group the Star Trust, with another joint of Juicy Puff and challenged him to smoke it on the show. When Hall demurred, Duncan badgered him to do so. I'm told the confrontation went on for longer than we actually saw on TV.

Now, Hall, whose company makes Juicy Puff, had a perfectly good reason to not want to become inxoicated on his or any other product: he was in the middle of a televised debate. Most people don't get high when we're working, or in a meeting, or on TV. But there was a more important point at stake:

Don't EVER put pressure on someone to take drugs.

I had a little discussion with Duncan about it on Twitter today, and he acknowledged my point that he was modelling unhealthy behaviour. But producer Tim Watkin (I presume it was he behind the @TheVoteNZ Twitter) justified the stunt, saying the programme wasn't "pressuring an innocent, but testing Hall's ethic," and that "it wasn't a stunt for the sake of it, but asked whether the industry would consume [its] own product."

I have no problem with synthetic cannabis vendors being put on the spot about what they're selling, where it's being sold and who it's being sold to. Hall freely admitted on the show that natural cannabis was in all likelihood safer than the products now being sold legally. Duncan tells me Hall does use his own products, but in oral, rather than smokable form.

I guess this is perhaps the kind of thing that happens when someone comes into an unfamiliar sphere. But I'm struggling to think of a point that could not have been made without trying to coerce someone to take psychoactive drugs against their better judgement. Oddly enough, I suspect that the issue would have been clearer all round had Duncan been rounding on Hall with a shot glass in hand.

But for the moment, let's all try and bear in mind that behaviour on TV is public behaviour, and it's modelled behaviour. And that pressuring someone to take drugs when they don't want to is Not Okay.

You can watch last night's episode of The Vote and read more information on the participants and the issues here at The Vote home page.

Two weeks from today, on Thursday June 6, I'm hosting one of Auckland Museum's 2013 LATE series, Gods and Men, with Judge David Harvey, Rosabel Tan of the excellent Pantograph Punch blog and the New Zealand Herald's switched-on social media editor Troy Rawhiti-Forbes. My allocated Greek god is Hermes -- the god of communications, invention and more.

We'll take our cue from the short essay below, which I wrote for the LATE season booklet, and I figure we'll touch on everything from the news-versus-noise of the Boston Marathon bombings to 3D printing, commerce and copyright. But I'm interested in what you all think about the theme, so please do accept my invitation to share some adventurous thoughts here.

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If we know anything about Hermes, it's that he is the Messenger god.

On that basis alone, we could easily appoint him the patron of an era where a billion Facebook users send around eight billion messages a day, and where trillions of IP packets every second flash across the global network, each like a tiny digital envelope, carrying the address of its sender and recipient, and some fraction of an image or an idea. The Roman name for Hermes, Mercury, embodies a modern space where delays are literally calculated in microseconds.

But that's only where it starts.

Hermes was an inventor from birth -- his first exploits were accomplished from the cradle -- and, by legend, he is responsible for the alphabet, numbers, astronomy, music, measures, weights; even the the lyre and the guitar and the plectrum with which they are played. It's pretty safe to assume he also invented the internet.

Hermes' purview is in fact the entire modern, connected world. The world of transactions and journeys, trade and literature, oratory and wit. When you follow on Twitter the stars you will never meet, he is there too, as the intercessor between gods and men. He was the original flattener of hierarchies.

But, as they say on Facebook, it's complicated.

The god who facilitated mystical truth was also a liar and a thief. His offspring included both a nurturing shepherd (Eudorus) and a sociopath (Myrtilus). And we can see all those conflicts in Hermes' world.

The same innovations that fostered open government and the Arab Spring have also brought along cyber-bullying, sexting and surveillance states. We fret about the post-literate world while more people write more words than at any point in human history. The debate over copyright is really a battle between the innate interests of two of Hermes' works; communications and commerce.

How does invention itself change when knowledge is -- or ought to be -- frictionless? Are we doing better science? And if so, is that making a better world? If open knowledge is such a good, why was the info-rights campaigner Aaron Swartz -- who "liberated" thousands of academic and scientific journals -- prosecuted so zealously that he took his own life last year?

Predictions, of course, are perilous. In 1978, the BBC Horizon programme broadcast an episode called Now the Chips Are Down, which forecast a calamitous future as a consequence of the adoption of the computer microchip: whole industries vanishing, permanent mass unemployment. It didn't turn out that way. And yet we are seeing existential threats to sectors on which we thought we could rely -- not least, the free and independent press we like to regard as a pilar of democracy.

Around the same time, it was still easy to find economists who believed that a similar calamity would befall New Zealand if the country surrendered its economic barriers. The farms that fed us would fail if they were not subsidised. They didn't. Yet we are beginning to count the terrible environmental cost of our burgeoning role as the world's dairy farm.

What kind of world has Hermes wrought? What are the implications of the buzzing, constant, real-time world in which we now live? Is it a better world? Or just one with new problems?

This seems to be a bit of a week for government ministers being snippy on the socials. On the heels of Judith Collins unloading on her critics on Twitter comes this today from arts minister Chris Finlayson:

Admit it, @grantrobertson1, this is a golden age for the arts in New Zealand. Your sniping is #tragic #jealous

— Chris Finlayson (@chrisfinlayson) May 17, 2013

His tweet was in reply to this one from Labour deputy leader Grant Robertson:

not a peep from @chrisfinlayson on Arts in #Budget today.Not surprising when you see cuts for MCH, public bcstg, regional museums and more

— Grant Robertson (@grantrobertson1) May 16, 2013

Insofar as public broadcasting -- the area I know a bit a bit about -- contributes to a heathy public life, the picture is pretty bleak. NZ On Air is into its fifth year of a budget freeze and it's starting to hurt. The overall budget for Public Broadcasting Services was actually cut by $3.08 million this week.

On the other hand, let us be clear: the level of public funding for arts and culture may have an impact on the health of the arts sector, but they are not the same thing. You can't measure the vitality and worth of contemporary art and culture by line items in a ministerial Budget. Indeed, some of the best art emerges in hostile times.

But I'm struggling to perceive the "golden age". I'm genuinely unsure what the minister means, or whether he is claming any credit for the cultural bounty he hails.

Your thoughts, people of the arts?

Last week, I saw Lawrence Arabia play solo on a Tuesday night. This week I saw SJD play solo on a Wednesday. And I didn't have to go into the CBD or stay up stupidly late to do it. I could really get to like this neighbourhood gigs thing.

Sean James Donnelly didn't just play solo -- he's been doing that since Elastic Wasteland came out -- but unplugged. It was intriguing to hear 'Superman You're Crying' (which he's been playing lately as a techno track) strummed out on acoustic guitar. He tried out two new songs (one of which, 'Invisible Man', definitely sounds like a keeper) and played what he said was the first live performance of the title track from Southern Lights.

Credit here to the venue, the Portland Public House in Kingsland, whose owners have shown a lot of imagination in the way they present artists; hosting regular dates like the Kingsland Folk Club (which isn't quite what it sounds) on Sundays and booking month-long residencies for various bands. Also to the Dan Sperber Band, who used their own residency to present a different guest each week -- Buzz from Voom, Hollie Fulbrook, SJD. Their own three-piece-indie-jazz thing was cool too.

It's not perfect. Not everyone comes to the bar to hear the band, and people do have a right to socialise. But really, pal, when someone's singing, do you need to have your awesome high-decibel conversation with your friends right in front of the stage -- when there's so much space out the back? People are weird like that.

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"There's a bit of a function on tonight," advised the bouncer.

"Er, you mean @Peace are playing?" I said.

"Yeah."

"I know."

He still didn't quite seem convinced that I really wanted to be there. To be fair, once I got inside the Tyler Street Garage I could see his point. Everyone else there was apparently 22 and boisterous.

"See, Jim?" I said to my son. "This is what people your age do."

He looked around: "Well, why not?"

We'd come to see what was if not the last gig ever by @Peace, then certainly the last here for a while. Tom Scott and Haz Beatz, his beatmaking sideman in Home Brew, are heading to Melbourne for a change of scene. (You've missed out on buying Tom's clothes on Trade me, but there's still time to grab a Home Brew gold disc.) If you're reading from Melbourne, their residency next month with other members of the YGB crew at the Laundry Bar in Fitzroy looks great.

The most notable thing about @Peace's show at TSG last night was quite how engaged the crowd was with their music. The kids knew all the words. It was hardly the best show they've ever played, and Tom even advised me earlier in the day that "It's really the worst bar ever. I wouldn't go if I was u." It wasn't that bad.

Tyler Street and its companion bars in Britomart Square (several of them owned by the same company) are examples of the trend that has sent Coherent in Karangahape Road out of business this week -- the funky brew-bar versus the old-fashioned nightclub. It's nice to have Emerson's Pilsener on tap at a gig, even at $12 a pint.

This trend must also be putting some pressure on the King's Arms, with its awkward layout and deafening rock PA. It just doesn't seem as much fun as it used to.

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 The household's reliance on tethered-phone internet for the past eight days has deterred me from clocking up data overage with downloads and streams, but Street Chant have a deal on Soundcloud that's too good to refuse.

They've made available for free download 'Sink', the first single from their endlessly-forthcoming second album:

And that single's physical b-side, their cracking cover of Wire's 'Outdoor Miner'.

You want them both, believe me.

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Hey, my internet is back! Check out this sweet Rhian Sheehan remix:

And Mojo Filter's trippy take on that song:

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Last weekend (thanks internet) I watched Once in A Lifetime, a 1984 UK Channel 4 "documentary" produced with Talking Heads. It's an odd beast -- the decision to shoot most of the "live" footage with the band playing to an empty Wembley Arena was bizarre, especially given that the actual concert footage at the end is blindingly good -- but I'd especially recommend it to anyone who's read David Byrne's book How Music Works. The film's crazy melange of found footage from commercials, religious broadcasts and other documentaries achieves an odd sense of commonality.

Here's the first part on YouTube. The same user has uploaded the other parts too:

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Back at TheAudience, there's this nifty shuffle out of West Auckland (click through for the free download):

MC Tali again with this Kendrick Lamar cover for George FM Breakfast's 'Damn! I Wish I Was Your Cover' series:

And from the same series, Ruby Frost singing rather than being on TV telling other singers they're not ready:

You can download that here.

And in a wholly different vein, plangent Portland Public House folkie Nadia Reid:

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Righto. Time for lunch. And a giveaway. I have a double pass to tomorrow night's Bobby Womack show at the Civic Theatre. Click the email icon below and email me with BOBBY in the subject line. I'll draw a winner at 3pm.

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The Hard News Music Post is sponsored by: