Posts by Tom Beard
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The "How to" section in the Listener was indeed a good bit of fun, but they let themselves down by promoting that nutter Ken Ring in the "How to predict the weather" bit.
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!edit function!
educated liberal cesspit -
Sport: I used to hate the very concept, but while I'll watch the odd game these day, you won't catch me playing the stuff.
Beer: I never even tried it until I was in my mid-30s, and then only because I was in Brussels and it seemed like the thing to do. I still prefer Chimay Bleu to Lion Tui Red Lager or whatever that blokey stuff is, and give me a dry Martini or a Cotes du Rhone any day.
Horse racing, fishing: ugh.
Summer holidays at the beach: the worst thing about summer holidays is that all the decent shops and bars are closed. That, and it's too hot to wear cashmere.
Marmite: Double ugh! Pass the tapenade.
Gumboots, bush walks, hunting: I don't even like walking across the grass at Midland park. I love game, but prefer to get it from Logan Brown than DIY.
Flying nun bands: if you've been reading the other thread, you'll know my thoughts on that. Unless FN bands have started using Ableton Live, that is.
So, that pretty much rules me out as a Pakeha. In fact, it pretty much rules out everyone except Colin Meads and Brian Turner. And since I'm white and English and have lived here for over 80% of my life, long enough to find the L&P ads genuinely nostalgic, I should have had a reasonable chance to become Kiwified.I had hoped that this sort of "good keen bloke" stereotype was dead and buried, but then again the reason that I don't come up against too many examples of it these days is that I don't live in New Zealand: I live in Wellington. In the same way that London isn't the UK, and New York certainly isn't the US of A, living in the http://wellurban.blogspot.com/2005/08/sex-sin-and-latte.html!educated liberal cesspit of Helengrad is a long way from living in the land of Burqa Bob.
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One band name that stuck in my mind was "Naughty Amoeba". Here are some recent ones I like:
Birchville Cat Motel
The Proxies (Pixies tribute band)
Peneloping
Captain Hammondhead
Disasteradio -
After 6 years away I was amazed at how much NZ music was in the mainstream, but it had ditched any of the uniqueness of old which was ultimately holding the likes of the Chills, SJF, Verlaines, JPSE back
Perhaps that's partly inevitable (if you're too unusual or distinctive, almost by definition you won't be part of the mainstream), and partly not quite true. Some mainstream NZ music (The Feelers, Bic Runga, The Bleeders) could be from anywhere, but there are some big successes that have a distinctively NZ (or at least Pacific) sound. Acts like Rhombus or Fat Freddy's Drop take inspirations from all around the world, but produce a sound that is certainly unique and (to use a loaded term) "indigenous".
But you're right that the rise in profile of NZ music has been quite remarkable. Back in '95 when the "Harmonic 695" compilation came out, I was shocked to know that anyone in NZ was making electronica/IDM at all! Now I'd say that, without any conscious decision and without any cultural nationalism, maybe 90% of my music purchases are by local acts.
Perhaps that's due to the affordability of technology. Back in the 80s, it would have cost hundreds of thousands to set up the sort of studio required to make the sort of music I was interested in and produce it to a professional level (I used to dream of winning lotto so I could afford a Fairlight). Now all you need is a laptop and some affordable (or often stolen) software, and you've got your instruments, studio and marketing machine in your backpack.
To get marginally closer to the topic, what are the important NZ music labels of the last ten year? For my tastes, they'd include Pulse, Kog Transmissions, Involve (hearing Aspen & Jet Jaguar got me back into making music again) and of course Loop. Who else?
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Things moved very fast in the eighties, partially as a result of the massive changes in NZ, and partially as the result of the huge musical revolutions that followed the punk and post-punk electronic and rhythmic (including the things happening in Detroit & Chicago) explosions.And then there was hip hop too, which had a huge effect on white indie rock'n'roll. What was radical in 82 was very old school in 85.
They were heady times around the world, NZ included.
Yes. I remember moving to Wellington in the late eighties, and being to shocked to read in the Radio Active magazine that dance music was cool. Dance music? Cool?! Isn't that just for sleazy people in shiny shirts who drink Pina Coladas in chrome & neon clubs and dance to Stock Aitken Waterman? Surely the cool thing to do was wear a black jersey and live in Castle St drinking bad beer (wasn't all beer bad back then?) and sneering at people who knew four chords?
You're right to point out the dynamism and diversity that underlies that monolithic construct "80s music". Before the recent revival of 80s music as the office party pap du jour I used to think I liked 80s music, because to me "80s" meant "British synth pop and a bit of electro". I was recently in the unfortunate position of being forced to join in a Sing Star party, and thought "oh, at least Sing Star 80s will be more my cup of tea than endless boy bands and R&B". Ha! There were only two tracks on the entire thing that didn't induce instantaneous retching.
Having said that I never got into the whole FN, thing, I'd love to see someone take over an 80s night at the local cheesefest bar and play some Verlaines or The Clean. Not to mention some Chris & Cosey, Cabaret Voltaire and "Boing Boom Tschakk".
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They were called Car Crash Set, Body Electric, Marginal Era, Ballare and dozens of other bands pulling quite good crowds. The tough time they were having was getting much coverage in the media. There was a huge swell in electronic music happening.
I knew Car Crash Set and Body Electric, but haven't heard of the others. I wouldn't have known whether they pulled the crowds, since I was a bit young for gigs at the time. Certainly there was a certain amount of electronic music around at the time, especially toward the experimental/industrial end of the spectrum: the one live gig I was part of, we played support for Tinnitus, and made sure we skipped all the track where we had tried hard to sound like Yazoo or the Pet Shop Boys!
But it seemed to us that synths and samplers weren't really a part of either mainstream pop or the FN sound. The cool kids were turning up the treble on their guitars and gazing at their shoes, not sitting at home programming a step sequencer and listening to Kraftwerk.
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Still, the 80s in NZ were a tough time for anyone who didn't like guitars. We had all those local equivalents of Joy Division or the Smiths, but where were the local equivalents of Depeche Mode or Art of Noise?
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Maybe she comes from the same school of statistics as Jane Clifton, who claimed in the Listener that it's meaningless to look at crime rates (e.g. offences per 1000 people), and that it's only absolute numbers that count. That way, if a place's population increases by 10%, and the number of crimes there increases by 5%, you should say "Oh my god, crime has increased by 5%!" rather than "Phew, my chance of being a victim of crime has decreased slightly".
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Ah, that screen capture of the census ethnicity question is here.