Hard News by Russell Brown

So farewell then, George Martin. You encouraged The Beatles to be adventurous, and then you helped them make those adventures real. You transcended what a producer was half a century ago and you helped define what a producer is now.

There have been some great things written since Sir George's passing this week, but one of my favourites is the concise, personal testament on Facebook of Danielle Moreau, known hereabouts:

OK, so people who are not Giant Beatle Dorks like me may not care, but I just need to share some of the ways in which George Martin made my life better.

He scored the strings for 'Yesterday' and 'Eleanor Rigby'. I consider the latter the most starkly beautiful and sad of any of Paul's songs.

He wrote and played the Bach-esque piano solo on 'In My Life'.

He didn't say "seriously? piss off" when Lennon came to him on acid and asked him to make Lennon's singing voice sound "like an orange".

He organised the piccolo trumpet player for 'Penny Lane'.

He agreed to produce the Beatles because he thought they were charming and funny when everyone else had turned them down.

He scored the orchestrations for 'All You Need is Love' including the 'Greensleeves', Bach and 'In the Mood' samples in the fadeout.

He congratulated them for recording their first number one record after the 'Please Please Me' session. (It was.)

He encouraged them to experiment with instruments and wacky sound effects thanks to his comedy album production background.

He was a tolerant, wise and inspirational producer and The Beatles wouldn't have been what they were without him. Even if he didn't have very good taste in ties. RIP.

Everyone's been posting their favourites, so I'm going with this deconstruction of 'Tomorrow Never Knows', which, as Paul explains, they expected to be a challenge for George because it was Lennon strumming just a single chord – C – but which became yet another testament to George's eternal openness to "far out ideas".

That track, man. It's the spawn of rock music as drone, you can drop it into a modern DJ set, it's everything.

Bonus: Chris Bourke's great Audioculture article on The Beatles and New Zealand.

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Lontalius launches his well-trailered debut album, I'll Forget 17, with a show at the refurbished Las Vegas Club on K Road on March 24.

There's a new video for 'Glow', which I immediately loved when Ed posted it as a Soundcloud preview more than month ago. It's not just a sweet, longing love song, it's a beautiful arrangement:

Meanwhile, out today, Dave Dobbyn's first album in eight years, Harmony House, which was produced at Dave's home studio by Samuel Flynn Scott and Luke Buda of the Phoenix Foundation. I first heard this record last year and it was the first and last tracks that really grabbed me.

They're personal in different ways: 'Waiting for a Voice' is a cry from faith, prophetic, poetic, maybe even angry. And, as he told Russell Baillie, the closing title track comes from a tough year for the family, when his wife Anneliesje was dealing with breast cancer – with its layered vocals and bouncy bassline, is like nothing I've heard Dave do before.

It's not all unusual – the single 'Angelina' is a straight-up guitar pp tune – but Dave has a track record of going looking outside his comfort zone and I think Sam and Luke really helped him find something this time.

And finally for new releases, Ladyhawke – who appears next weekend at Auckland City Limits – is back from a four-year break with her forthcoming new album, Wild Things, which is out on June 3. First taste is the official lyric video of 'A Love Song':

She talked to the ABC in Australia.

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If you haven't already watched this, you should watch this. The BBC shot Orkestra Obsolete playing 'Blue Monday' on the instruments that would have been available in 1933. The arrangement is the thing:

More on the instruments here.

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This is a great read: Terence Hogan on a youthful journey from Auckland to spend a winter in London in 1972, seeing bands (from a tapped out Velvet Underground to an ascendant Bowie and a rock Flamin' Groovies) meeting Charlie Gillett and finding out things.

Meanwhile in the music business of 2016, Digital Music News (who have been wrong before) says Soundcloud will entirely shift its model to become a subscription service this year. I'm not quite sure how that's going to work.

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Gold Medal Famous is staging a theremin playing contest at Moon in Newtown, Wellington, tomorrow evening at part of their gig with The Doubtful Sounds.

Anyone can have a crack and there are prizes including merch, CDs and glasses of the Gold Medal Famous Aotearoa Golden Ale.

If, like me, you've never seen, let alone played with a theremin, this seems a good opportunity. Also, beer. And as GMF's Chris Wilson notes, this week would have seen the birthday of the "greatest theremin player ever", Clara Rockmore.

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Tunes!

Another Auckland City Limits act, Racing, goin' be funky with their new one:

Classic indie-pop? They're still making it. The Beths feature Jonanthan Pearce, who helped produce Anthonie Tonnon's Successor, and this bristles with guitar verve:

From the excellent Analog Africa label, a free download comprising five whole hours of African funk, jazz, soul and rock you very probably haven't heard before.

Mr Fingers is back! Larry Heard's first new recordings in a long time. Sampler here:

A free-to-download mix of funk and soul from Bill Brewster. Click through for track listing.

And finally, a new Digital Visions re-edit for free download. The Rolling Stones' 'Miss You' turned yet further to the dancefloor:

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

One of the frustrations of local body cycling networks is that they tend to ignore some of the key ways people actually ride. Official cycle maps have tended to show official cycleways that are part of the transport network, but not rights-of-way and paths through parks. That's why riders make and share crowdsourced cycle maps.

Happily, the launch of Auckland Transport's consultation exercise for its planned Point Chevalier to city cycle improvements suggests that has changed. Of a fairly dense prospective network of paths through the Western Bays area, the first project is one that connects three parks and a right of way, from Williamson Ave through Grey Lynn Park to Cox's Bay Park. It's basically already my go-to way home from K Road through the foodie zone and it's in red on this map.

(Larger and more useful map here.)

"It’s been a longstanding desire of the Waitemata local board to get that link recognised and upgraded," Kathryn King, AT’s Cycling and Walking manager, told me. "It connects a number of parks and is a really nice route for people travelling to the shops or parks or cafes along it. It's a well-established route for local people, it just needs needs some investment to make it more comfortable and attractive."

That path, including improvments to street crossings, will be the only one done this year, in part because AT's consultation process is so extensive. Seventeen thousand households will receive AT's brochure outlining the prospective network and be invited to provide feedback – including by drawing their own preferred paths on the map in the brochure and sending it back.

"We're asking people living within that greater Western Bays area what routes are the priority for them," said King. "And from that analysis, we'll be taking five or six projects forward to design and then coming back to consult people about the range of options we might be employing."

The philosophy of the project is to enable local journeys – to school or the supermarket, for example.

"The strategy for cycling investment in Auckland is to develop these networks in local areas, starting from the city centre and radiating out," said King.

"And that's based on the knowledge that people are likely to cycle up to six to nine kilometres comfortably. That's a 20 to 30 minute bike ride. So we want to make sure the networks and facilities we're building match what most people are likely to do.

"I think we have a lot of really long facilities that don't help to build up those local cycling communities. It's establishing cycling as an option and creating travel choice for our customers. And that travel choice is for all sorts of journeys, not just commuting."

I pointed out to King that I feared I might have shocked one of her colleagues by confessing that I generally prefer to ride up Chinaman's Hill into town than to cross the motorway to the northwestern cycleway, which terminates in the short but oh-so-irksome climb to Newton, only for the whole climb to be thrown away on the descent on the other side.

It turned out that she also lives in the Chev and does the same thing.

"I think it's actually a nicer ride."

The Newton Road Problem will be subject to consultation in the next few months, and then, hopefully sooner than later, a new path will be made through the small reserve by the bridge to connect with a cycleway on Ian McKinnon Drive making for a single, easier climb.

Chev-to-the-city is a 10-year project with both local funding and money from the government's Urban Cycleways Programme. It's also a 10-year project which currently has only three years of funding locked in, so there are no guarantees of its completion. But the first set of facilities will be completed along with the three-year deadline in June 2018.

That first set will not include the busiest route in the area, Ponsonby Road.

"Ponsonby Road needs to be addressed as a wider streetscape upgrade," said King. " That means we need to work on facilitating improved public transport and pedestrian access and retaining access for people in cars – all of that needs to be looked at at once. Like Queen Street or Broadway in Newmarket, it needs to have a bit of money thrown at it and be done properly."

As a rule, roads with high traffic speeds and volumes (Great North Road, for example) will get protected cycleways, while the focus on quieter local roads will be on making the motor vehicle traffic even quieter. I would hope AT has learned from the cyclewaysalongside Dominion Road, where traffic-calming measures created bottlenecks that seemed to make cycling more, not less, difficult.

AT has been largely talking so far to the Waitemata local board, but also also consult fuerther with the Eden-Albert board, which wants to make sure the trees it has planted on Point Chevalier Road are safeguarded. But, by chance, one of the big early projects will fall on the Eden-Albert side of the boundary (which runs along Old Mill and Garnet Roads).

It turns out that Meola Road is due for a once-in-25-years do-over, which will see the whole road dug up and replaced, along with services. You can exect to hear the roar of the the people who park their luxury SUVs the length of the road while their children are playing football on Saturday mornings.

"We are looking at different options there. It's difficult because the land is contaminated on the seaward side. That reduces the options available to us for an off-road facility. But it's a fantastic opportunity for us to add value, if possible, with improved cycling and walking connections."

We'll see what happens there. But in general, what AT is doing accords with my cycle-sense as a local rider, and I'm keen to see the additional cycle parking which will be built along each route – something I wrote about in a post about quaxing.

I think things are getting better.

One week short of six years ago, Rob O'Neill published a story for Computerworld revealing the background to the Auckland Transition Agency's decision to apply a "veneer" to the integration of the IT systems the constituent councils of the imminent Auckland supercity.

O'Neill focused on responses to a memo from the government-appointed ATA's "stream leader of business processes and systems", Mike Foley, on the viability of commissioning the quick-fix without a conventional public tender process. As was the case in other areas, central government's unrealistic timeline for integration was having a impact on decision-making.

The response from Waitakere City’s group manager for information John Johnson warned Foley that the decision made on a fix would set the "platform and future IT direction for the new council over the next five to 15 years” and said having no public tender process was “not a defendable option”.

The ATA did not conduct a public tender. Instead, as acting local government minister John Carter confirmed later that year in response to a question from Labour's Phil Twyford, the contract was awarded to a group of four companies led by SAP after a "discussion". [NB: the original response in this discussion was led by Deloitte, not SAP.] The minister said he had "every faith that the Auckland Transition Agency, and particularly the new council, will deliver a grand service for the people of Auckland."

In a commentary accompanying his report, O'Neill noted the opacity of the ATA's way of working and the difficulty in getting officicial information. He wrote:

There are signs building of a serious backlash against the way the Auckland Supercity is being implemented. Whether it’s the way executives are being recruited or the way the Council-controlled organisations are being reorganised, it looks increasingly as if the entire effort is being driven out of Wellington — and that’s making Aucklanders uncomfortable.

Arguably, all of these new structures should be decided by the new elected council and not implemented before elections are even held. At the very least, the new Council should be able to undo some of the decisions made before they arrive if they feel that to be necessary and in the best interests of ratepayers and residents.

He concluded that hope that Aucklanders would have to hope their shiny new council "is not hamstrung by decisions now being made by unelected officials."

 I used somewhat stronger language in a follow-up blog post headed The Auckland Council as leaky building:

My understanding is that the quick-and-dirty approach will have another unpleasant effect, one reaching across much more than IT consolidation: it will delay the real spending until after the Auckland Council is formed.

This might suit the government, which can declare that the delayed spending – of the order of $200 to $300 million – is being done at the discretion of the newly-elected council. But it will leave us Auckland ratepayers with huge obligations from day one.

It’s been described to me as “the Auckland Council as a leaky building”: it looks fine on the outside, but is rotten underneath. The word “veneer” would seem to have been well chosen.

 A year on, the Herald was reporting that the council was faced with a $500 million bill over eight years to build new computer systems to conduct its business – a staggering $300 million of which had not been budgeted. And I was writing:

Even if we are charitable and assume that this is all simply the cost of equipping a robust unitary authority, it is not what we were told would happen. Local government minister Rodney Hide wrote in the Herald a year ago that projected $94 million establishment costs up until election of the first Auckland Council in November were “a drop in the bucket” compared to the $2 billion spent annually by Auckland’s councils. “Decisions now made,” he wrote in the passive tense, “also commit the new council to a further $66 million on IT to finish the job post November 1.”

Given that, as The Aucklander has discovered, the new council has been obliged to spend $2 million a month on private outsourcing of planning work it no longer has staff to cover, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Hide’s estimate of post-November establishment costs – to which the transition authority he personally appointed has committed Auckland ratepayers – will be out by a factor of 10.

Last week, the Herald reported that Auckland Council has spent $1.24 billion on IT since its formation in 2010. This figure very probably includes normal operational costs and thus is not all additional spending on development. But it does seem clear the council's IT integration has been a calamity.

Now, a guest post at The Standard lays out a firm, and damning, view on what got us to this point. The author says that ATA chief Ford:

... ignored modern business practices and ignored sensible advice by dividing transition planning into siloed ‘work streams’, and relegating IT to a minor role inside ‘infrastructure’.

Ford showed little understanding of, or care about, the critical, extensive and expensive role IT plays in modern businesses and not for profit entities. The result is a massive cost overrun.

It's even more damning on the role of Ford's hire Mike Foley, who became Council CIO and, according to the post, "proceeded to make every IT mistake in the book."

It identifies major problems with governance and scope that the new council inherited and failed to address. And describes how it got worse:

Incredibly, the poor programme governance, poor decision making, and lack of accountability identified in the reports were still occurring. For example, Foley decided to undertake a major re-design of NewCore, which blew time and a lot of money, and threw out the existing software used for property, consents and LIM’s (Pathway), in favour of heavily customising the expensive off the shelf SAP package. Maybe this was based on a 19 year old SAP project he once worked on in the UK. Who knows?

Customisations of massive monolithic software such as SAP hugely increase long term costs as every update to the product (e.g. new version, security update etc) has to be tested by Council against their customisations. Eventually the core product diverges significantly from the customised code and the entire IT system has to be re-written, again at massive cost.

This has also been the experience of a major NZ utility firm, who’s customised version of SAP has locked them into a lifetime of exceptionally costly testing, re-coding and upgrading as SAP changes. These problems are well known in the IT industry, but were ignored by the council’s IT leadership.

And concludes:

The Supercity was set up this way from the start. The elected council has no real oversight powers and as the potential IT spend was not costed correctly at the start, that’s been a costly NACT political decision for the rate payers of Auckland to cough up for.

The warning is very clear. The supercity structure is highly vulnerable to massive cost overruns.

Mayoral candidate Vic Crone may well be right when she slates the "lack of leadership, oversight, transparency, discipline and expertise" that got us here. But it seems clearer than ever that those problems were baked into the new city right from the start.

Auckland City Limits has published its timetable and site map for March 19 The site configuration will be familiar to anyne who went to the last Big Day Out, but there a few differeneces – most notably that the entrance and box office are now at the foot of the Bullock Track and there's an Auckland Kiddie Limits zone in one corner of Motat.

Fat Freddy's Drop, The National and Kendrick Lamar headline the Spark statges in the stadium with relatively long sets – 75 minutes for the first two and 90 minutes for Kendrick. Girl Talk, Shapeshifter and Modest Mouse take the evening on the V-Energy stages out in the front field. Earlier in the day, Carnivorous Plant Society (4pm in the Golden Dawn zone) and Phoenix Foundation (6.30pm) are of note.

The field and stadium bars will be serving mid-strength (up to 3.5%) drinks, including Mac's really-quite-good Mid Vicious Pale Ale, which can be consumed anywhere onsite and the R18 lakeside Golden Dawn bar will offer higher-strength drinks to be consumed within the confines of the bar.

NB: The timetable on the ACL website isn't displaying properly for me in Safari, so I've uploaded a simple jpeg here.

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I was talking to music teacher and teenage band coach Jeni Little on Twitter the other day and the conversation turned to a blog post she wrote a couple of years ago called The Truth About Music, which describes her opening up from an academic background ("I played and studied music composed by dead white men") to an embrace of the community role of song and dance during the six months she spent in Rarotonga. It's lovely.

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Also lovely: I wrote a while back about the nasty harassment suffered at Laneway by my friend Jean Hughes. I delighted to report that a few people and companies have clubbed into donate a care package for Jean to affirm that what happened was not okay.

Thanks go principally to Andrew "Drus" Dryden of Sensitive Boyfriend, who had the idea and did most of the legwork, and to Madman, Mixitup
and Cheese on Toast for kicking to help. And big ups to Laneway promoter Mark Kneebone – who sent a lovely letter to Jean with the offer of free double passes to Laneway for the next five years.

I've also been able to give Shelley two Auckland City Limits tickets. It's nice to get a good thing out of a bad thing, and for the music community to play its part in that.

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Going to the Jesus and Mary Chain tomorrow evening? Tito at Rebel Soul Music on K Road is hosting some drinks and playing some appropriate tuneage beforehand.

While Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd checks the spelling on his forthcoming memoir, you can read John Russell's 1997 Rip It Up interview with Roger on Audioculture.

But the big one on Audioculture lately is Grant Gillanders' lowdown on the Wellington psych-pop sensations of the 1960s, The Avengers. They were a hell of a band.

Ever dreamed about a life-drawing class with Iggy Pop as the model? Yeah, it was in New York last month and you missed it.

And, pursuant to some discussion on Facebook this week, John Peel interviewed on 95bFM during his 2002 visit to New Zealand:

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Tunes!

The NZ On Air Soundcloud account has done a bunch of reposting of recent local releases, including Baynk's 'Could You', which is a free download:

And Eden Mulholland's epic 'Singularity':

For some smoove groove: you probably have Sade's 'Why Can't We Live Together' tucked away somewhere in your subconscious. The original is by Timmy Thomas and this is a sweet little edit by a couple of different DJs. Free download:

 

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

Duncan Greive's recent The Spinoff  column The real problem with New Zealand TV drama is a follow-up to his earlier review of the new NZ On Air-funded drama series Filthy Rich. Actually, no: it's a consequence of that scathing review.

Greive couldn't help but witness the indignant response of the show's creators, most notably Gavin Strawhan, who complained on Facebook about "people who think they know about television because they watch it" and averred that "we worked really fucking hard to make this". And yet, Greive writes:

The interesting thing to me was that of the 22 messages I received in the days following the review, almost all were from people working in television – who did know the business from the inside. Many of them have had long, successful careers. One, an actor with one of the most acclaimed shows of the last decade on her CV, wrote that she had “deliberately walked away from TV” because of the way the big dramatic shows continued to be made by the same small set of people.

They wrote with a sense of palpable anguish, one I sensed was borne of the creeping feeling they were getting old and wasting the best years of their creative lives making stuff that no one really cared for or about. These were smart, talented people who found themselves unable to put that intelligence and aptitude on screen. 

I was struck by how much thought they’d put into this issue, how precise their diagnoses of the problems were, and how constructive their various solutions.

The problem, Greive concludes (even managing to set aside his sometimes overdone beef with NZ On Air) is the TV networks. If you've ever made television you will at some point have at least internally voiced the thought that the networks are the worst organisations in the world, staffed by unthinking gatekeepers and what my producer likes to refer to as "programme prevention officers".

So the comments Greive received should be seen in that light. Which doesn't mean they're wrong. But the people on the network side of commercial television work in an increasingly risk-averse business. Even when a locally-produced series is funded by the taxpayer, a failure puts everyone's job at risk. And there have been a few failures in the past five years; more misses than hits. For reasons of politics rather than commerce, the same applies to the funder, NZ On Air, which pretty much lives in a low-level existential battle. No one wants to fuck up.

But, yes, I watched a preview of Filthy Rich and three quarters of the way through I turned to my partner and said: "I don't care about any of these people." The characters (a prostitute with a heart of gold!) seemed by-the-numbers, the set-up and style painfully familiar. I didn't write about it because TV reviewing isn't usually my gig and I know quite a few of the people involved. I also had no wish to watch another episode.

Should producers, funders, broadcasters and creators be more ambitious? Well, probably. But it does bear noting that some recent successes – the boilerplate small-town murder-mystery series The Brokenwood Mysteries and the Aussie co-pro heartwarmer 800 Words – have been palpably content to be what they are. You might say the same about the good ship Shortland Street.

And ambition doesn't always mean good television. I wasn't the only one to sit through the endless two-hour premiere of the Scorcese-Jagger music biz opus Vinyl and wonder what the fuck I'd just watched. Even three eps in and somewhat improved, it still seems remarkably full of bum notes. We caught a glimpse of the Casablanca Records team in the last ep – and I'd already been thinking the producers might have been better off just telling the true, wild story of Casablanca Records than making a Scorcesean contrivance of raging alpha-males.

By contrast, the first series under the banner of American Crime Stories – which sounds like it might usually live on a minor Sky channel – is sensational. The People v OJ Simpson on Sky's Soho tells the story of that awful murder and that bizarre trial in a way that's acutely aware of its contemporary parallels.

As the exagerrated presence of the teeny Kardashian daughters emphasises, a good deal of what we now know as global popular culture was forged in the OJ case. The sensational televised trial, the hungry news channels, the reframing, again, of race in American culture.

But there's another thing, for me at least. I was playing with online services in 1994 and the OJ case was my first taste of following a story via source material. Apple's painfully slow e-World service had a Court TV channel, which published transcripts and written evidence from the case every day. I read most of it and came to the firm conclusion that OJ was guilty as hell – and also properly acquitted.

Another reason I don't write often about TV drama and comedy is that I don't watch a lot of it. (By contrast, my partner watches television in a way that surpasses even her considerable professional interest. She loves it like I love cooking, riding bikes and kicking back to music.)

So the only other thing at the moment of which I'm a committed viewer is The Walking Dead. Most nights we actually watch the episode and then flick over to Freeview Plus and watch the fan wash-up Talking Dead on TVNZ on-demand.

I should probably use the Freeview Plus red button more often. The ad rotates can be a bit glitchy, but it really does work quite well. (NB: If you have a Freeview Plus-capable TV made by LG, you need to turn off LG's "wand" function, by pressing the remote's jog control left or right. Irritatingly, the wand completely disables Freeview Plus.)

Being the kind of household we are, we also have access to Netflix and Lightbox. On the former, we loved Jessica Jones. Otherwise I'm definitely up for another series of Westside – and really pleased that High Road has a third series coming and that Flat 3 Productions continues to make great stuff, and that they're both getting some funding from NZ On Air.

Could those last two work on actual New Zealand television? It depends what you mean. Would they attract an audience that loves them? No doubt. Would that audience contain enough members of the crucial whiteware-buying demographic and would they make it through the network process  unmolested? Not so sure.

The answer, of course, would be a public television channel, where expectations are more manageable and things get room to grow. (Look what Maori Television did with Find Me A Maori Bride.) The alternative would be Lightbox gaining more ready access to NZ On Air-funded productions, which is politically difficult, given its status as a pay service. You can, of course, watch those two and more via your smart TV, your Apple TV or your Chromecast, but it's not quite the same thing.

So anyway, I'm interested in what you filter for yourself from the screen deluge, and what would work for you. Because it does seem we have something to do.