Random Play by Graham Reid

Russell’s post from Vietnam has prompted me to recall my visits to that beautiful, friendly and fascinating country. Allow me to indulge myself. My first encounter was in late ‘69. Think about that.

It was Christmas Day when I flew in to Saigon -- PanAm 001 if I recall -- and there was a Christmas truce. The VietCong however, being no respecter of Christian matters, blew up the end of the runway. There was smoke and panic.

On the way in as the plane dropped down I had been initially baffled by the large circular indentations all across the landscape, right up to the edge of the runway. For a few moments I thought them wells or some gravity-feed water system. They were, of course, pockmarks from shells and bombs.

The previous year the VietCong and the North Vietnamese Army had equally ignored their own holiday of Tet and mounted the Tet Offensive which had seen them fighting on the grounds of the American embassy in central Saigon. I thought at the time that surely now the Johnson administration would see that this was a no-win war and bail. They didn’t.

On the ground at Saigon airport that Christmas Day we taxied past row upon row of B52 bombers and other aircraft, all in concrete bunkers. I am told that when the Americans got out in ’75 they left behind the third largest airforce in the world. I have no idea whether that is true -- but on the evidence of what I saw in just Saigon alone I have no reason to disbelieve it.

What I do know was that it was damn all use to the victorious VietCong and NVA in ‘75, they didn’t have pilots to fly the things.

I assumed that at Christmas time the flight out of Saigon would be full of American boys returning home for the holidays, but that wasn’t the case. The flight to Frankfurt then London was packed with wealthy Vietnamese heading to Paris for the holiday season.

In ’95 I went to Vietnam and travelled around for a month. The country had only recently opened itself up to tourists but there were few of us around. Saigon seemed to have reverted to type after the takeover by the administration based in Hanoi, and after the terrible re-education programmes.

The south was always known to be more entrepreneurial than the more conservative north, and so Saigon had Western-style bars -- like Russell I went to the Majestic and sat on that roof garden where at the time they had godawful plastic and plaster sculptures of two-metre tall elephants and so forth, and fairy lights everywhere.

There was a club called Apocalypse Now. Someone had a grim sense of humour.

I travelled around the country by minibus for the most part: the train to Nha Trang took about half a day and people walking along the track passed us so I avoided trains after that.

The roads were mostly woeful and even now I still have to stop and think which side of the road you drive on in Vietnam. It seemed to me that drivers just stuck to the centre to avoid the chickens and children and old men on bicycles.

I had a wonderful time, met exceptionally friendly people, heard stories of the American War and the re-education camps, and ate the best-ever food in cheap roadside cafes. (And the worst, a meal of horse gruel in a Hanoi marketplace.)

But within a half day of leaving Saigon I realised that Saigon was not Vietnam: it would be like mistaking LA for the USA. The capitalist spirit and sometimes conspicuous wealth wasn’t evident in many other places. The north was very different: quiet and staid, more reserved.

It was the 20th anniversary of the Fall/Liberation of Saigon in ‘95 and there were a couple of military parades in Saigon. There was nothing in Hanoi because, as I was told, they didn’t need them. They had won and the show parades were for the benefit of the southerners to remind them, and the world, just who was in charge.

One day a tank rolled into the street in Saigon and a whole pile of videos were taken from a local store and ceremonially crushed. They were corrupt western-influenced things and the much televised event was to also send a message to the southerners and the wider world. A shopkeeper told me later that the videos weren’t western ones at all, just what the soldiers had grabbed off the shelves.

But these were isolated and much staged incidents, mostly people went about their business and I couldn’t believe how achingly poor rural Vietnam -- in fact anywhere outside Saigon -- was. Everything was manual labour. Roads were built by hand. A bulldozer was a rare sight.

There were also very few cars (someone told me the previous year only 20 or so cars had been bought by private individuals) and only in Saigon did I see many motorcycles. Hanoi had even fewer. It was a beautiful city, and so quiet because of the absence of cars and motorbikes.

I saw some memorably odd sights: in a street a little boy played with a toy gun. That stuck with me. But half the population of the country was under 20 and so the American War hadn’t affected them directly. Of course the re-education programmes had.

Two years later I was back and again travelled around for a month. Same thing: lovely people, wonderful food, lousy roads and so on. But even in two years some things had changed.

When I had previously been in Hoi An there were only two places where tourists were allowed to stay. Now you had a choice of about 23, if I recall.

(A word on Hoi An: back then this tiny, riverside and beach village saw very few tourists, and local people would stare. There were no vehicles allowed in its narrow streets and I took some black’’n’white pix: it looked like something out of the 16th century. Today you pay to go into the town, there is electricity -- and a guy I met managing a swanky hotel in Thailand now runs a luxury hotel with an infinity pool right on the beach near Hoi An. He said to me not to go back to Hoi An, I would only weep for what has been lost.)

Other things had changed too: ’95 had been a reasonable year for tourism -- although as I say I saw very few -- so local people had made a financial and emotional investment in tourism-related services. But ‘96 had seen a downturn and so by ‘97 people were desperate. There was hassle-factor which hadn’t been evident two years previous. Corruption was endemic.

But again, Vietnam struck me as a beautiful place full of wonderful and forgiving people.

I wrote about my two trips in my travel collection Postcards From Elsewhere

The piece was more like a series of telling snapshots, the first of which was this . . .

The young man who waits tables at this small, family-run hotel in Hanoi is 24, the same age as my eldest son.

He lives 10 kilometres away and cycles to work here every day at noon, returning to the room he rents at around 11pm. He sometimes eats here but otherwise can only afford one bowl of rice a day. He works every day.

I have been in this cheap backstreet hotel near Shoe Street for a week. One night when it is quiet, the young man says he will tell me a story.

In 1988, he says, his family tried to escape from Vietnam. They paid some sailors on a fishing boat at Haiphong Harbour and they, and other families, hid between the decks. They were heading for China, Hong Kong … Anywhere.

He tells of the killing on the boat and the pool of blood on the deck, of the sailors abandoning one family on the coast of China, and of how later the boat ran aground and they had to swim for the shore in the darkness. He tells of how he fainted from hunger and was helped by a Chinese woman, and of eventually being taken to Hong Kong where the family spent the next seven years in four different detention camps.

There were fights and killings in the camps, they couldn’t eat the food and a year ago they were forcibly repatriated.
When they landed in Vietnam, he says, they were thrown down the steps from the plane and beaten. His parents now live in the house of other family members in Haiphong. He tries to send them money because they cannot find, or are not allowed to, work.

When he arrived in Hanoi earlier this year he knew nobody, had no food or accommodation, and spent a fortnight asking for employment in the small hotels because he speaks fractured, but serviceable, English. He had some lessons in the Hong Kong camps, but mostly he has taught himself.
At this moment a beggar arrives at the door of the hotel. The young man has no money to give the broken man.

“I hesitate when I see people asking for money for food because I remember the kindness the Chinese lady gave me.”

He smiles with the same gentleness I have seen all week.
It is 8.30pm and I haven’t eaten since morning. Now I have no appetite at all.”

I have also posted some other snapshots of Vietnam here and here and here.

I envy Russell and, despite being warned that Hanoi is now just another noisy Asian city overrun with cheap motorbikes, I would dearly love to go back. I like a country that has a Temple of Literature.

It was cheap then (I paid an average of $US10 - 12 a night for a room with air-con) and not much has changed. Three years ago a businessman in Taiwan told me that for the salary of one Taiwanese they could employ 10 people in mainland China -- and 20 in Vietnam. I guess “cheap” from our perspective means “poor” from theirs.

Something about Fiji? A few years ago I was in a street in Lautoka (which struck me as being like Kaikohe with curry shops) and I was looking in the window of a store which was obviously Indian-owned. A large Fijian guy in his mid 20s loomed over me and said with genuine menace: “Don’t you buy from this place, you buy from a Fiji boy place.”

Five minutes later outside another Indian-owned shop a different guy approached me and said exactly the same thing. I haven’t been back to Fiji since and although I see cheap holidays advertised I don’t think I will. Not out of fear (God, I went to the Solomons, and New York before Giuliani!) but just because I have a bad feeling about such endemically race-divided places.

Yesterday I was talking with some people in the travel business and they were saying that many New Zealanders -- but not English or Australian tourists -- are feeling much the same and striking Fiji off their holiday wish-list.

Pity because it punishes the innocent. But . . .

Finally in this travel ramble: I am expecting to be off to Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak and Brunei some time in the next two months and so am openly soliciting for interesting diversions, digressions and places to go in those regions. Anyone got any tips that would take me away from the familiar? (Which I will be seeing anyway, as an architecture groupie I am certainly going up the Petronas Towers!)

Your help greatly appreciated.

And now apropos of nothing: there is a lot of diverse music posted at Music From Elsewhere which you might like to check out. (My Essential Elsewhere columns seem much appreciated, as do the One For Fun things).

But get in now -- you may like to subscribe, it’s free and you’ll get weekly newsletters and be in for the giveaways -- because at the end of the weekend I’m going to post a swag of new and old stuff, and also offer the first annual “Best of Elsewhere 2007: The Half Year Report”.

I’ll be singling out some of the best albums to come my way in the past six months -- and no, don’t come to Elsewhere if you are wondering about Arctic Monkeys, I’m more a Tinariwen kinda guy!

It always amazes me when I meet someone I haven’t seen for years, or am introduced to people who are vaguely familiar with me as a music writer, at what they say. Often they will say, “Gosh, I haven’t been to a live concert for years.”

Then they’ll usually turn to their partner and say something like, “Darling, what was the last concert we went to?”

An embarrassed partner comes up with something like “Norah Jones” or Tom Jones” or something even more remotely lost in the mist of time. I just look interested and ask after their kids.

I can’t really understand how you can have a life without a soundtrack -- but then again, these people probably get in the car later and say, “Interesting meeting old Graham again, wasn’t it? He seems to know nothing about the stockmarket though”.

But music has always been a crucial ingredient in my life. I sang the Ballad of Davy Crockett at the top of the Eiffel Tower when I was about 4. (I still have the first 78rpm I ever called my own and it is . . . yes, The Ballad of Davy Crockett by Rusty Draper on Playcraft Records.)

Being 13 when the Beatles/Stones/Kinks/Who etc broke probably condemned me to this lifelong infatuation with music. I bought Ravi Shankar and Blue Cheer albums when I was 17, and never thought that Indian classical music or heavy metal garage band rock from San Francisco were mutually exclusive.

Right now I’m listening to an album of popular Greek music -- which will be replaced shortly by the next in the pile which is . . . Hmmm. It’s Doug Cox and Salil Bhatt from Canada, an album I know nothing about but was sent to me by a friend on Vancouver Island (cheers Shayne) and which Dave Rubin from Guitar Player magazine describes in the cover sticker as a “groundbreaking marriage of the blues and Indian classical music”.
Sounds cool.

Last night Megan and I went to A Night at the Movies at the Aotea Centre where the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Tecwyn Evans played great movie themes: thrilling Bernard Herrmann scores for the Hitchcock’s movies North by North West, Vertigo and Psycho; plus Nino Rota’s extraordinary suite from Fellini’s La Strada -- and then the vivacious Helen Medlyn came on and belted out the themes to Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever, and Nobody Does It Better (from the Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me).

There was much more: some Harry Potter music, the Gladiator suite and a swag of Star Wars and so on. This was populist stuff but the middlebrow audience (of which I count myself a cheerful member) lapped it up and we went home very happy. It is always exciting to hear a live orchestra, especially when it is doing those stabbing strings from the Psycho shower sequence or thumping through some martial Indiana Jones music.

Not that long ago we were at the APO for the first in their Vero Aotea Series (at which pianist Jin Ju hammered the piano like Thelonious Monk on amphetamines) and that too was thoroughly enjoyable.

In both concerts there was none of that cooler-than-thou classical thing: at the first conductor Baldur Bronnimann made some good jokes and had a self-deprecating humour; last night Medlyn sashayed around in a glittery dress and was also highly amusing. If you live in or near Auckland and think you’d like a bit of this classical music stuff then the APO is offering some easily approachable options over the next few months.

And that wasn’t the only live music I have heard lately. About 10 days ago I dropped in to the Fancy New Bands gig at the Kings Arms to see Artisan Guns whom I am enthusiastically recommending to anyone who will listen. I’d seen them eight months ago when they played in the boardroom at EMI and, somewhat the better for the free alcohol on hand, made extremely enthusiastic noises to them.

But the songs on their MySpace page vindicated my belief -- and before an almost full bar at the Kings Arms they did it again. I chatted briefly to Mikey Havoc and joked, because this was a free gig, that this was Five Bands For No Bucks -- a reference to those Five Bands For Five Bucks nights at the Powerstation many years ago where I used to go to see Push Push, Nine Livez, Bad Boy Lollipop and many, many others.

At 56 I am probably far too old for rock’n’roll and hanging out in bars these days, but I’m not trying to “get down with the kids”. It’s just that I know nothing else, and few other things I enjoy quite as much.

I just love the fact that people are there enjoying music. It’s a whole lot more harmless standing in a noisy bar nodding along to a band than it is doing what a lot of others seem to do these days. Adults and teenagers alike.

Another recent musical highlight was Dudley Benson’s eccentrically charming gig at St Matthews-in-the-City a week ago. I’ve been a fan of Dudley’s since he opened for Casiotone For The Painfully Alone at Schooner Tavern five or six months ago to an audience of about 25. So I was delighted to see he got a big spread in the Sunday Star Times magazine in advance of his gig, and that the place was packed on the night.

Some people told me they’d come because I had been putting his music at my Elsewhere site. That was gratifying.

My weekly Music From Elsewhere postings (profile of a good new album/track to listen to etc) has seemed a logical step after writing reviews for newspapers and magazines for decades: putting music up for people’s consideration seems sensible, especially when much of it is music they wouldn’t hear or read about in other places.

Quite how the downloading thing is going to affect what I’m doing I don’t know -- but I’m making so little out of referring people to Marbecks if they want to buy (less than working for a fastfood outlet, believe me) that I think it isn’t going to affect me at all. I do it because I want to take this music that I love to other people.

If I wanted to do something for money then I’d do something else -- like get a real job.

This week -- among many other music-related and not-related things -- I’m speaking to a group of students at Mainz about the marketing of music in the world of MySpace, and am doing a radio programme on Thursday at 12.45 (Radio New Zealand: Concert) about Miracle Mile who are considered by UK critics -- and me -- as one of the best but least known bands in Britain. I’d previously posted them at Elsewhere and got an excellent response.

This week, among other new albums, I’ve banged up Wilco's Sky Blue Sky at Elsewhere (for Elsewhere subscribers I’m doing a giveaway of two copies of the Limited Edition which comes with a great DVD) and my customary oddball stuff. I've also added some more rock'n'roll anecdotes in the My Back Pages section for people's amusement.

Midweek I will change the tracks on the albums I have posted which I always enjoy doing, and on Thursday I’m off to see Lucid 3 and Dave Dobbyn.

It’s not a lifestyle that has ever made me money, but at least I do have some style in my life -- and things I anticipate with enjoyment.

I wonder what the stockmarket people are looking forward to this week?

Some time around the end of the 60s I remember reading an interview with Abbie Hoffman, the activist-cum-clown of the Yippie Movement. In it he said he didn’t mind John Wayne -- a man whom we might have considered Hoffman's polar opposite -- because at least he knew where he stood with him.

This came back to me as I read the statements from Brian Tamaki in the past few days. I’d like to say I don’t mind him because at least I know where he stands.

I doubt however he knows where I stand.

Because we inevitably gravitate toward people who share similar views, social beliefs, taste, aspirations and humour, I might even go so far as to say that Mr Tamaki -- a self-styled “Bishop” in a church of his own invention -- doesn’t know where a lot of people like me stand.
If I may be presumptuous I would like to speak for us.

We believe in tolerance and understanding; in dialogue over diatribe; and in people’s right to hold and express their own religious, cultural or philosophical beliefs within the constraints of the commonly agreed laws of the country we share.

And we do believe in sharing this beautiful country, a small and interconnected nation where all should have the right to feel secure, free from hatred and oppression, and free from fear of marginalisation for reasons of complexion, belief or gender.

We believe that inflammatory rhetoric of the kind we have heard in the past few days is abhorrent, wilfully and transparently divisive, and doesn’t stand serious scrutiny by people of good conscience.

In that regard we believe that intelligent and informed discussion is preferable to bald assertions of personal faith or blind rhetoric.

We believe all these things, and we practice these beliefs quietly and without bellicose bannering of them. We pass these beliefs on to our children.

We are tolerant -- but only to a point.

If this “Bishop” decides to do more than exercise his right to spew his vile, divisive and insulting speech in the streets, or to run for public office on that platform where his mandate would be tested, then we might have a problem.

If the agencies of this “faith” -- what we see as a self-serving distortion of scripture, and common sense -- act unlawfully, attempt physical threat or harm to other citizens, or try to impose their views on others, then we too will stand up for what we believe in.

What the “Bishop” might learn is that people like us -- liberal humanists, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, the whole diversity of tolerant and law-abiding citizens -- also have deeply held beliefs and do have the courage of our convictions.

It may be that we -- surprising even ourselves -- are the Silent Majority.

I just caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye when I heard him shout “Why don’t you keep quiet”. Or words to that effect, with unprintable expletives included.

He was dressed in a lawyer’s suit, had close-cropped hair, had those mad staring eyes like Chris Dickson, and was wound tight as a drum. His fists were tight balls and for the life of me I thought only the thinnest veneer of Civilised Man and the people around us was keeping him from decking me.

Funny place Freyberg Square in central Auckland on a weekday lunchtime, huh?

Quite what I had done to offend his thin-skinned sensibilities I don’t know, unless you call reading a short story in public an offensive act these days. Jeez, this Auckland Writers and Readers Festival thing can be damned dangerous for the unsuspecting writer who has the temerity to get up and read in public.

For reasons I cannot fully explain -- being a middle child and only son perhaps? -- I have always been the one who tried to smooth troubled waters, find the middle path and generally pitch in when help is required. I’m certainly no saint, but I do seem to end up on more committees than I should, and if someone has an idea that sounds interesting I just jump in with scant regard to whether it’s a good career move, of interest to anyone other than me, or even moderately dangerous.

Which is why I was in Freyberg Square today reading one of my short stories (previously published in Metro) to the lunchtime crowd of maybe a couple of dozen unsuspecting citizens -- and one very angry man crossing the square who came within a metre to rain red-faced abuse on me as I ignored him.

A few weeks ago at a meeting of the Society of Authors we were asked if any of us would be willing to do some public readings to get interest up in the Festival -- which officially opens on Thursday night. No one seemed especially willing -- Famous Writers and Well Known Authors don’t do this kind of public-humiliation thing, I guess -- but I jumped in and said, “Why not?”

Other than hosting a panel discussion of travel writers on Sunday (Aotea Centre 4pm, panellists are Pico Iyer, Ian Robinson, Jo and Gareth Morgan, and Eleanor Meecham) I am not involved in this year’s festival. But of course as one who writes and reads I wanted to get in behind it.

Which is why there I was with a head-mike on Monday and Tuesday joking that I knew what those lunchtime chompers were thinking: the long hair, the head-mike -- you think I’m Britney Spears right? But no, the hair is my own, and this isn’t lip-synching.

Ice-breakers like that get a laugh, and it did.

Because the topic is Auckland (in the most general of terms) on Monday I read from Decently And In Order, the big, boring and seldom-read book by GWA Bush published in ‘71 about the history of the Auckland City Council.

Yep, a real crowd-pleaser, right? Well actually . . .

By dipping and diving with discretion I came up with passages that I think are fascinating. As the French say, “the more things change . . .”

Some sample quotes about my city which I read to an initially bewildered then bemused gathering of sandwich eaters on Monday then?

From 1848: “Let the veriest stranger [gaze] upon shapeless streets, torturous alleys, and huddled by-lanes exhaling their ‘fragrance’ to the sky, let him declare whether the most painstaking ingenuity has not been displayed in making the utmost of every inch of space, wedging the embryo city . . . into as close column as most grinding condenser could desire.”

And this from the same period: “Look only at Queen Street, that regal paragon of miry ways; -- extend a glance up the bogs of its minor appendage, West Queen-street; -- consider the almost impracticable banks of Shortland-street; -- and without diverging into that filthiest yet busiest of the haunts of men, High-street -- proceed onwards towards Princes-street -- even there . . . this really noble thoroughfare will soon be worn into ruts and ruin.”

From 20 years later: “The warmest admirers of Auckland . . . are yet obliged to confess that the city itself is not a model of cleanliness, that its principal thoroughfares are unmade or in disrepair . . .”

That got a laugh out of those who had walked up from the battleground that is Queen St on the remake/remodel.

From the 1920s here is a comment likely to warm the prejudices of those in the provinces: “The number of shabbily dressed people, and ragged, apparently uncared for, children, is much greater than in Dunedin, and many of the streets bear the stamp of poverty and want upon them.”

There was much more down the decades that was wearily familiar: a debate about the planting of trees, the need for a viable public transport system . . . and of course traffic. In the 50s people were saying “the city is being swallowed by the motor car” and that “Wellington fails to understand [Auckland’s] bigness”.

My favourite comments came from writers: this is Maurice Shadbolt in the 50s: “Auckland has never pretended to be anything other than itself, a frontier town grown haphazardly into a city on a humid isthmus . . . . [it] is still philistine and commercial, vulgar and brassy. But vulgarity and brassiness are surely symptoms of an urban vitality.”

The voice of the good keen man, Barry Crump, also weighed in: “Auckland fails to provide itself with a real city atmosphere. Although it has all the ingredients of a city, the citiness is swamped in a great surrounding area of suburbanism.”

My favourite quotes however came from JC Reid, no relation, who wrote in the 50s: “[Auckland has] a passionate addiction to money-grubbing. It is materialist-minded, overloud, contradictory. Its people work hard and play hard. It is the most cosmopolitan of New Zealand cities in both composition and outlook.”

And finally this from him: “Modern Auckland is a perky gold-digger, over-talkative but full of ideas, mildly interested in the arts and much in love with life. She’s very good company.”

Strange how much of this remains true, and I shall be back in Freyberg Square on Thursday lunchtime essaying this idea again, and again on Friday reading that short story about two very different Aucklands (which some people applauded after, to my surprise and delight.)

I don’t actually enjoy submitting myself to public indifference or abuse, but it does have its pay-offs. If I hadn’t jumped in as I am wont I never would have dug through Decently And In Order to get this historic overview of my city, and to be reassured that our present problems aren‘t new.

I can’t find a quote about irrationally angry and abusive dickheads in suits however.

Since I first seriously reviewed an album about 36 years ago (the George Harrison triple set All Things Must Pass) I guess I have written about somewhere in excess of maybe 6000 records/CDs/tapes etc -- and of course I have heard many, many more than that. Some people are well-read, I am well . . . There must be a word for it.

In that time I have also reviewed hundreds of books, maybe a few hundred or so movies and DVDs, written about quite a number of restaurants and bars, and even done a few theatre reviews.

In short, I have become pretty aware of the role of the critic.

Which is why I read with interest the article in last Saturday’s Weekend Herald (an excellent edition incidentally) about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s banning of critics from a production.

The production in question is their King Lear with Sir Ian McKellen in theatre’s most challenging role. It is the one coming here soon.

What the Observer article was saying was this: here was a much anticipated production by a great company and with a real crowd-pulling star in the ranks -- and yet there had been no reviews. The director Trevor Nunn had “imposed a complete ban on critics attending the play until May 31, when it will have only three weeks left to run,” according to the article.

The RSC’s argument was that one of the leading ladies had dropped out of the production because of a hurt knee and her role was being taken by an understudy. This is every director’s nightmare -- the actress was to have played Goneril and was injured on the eve of press night -- and so you can have every sympathy. But banning critics?

The rationale was the RSC would now only be able to give “a limited account of the production”. Some critics complained -- but they also complied. No reviews have appeared in the major dailies.

It is here you start to wonder, just what the role of the critics is: are critics responsible to the theatre company or to their own readers? Whose interests are they there to serve? I’ve always argued the latter.

As a critic my first and perhaps only responsibility is to the reading public, not to the musicians who make an album, a theatre company or the artist.

Because of that I don’t have much time for obscure writing as I think it masks honest opinion. At a panel discussion at Elam once the Herald’s art writer Terry McNamara and I spoke about the need to communicate clearly with the reader, another writer said she felt she had no responsibility to communicate with readers. Weird. I looked at her stuff and found it wilfully polysyllabic, drowned in coded language and absurd art-speak. It was arrogant and exclusive writing designed -- I thought -- to promote the writer’s career and profile rather than being there to illuminate or critique. It is also bloody easy to parody.

So, the role of the critic?

Let us get rid of a few shibboleths here. “But it is just one person’s opinion.” I agree. But it is one person’s informed opinion, and that is the difference. Critics, by virtue of having heard/seen/eaten/etc more have wider frames of reference and bring that to bear, mostly intuitively, in what they write.

Artists often wail that they don’t mind criticism but it should be “constructive criticism” whatever they mean by that. But a critic isn’t there to tell an artist what to do, that way madness lies. I used to have to point to many young musicians that if they wanted critical comment about their musical direction or whatever that this was something which should be done by themselves, their manager, record company and so forth. The reviewer who gets the album in the post can only deal with the artefact in hand. You critique what you hear or see, not what you would have liked to have heard or seen.

Can critics be wrong? Of course. I have been “wrong” many times -- and by that I mean I have perhaps been unduly praiseworthy or unduly harsh. But when people have complained that I was too harsh I generally mention that never once in my very long career had any musician called me and say that I was wrong because I had been too generous towards them. I always found that interesting.

Musicians would sometimes send me albums asking me to comment on them, but only review them if I liked them. Huh?

Which bring us to the case of the RSC and the banning of critics: I have no idea how things work in Britain but I would have thought that if any theatre company here tried to impose a critical silence because they thought their production need a bit of break they would be told with absolute certainty what the critics thought about that.

It has been tried a few times but here’s my two-cents worth: the second some paying customer walks in the door to see a show it is fair game.

At the Herald we would sometimes hear that a theatre company -- and it was always theatre companies -- didn’t want reviewers there on the first night to give them a chance to bed in the performance. Well sorry, but for me when the curtain goes up on the first night and people have forked over their entrance fee then the production deserves to be reviewed.

As one who always reads reviews, even when they are about arts which I have little interest in, I admire many New Zealand critics. They do a difficult and often thankless job in a small community where backbiting and personal attacks are endemic (Yep, I’ve had the drunken abuse in bars, comes with the turf).

Speaking to some journalism students recently I posed this question: let us say you are lucky enough to get a job at the Herald and you get a call from a small theatre company putting on a show at Silo. They want some publicity and your editor says, “Yeah, go for it”.

You go there and you meet the director and it turns out one of the cast is someone you knew from school. You do a nice interview during the course of which the director tells you how they took out a mortgage on their house to get the show on stage -- so they really need full houses for the season. They are appreciative of you taking the time to come and speak with them. You leave on good terms, write your piece and they ring and thank you for it later.

The day before they open however your editor says, “Hey, we should review that show. You know all about, why don’t you go along?”

And so you do. And it is bloody awful.

What are you going to do?

Are you going to be true to yourself and your readers knowing that you might kneecap their season, and piss off people you actually liked?

No, it’s not easy being a critic. But someone has to do it -- unless of course the Royal Shakespeare Company says you can’t.

Oh, and apropos of nothing: there is a swag of new music posted at Music From Elsewhere. Enjoy.