Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Friday Music: Summer Time, in reply to Hebe,
We seemed to have a copy of the first Cure record when they played in Christchurch in 1979 or 1980.
It came out early in 1980 in NZ. We were lucky because it was on Fiction, a label owned by Chris Parry who used to be the drummer in The Fourmyula and thus he did a deal with NZ indie Stunn Records.
Joy Division's first was was released in NZ via RTC about May or June 1980.
But what Chch had was Tony Peake, who was running the UBS record store and using their academic exception to by-pass Muldoon's restrictions. Used to get Tony to send up parcels of stuff that we couldn't dream of getting in Auckland.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Summer Time, in reply to Rob Hosking,
Really? Didn’t know it was that restricted, but it doesn’t surprise me.
PolyGram put out a compilation called New Wave in January 1978 but almost instantly lost the rights to half the tracks and deleted it. In 1978 WEA said they were doing a big push on the newly acquired Sire label, which, to their credit, meant local release for Talking Heads and the second Ramones album. The rest they simply imported a few copies from Australia.
CBS didn't release the first Clash album in NZ until the end of 1978, replying on sparse Australian imports from early 1978 when they first admitted it existed.
The first two Buzzcocks albums arrived in 1980 from EMI, at the same time as the Singles Going Steady compilation.
Shocking to think that you couldn't buy ('cos of Muldoon era import licensing) a record as seminal as All Mod Cons in NZ. Somehow we muddled through....
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That Summer! was probably bigger (the album anyway) in NZ primarily because large parts of it were not available anywhere else because the record companies hadn't bothered to release it here.
I was working in a record store at the time and we sold truckloads of it for that very reason. Things like Richard Hell's Blank Generation were deemed unworthy of local release. The first three Jam albums were not released in NZ until 1980 and then only after extreme retailer pressure.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Keep Warm With Music, in reply to JacksonP,
Also, have you seen these Woman's Weekly photos from 1974? Put a shirt on!
Oeee - no, and not sure I needed to.
The haircut therein supports 74 then. I feel more relaxed with my shot though.
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I love this shot from the Rowles page. It comes from the Phil Warren archives so I'm guessing it's around 1974-75 when Phil toured him.
We have a couple of biggies due next week on AudioCulture - the Phil Fuemana profile from Peter McLennan and Bruce Russell's legendary Xpressway label, written by Gavin Bertram.
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And we have the former head of the GCSB saying that we either play their game or unnamed enemies ("a very generic grouping of straight-out jihadists and terrorists through to nation states who may have some evil or incorrect intent against New Zealand") will take away our freedoms, or –worse – turn off the sewage system.
Either way, he says we will be in a power of shite if we don't do as we are told.
You'd be forgiven for thinking, at least from the evidence on display in this story, that Sir Bruce Ferguson is, at the very best, deluded.
I guess he's still not over the Skyhawks.
I was reminded of Muldoon's 'the Russians have a presence in the Pacific' meme of years past.
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Our General Clapper (good name) from the NSA has quite a history of his own:
The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of Iraq.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Schooling Up, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I’ve been fossicking away up in the north 40 of the Silverfish Ranch, and have found some gems I’ll send thru to AudioCulture soon
wow, Ian...
how loudly can I say yes please!
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Hard News: Friday Music: Enter Audioculture, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I always think of them as a Christchurch band
Me too actually but on investigation discovered they were from (and returned as a band to) Rotorua as per that link. I think both cities can claim parentage.
I saw them once - in 1974 supporting Average White Band at the Auckland Town Hall. It was the mismatch from hell. They played ponderous prog including a seemingly interminable take of Stairway to Heaven before the deft Scots funksters saved the evening.
Another record about to be reissued - the 1972 album by LittleJohn which UK mag Record Collector called the most obscure major label release in the world ever. And he's still playing too it seems.
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Cheers Chris.
What hit me so powerfully is how much extraordinary music has come out of these small isles over the past 75 or so years. You tend to forget stuff and then it hits you again. In the last week my soundtrack has been dominated by the new P-Money album, the impending reissue of both Larry's Rebels albums and the Howard Morrison Quartet (who I'd never really appreciated before) plus a thousand YouTube and Spotify tracks which I played as I embedded. It was beyond eclectic, but a wonderful experience. I guess we are trying to convey a little of that.
One really important sideline to all this is a related drive by RIANZ to get every New Zealand album released over the past 50 years online, so that they are available and we can also embed. Chris Caddick, the CEO, has personally been performing miracles, tracking down owners, finding masters, pushing labels and working with us to ensure that we can show off the music and people can buy it. There are records going up that have not been available since 1972 or so. No matter how obscure. Want the 1973 album by Butler (a forgotten band from Rotorua)? It's on its way.
All remastered by Chris Chetland at Kog.
