Hard News by Russell Brown

We nearly all have cameras now, built into our phones with a ubiquity that doesn't even bear comment. Back in the day, you had to make the effort first to bring the camera, then, to pay money to see whether you even got anything. We did not take photographs with anything like the intensity we do now.

But my old friend Gordon Bartram did often take his camera. And his snaps of Christchurch bands playing in the early 1980s fill such a gap in the visual record of a vital music scene that they've been collected on Audioculture. They're a teenager's snaps rather than professional pictures and their colours faded long before they were scanned. In a way, the fading adds to their lustre.

This week, in a private Facebook group to which we both belong, Gordon posted pictures of a party I think of to this day and never thought I'd see again.

As I've explained before, in February 1982, in the traditional fate of the junior cadet each year at the Christchurch Star, I was sent to the Timaru branch office. I replaced Neil Clarkson, who had replaced Richard Langston, who would later go on to publish the crucial fanzine Garage.

If the work wasn't up to much, the social life was considerably worse. Apart from smoking dope with Philip Sherry's nephew at Timaru's short-lived Chelsea Records franchise, there wasn't a lot to do. I did meet the Dance Exponents, who were already something of a pop sensation. But mostly, I went back to Christchurch nearly every weekend, crashing on the couch of a house where Michele A'Court lived. The first time I met Michele she was doing the ironing and singing.

Things changed towards the end of my year in exile, when a group of kids my age returned from their first year at Canterbury University. Among them were Kevin Smith, Patrick Faigan and Steve Watson – the band called Say Yes to Apes. They were strange and brilliant and already had several cassette releases to their name. A long winter became a really interesting summer.

The other thing that happened was that I moved into a house on Craigie Avenue, at the invitation of Andrew Fyfe, who was my age and worked at the Timaru Herald (and would later become a sub-editor at NME). It was a rough sort of place but I had a mint bedroom.  It was there that Murray Cammick visited when he offered me the job of deputy editor at Rip It Up in November 1982. Murray, Fiona (who came down from Christchurch) and I travelled the following day to Dunedin, to see The Clean play their "last" gig at the Captain Cook.

So I knew I was on my way to a new life that summer. And at some point, presumably in January, I felt we should have a party. I realised that Sneaky Feelings were playing with the Blue Meanies in Christchurch on a Saturday night, so I got on the phone (toll call!) to Roger Shepherd to make the invitation and come up with some sort of fee for them to stop off and play for us on the way home to Dunedin.

I struggle to imagine how anyone ever organised anything before mobile phones and email, but apparently we did. I do recall when the Dunedin bands' van arrived with Martin Phillipps at the wheel, because 'Rolling Moon' was blasting out the window of the house. Although a number of them would become my friends in the years to come, I don't think I'd met any of them before that day. Everyone was pretty friendly, except for Kat Tyrie, who didn't talk to anyone.

There were other other bands on the bill: Anthrax (the Timaru Anthrax), My Three Sons, the band of future Metro magazine editor Bevan Rapson, and Say Yes to Apes.

Timaru responded as if nothing like this had ever happened in Timaru, which it probably hadn't. The city's traditional dual threat – being beaten up by yobs or being monstered by police – was apparently neutralised by all the good vibes.

Some passing yobs did turn up and enthused about what a good scene it was. And when the police arrived, they walked straight past some pot-smoking (which didn't always happen in those days) and had a genial conversation with me about when we might expect the bands to finish. Good party, they said, nice to see this sort of thing. Even the people from Sacred Heart basilica across the road were apologetic when they popped over to ask if we wouldn't mind wrapping up before their evening service. It was as if someone had cast a spell over Timaru.

In a way, the nicest thing about Gordon's photos is that they show what a brilliant, blue-sky day it was. And it must have been only two or three weeks later that I packed up the car (terribly hungover, as I recall) and drove to Auckland for a whole new life. Timaru's blessings were, to put it politely, mixed in the course of my year there. But on that one perfect day, it was a brilliant place.

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

Last night, we went to the opening of Auckland Museum's exhibition Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa. As I've noted here previously, the very fact of this exhibition is an endorsement of popular music as culture – our culture – and Mark Roach, the man who proposed the idea two years ago and has worked on it ever since, had every reason to be standing at the door beaming as the guests streamed in.

It's a modern museum exhibition, which means that alongside key objects there are interactive features which will be particularly good for kids. So you (or your kids) can magic yourself into the set of C'mon, or have a crack at remixing Che Fu's 'Fade Away' under the video tutelage of Sir Vere. Everyone gets a laminate on entry and it can be used to tag various exhibits to collect Spotify playlists (Spotify partner Spark is the corporate sponsor) then redeemed for emailing to the holder.

An opening where hundreds of people descend on the exhibition at once isn't really the best way to experience something this big and I'll be going back at least once once on a quiet weekday afternoon. But last night there was still plenty to gaze at and dream on.

There was this – New Zealand's first homebrew synthesiser, built by Paul Crowther of Split Enz in 1973. Wow!

And this, one of the Chicks' tunics, by Annie Bonza:

And that time that Jon Toogood from Shihad crossed out a shit opening line and wrote in a classic one.

For what is perforce a mainstream exhibition, Volume is notably adventurous in its reach: punk rock and its objects, student radio, Pacific hip hop and Chris Knox's famous TEAC four-track all have their place. In a sense, the wilder reaches are present because they've gained admission to the music industry narrative, and that's fine. But I came away thinking of niche projects that could take a cue from this.

The art of music posters and covers is an obvious one – there's more than enough to fill a separate exhibition. Ditto for a dedicated show of photographs or a look at hip hop street art. And whatever happened to Jac Dwyer's model for the cover of the Headless Chickens' Stunt Clown, or the backcloth for the 'Cruise Control' video? What of the deeper social histories behind club culture? This isn't a criticism but an observation that the culture is too big to be fully captured even in an exhibition as prodigious as this one. There's a lot of it – a lot of us.

But for now, Volume is on for the next seven months and if you live in Auckland or will be visiting in that time, you really should go and enjoy it. It's quite a thing.

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There was, of course, a party on too and Jackson Perry and I got a few pics of that. Here's Mark Roach, looking pretty much how he did all night:

Aroha as the DJ (Jackson):

Tami Neilson and Silke Hartung (Jackson):

A Hallelujah Picasso in a museum! (Jackson)

The all-star band that played a half-hour medley brought it home emphatically with 'Poi E' as I took this picture – I love the juxtaposition with what's on screen.  (I could really have done with them doing a few of those songs at their full length – Chip Matthews' bass playing on Straitjacket Fits' 'Done' was gorgeous.)

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The other preview I got yesterday was a walkthrough of the new Laneway festival site – and and around Albert Park – with the promoter, Mark Kneebone.

Let's take a moment to appreciate entertainment promoters. Theirs is a gig that embodies a high degree of risk by its nature. More so in the case of festival promoters, who face financial risk, especially early in the life of a franchise, along with the risks of being responsible for a very large group of people of less-than-sound mind. Oh, and the weather.

It's also really complicated. I've written previously of the effort that CRS went to in securing consents to hold the Big Day Out and Auckland City Limits at Western Springs. I'm wondering if Laneway's job in sorting out the Albert Park precinct was even bigger.

Two of the four stages will have to be customised – built as modules and shipped on site – because they're in a park full of heritage sites and trees and standard staging won't fit. The whole park will be fenced, meaning a doubling of onsite security staff. Three streets – Princes, Alfred and Wellesley up from Queen – have to be closed. And there's a rather large university in the middle of it all. That will be fenced – while being kept open for staff and students – too.

But, you know, it looks great. This year, down at Wynyard, I chose not to arrive until 6pm, because I just couldn't face being baked on the asphalt. The new site has hectares of grass and a lot of shade and the promoters are looking for people to spend longer on site. There will be more bar space, more food and, on this part of the park, a bar offering $9 glasses of boutique wine ("Nothing that's for sale in supermarkets", apparently).

Stage 2, accommodating a crowd of 4000-5000, will be at the south end of the park, by the old toilet block. It's one of the bespoke stages:

This is Mark pointing to Stage 3, a smaller stage in the middle of the park:

Stage 1, where Tame Impala will close, will sit at one end of Princes Street, facing this way:

And the old Thunderdome will be replaced by a stage looking back at the park from Alfred Street.

If the stage names seem a bit functional to you, they're not permanent. The public will be invited to name each of them in December.

Mark was frank about the fact that they're not yet clear how how the stages will interact and how good sound separation will be. (He can probably console himself with the thought that it could never be as bad as the infamous back-to-back stage at the original Auckland Laneway in Britomart Square.)

The first show on a new site is always a bit of an experiment, but on the basis of what I saw yesterday, it's hard to see how they could have prepared better. This will be a show that's in an urban location and a park setting that offers space and shelter. I wil certainly be there.

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In other summer festival news this week, Splore made its second lineup announcement, adding Blackalicious, Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey of Morcheeba and more.

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Tunes!

Greg Fleming launched his new album To Hell With These Streets last night – it's urban alt-country, if that makes sense. Here's the title track:

Teeth, a band including Luke Buda which is not The Phoenix Foundation, recently released this way-dreamier-than-the-title-sounds single. You can buy it here on Bandcamp. (They're also taking a month-long residency in at Meow in Wellington.)

Whoop whoop! Original 1978 disco banger alert! (Reshare to download from HearThis.)

Aaaaaand nearly three and a half hours of RocknRolla Soundsystem at a gig this week in Gronigen, to freely download. Gotta love that. (Click through for track listing.)

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

This week, the Ministry of Health published a review of standards for the remediation of former clandestine methamphetamine labs. The "review" in the title signifies a review of relevant international literature, but the document effectively also functions as a review of the ministry's own 2010 guidelines for meth lab remediation.

In this context, the review does two specific things. It draws a crucial distinction between properties that have been used to manufacture methamphetamine and those where meth has simply been consumed. And it proposes a new standard for the latter of two micrograms of methamphetamine residue per 100 square centimetres (2.0 µg/100 cm²⁾ – four times higher than the 0.5 µg/100 cm² value recommended in the 2010 lab guidelines. It's still a pretty conservative value – it could have been 3.0 and still been well in line with the evidence.

The 0.5 benchmark remains for former labs, as a "conservative sentinel value" where the presence of meth residue may signal the presence of other, more toxic, chemicals used in manufacture.

In a general sense, the review – commissioned by the ministry from an ESR team as a contribution to the development of formal cleanup standards by Standards New Zealand – is much clearer and more concise than the rambling 2010 guidelines. And it does something all the people who have misapprehended the 2010 guidelines thought they did – reaches a view on the actual toxilogical harms caused by ingesting methamphetamine at these very low concentrations, noting that:

The highest calculated exposures to MA are those experienced by children under 2 years of age, due to their frequent contact with household surfaces, their low body weight, and their hand-to-mouth behaviour. However, even these exposures, using conservative exposure assumptions, fall several orders of magnitude below prescribed therapeutic daily MA doses for children as young as 3 years of age. 

In other words, the potential dose to the most vulnerable infant from touching the walls of a house "contaminated" with meth is vastly lower than the daily therapeutic dose of methamphetamine (sold as Desoxyn) given to a three year-old to treat ADHD. It's a strong vindication of a similar analysis offered by Dr Nick Kim of Massey University in my Poor Foundations story on the issue for Matters of Substance back in August.

The ministry might deserve congratulations for producing such a useful summary of the literature.

Might, if it hadn't spent six years sitting on its hands while all hell broke loose.

The ministry claimed yesterday that it had repeatedly warned Housing New Zealand it was misusing its 2010 lab guidelines to evict tenants. And yet when I approached the ministry with questions about this selfsame misapprehension of its advice, the response was to insist that the guidelines were "self-explanatory" and no further action was necessary. So there's a pretty high stench of bullshit here.

I suspect that over the next few months we'll learn more about the dreadful ways in which Housing NZ has applied its misapprehended knowledge. This morning, Radio New Zealand reported on a family – one of many, according to a South Auckland family support service – that had been thrown out of its home on the basis of alleged meth use that left residues in their home. Use that was strongly denied and which Housing NZ would never have been able to prove in court, because it does not take baseline tests before tenancies begin. Its evidence – and this is literally what's laid down the the Housing NZ process – is generally guilt by association or gossip from the neighbours.

There is talk now of reparations and class actions. Whatever happens, there's another agency I'd like to see held to account: the Tenancy Tribunal. The tribunal took an extreme stance in its apprehension of the the MoH guidelines – insisting that any property where any part tested over the 0.5 guideline value was therefore uninhabitable and should only be entered by people in hazmat suits. The tribunal, too, was warned.

I would also hope that those of my journalistic brethren who gave gullible interviews to self-interested "experts" (spoiler: not experts at all) in the meth-testing industry will reflect on their own failures and their own complicity in the damage done. The same for government ministers – Paula Bennett especially – prepared to harness the hype for their own political purposes.

There's a common thread through all of this, and it's drug stigma.

The stigma that permits lower standards of evidence, and of jurisprudence, care and decency, because it's drugs and no one wants to appear soft on drugs. The stigma that always plagues any attempt to do the right thing. When some of us bang on about evidence-based drug policy, this is what we're pushing against.

By way of closing, I was told yesterday that one of the most prominent meth-testing entrpreneurs, a man who's had soft media for years, is very upset about the Ministry of Health review. Well, good fucking job.

After Kirsty Johnston revealed two weeks ago that Miramar Central School had repeatedly locked children – including an 11 year-old boy with autism –  in dark, cupboard-sized room as a punishment, the story developed quickly.

It emerged that many other schools were using the practice basically unmonitored and Education minister Hekia Parata appeared bizarrely disconnected from the situation at one school, where staff were refusing to cooperate with a police investigation into their use of restraint and seclusion. It's an appalling situation.

But I started to wonder about the basis on which these rooms had been installed in the first place. Before we were obliged to withdraw our younger son from intermediate school some years ago, we had been promised that there would be a quiet room for him to withdraw to and escape the human noise he sometimes found unbearable. It never happened.

But might at least some of these rooms have been installed for good reasons – and was there a danger of a knee-jerk reaction that might harm other familes for whom they were of benefit? Yes and yes, as it turns out.

The Ministry of Education has now cracked down on all schools using such rooms:

The ministry is now focusing on cracking down on other schools that have used seclusion rooms in the last 12 months.

The message is that all schools must stop using such rooms immediately and that Ministry of Education staff will be offering help to come up with techniques to manage students with extreme behaviour.

Meanwhile, this message from the mother of an autistic boy found its way to me:

My son's school has something which could be called a 'seclusion' room but is really a 'sensory deprivation room', a darkened room with a mattress and a hammock.

When he was younger and more volatile, I know my son was offered the room and chose to use it. He would rock in the hammock and have some calming downtime in there, soothed by the the motion and the feeling of safety, a break from his overwhelming senses.

I have also seen teacher aides use the room for students who are screaming and physically lashing out, to protect both the flailing student and themselves from harm.  The students usually calm quickly in there.

I am fine with our school's sensory deprivation room, I think it has helped both students and teacher aides deal with sensory overwhelm. The room has a window and students are allowed out when they want to come out.

I know the seclusion rooms in other schools are not necessarily the same and have not been used so well.  The point I am making is that SOME 'seclusion rooms' are designed to deal with autism's sensory processing issues and so it is not a black and white issue: aka 'all seclusion rooms are bad and staff who use them are bad people'. The teacher aides at M's school are the most caring, strong and wonderful people and I totally sanction the use of the sensory deprivation room that I have seen at our school.

Even the phrase "sensory deprivation room" sounds a bit grim: it's not as if there is no sensory stimulation, just a lot less of it. Even the darkness is relevant – some autistic people find fluourescent lighting aggravating.

The checklist is actually fairly simple. Is the use of the room discussed with parents and part of an agreed plan? Does the child find relief? Is the door unlocked? Are staff on hand?

The belated attention to unacceptable practices is, of course welcome. But having failed to monitor schools' use of what can be a helpful facility – and thus allowed the rooms to be used as a routine form of punishment, to the point where the police have had to get involved, the ministry and its minister are in danger of erring in the the other direction.

Their pressing need to get themselves off the hook risks compounding the negligence that got us to this point.

The occasions when Bill Direen recruits some friends to explore his remarkable catalogue always have the feel of a gathering of initiates and oddballs. There are often unusual people present, but perhaps we're all strange.

This year, Saturday night's show at Audio Foundation was the culmination of a short tour northwards from Dunedin, with a fresh vinyl pressing of Bill's brilliant debut album Beatin Hearts in hand and Simon Ogston there shooting for his forthcoming documentary Bill Direen: A Memory of Friends.

The lineup has varied according to who's been available in each centre and Auckland was notable for the presence of Andrew McCully on keyboards and the presence of two drumkits, marshalled by Stuart Page and Steve Cournane respectively.

I only caught the end of a quieter early set (having spent the previous two hours yelling and cheering at the rugby coverage with some friends I'd just met), but I was there for all of the rock 'n' roll. There was a dramatic version of 'Inquest', a blazing rendition of 'Kicks' and this performance of 'Love in the Retail Trade'.

I thought the twin-drummer lineup brought a real snap and intensity to proceedings. It was brilliant, basically.

The only bum note (well, okay, 'Circle of Blood' was a bit messy) was the couple in front of me. Who stands in the front row of a show like that and proceeds to have a long, loud and unrelated conversation while the band plays? Honestly, go and do your flirting somewhere else, you prats.

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A hundred metres away from where The Builders played on Saturday night stands the Flying Out store, on Pitt Street in what was once The Shaver Shop. Hunter Keane's 10-minute documentary on the shop is basically a look at what a record shop is in 2016 – a place to be.

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Speaking of great catalogues, the Hamburg-based label Thokei Tapes has just released RePort, "a selection of 21 not-so-famous Robert Scott songs", which covers both solo work and Bob's various musical alliances, including The Magick Heads and his settings of Robert Burns' 'Green Grow the Rashes O' and 'My Bonie Bell'. (There's also a version of Abba's 'When I Kissed the Teacher'.)

It's available here on Bandcamp for $US10.

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My other long-weekend listening has been of a different character. Leisure's debut album was released on Friday and it's a slinky, groovy summer thing. It's on the usual digital servces, but there's also a vinyl pressing which was, unusually, ready on the release date.

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David Herkt has popped back to his Public Address blog with an absorbing interview with my old friend Martin Aston, on occasion of Martin's new book, Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out, a definitive (and until now, somewhat secret) history of gay and lesbian pop. It's a great post with examples of the music sprinkled through it. Have a read.

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I couldn't get to Thursday's launch event at Golden Dawn, but I got a private demo of Rohan Hill's synthesizer-sequencer-sampler the Deluge a little while ago and it's a remarkable thing, developed from the ground up – he even did his own microcontroller programming. You can read Audio Newsroom raving about it and find out more here.

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On Audioculture, Peter McLennan traverses the remarkable career of Alan Jansson, from The Steroids to 'How Bizarre' and beyond.

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Eric B and Rakim are back together!

And they've hinted about touring as far afield as Australia ...

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by: