Hard News by Russell Brown

This showed up yesterday:

remembrance of things parsed...
Please note that the credit for that original photo of The Clean in the bath should go to Carol Tippet, without whom there would be few early F Nun and Toy Love pix....
...and how embarrassing to see a coupla pages of my old crappy doodles in that 'boodle, boodle, boodle comic' - along with gems by The Clean members, Hamish, David, Bob and also Martin Phillipps and Chris Knox...

PS: - from the other Fridy Thread:
The Bats play Chchch Friday 10th May -Today!!
- lunchtime concert in Restart Mall (weather permitting)
- the Brougham (Waltham Arms) doors open 8pm

Thanks for posting The National clip Ben. Thanks too to publicaddress for alerting me, I picked up a couple of t-shirts with Clean covers on. Can't recall immediately who made them.

The Bats... god I'd love to see the Bats again. Oddly, I heard a couple of Bats tracks shopping in Rozelle in Sydney last weekend.

I really enjoyed the Mint Chicks cover art. Seeing the work of these former art-school punks was like candy, enticing you into the world they'd created. Octagon Octagon Octagon in particular stands out to me, coming as it did early in their career when their presence hadn't been established.

More Flying Nun, of course, as McClennan notes, but I think the encouragement of that particular canon of creation helped bring into fruition a lot of these [FN] works.

I dig that Ronnie van Hout designed flying saucer cover of the Pin Group's Go To Town 12" EP and later on the remastered CD Ambivalence. Worth noting Ronnie van Hout's posting of live footage of the Pin Group ca 1981 - two songs, Ambivalence and Coat squeezed bookended by footage of band associates.

Wow, that was very 1981. Blast from the past! (although if I ever actually saw the Pin Group play, I can't remember.) Duffel coats, cheap alcohol, boot boys and bad parties. Them were the days :)

Point that thing...

Ronnie van Hout

... points into the void...

A propos of precious little, but.... Well, it has music, at least. I just saw Sky Kiwi's retweet of a Weibo post by Whale Watch Kaikoura. The text is about the Marine Mammal Conference, but it was the video that grabbed my eye - fairly typical of how NZ tourism is marketed in China, including videos posted to Youku and official Weibo accounts. Anyway, don't worry about the text, just click play on the video.

Good to see you and Jose in the Waikato yesterday,

Indeed! Into the Void aren't scheduled to play this time around but on offer at 209 Tuam St/C1/Alice in Videoland today to celebrate Populate! (10th anniversary of opening of Chch Art Galleryoutside the venue are a series of live acts from 12pm including Delaney Davidson, The Eastern and pointing that thing somewhere else...David Kilgour & The Heavy 8's. Here's a clip of ITV doing Motorbike at the gallery - which unfortunately remains closed due to quake damage.

David Kilgour & The Heavy 8’s

Free gig in a small room! tonight (sat 11th), sometime...

The Bats were great last night, full house of appreciative fans, the support act The Salad Boys were a revelation too...

The Bats were great last night, full house of appreciative fans, the support act The Salad Boys were a revelation too…

Such a great bill!

Good to see you and Jose in the Waikato yesterday,

Good to see you, too, Geoff. Shame we couldn't stay longer -- although we did manage to see Richard O'Brien as we drove through the CBD!

I took a pic backstage at the FN 10th anniv. gig at Sammy's, Dunedin of Robert Scott, Paul Rose and Dominic Stones all standing next to each other wearing Clean t-shirts. Paul had the pic as his F/b profile pic a little while ago.

A rejoinder to my Wroclaw t-shirt experience, from reader Jimmy Hayes:

Had a real moment reading your anecdote about The Clean and Wroclaw.

In late 2011 I travelled through Wroclaw also. My host took me to a bar and introduced me to a burly doorman who spoke zero English, but apparently had a radio show (or podcast) that only discussed/played ‘Dunedin Sound’ groups. It was evidently quite a popular show. Wish I could tell you the name, but the scrap of paper is back home in Nelson, inside a box marked ‘awesome travel memories’.

With our two experiences combined, there may be a Polish hotspot worthy of future investigation! So strange how these pockets of fan-dom exist.

Amazing.

Awesomely enough, Luke Buda of the Phoenix Foundation was born in 1979 in Wroclaw.