Posts by Simon Grigg
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Can you recommend two or three killer tracks?
The aforementioned Marvin, a acoustic version of Sister Sledge's Thinking Of You (much better than the version on his very patchy covers album) which accentuates what a wonderful composition the Rogers/ Edwards penned song is. All I Wanna Do is a terrific power ballad (yeech, I know, but ignore the instinctive warning bells in your head that the phrase triggers) from the second to last album. Just Like Yesterday sounds like early Style Council without the pretensions.
There's a 34 track Best of the BBC Session on iTunes too, which is half the price.
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I'm jealous Russell. I own every Weller album (some of the solo ones only because I was able to snaffle them from the label) but I've not seen him live since The Style Council in London in '83 on the Our Favourite Shop tour.
The mid 90s onwards were patchy as he tried reinvent himself as a kind of latter day Stevie Marriott, but the last few albums have been rather good in a warm and fuzzy way, with some gorgeous ballads on each.
The BBC sessions from a few years back is quite thrilling in places. I love the killer take of Marvin's What's Going On where he turns that seventies anthem into a sixties Motown mod stomper with swirling Hammonds and all.
And it's only a fiver now I see.
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Also, hopelessly off-topic, but does anyone know if Simon Grigg is ok? I know he's in Indonesia, and he hasn't posted anything to his blog since Tuesday (and I don't know whether that's a NZ time stamp or an Indonesian one).
Thanks Petra. Yep, I'm fine. I'm in Bangkok these days but I put my wife on a plane to Indonesia this morning for work. She will be in Jogja (Yogyakarta - where Gunung Merapi is) on Monday which she's nervous as hell about, as I am. We're going to take it on a let's see basis.
I was on the side of that volcano last year and walked up the lava flow. It's rather humbling walking amongst the demolished villages on the slopes, with houses and shops which we were told still held bodies from the 2006 eruption.
Those same buildings, looking at the images these last few days, have been hit again.
Wonderful Jogja, which is the intellectual and artistic centre of Java, and the ancient Mataram capital, seems to be struck over and over again. So sad.
I'm also hoping the incredible royal museum, Ullen Sentalu, cut into rocks on the side of the mountain and filed with centuries of royal relics, has survived.
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And people use and see the results.
Which I think is the point of any living archive.
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Are you sure?
I've been releasing records in New Zealand for close to thirty three years. Many of the records I've released (NZ punk, OMC, Nathan Haines, Screaming Meemees, Blams and much more) have some cultural currency in New Zealand.
However my only communication with Natlib over the years has been via the requests for two copies as required for legal deposit. I've not once been approached about artwork, memorabilia, press releases, historic paperwork (which I have a lot), images, stories or anything else.
I've had no approach about the valuable master tapes I have in storage, nor the video footage I own, much unseen.
You say that it lacks a 'fancy website'. I envisage a fancy website having things like a list of every record label that's ever operated in NZ with a list of releases for the local artists, biographies of the fifty or so key figures in the NZ recording industry over the last five decades, stories of the local scenes, the venues, the controversies, a growing list, interlinked, of recording artists and so on. It will excite. It will tell you why the Jerry Wise Young Performers Scholarship Award was so named and ensure that the name was not lost (unlike the award which was shamefully forgotten after about three years by RIANZ) and so on.
This, for example, would be better suited on a music archive site, than mine. The blogs of Andrew Schmidt and Chris Bourke are filled with things that should be centralised on an archive site. I'd love to see both writers adding regularly to an archive website. And sitting on its governing board.
All of this will be curated in a way that Natlib has not done, and, correct me if I'm wrong, does not have the brief to do.
This archive needs to be dedicated - in the way film's archive is in NZ - and guided by those who have an intuitive understanding of the unique culture(s) and it's surrounding industry.
setting up a competing archive
I'm not sure that needs to be the case. Certainly what I think I, and many others, envisage, doesn't clash with what NatLib has been doing to date, which is mostly just collecting and storing.
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It sounds like it already does everything described, apart from having a fancy website.
The frustration is that it doesn't. It really doesn't do much more than store a couple of copies of everything. It is a collection, a library. And that, only of finished copies.
I tend to think that it was doing everything that was urgently needed, there wouldn't be such a sense of loss and panic in the recording industry.
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And sad, saying goodbye.
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It proposes to cover all musical genres, styles and forms
Which of course is vital - any such preservation and renewal needs to step away from the cool factor or taste bias.
Turns out there's already a brief paper circulating amongst potential stakeholders – RIANZ included – aimed at laying down the basis of a New Zealand Archive of Recorded Music.
I was aware of that, and one of the reasons I posted, was to ramp the pressure just a little.
However, any such archive needs to document and, importantly, give life to the musical past in such a way that it excites the casual viewer as well as simply offering access and support; hence the need for a strong web front end - which I'd also like to see step away from the biases that have re-written parts of our past but fear if we let the same names dominate this we will end up there again.
The voices need to be as wide ranging as possible so we accommodate and document, for example, the likes of the country music scene of the sixties in the South Island, which has largely been written out of NZ's musical history, or the big, and largely ignored, folk scene centred around Auckland's inner city and Newmarket for a decade or more from the mid 1960s.
It needs to go beyond the established 'stakeholders' or it's pointless.
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I'm up for any sort of discussion about this, especially if the big music companies can get over their squeamishness about public-good archives.
Thanks for the post, Russell - I think that any focus we can put on this is helpful, and I agree that the majors have been a big part of the story but their archival track record is almost indicative of how much has already been lost.
Mostly the majors - now EMI, UMG, WMG and Sony - have almost nothing in the way of archives. EMI are, I think, the only exception, but Universal, for example, as far as I know, have no PolyGram archives. When I was working out of PolyGram in the mid 1990s they had no real archival history of the thirty odd years of making music in New Zealand the company then had under its belt.
Festival threw out a swag of my Propeller artwork in the mid 1980s.
I actually don't think any of the majors have any real idea of what they may or may not own. I doubt, as an example, if Sony are aware they might own a Tommy Adderley album from the mid 1960s (it was on RCA). Or if they know they likely own an album by mainstream rock band called Lipservice from 1980 which actually did ok and reflected scene centred around venues like Charlie Gray's Island of Real.
An archive needs to exist not only as a physical place where the likes of posters, records, master tapes and more can be preserved (although a central repository where masters, both analogue and digital, can be stored is urgently overdue) but also as a growing document of the past, what we listened to, where we listened to it, who drove what we listened to and so on.
And, of course it needs a living web presence. It's not a practical prospect that we should somehow make everything ever recorded available again, especially given copyright and other such issues and the sheer number of releases, but an accessible visual and audio library of our musical past should be a work in progress. And it needs to happen sooner rather than later.
Andrew Schmidt is absolutely correct when he says
It needs to part of an ongoing cultural project in which an archive is central.
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On the Zoo TV tour?
Twice. On the Zoo TV tour I had him on my radio show and he simply refused to talk and offered up a copy of his remix of U2's Lemon for me to play. I had, over the years, dozens of DJs on the show and they were, without exception, a joy. DJs love to play records. Paul was the only exception. Maybe it was a mood.
Ironically the night he played the Box he got really drunk and ended up hanging off me telling how much he loved NZ.
The next time he came to NZ, the notorious show where he played only half a record before he passed out in public, the promoter rang and pleaded with me to have him back on. I relented and he came up with a few more records then spent the next half an hour telling me how much he didn't like NZ and that he was only there for the money.
He has something of a reputation for being difficult.
Bizarrely, I saw him DJing in London at a private party around the same time and he said the Zoo TV aftershow party (at The Box) was his favourite gig of the whole tour - he said the same thing to Urb mag.