Hard News by Russell Brown

The week began for this blog with a close look at Radio New Zealand's boffo new survey results. And then on Tuesday evening, at the launch of Murray Cammick's Flash Cars exhibition – back in a gallery for the first time in 40 years – I bumped into an old friend of Murray's, William Dart.

William has been making New Horizons, a contemporary music programme on Concert FM, since roughly the dawn of recorded time. And throughout that time he has brought an openness to new music and an ability to perceive the roughness of pop with the ear of a classical critic. He has championed and taken seriously music that would otherwise never be heard on Concert. He doesn't claim to be down with the kids – he's 69 and the wrong side of heart surgery and a stroke – but what he does provides a unique complement to RNZ's other pop music programming.

I said as much to him as we inspected Murray's photographs. He noted with some satisfaction that in his most recent programme, reviewing Lawrence Arabia's new Absolute Truth album, he had detected the inspiration (coincidental or otherwise) for the album's lead track, 'A Lake' – which was an obscure Randy Newman song, 'Snow'. The programme includes a recording of the song by Nilsson to illustrate the point.

William goes on to make a comparison with Jacques Brel and then consider a couple of tracks from an earlier Lawrence Arabia, Chant Darling. He often does this: draws a continuity not only with an artist's previous work, but with other, older musical ideas. He also notes – how did I miss this? – the Philly disco intimations of another Absolute Truth track, 'Another Century'.

William did a similar job in considering Dave Dobbyn's Harmony House album at the beginning of the year. It is a most useful service. New Horizons is available as a podcast (although the podcast subscription button on the page seems to be broken – just me?).

Another musical treat on RNZ: last weekend's return of the occasional series The Mixtape, in which John Campbell played and discussed the music that moves him. Even if you've heard the song before, there's something really good about hearing someone else speak thoughtfully about what it means to them. I listened to it while I prepared a goat curry – a sort of weekend edition of the popular weekday listening game #cookingwithjohn – and it made me happy. The goat curry turned out bloody well too.

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Lontalius' 'Light Shines Through Dust' has a pretty new video by production house Arty Films. It's made with a camera obscura:

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If you're one of those people who like Pink Floyd but only the early stuff, there's a box set coming for you. The Early Years 1965 – 1972 runs to 27 discs and will set you back nearly $1000:

There's also a more conventionally-priced and substantially less deluxe version. It's not out till November, but there are details and pre-order links here.

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When I worked at Rip It Up in the 1980s, I met and interviewed all manner of musicians, from Nick Cave to Nico, INXS to a particularly unhappy Andy Summers. Also: Patsy Riggir.

Strictly speaking, the interview was for Rip It Up's style sibling, ChaCha. But the main thing is, Patsy Riggir was bloody lovely company and I've never forgotten it.

As Glen Moffat explains in his new Audioculture profile of Patsy, she came from a deep country music heritage – her father Jack was recording with Eldred Stebbing in 1951. She was New Zealand's platinum-selling queen of country in the 80s.

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Tunes!

Denver DJ Funk Hunk has a new clutch of edits available as a free download – the only catch is you have to sign up to Juno download to get 'em. It's worth the two minutes it'll take.

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

Karangahape Road's First Thursdays events have never quite happened every month – there are probably too many moving parts for that. But every time they do, they underline what makes K Road different from anywhere else in Auckland.

Last night's event was no exception. We came and wandered along while the art wandered past us. We bought some knick-knacks, ran into friends at at Rebel Soul Records and ate excellent burgers from Burger Bar in St Kevins Arcade, which has reached a good equilirium under its new ownership and looks better than it has in many years. We didn't try the silent disco downstairs, although it was clearly very popular.

There were families and old people and it sometimes seemed that everyone who wasn't part of the art was taking pictures of the art. It's my favourite place to take photographs (all pics taken with my iPhone SE) and last night's "light" theme made it even better than usual.

Did I mention that I bloody love K Road?

Just me, or did yesterday's confirmation by the Māori Party that it will not endorse Helen Clark in her bid to be the next UN Secretary general flick some kind of switch? The not-unexpected announcement provoked a furious political response and some citizens were needlessly rude to Māori Party co-leader Marama Fox when she restated the party position on Twitter.

Social media abuse also flowed the other way, towards liberals who debated the stance ("shut the fuck up" was one of the less useful contributions). Others were moved to state their own misgivings about the Clark candidacy. After the whole thing had drifted on for months as a matter of vague patriotic duty, we seemed to finally be saying what we really thought. It seems worth considering in more than 140 characters.

I don't debate the Māori Party's right to withold its endorsement of Clark and I think the response to its decision has been excessive. The decision is not "treachery" or anything like it. I realise these things will be perceived differently in te ao Māori and I can't presume to to tell anyone what to think about that. And I have a high degree of respect for both Marama Fox and Te Ururoa Flavell. I met Marama not long after she was elected and was hugely impressed by her.

But I do firmly believe that if you're going to expand the argument to the Secretary General candidates' "skills" or "knowledge" in the interests of indigenous peoples – as both party co-leaders have done – there is probably no stronger candidate than Clark. In part, that's simply a reflection of her role as head of the United Nations Development Programme, but it's true nonetheless.

But it's not that straighforward. In its troubled last term, Clark's government was one of only four (along with Canada, Australia and the US) that declined to sign the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Its ostensible reason for doing so – that the declaration was in conflict with New Zealand law and practice and the Treaty of Waitangi in particular – was not actually invalid.

But it could and should have done what National did three years later and reserved exceptions on that basis. It would not have won a Parliamentary vote to do so in 2007 – but it didn't need to. The declaration isn't a treaty or a convention and it requires no ratification. As a statement from John Key noted no fewer than four times when Pita Sharples eventually went to New York to affirm it in 2010, his goverment was accepting the declaration as an "aspirational" document.

New Zealand's relationship with the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights was already uncomfortable in 2007, given that office's strong criticism of the way property rights were appropriated in Labour's Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004. (It's worth noting that this was before National's 180-degree shift on the same issue: then-Māori Affairs spokesman Gerry Brownlee urged Clark's goverment to "show this report the respect it deserves by throwing it straight into the dustbin".) This article for the New Zealand Yearbook of International law by Fleur Adcock (not the poet) offers an interesting perspective on what actually did and didn't change when the  Act was replaced. But Key's government was able to find a political way forward, Clark's wasn't. She has to wear that.

And yet, as administrator of UNDP, she signed and helped direct the creation of this handbook for the implentation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Since taking up the role in 2009, she has consistently kept the interests of indigenous people in the conversation. Earlier this year she noted in a formal statement that:

At the global level, UNDP engaged last year with the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples throughout the process of consultation and drafting of the UN System Wide Action Plan (SWAP) for the implementation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The SWAP will bring more coherence to UN interventions in support of indigenous peoples’ rights.

It's wordy and procedural but it does mean something. That same might be said of the big policy achievement of her UNDP tenure, the Sustainable Development Goals. Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to attend the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the world drug problem. I was struck by the way the SDGs – which essentially define and test the reasons we make policies – provided almost the only overarching philosophical rigour at that big and sometimes bizarre meeting.

UNDP's submissions in advance of UNGASS were high-quality and influential and I spoke to a number of NGO representatives who were very excited by the prospect of her winning the post of UN Secretary general. I interacted with several UNDP people and that also reinforced the impression that this was a UN agency that was running well.

It's also a UN agency that Clark reformed, slashing management roles in a way that was virtually unprecedented. It cost her politically, but brought the agency within its means. Her style in doing so may also have been, as Colum Lynch's Foreign Policy article argued, vindictive and possibly driven by her ambition for the top UN job. But if Clark, as she has repeatedly indicated, sees herself as willing and able to carry out reform of the United Nations and make it "fit for purpose", there can be little doubt she has the ability.

There are other reasons to favour a Clark candidacy: it's long past time for a woman Secretary General, and it would be nice (and good for New Zealand) to have a New Zealander in the role. But I think more important are the specific reason of her engagement with indigenous peoples' interests over the past seven years and the general reason of her willingness and ability to reform the United Nations from the top.

So, I'm not telling anyone to get over anything and I think the Māori Party should be allowed to take its own position without its leaders being abused on social media or anywhere else. But I do think Helen Clark has a strong case to be the next United Nations Secretary General.

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Anyway, there's one thing we can all get together and laugh about. And that is what happened with the Guardian column by Carl Ungerer, the former advisor to the unloved aspirant to the SG role, Kevin Rudd. In criticsing the Australian government's decision not to back Rudd, Ungerer wrote this:

Presumably the Turnbull government will now vote for Helen Clark from New Zealand.

But Clark is unacceptable in Washington, and is not well respected among the UN establishment. For Washington, she will always be the anti-nuclear campaigner that forced the split among the “Five Eyes” intelligence community.

Some Twitter friends drew my attention to the column, suggesting that this didn't seem right. It wasn't, of course: it was hilariously wrong. And then, overnight, Ungerer doubled down:

Carl Ungerer's Twitter bio describes him as Head of the Leadership, Crisis and Conflict Management Programme, Geneva Centre for Security Policy; former Senior Adviser to Australian Foreign Minister. The GCSP's motto is "Where knowledge meets experience". It charges actual money.

The Radio New Zealand press release announcing its new survey results arrived last Thursday under a very restrained billing: the headline was 'RNZ Radio Research Results'. At the time of writing, the release doesn't even appear on the broadcaster's media releases page.

It fell to the Sunday Star Times to go with the more celebratory Bloody marvellous! John Campbell and Morning Report lead RNZ to a ratings resurgence, and to declare Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking "dethroned" by Morning Report.

It's a very strong result for RNZ, not least because it puts to bed the awkward audience slump of 2014, which saw the cume (ie: weekly cumulative audience) for RNZ National and Concert dip below 500,000 and led CEO Paul Thompson to venture that his strategic changes were generating "speed wobbles".

The new survey has the two stations' cume at an impressive 600,200. But even that recovery had already happened. In January RNZ was able to report a cume of 564,000, or about where it was before Thompson turned up as a change agent. Further, Morning Report, Nine to Noon, Midday Report, The Panel, Checkpoint, Saturday Morning and Sunday Morning are the most popular shows in their respective timeslots, by both cume and share (ie: the share of all radio listening at the time).

Morning Report attracting more listeners than Newstalk ZB Breakfast isn't actually a new thing – in 2012, for example, Morning Report, hosted by Geoff Robinson and Simon Mercep, was found to be the most popular radio show in the country, with an average 342,000 listeners.

The difference is that those earlier figures were in the survey RNZ has long commissioned from Neilsen, and not the same ratings survey by which the commercial stations live or die. That separation, and Radio New Zealand's parsimonious approach in publishing the results (it had more information about individual show performance than it ever released) has often led critics to suppose that RNZ was somehow scared to be compared to commercial broadcasters.

In truth, the commercial stations hated having RNZ in "their" survey much more than RNZ disliked being there – for the simple reason that having the large public radio audience in the mix accordingly reduced their share numbers. But RNZ is in the new survey conducted by the Australian company GfK, which took over the commercial ratings from Research International last year, after a messy period in which there was no overall commercial ratings survey.

And, as Stop Press explained last week, a face-saving agreement has been reached:

The results come a week after the results for the commercial market but was in line with an agreement between the Radio Broadcasters Association and RNZ.

The industry felt a separation would ensure commercial radio results and RNZs results are given the appropriate level of exposure, and there would be no confusion in the market, according to a GfK release.

This is the first set of nationwide results under GfK’s new research methodology that has brought together RNZ and the commercial stations in one rating system.

While it is possible to compare RNZ to its commercial competitors, GfK said the station shares (percentages) cannot be compared. This is because the share results in the commercial radio reports are based on all commercial radio listening and the share results in the RNZ report are based on total New Zealand radio listening.

This produces a contradiction when the numbers are put together. Morning Report has a weekly audience of 385,900 people, which it converts to a 13.8% share of all people listening at that time. Newstalk ZB's Hosking Breakfast show attracts a weekly audience of only 342,000, which it is entitled to state as a 15.6% share.

So the commercial networks get to claim their own station shares, RNZ can truthfully claim to be the clear leader in news radio and The Edge's well-engineered pop fare makes it the most listened-to individual station in the land.

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Although GfK was chosen by the Radio Broadcasters Association as the new radio ratings company in part because of its expertise in measuring digital audiences, only conventional broadcast ratings have been published so far. But, by chance I think, NZ On Air published the second round of its intriguing Where are the Audiences? survey last week too.

The first instance of this survey was conducted in 2014 by Colmar Brunton. This year's was carried out by Glasshouse Consulting, but let's assume they're comparable apart from stated changes, which include the addition of questions about devices used to consume media and and "simultanous media consumption" or so-called second-screen use. Use of local and international SVOD (subscriber video on demand) was measured separately this time and there were questions about webseries viewing.

The trends are about what you'd expect: the weekly reach of linear TV (both pay and free-to-air), live radio and newspapers has declined in the past two years. A remarkable 35% of us are using SVOD services weekly, and more than two thirds of that audience is using local services. Online radio listening is up from 12% to 18% and the growth is all local. Time spent watching video on sites such as Facebook and YouTube has more than doubled to 40 minutes a day.

Listening to music on CD or "iPod" (which seems to mean offline listening) is down from 69% to 53% weekly and listening to music on Spotify has nearly doubled to 21%. Music streaming across all services has increased fivefold in two years, with 59% using it on a given day.

There's a nice little nugget buried in there for RNZ: the daily reach of RNZ National has bucked the trends and edged up from 12% to 13% of the population – against a small decline in overall radio listening.

Although linear TV still attracts more consumers than any other medium,  by a large margin – 81% of us watch it on a given day – the biggest differentiator in using alternatives is age. The younger you are, the more online media you're likely to consume.

But ... that doesn't apply to New Zealand-made webseries. One in 10 of us have watched a local webseries, but they're most popular not among the otherwise online-friendly under 25 year-olds, but in the 25-44 demographic, of whom 16% said they'd watched one. There's a problem here and I suspect it's the same one faced by local music – getting noticed amid the vast international offerings.

But it's actually worse in some ways for local webseries, because they're scattered across a range of places (NZME's NZ On Air funded webseries, for example, are exclusive to NZME's WatchMe website). Even if you're watching via TVNZ OnDemand, a low-budget webseries will tend to get lost amid catch-up viewing for flagship TV shows. Given that some of the best creative work is being done in that format, this is going to take some thinking about. NZ On Air may have to look at trying to aggregate the webseries it funds and putting them in as many places as possible – including the SVOD services.

Anyway, there's much more in Where Are the Audiences?, so feel free to dig around that and the GfK site and see what strikes you.

The electricity gods have been angry today, so I'll get straight to the point: Lawrence Arabia is playing at Mt Eden's Crystal Palace theatre this evening, with a string section – and a (solo) SJD in support. There's no way this ain't gonna be great. It's also your last chance to see them before they head off for dates in the UK and France.

And I have a double pass to give away. Just click the email link at the bottom of this post and mail me with "Lawrence Arabia" as the subject line. I'll do a draw at 4pm today, which will leave all the non-winners time to buy a ticket here.

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Moana Maniapoto has written a wonderful column remembering Dalvanius Prime. And the comments are really good too. With Tearepa Kahi's Poi E: The Story of Our Song poised for general release, it seems we're paying some overdue atention to a proper legend.

Here's Dalvanius and the Fascinations from 1977. Awww yeah.

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Shaft have released their first track in decade and it's everything you'd expect and hope for – just madly, madly tuneful. I was singing along to the chorus the first time I played it.

They're playing with Minisnap, Nakey and others tonight at the Darkroom in Christchurch.

I've been following trippy West Auckland hip hop crew Third3ye for a while now and I think they've gone up a level with their new album 3P. It's conscious and funky like this:

The whole album's only $6 on Bandcamp. 

Shayne Carter and Don McGlashan are reprising their Auckland Arts Festival team-up and hitting the road for a tour together in October. Their new website – donandshayne.com – has the info, including the news that a live-in-studio CD, recorded at The Lab the day of their arts festival show, will be exclusively on sale at the gigs.

Impressive electronic producer-artist Peach Milk launches her EP Finally tonight at Whammy. Under the Radar has the exclusive on the Soundcloud stream, along with an interview.

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Turns out, there's a lost William Burroughs album and it's seeing the light of day now, nearly 20 years after he died. It's Burroughs reading from The Naked Lunch, backed by Bill Frisell and others. You can listen to and read about here.

And if you like that, you'll probably be interested in staring at this one-of-a-kind Sun Ra record that for sale on eBay at the moment.

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Thanks to Stuart Page for the heads-up on this YouTube channel of conncerts from New Jersey's Capitol Theatre from 1973 to 1987. Let's be clear: some of them are in very murky black and white and rather a lot of them are Grateful Dead shows – but there are some gems, including Prince, Parliament, Elvis Costello and this 1984 show by REM, which opens with a country-stye cover of 'Pale Blue Eyes':

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Tunes!

Aussie two-steppers Cup & String have a new EP out, but I'll do that when it's available more widely and not just on Traxsource. But for now, they've made their remix of the Nightcrawlers 90s club hit 'Push the Feeling On' a free download. I like this.

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by: