Posts by Simon Grigg
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When I left George it became almost exclusively house for a long long time
Not really true though Damian. When I arrived there in 2002 there were tons of specialist shows on the station, killer jazz shows on Sunday, Victoria's Sunday show, ambient shows, drum'n'bass, hip hop shows which went for years, a NZ electronica show which went from the late 1990s for a decade or so, funk shows, Cian, the saturday morning shows which were hilarious at times, brekky, which pre-Urlich was quite rocky, Bevan's shows which have always played a huge range of black music.
The house shows were mostly afternoon and drive, and I guess that's when large numbers were listening hence the stereotype.
I'll always be grateful when I released the Welcome To NZ house comp, which was the first time many of those acts had had any release in NZ, in 2000, George, at no cost to us, came to me and offered a weekend of free support, with every track on the album being carted and played repeatedly by Thane and others over the next month or so.
BFM, even though Greg and I hosted their dance show, and Greg featured on the first track strongly, didn't playlist a single one even though some 5000 people bought it. Ever.
I don't want to bitch about B as they've been hugely supportive of so much I've done, but y'know, it irks..
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Thanks Jan, I've just had DomPost on the phone too. Charles Mabbett, the media adviser at the Asia New Zealand Foundation and a twitter buddy pointed them in my direction
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b also ran sold-out dance parties through the 90s.
Yes but called them Oonst which was seen as very condescending by the dance community and the DJ lineups tended to be rock survivors playing that funny dance music. They were less than dance-credible.
There was a point after 2000 where Auckland social life emphatically swung back to bands playing, and bFM was there.
Yes and no. On any given weekend night over the first decade of the 2000s I'd wager there was, and likely still would be 20 kids in Auckland entertaining themselves in the clubs along K Rd, Pons Rd, and down High Street for everyone at a live venue that night. But surely the two are complementary.
For me, B was my home for close to 16 years, and for at least 6 of those I was its only dance show and we had to cover house AND hip hop because nobody else on the station did. In the early 1990s Phil Bell, DLT and later P-Money were given a hip hop show so we then played the house and techno on B for another decade. It was, I'm still continually told, hugely influential but the programmers at B used to try and push us later and later and we, both us and the hip hop guys, were continually battling being re-slotted.
We (the beat orientated shows) used to call ourselves the ghetto because nobody at B showed the vaguest bit of interest in what we were doing and 'forgot' to invite us to things like the DJ meetings and, worse, always seemed to overlook us when those Ooonst gigs were put on. We were the only dance show on B and we were not even given tickets to the bloody things. So we'd make fun of them on air, which caused some mirth amongst the dance community, but hell, nobody in B management ever listened to us anyway.
And when George arrived and they were both welcoming and offered a warm sympathetic home, we all jumped ship (I did B AND George for a year), with Nice'n'Urlich (who actually paid B a small royalty on the albums I released but got rather shoddily treated for doing that), Roger Perry, Greg Churchill, Soane and just about anyone else who was involved in the electronic scene all moving across to something that was more home.
Even Mikey talked but was lured back.
I was encouraged to do very much my own thing and enjoyed being able to play a Public Image track next to a Derrick May tine at 10am without odd looks from staff or shitty txts and calls snarling about disco.
I loved B and still do, although musically I've found it heavy going for a few years. But the words and the specialist shows still work.
I also find much of George pretty heavy going these past two or three years and think it's lost its way and edge. It's increasingly formulaic, bland and yes, wallpaperish.
But then I listen to Roger Perry or Murray Cammick and I'm convinced there is no better radio in the world.
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Simon, do you think that's partially a function of population size?
Village life in the UK, centred around the pub, would perhaps suggest otherwise.
And even in the smallest Asian hamlet public life rarely stops at 6pm.
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@Jan. There is some irony in the fact that the battle by the rural masses to readjust the power balance away from the urban elite is being directed from a luxury suite in Dubai. And by someone who has the power to say stop to all this but seems to be so self absorbed that he doesn't know how or care.
As to the conspiracy theory, yes it's increasingly widely held, and there are variations on it although I don't know how far these things go. But this has, they say, knocked 1% off the GDP in the short term, although some people have made a lot of money in the past few days speculating on the currency.
That said, Thailand is a huge place, 70 million people, and resilient and I think most Thai people are so thoroughly shocked by Saturday that they've taken a big step back and are asking what happened, and how.
The army..many of the soldiers are from the same backgrounds as the redshirted masses, these must be, in some cases, their friends, families or relatives on the other side.
The explosion on Saturday night was fairly brief and mostly it's been a reasonably peaceful standoff, but something had to break and when they effectively closed down the 10 huge malls (Zen-Central is the biggest in Asia which is saying something) and the millions they generate daily, along the Chit Lom / Rama 1 strip for almost a week, it was obvious that it was coming to a head.
The one that shocked me more was Khao San Rd, which is mostly just backpackers and thousands of grinning Euro kids on holiday, but it was a spread when they tried to clear the nearby Democracy Monument which sits on a very main road.
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By 'get', you really mean 'become big enough nationwide to really be thought of as pop', though, right?
No big as in getting any traction beyond a niche and a media response. There were big niches and underground scenes in many cities but, unlike much of the rest of the world where punk caused huge change in the mainstream musical landscape after 1977, the closest the US got to that before Nirvana provided an, acceptable to FM and college radio, half way point between stadium rock and punk was Billy Joel putting on a narrow tie.
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Cheers Jan.
This is worth watching, from a friend of ours:
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But... my house is so much more comfortable, and I can choose who I invite over. And I'm in charge of the music.
Oh, I can do that too, it's just I have the choice whether to do that or perhaps some nights wander outside, sit at a buzzing cafe and maybe buy a book @ 9pm on a Tuesday night, and its not a choice foisted on me by someone else deciding what hours I should live my life and what hours I should hide myself away.
I'm not arguing that everything should be open but precincts where the city is allowed / encouraged to move beyond the constraints of the 1950s would be nice.
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Didn't they use the boss at gitmo?
And Queen & Aerosmith got Noriega out of his hole in Panama so they could quickly tuck him away in the he knows far too much about us holding pens in Florida for the rest of his life.
On reflection, Ra-Ra Rasputin sounds quite appealing
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I'm not sure that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial made all that much of anything clear.
Hence the comments posted afterwards by both Joe and myself.