Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Friday Music: Up the Charts, in reply to Grant McDougall,
Given the number of copies Tony Murdoch sold at Vibes in Gisborne, I suspect it was probably number one in every minor centre, too
We used to regard Tony's store as a MAJOR centre :)
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Hard News: Friday Music: Up the Charts, in reply to Grant McDougall,
That was the rumour but it wasn’t true. See Me Go was a genuine #1 (by a massive margin) that week. The single was delayed and delayed (primarily because an exec at Festival decided to remix it without asking whilst we were on tour – it was a dogs breakfast so we pulled it and had to wait for new pressings) so that the limited edition 12” was completely sold out for weeks and there was a big demand for the non-limited 7”.
The band had no members working in stores at all (although one mate – Adam Holt at EMI downtown but they were not a major singles outlet). The day of release saw queues in Queen Street – I watched the frenzy in Sounds Unlimited in Queen St – and it was nuts. I made the call to delete the 7” at 4000 copies sold that week despite protests at Festival Records (no-one deleted a #1 I was told) and so it was. Thus it was unavailable in the second week from the wholesaler and dropped from 1 to thirty something. In week one we sold 500 12” and about 4000 7”. In week two it was gone. The rumours began. Radio Hauraki complained to RIANZ about chart rigging but RIANZ concluded it was a genuine #1.
It was number one in every major centre so that also knackers the chart rig story.
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Hard News: Friday Music: They even taxed…, in reply to Sacha,
The yachtie or a different dude?
Different. The musical one was director of RadPics for some years and a well known keyboard player in Wellington.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I’d just point out that had almost any other British politician been PM in 1941 (especially the crypto-quislings on the Conservative benches) Britain would probably have surrendered to the Nazis.
That’s true, but thereafter his grasp became increasingly tenuous, heading towards deluded. Invasions of the Greek Isles, the coast of Malaya, Sumatra, Norway, commando raids into France and so on were all either plans that wiser men (as in Brooke and Roosevelt) blocked, or were bloody disasters.
Brooke on Winnie:
…..And the wonderful thing is that 3/4 of the population of the world imagine that Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other 1/4 have no idea what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war ! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of this otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again…… Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being
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Hard News: Haphazardly to war, in reply to ,
I meant to say, before I mangled my last comment, is that it’s embarasing to have a Primeminister who partronised the Iraqi people by making grand statements about sending a small group of New Zealand soldiers, and I paraphrase; to show the Iraqi army how to have the balls to fight ISIS. He must think that winning the rugby World Cup is more awesome than it really is.
Yes - the imperial superiority on show is stomach turning. Lest we forget that the Iraqis on both sides here are as often as not the same people who handily defeated the US, UK and Australia a few short years back.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Two Sevens Clashed, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Nice to see Mr Terence Hogan (graphic designer par excellence) leaning at the back there, by the Zappa heads…
Yeah Terry and Frank was a rather perfect coincidence. Also in the shot is my then flatmate David Herkt, my then girlfriend Yvette Parsons, future Oscar winner Kim Sinclair, RipItUp's Anne Louise Martin, and another flatmate, Jay Tidball, who took a lot of shots of the Auckland live scene around the time and is brother of Andrew.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Two Sevens Clashed, in reply to Mike O'Connell,
Simon, would love to hear more about your night on the town with Mr Osterberg – perhaps an Audio Culture post beckons?!
Funny thing is Mike, is that various sources place the trip as July and given that it was the mid-winter ball I think that's right.
And, I talk about it here (where I say 1980 but that's wrong).
But - expanding on that (and I didn't work this out until last year), the Ig had convinced EMI it was his birthday (which I now know is April 21, not mid-July) and so they gave him a cake and made a bit of a deal about it. We all went back to the Intercontinental to have the cake and then went to dinner. I can't remember exactly where we went but Auckland was sparse in those days so who knows. Then Iggy wanted to go out so a few of us (me and a couple of EMI folk) took him to the party.
As I recall it all got a little drunken and have no real memory of when Iggy left or how?
This pic, which has done the rounds in the last couple of years, was was taken by Chris Slane earlier in the day at Taste Records (me on the left).
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Two Sevens Clashed, in reply to Russell Brown,
Gah! Yes. I meant 1988, brilliant year that it was for me.
Same – brilliant, challenging, innovative and rather extraordinary 10 years that gets a bad rap from those that were not listening.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Two Sevens Clashed, in reply to Grant McDougall,
I've exchanged a few e-mails now and again with a bloke called David MacLennan who was a scenester on the Wellington punk / post punk scene and he was there, so I'll see if he can elaborate on this.
The next night a couple of us took Iggy to the Cook Street Markets' mid winter Xmas party at the Mandalay but that's another whole story.
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Capture: Old Delhi, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Thank goodness you popped those two serene pictures in at the end! Sure creates a feel of density/intensity!
Hi Nora, those last two are inside the Red Fort, one of many glorious buildings in this old Mughal imperial palace; and Gandhi’s last steps – he was assassinated where the stone plinth stands at the end. A very moving sanctuary in the government district of the city.
