Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk - Soest Live (2020)

Craig Stephen’s been on a Kraftwerk trip, discovering a hugely significant but largely unlistenable gem from deep within the German band’s archives. Soest Live was a long celebrated YouTube clip, but in 2020, 50 years after the fact, the rudimentary recording got the full vinyl treatment …

Following Kraftwerk’s stunning gig in Wellington late last month – which you can read about here – it seems apt to delve into a live album recorded more than half a century ago.

It’s only relatively recently that the show has been rediscovered showing the band at a primitive point in their existence.

A Kraftwerk show in 2023 is of four men performing behind synthesizers with computer-generated images and videos being shown on large screens behind them. Other than sole survivor Ralf Hutter the performers have changed often over the decades.

In November 1970, however, it was a vastly different Kraftwerk that performed at a cramped venue in the town of Soest in Germany’s northern industrial heartland as part of the local Winter Festival. The band’s line-up consisted of Hutter, Florian Schneider-Esleban (as he was then known), and Klaus Dinger, who would later form Neu! Hutter played organ and tubon, Dinger the drums and Schneider-Esleban flute, violin and vibraphone. Everything then was radically different from what the band would evolve into within a few years.

 Kraftwerk had only formed that year and had released their eponymous album a few months before this gig. All four tracks from that album were played this evening, and no other tracks made it onto the setlist.

As it was part of a festival, the performance was captured on camera and shown on regional TV station WDR-TV. It is worth investigating on YouTube especially to see the somewhat unusual layout of the venue (clip below). The band was crammed into a corner as the almost entirely student/youth audience sat awkwardly or stood passively facing the stage. A large screen is to the right of the band and in front of that two old-style (ie. massive) standing cameras pan in on the audience. 

The gig begins with ‘Vom Himmel Hoch’ which starts slowly and seems to be an attempt to replicate the sound of VW car trying to start up on a cold winter’s morning while a swarm of bees fight to get out. Eventually, the car starts and after eight minutes faces in the crowd that were showing bemusement and confusion suddenly become interested. Some even clap along to the rhythm of the beat. Someone in the crowd pulls out a whistle and blows it incessantly. English pop and Californian rock this is not.

After 16 minutes of this, they flow into ‘Ruckzuck’ which sees Schneider-Esleban let loose with his flute a la hippie rock band Jethro Tull. Dinger, who was positively restrained for much of the opening track, is now in his element, doing his finest Keith Moon impression.

‘Stratovarius’ is rockier, a little like one of the proto-metal bands that had surfaced a couple of years earlier. It is purely experimental, lacking in any melody at all, basically an amalgam of unsynchronised sounds. A few minutes in, it begins to truly get weird with Florian playing his violin in a manner that would have given a music teacher a cardiac arrest.

The final track, ‘Megahertz’, is most akin to what Kraftwerk would become a few years later with Hutter’s organ-playing and Florian’s violin combining to create that renowned esoteric and magical sound.

This performance is a period piece that provides little insight into the band that would release albums such as Autobahn and Trans Europe Express. But it certainly also parades the immense talents and creative minds of Hutter and Schneider-Esleban. Once they became a quartet with Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, they became a notable exponent of electro-pop that influenced multitudes of artists such as Bowie, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode.

Neither Kraftwerk nor Kraftwerk II (1972) have been officially re-issued and, if truth be told, if they were they wouldn’t captivate the current audience due to their raw and experimental nature. They would be of curious value only.

Nevertheless, Soest Live merits listening (and viewing) to see the massive developments the band would make in a relatively short time.

Album Review: Vorn - The Late Album (2023)

After reading the Will Not Fade blog’s far more timely review of this album I was quite taken by something the author noted in the review’s final paragraph about “imposter syndrome”. And although I’m not sure those words are the precise words I’d have used, I got the point, and I could relate to the dilemma.

It’s that sense you get when you feel ill-equipped to critique the work of someone you admire. That feeling of inadequacy, and the notion that whatever I wrote, no matter how honest, how insightful, or even how witty I thought I was being, Vorn Colgan - musician, wordsmith, funny-man - could have articulated it so much better himself.

It’s all there in his songs, and if you’ve ever had a chance to read Colgan’s own (far too irregular) written word musings on his Vornography website … well, it’s enough to make you want to permanently retire your own keyboard out of sheer frustration. Vorn Colgan knows how to create a little bit of magic out of words. And he seems to be able to do so without much effort at all.

Writing words is one thing. Turning them into a bunch of decent tunes is quite something else. What are we up to now? Album number eight? Album number nine? And still so little mainstream traction. Colgan probably couldn’t care less. His songs, after all, “are his children”. There to be shaped, nurtured, and loved, and like any parent, his starting point is just as likely to be “who bloody well cares what anyone else thinks? … I love these snotty-nosed little bastards”.

 The Late Album, of course, had long threatened to be a posthumous release, given Colgan’s recent brush with cancer. A fairly advanced stage of cancer too, if I have my facts correct. Yet all through that, I’ve seen him out and about. Conducting pub/music quizzes as the MC, playing music with a number of different “side-projects”, and as a one-man grinning machine - armed with a walking stick, no less - up on the dancefloor at Atomic retro nights at San Fran (venue). Not just surviving, but raging against death in ways I simply couldn’t imagine. There’s a lot more to admire than mere words.

Words are mostly what it is all about though. Words and music. There’s some pretty great words on The Late Album, all underpinned by the unique musical talents of Thomas Liggett (violin) and Nick Brown (drums, percussion) who also support Colgan - who does a lot of everything else - on vocals at various points. As Vorn, the band, this is a tight, well-honed trio, operating at something close to a peak. Although, to be fair, every new Vorn, the band, release across the past two decades has felt like a peak.

Death is, naturally enough, a prominent theme – the album opens with a track called ‘Fanfare For An Album That Beat Terminal Cancer’ and closes with ‘A Dying Man’s Curse Be Upon You’ … the opener being exactly what it says on the tin, a brief “fanfare”, while the closer veers into faux-country-prog-hybrid territory. Several listens in, I still can’t really make out the exact lyrics, but suspect its title rather gives the game away.

Between those two bookends we get various musical forms and a mix of genre, with the most common thread being that wicked sense of humour in the lyrics. I’d be lying profusely if I said that ‘Aging Hipster Blues’ and ‘Drug Friends’ didn’t, for my own sins, touch something of a raw nerve. I laughed and I cried a little, simultaneously.

Then there’s ‘Somebody Wrote A Prog Song About The Internet And It Is (Flame emoji)’ … where to even start with that little 6-minute-plus beastie? Sort of epic, a little bit Beatle-esque, with chunks of pretend Black Sabbath, just for laughs. There’s definitely something quite psychedelic about it, whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.

Suffice to say, without going through all of the individual highlights or trying to dissect each track, the two advance singles - odd timings and breakdowns notwithstanding - ‘No Arms, No Chocolate’ and the covertly catchy ‘A Safe Pair of Hands’ are perhaps the most pop-friendly tracks on the album.

All up, 13 tracks, a lot of hooks, a solid baroque feel - another Vorn staple - thanks largely to the presence of Liggett’s violin and other unusual instrumentation (um, a “banjolin”?), and more than the odd morsel of humour, it’s another worthy addition to Vorn’s ever-expanding musical legacy.

Just a note on that album cover: once you’ve seen it as The Latex Bum, it becomes impossible to unsee it. With thanks to the person who pointed that out … (I think).

You can pick up a copy of Vorn’s The Late Album here (Bandcamp)

Gig Review: Kraftwerk @ TSB Arena, Wellington, 29 November 2023

You know that feeling you get when you’re under the weather, functioning at less than one hundred percent, but have an expensive ticket to a bucket list gig? You force yourself out and simply hope for the best, well aware that it’s a bucket list gig you’ll (likely) never again get a chance to tick off?

That was my dilemma last Wednesday evening as I headed for Wellington’s TSB Arena to sate a lifelong desire to see Kraftwerk up close and personal. I need not have worried too much, any fatigue factor was partially mitigated by it being an all-seated event, and naturally Kraftwerk’s arrival on stage soon made me forget about any of those initial concerns.

There they were, almost within touching distance. Four glowing figures. Standing behind their four customary lectern-like structures. No other band* equipment in sight. And none required. 50-plus-years’ worth of cutting edge electronic musical innovation standing right there. Well, founding member Ralf Hutter was there, at least, with support from three band* members with considerably less time on the clock. It was Kraftwerk nonetheless.

*are Kraftwerk a band? Discuss, show workings where applicable.

As the German technocrats worked through the opening phase of their set it immediately became obvious we were about to hear something close to a “greatest hits” show - opening with ‘Numbers’, ‘Computer World’, and ‘Home Computer’ hybrids - and I couldn’t shake the notion that much of this stuff was practically inter-planetary back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it initially surfaced.

Pre-Microsoft, pre-Windows ’95, pre-Apple, magnificence. And quite visionary when you stop to consider how relatively peripheral to our day-to-day world that kind of technology would remain for at least another decade.

The lightshow effectively amounted to projections on the super-sized screen behind the stage, which was more than enough, with each graphic or image perfectly synchronized with what we were hearing. ‘Spacelab’ courted us momentarily with screen shots of Aotearoa and Wellington itself, garnering an additional cheer from many, yet oddly provoking an involuntary bout of inner cringe from yours truly (why does it always have to be about “us”, huh? – Cynical Ed).

And it may have just been me, but five tracks into it, when ‘The Man Machine’ launched itself upon us, it felt like the gig suddenly took on another gear. Was it just a not-so-subtle increase in volume? … or had the pill I didn’t take somehow just kick in? It wasn’t just me, there was an immediate buzz all around me, and I felt sure the entire arena had instantaneously lifted itself couple of feet off the ground, at the very least.

Then the mid-set run: a veritable feast of everything that’s great about technology, and perhaps, 1970s Germany – visually and aurally … ‘Autobahn’, ‘Computer Love’, ‘The Model’ and ‘Neon Lights’, followed immediately by the weightiness of the always relevant but hopefully no longer quite-so-relevant ‘Radioactivity’, which ended with quite a crunch. Deliberately or otherwise (ie. slight technical glitch?), the bass-driven crescendo felt like it fair blew a hole in the very foundations of the venue itself.

‘Tour de France’ took us on a journey, a retro-trip in fact, back to when the world existed only in black and white, whilst simultaneously, musically, steering us well into the distant future. The less familiar ‘Vitamin’ followed, before what might have been the only programming or sequencing hiccup of the night, right at the start of a still quite sensational ‘Trans-Europe Express’; it seemed for a moment as though one of the quartet had briefly fluffed his lines, Hutter glancing sideways at the offender, but no real damage was done.

From there it was distinctly end-game stuff, and the slow build in tension to that earlier mid-set mini-peak was given wider context by a rush of pure unadulterated electro to end the show – after the relatively sedate, but still glorious, ‘The Robots’ had given us the calm before the climactic storm: a ‘Boing Boom Tschak’ / ‘Techno Pop’ / ‘Musique Non-Stop’ hybrid beast of a thing ending a show that will live long in the memory.

No encore, none called for, and none required. Everyone in that crowd had had their fill. And more. It was a gig well worth getting off my woe-is-me lethargic arse for, and one truly befitting the bucket list tag I’d long since given it.

Just a final word for Ralf Hutter himself: that man is 77, yet he stood there for a full two hours directing proceedings, amid the heat, the noise, the visual bombardment, and the pressure to perform; singing, vocoder-ing (is that a thing?), and fiddling with all manner of synthetic gadgetry. But at the end, there he was, the last man standing. Remarkable.

Gig photos courtesy of nothingelseon. With thanks.

San Francisco Nights

Last week saw my latest contribution to local pop culture history site AudioCulture published online (see here). This one was a little bit different. This time around it wasn’t a “scene” piece or a band profile, it was the history of a venue – San Fran in Wellington. A venue that has, a few times across the past couple of decades, been on the brink of terminal closure. But it always manages to survive and bounce back. It wasn’t strictly about San Fran either, because I wanted to offer a brief overview or history of the premises itself as the building located at 171 Cuba Street nears its one hundredth birthday. Which also meant there was a lot of focus on the popular nightclub known as Indigo, the building’s occupant at the turn of the century. This article sat unloved and unfinished in a "drafts" folder for more than three years as I tried to get some buy-in from a couple of people I desperately wanted to talk to, but never quite did. In the end, the "publish and be damned" option seemed the only way it would ever get to see the light of day. Anyway, click the link provided above and see what you think. 

Words Fail Me: A former fanzine writer recalls his days writing fanzines

Craig Stephen on a love of fanzines …

Bored, in between college courses, and with a desire to be noticed, this writer hammered at his keyboard to come up with a string of entertaining fanzines in the heyday of the format.

These A5 wonders were once an important part of the underground media. They were a source of information for music fanatics with music coverage restricted to the weekly newspapers which often bypassed certain bands or genres to the annoyance of many.

In Britain, the black and white paper frenzy began in earnest during punk, with titles such as ‘Ripped and Torn’ and ‘Sniffin’ Glue’, which have virtually entered the mainstream as reference points, and have been compiled into glossy books. As punk was overtaken by post-punk, indie and a myriad of sub-genres, fanzines blossomed, often particular to certain bands or the trend of the month.

In New Zealand, the likes of ‘Empty Heads’, ‘Push’, and ‘Anti-System’ appeared while the Dunedin-based ‘Garage’ fanzine is generally regarded as the daddy of them all, and has recently been compiled in a big fat book costing $59.

My own experience of writing/editing fanzines began while studying at university and with the hopes of having something to add to my rather thin CV. They were an outlet for my writing ambitions as well as my angsty, generally left-wing opinions. And they were also a vehicle to gently annoy people, people who needed to be annoyed. Of course, those people would never have actually read my zines, but that wasn’t the point.

 The first zine was dedicated to the House of Love, and was called ‘Se Dest’ after one of their album tracks. It was a straight-down-the-line band-focused fanzine, with the emphasis on fan. It was short and to the point. While it was strictly a one-off for me, I am pleased to say that ‘Se Dest’ continues as an online publication in the hands of one of the first people to buy that initial edition.

Nevertheless, my mind was more interested on the broader music scene so I did a zine dedicated to the Festive 50, the end-of-year chart of the year’s standout tracks which were aired on the John Peel show during the Christmas break.

It appealed to the list-making side of my brain, and while it was a straight compilation of annual charts from 1976, it had a great title ‘The Recreant Cad’, and a cover star in Kenny Dalglish in a Celtic strip. He wasn’t a cad, just my favourite player growing up. Dave Gedge of the Wedding Present was a buyer.

But the real deal were a series of zines that expanded my musical interest. The first of these, ‘Words Fail Me’, featured a cover drawn in the shape of a whisky bottle and had the words “established in 1997”. The back cover had a map of Angus with my home town Montrose snap bang in the middle.

The emphasis was on not taking myself seriously and to write about subjects that mattered to the still young self. “There is basically no limit to what can be discussed,” I wrote in my introduction trying to entice would-be contributors.

 So, the first article was entitled “Burn the NME” and was a critique of the best-selling music weekly of the time. Just to consolidate my dislike of the owners, editors and writers of that esteemed publication, there was an article called Morrissey versus the Music Press in which I both defended and pilloried the artist, and accused the music press (and that being mainly the NME) of having a vendetta against Mozza. Clearly, I had some internal issues with the music media at the time. Far more constructive was the obituary for Billy MacKenzie of The Associates, a cribbed interview from another fanzine of punk revivalists ‘S*M*A*S*H’, and some record reviews.

The enthusiasm was there, though it’s debatable about the quality. There is certainly a refreshing sense of dry and dark humour throughout, and some of it couldn’t possibly see the light of day in the current climate.

The second edition of ‘Words Fail Me’ is something I am far more prouder of. There are interviews I conducted myself – of Travis before performing one night in Sheffield, of Topper over the phone, Dave Gedge, and Euros from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, who wasn’t in the mood to talk after the band’s soundcheck but gratefully did so anyway. I stuffed up the recording of the Topper interview, and after writing up what I recalled of the chat almost immediately, made some stuff up based on what I knew of the band.

There were live reviews of acts performing in Sheffield and Hull, and a piece on French arthouse movie Battle of Algiers. Mates contributed short stories and there was a feeling that this was what a fanzine should look like. It was still stapled together, the font types and sizes are all over the place, and it contained several cut and glue pictures, but it was a move forward.

 The third of these zines was issued when I had moved to Croydon in south London. It was not a suburb renowned for producing great bands nor contained any venues of note, but had several excellent record stores including Beanos, which was apparently the biggest independent record store in Europe at the time. The best thing about it were the trains heading to central London or in the other direction to Brighton.

Unfortunately, I can’t locate my own copy of this so I’m unable to offer judgement on it, but I recall it being a continuation of issue 2. It contained one of my own short stories (which I never want to read again!) and a piece on American gangsta novelist Iceberg Slim.

But at this point, the work involved for modest sales was draining, and a career in journalism was taking precedence. Meanwhile, fanzines were being taken over by the phenomenon that was the internet.

In 2023, there isn’t much need for printed music zines with so many avenues online. The DIY cottage industry still exists, and recent Zinefests in Wellington have been dominated by those focused on identity or other personal issues, or comics.

Some music fanzines exist in the UK where the football zine is surviving via veteran publications such as ‘Not The View’ (Celtic) and ‘City Gent’ (Bradford).

You hear that? That was this writer giving himself a firm pat on the back, not due to an out-of-control ego, but for having the motivation and commitment to do something that took an awful lot more work than the finished product would suggest. I put it down to a start in a career that has taken me to New Zealand, into radio and several quality publications, as well as being a published author.

Long live the fanzine. If you know what I mean.

Gig Review: Kevin Bridges @ MFC, Wellington, 7 November 2023

Walking into the Michael Fowler Centre last Tuesday night I worried that I might already know all of Kevin Bridges’ best material. I’ve seen so many online clips of the prolific comedian’s live performances across the past decade or so, I feared it could be a night of few genuine surprises.

But that outcome, of course, would be completely at odds with one of stand-up’s many unwritten rules; a new tour - in this case, Bridges’ ‘The Overdue Catch-Up’ tour - is almost always about unveiling brand new work. New stories, new jokes, and a bunch of fresh takes. A new tour is the comedy equivalent of a musician or band releasing a brand new album.

 I missed the Glaswegian funny man the last time he performed in Wellington in 2017, but his reputation clearly proceeds him in this part of the world, because he all but sold out the MFC (the kitset-like wooden interior of the venue is “like a giant Ikea” according to Bridges), with a large portion of the capital’s (and beyond) ex-pat Scottish community firmly in tow.

In fact, Bridges must have wondered what all the fuss was about when he arrived on stage, just after a chorus of boos rang out around the venue – on account of some jobsworth “security steward” having asked a group of patrons to remove the large Saltire they’d hung from the front row of the theatre’s second tier.

It turns out “Owen fae Dunfermline” was responsible for that little piece of mischievous patriotism, and the Saltire soon reappeared, exactly where it shouldn’t. Bridges quickly spotted it and immediately had a little fun with Owen during the first segment of his set.

Bridges loves a bit of banter with his audience, and for the most part that’s one of the best things about his comedy. The connection, the humanity, the cheeky-chappy persona, and the sense that he’s really just an ordinary guy getting paid to share his close observations about everyday life. But it doesn’t always work out, and it could be that on this particular night, Bridges overestimated the intelligence of those he was about to banter with.

It was a feature of the night, and not necessarily in a good way. Pass marks and bouquets for Owen, and a “57-year-old” man who challenged Bridges’ assertion that teenagers drink less these days, but a firm brickbat to the clearly drunk English woman who kept wanting to involve herself. “You’re a cunt” she yelled, to the appreciation of exactly nobody, before Bridges reminded her - and perhaps himself, through gritted teeth - that he was “a cunt she was paying money to see”.

And a brickbat to the guy wearing “the Cowboys” tee who refused to engage, and perhaps an only slightly less violent gong for Bridges’ selected “local” translator in the front row, who tried to engage but evidently had issues speaking the language coherently.

Sometimes audience engagement works out just fine and adds to the flavour of the gig, but on this occasion it only seemed to leave Bridges scratching his head and regretting it. At one or two moments, particularly near the end, Bridges had to essentially beg rogue wannabe participants to quieten down just so he could get to the end of his story.

Other than those unforeseen hiccups, Bridges was in pretty good form. He reminded us that so much has happened in the six years since he was last in Wellington, with warzones in Europe and the Middle East, with Covid, and the small matter of him getting married and becoming a father during that period.

Covid and its fall-out is ripe subject matter at present naturally, and Bridges returned to it a few times during the course of a set which also had gags around bullying, cancel culture, insomnia, social media, technology and the internet, yet one of the biggest cheers - but not so much for yours truly - was reserved for a tale about hemorrhoids which crossed over nicely with an amusing observation about Instagram gym junkies.

Now in his mid-30s, although he seems to have been around a lot longer, Bridges also indulged in morsels of obligatory self-deprecation, having a laugh at the boy and young man he was, while also having a wee crack at his older present day self.

He managed around 80 minutes and was good value for most of it, all unwanted interruptions aside. All of his gags were new to me, and I suspect many of these stories will only get better, and probably even added to, as the tour continues.

The opener/support slot was Londoner Carl Donnelly. Not Carl Connelly, as the promo flyers suggested. Imagine getting a career break to perform 12,000 miles from home as the support for a popular headline star and the lazy marketing people only go and get your name wrong?

Donnelly did a relatable and mostly funny 20-minute set covering off his Irish heritage, his physical decline into middle age, and turned his (and his partner’s) struggles with IVF into a series of quips about wanking. He looks like one to keep an eye on.

Classic Album Review: Half Man Half Biscuit - Back Again in the DHSS (1987)

Craig Stephen’s route to Biscuits fandom wasn’t through the seminal debut album, Back in The DHSS (which Craig reviews here), but through its bastard sequel which was released after the band had split up due to “musical similarities” …

Back Again in the DHSS is a compilation of sorts … in the sense that it contains mostly new songs and some previously released singles tracks.

The unreleased tracks are all taken from three sessions for the John Peel Radio One show recorded and aired between November 1985 and September 1986. Peel was a huge fan and gave the band an audience that could never be attained through droll mainstream daytime radio. It was crucial that these tracks were given a release as every one of them is a gem.

Take ‘Rod Hull is Alive … Why?’ for example. A death has occurred (of a “doyen of topiary”) and the grieving relative/friend/acquaintance asks why someone else couldn’t have died instead … such as Rod Hull, the man famous in the 1970s and 80s for a double act involving a toy emu. It would require a long and tedious explanation of the strange workings of the British comedy system to elucidate why he/they were so popular.

Singer Nigel Blackwell manages to also incorporate Jacques Laffite, The Wrekin, Helen Keller and the birch in one song. Again, and as ever with the Biscuits, Google is your friend here.

From that same Peel Session recorded in the British autumn of 1986 came ‘I Was A Teenage Armchair Honved Fan’, to which my naïve friend asked at the time what was a teenage armchair honved, as if it was some sort of new appliance or sexual position only tried by S&M “enthusiasts”. The answer was rather mundane, as Honved were a Hungarian football team.

Eastern European football was also acknowledged on ‘All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit’. This is a particular favourite for its references to Scalextric and the issues setting it up: “But it always took about 15 billion hours to set the track up/ And even when you did/ The thing never seemed to work”, and table-top football game Subbuteo.

Surely, this is greatest song about sport toys ever. Another reference to European football of the 1970s is a magnificent merger of the longest song title ever, and the most ridiculous club name: “Supercalifragilisticborussiamönchengladbach”.

The Biscuits were never a singles band per se, but ‘Dickie Davies Eyes’, released in 1986 and almost a chart hit, of all things, was an exception, and is included as are its two B-sides – ‘The Bastard Son of Dean Friedman’ and … ‘Dukla Prague’.

The A-side is a play on Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, and is a familiar trick of the band – ‘Reasons to be Miserable (part 10)’ is a tweak on Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3)’, while ‘Arthur’s Farm’ is a play on George Orwell’s Animal Farm novel.

As well as referencing football - strictly a no-no at the time - ‘I Was A Teenage Armchair Honved Fan’ excels primarily for the segue into a section ruminating on where the song should go: “Is this the bit where we're supposed to make guitars collide, and / Is this the bit where we release all that raw energy, and / Is this the bit where we go crashing through those barriers / Like what they do in music mags?!”

Elsewhere we have references to Siamese cats, a kitchen appliance manufacturer, spa towns, a disbanded English football trophy, double glazing adverts, Turkish Delight, Roger Dean posters, Arthur Askey and dozens more.

Back Again in the DHSS, like all HMHB albums, mimics those institutions almost sacred to the English: B-list television stars and their gimmicky shows, small-town life, sport outside the top leagues, life in cul-de-sacs, and working-class eccentricities.

And to think that these songs were hidden away on Peel Sessions, played late at night, with only insomniacs and students listening in. Releasing it in 1987 as I reached out to the Jesus and Mary Chain and Echo & The Bunnymen was perfect timing.

Most of this album was released two years later with a host of live tracks as ACD.

Gig Review: Dennis Bovell @ Meow, Wellington, 21 October 2023

I had no idea what to expect when I rocked up to Meow on Saturday night for the Dennis Bovell gig. Would it be a simple DJ set, or a performance set from the prolific UK dub producer? I was not fussed either way, and as it happened, it turned out to be a little bit of both.

The truth is, as an MBE-toting 70-year-old master of his craft, Bovell can do whatever the hell he wants. He has nothing left to prove. The man’s a legend within dub and reggae circles, and the vast majority of us present - the venue was around seventy percent full - were there simply to share the same rarified air as Dennis Bovell. To be in the same room. And to bask in the privilege of it.

So we got Bovell the selecta, Bovell the toaster, Bovell the performer, and morsels of Bovell the man, especially on those almost stream-of-consciousness moments when - often mid-track - he decided to share a short anecdote or memory with us. Which was more than occasional, and this gig was easily one of the more artist-chat-friendly interactive sets I’ve attended.

Musically it was mostly about Bovell playing selected tracks he’s been associated with across his long and fruitful career. Whether that involvement was as a vocalist, as a guitarist/musician, or more commonly, as a producer. He’d play those tracks, toast over the top, freestyling along, spontaneously singing the intro to one tune, or joining in on another song mid-chorus or part way through. It appeared random and unplanned, carefree and unproduced, which very much added to its charm.

As a selector, Bovell has impeccable taste. A taste honed by years of grassroots involvement with his genre of choice. His set was a hybrid concoction of reggae, rocksteady, ska, soul, and dub.

You know the drill: a selection of big bottom-heavy bass-driven tunes that at times had the venue shaking at its structural core. The best of which, for me, included tunes from Toots, Sly & Robbie, Gregory Isaacs, and Dennis Brown. But there was plenty for everyone.

There was a cool story about how Bovell had beefed up and reggae-fied a Sade track from the artist’s Soldier of Love album, after Sade herself had requested it upon sending Bovell the vocal stems. And there was some high praise for a kindred spirit of sorts, Linton Kwesi-Johnson, when offering up an LKJ gem he’d collaborated on.

We even got the odd Matumbi track, with Matumbi of course being the UK-based 1970s reggae act which gave Bovell his initial exposure.

The dub production and technical side of Bovell’s wider skillset was far less obvious - mostly only identifiable with the odd tempo or pitch change, and there wasn’t much in the way of the extra effects or wizardry Bovell would otherwise have at his fingertip disposal inside a studio.

I was later informed Bovell played for “three hours” or more, but my own lethargy and relative sobriety meant I managed only around two hours of the set, happy enough just to have experienced Bovell up close and personal, even if only briefly.

 

Classic Album Review: Guy Chadwick - Lazy, Soft & Slow (1998)

Craig Stephen looks at House of Love frontman Guy Chadwick’s all too easily overlooked solo debut …   

“Is it today I’m going crazy, come and help me lose my mind, who knows what we might find, maybe ourselves.”

So begins Lazy Soft and Slow, and with it the start of Guy Chadwick’s solo career, a project that promised so much but petered out rather abruptly and would ultimately be a one-album adventure.

The story up to this point is this: the House of Love fizzled out following the underwhelming Audience With the Mind in 1993, and Guy attempted new projects in The Madonnas and then Eye Dream, neither of which managed to take off. However, The Madonnas’ gigs had featured a number of new songs, which would later find a new lease of life on the solo album, notably ‘Crystal Love Song’ and ‘One of These Days’.

The logical next move for Chadwick was to establish himself as a solo artist. Could he become a Julian Cope who’s post Teardrop Explodes career was startlingly successful for a decade-and-a-half, or would the project go the way of Ian McCulloch’s?

Just getting to this stage had taken a considerable effort with Keith Cullen of Setanta Records instrumental in prompting the evidently reticent frontman to record an album.

So, over four years after the band split, Chadwick was ready and motivated to do his own thing. Country music and Leonard Cohen were on the speakers in the house at the time and inevitably rubbed off during the writing and recording sessions.

Suitably, an acoustic guitar was used for the demo sessions. The intention was to go back to a more mellow, softer sound - as the title testifies. 

Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins was roped in as Chadwick’s producer and mixer, with Giles Hall the engineer. Guthrie was the perfect choice: Chadwick didn’t want to make a House of Love record, while Guthrie didn’t want to make a Cocteau Twins record. Two birds, one stone, as it were. Guthrie would also play bass on the new album.

The first fruits of Lazy, Soft & Slow was the single ‘This Strength’, released in November 1997, backed by ‘Wasted In Song’ and ‘Faraway’. The latter B-side also featured on the album, re-recorded and slightly shorter.

A few months passed, bypassing the traditional compilation and big star albums for Christmas and the January fallow period. Then, in February 1998, Lazy Soft & Slow was piled onto record store shelves. Since this was a period when CD was king, there was no LP version. Sadly, that remains the case.

It is not an album that jumps out of the speakers on first listen, or even the second. It’s for those moments when you don’t want robust vocals, or amped-up guitars. It requires the kind of mood as you would be in for a Nick Drake album. ‘Close Your Eyes’ and ‘One of These Days’ fit very much into the aura of the album; languid and beautifully written songs with final track ‘Close Your Eyes’ taking the listener into a hypnotic state.

There are, however, some more athletic tracks, notably ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold of Me’, which celebrates a strong relationship as Chadwick paints a picture of that special someone. “I’m a passenger on a ship of dreams, on a course of love, I think I’m going down.”

There’s a surprise version of Iggy Pop’s ‘Fall In Love With Me’ which first appeared on 1977’s Lust For Life. The original is upbeat, captures the essence of 1970s decadent west Berlin, and has the magical Bowie touch – he co-wrote it after all. Chadwick strips it back by a more than two minutes (gasp!), and turns it into a campfire and toasted marshmallows type of song.

With such ravishing words throughout Lazy, Soft & Slow, Chadwick was reminding the world that he was one of the most talented writers of the era. Of any era, in fact. The entire album displays his knack for lyricism, and despite perhaps not having the dry humour of Morrissey, Chadwick matches the moody, and sadly now conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Mancunian, for captivating vernacularism.

If I’m honest, Lazy, Soft & Slow is an album I have jumped into less regularly than the House of Love albums. Partly due to it needing a certain state of mind, but also because vinyl is now played more commonly to my cat and child.

This is something that needs to be rectified. Many CD-only releases of the 1990s and noughties have been given the vinyl treatment. So should LSS.

Yes, it’s an odd one and it may not be to everyone’s taste, but with it being out of print since 1998, surely someone in the world of music can give it another airing, complete with outtakes, B-sides and what-have-yous. It deserves nothing less.     

Boots and Bombs

If you’re a regular everythingsgonegreen reader then the chances are you’ll be reading a lot of Craig Stephen’s words and not so many of my own (as the actual “supposed” blogger). I hope one day to reclaim the blog as my own but in the meantime, Craig’s doing just fine. As I’ve said previously, Craig takes the page places I wouldn’t dare to take it, simply because his knowledge of indie or alternative music is varied and vast, whereas my own is somewhat more limited and mostly retro pop-based. He’s the windswept and interesting one. I’m the lazy boring one.

Anyway, Craig’s just finished writing a book about New Zealand football called Boots and Bombs. It focuses on the New Zealand national team’s visit to war-torn Vietnam in 1967, to play in a football tournament, during the height of the Vietnam war (!), but it also offers a potted history of the code in New Zealand. I did some proofing, fact-checking, and research for the book, and offered Craig encouragement along the way – in addition to our mutual love of music, we also share a passion for the beautiful game. And since the book’s publication a little over a month ago, I’ve also been helping him out with some promotional stuff in a sort of auxiliary publicist capacity.

As part of that, I submitted a review of the book to a website called Friends of Football, a site which can rightly claim to have the widest reach of any website that concerns itself with football in this otherwise god-forsaken rugby union-obsessed land we call Aotearoa. It certainly seems to have the most active local social media presence. Since Craig has been doing almost all of the recent heavy-lifting for everythingsgonegreen, I thought it only fair that I reproduce that book review here:

 Friends of Football Book Review: Boots and Bombs ‘a bloody good yarn’

A newly-published book explores the state of football in rugby-mad New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s.

Boots and Bombs: How New Zealand football grew up in the 1960s and 70s, by Craig Stephen (2023, ISBN 978-0-473-67266-9).

Reviewed by Michael Hollywood

1967… the year of Sgt Pepper and the original summer of love.

The year of decimalisation and the introduction of our dollar. The year we mercifully stopped dishing out free milk in New Zealand schools.

The year our feted All Blacks became the first team to complete a grand slam-winning tour of Britain since the great invincible side achieved the same feat way back in 1924.

And it was the year, somewhat incredibly, when a group of largely amateur footballers from New Zealand were sent into the heart of war-torn Vietnam to represent their country in a football tournament.

Life was clearly very different in 1967.

You could say it was another world, and it’s a world revisited in some detail in Boots and Bombs, a new book by first-time author Craig Stephen.

A book that has that Vietnam trip at its core, and it’s quite some tale.

The notion of playing international football in war-ravaged Saigon while battles raged all around the South Vietnamese capital is worthy of analysis in itself, but that part is merely an otherwise scarcely-documented centerpiece for the book, or one part of a much bigger story; the story of how New Zealand football finally came of age.

1967 is simply the focal point of that wider story, not just for the drama surrounding the Vietnam excursion, but because it represents the year the national team played its first full international fixtures in five long years.

It was a kick-start, if you will. It was also the year of other tours of interest to these shores — by soon-to-be European champions Manchester United and the visit of a Scottish FA selection.

Plus there’s some coverage of that year’s trip to New Caledonia, which rather curiously coincided with the Saigon tournament, and featured a second national team made up of an entirely different squad.

You wait years for a municipal transport bus, and then two arrive simultaneously.

Highlights include the chapter on the disastrous and questionable 1964 World tour (no full internationals played).

Coverage of the various British clubs who toured here during the period, especially across the 1970s. Coverage and comment around the evolution of club football in New Zealand. Critique and analysis of our three pre-1982 World Cup qualifying campaigns, a forlorn process which commenced in 1969 with New Zealand’s first attempt to qualify for the world game’s global showcase.

And, of course, for an unrepentant anorak like myself, Stephen’s potted history of the code here, across the early chapters, is invaluable.

We tend to view history through rose-tinted glasses, and it can often be difficult for younger generations to really comprehend how different things used to be.

Small things like leading footballers being forced to work in their day jobs on the day of a big game so as not to lose income.

Footballers paying their own way, absorbing their own travel costs, and buying their own kit.

Anecdotes around coaching, and coaches — there’s a tidbit or two around the eccentricities of national coaches like Juan Schwanner and Lou Brozic — that illustrate both the extreme gulf, and at times, the fine line, between amateurism and professionalism.

We already know all about 1982, and about 2010; those stories don’t need to be told again.

And no book can possibly cover the same amount of ground or level of detail that mainstream media and indeed, social media, offer to today’s All Whites.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that Boots and Bombs wraps things up around 1982 or at the very least the early 1980s.

Stephen’s book is all about how we got there, not to Spain specifically, but the journey to credibility itself through the 1960s, through the formation of the sport’s first-ever National League, and right through the 1970s.

It provides a snapshot of history, and as ever, the really good oil is in the grassroots, the local, and the peripheral.

Local football luminaries such as Earle Thomas (who writes the foreword), Brian Turner, Dave Taylor, Owen Nuttridge, John Legg, Ray Mears, Alan Sefton, Paul Rennell, and coaching guru Barrie Truman all contribute extensively to Boots and Bombs.

Along with many others — too many to mention in a single review. Offering reflection and tales from those who were there is priceless, more so given their advancing years and the inevitable decline in access we’ll have to their words of wisdom in the future.

Bombs and Bombs offers both context and perspective around all of those things. It is a compelling resource for history obsessives, every bit as much as being a bloody good yarn.

Stephen employs an easy, almost conversational writing style, and at just short of 250 pages, Boots and Bombs is a very digestible read.

There’s a decent photo section with a few gems relevant to the stories, and the era overall, and this book will appeal not only to local football fans but to football fans of all tribal colour and creed, whatever their poison.

Recommended.

This review was originally published here: Book review: Boots and Bombs 'a bloody good yarn' - Friends of Football (friendsoffootballnz.com)

You can read an excerpt from the book here: Special feature: The teenage All White left to die in a war-zone hospital - Friends of Football (friendsoffootballnz.com)

You can purchase the book here: Boots and Bombs: How New Zealand football grew up in the 1960s and 70s | Trade Me Marketplace

Classic Album Review: Transglobal Underground - Psychic Karaoke (1996)

Craig Stephen revisits a lost classic …

It’s the mid-90s, and the British and international media are all over the phenomenon that has been labelled Britpop. Oasis and Blur have battled for the number one spot, Pulp are unlikely glam stars, and any band with a guitar and a love of The Beatles are being played ad nauseum on mainstream radio.

What chance has a band like Transglobal Underground got?

Playing diverse sounds from South London to South Asia in a variety of languages, they can’t be dubbed “retro opportunists”. That may have been too much of a challenge for the music critics of the time.

In the midst of this Britpop banality, Psychic Karaoke was released and was easily one of the albums of its year. It shouted at the Britpop bands and their media lackeys: “this is the future”.

I picked up the album on sale in Auckland and played it a little in the City of Sails before heading to Fiji. On a relatively remote island group it was on a regular spin cycle as it served as the perfect soundtrack to a country full of culture, friendly people, pristine beaches and palm trees. 

Psychic Karaoke, TGU’s fourth album, released on Nation Records and entirely self-produced, evokes visions of the Middle East and India with electronic rhythms and atmospherics.

It serves up cinematic textures and global grooves, mixing dance-friendly exotica, that utilised tablas, dhols, ouds, and djembe as well as guitar, violin/viola and cello. It features the magnificent voice of Egyptian-Belgian superstar Natacha Atlas and British-Asian singer Nawazish Ali Khan.

Hip-hop, dub, electronica, pop, and art rock are all here - and more.

The seven-minute ‘Chariot’ is the entry point to Psychic Karaoke. It’s a magnificent, meandering track featuring Middle Eastern percussion, a string section and breakbeats. It’s not until the three minute mark that Atlas comes in, working in tandem with an English language pseudo rap. It sounds like there’s far too much going on here, but it works and the instruments add an extra exotic element.

Atlas performs on half of the 12 tracks, a favourable number as she had released her debut solo album Diaspora the year before and her solo projects have significantly diminished her ability to record with TGU, and the various other artists she has collaborated with.

One of the tracks she doesn’t appear on is ‘Scully’ towards the end of the album. Instead, TGU’s Neil Sparkes takes on vocal duties and has a style similar to Barry Adamson, which is uncanny as part of one line is “Something wicked this way comes”, which happens to be the title of a track from Adamson’s Oedipus Schmoedipus album released the year before. It may well be a homage to the Mancunian singer, but they are very different songs.

Transglobal Underground have released many albums since 1996, all exploring different musical elements, cultures and genres. Some have worked and some haven’t but respect is due to a band that works outside the box.

Album Review: The Chats - Get Fucked (2022)

Craig Stephen on fair dinkum lucky country battlers, The Chats …

Three middle fingers directed at the camera on the cover. A title with a naughty word. A back cover with a schoolboy-esque penis picture. And the c-word dropped mid-song. Yes, The Chats tick all the boxes of renegade bovver boys/bogan rebels with badly-strung guitars and home-made haircuts.

Yet, I’ve never quite twigged since I discovered The Chats about four years ago as to whether this Brizzy trio are middle class rogues pretending to be from the tougher end of town to annoy their parents (while making money to invest in metals) or genuine working-class ruffians ruffling a few feathers (while making money to invest in beer n cigs). I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. They’re Australian, after all, a land where not giving a damn is the virtual national ideology. And it’s hard to be a Tarquin or a Hugo and be serious with a pudding bowl haircut or a love of souped-up boy racer motors.

Which brings us to the opening track of second album Get Fucked, named after a car, ‘6L GTR’. It’s brief and fast – pretty much like all Chats songs – and eschews a love of the road. Just a shame about all those cars on the road too.

“Pulled in at Beefy’s/ Got a steak and cheese/ Hoonin' down the Bruce now/ As fast as I please/ Late arvo congestion/ Every day’s the same/ So I pulled left around 'em/ And drove up the bike lane.”

 Ah, that wonderful Chats sense of humour, which seemed lost when they lost a guitarist by the name of Josh but brought in another Josh to replace him. It’s still there and in top gear. There’s the tale of a jobsworth ‘Ticket Inspector’ on that eponymous track, a man (presumably) who lives to catch out the larrikins trying to escape his clutches and catch a ride for gratis. “Short fuse, I'm 'boutta lose it/ Got a bit of power, ain't afraid to abuse it.” And you know he certainly will.

On the debut album High Risk Behaviour (2020) they revelled in being lager louts on such songs as ‘Drunk and Disorderly’, and continue the trend on ‘I’ve Been Drunk in Every Pub In Brisbane’. I imagine in a city of 2.4 million people that that would be a considerable achievement. It sounds like a challenge worth taking up.

“I've been legless at the Breakfast/ After a few they told me to leave/ I've been banned at the Grand Central Hotel/ And I've been pissed like you wouldn't believe/ I love relaxin' at the Caxton/ But they never like the look of me/ I've been off my face at the Stock Exchange/ They gave me a couple beers for free.”

‘The Price of Smokes’ meanwhile turns to the art of the ciggie. There’s pretty much two refrains in the entire song – one, the price of smokes is going up again, and secondly, the conclusion that “Those bastards in parliament ought to be hung by their necks.” Other than a lament to poor workplace safety on ‘Dead On Site’, it’s pretty much the only outreach to modern toils and troubles.

Clocking in at about half an hour it’s not going to challenge the concentration-lagging youth among us, but its 13 songs are sharp, pointed and frantic. You get your money’s worth.

In an age of insipid music in which middle class values are to the fore, it’s refreshing to have my ears blasted about alcohol, grunty cars and fighting. You don’t have to empathise with any of that to appreciate that The Chats play it their way: it’s part punk, part old style rock and perhaps even a bit of pub rock too. It’s also very much of a recent Australian trend, in line with similar contemporary bands like Amyl and the Sniffers and Drunk Mums. In an age of mediocrity and blandness in the music scene, that’s pretty much all you can ask for.

Blog Update and some Linky Love

Contrary to outward appearances, this blog isn’t dead. It has merely been on extended sabbatical. A bit like Monty Python’s legendary parrot, I’ve been resting. Pining for the fjords. A sabbatical which began in early 2022, interrupted only by the odd gig review and the irregular – but thoroughly welcomed – contributions of my good friend Craig Stephen.

Thanks Craig. I appreciate your enthusiasm and those album reviews. As on-point and insightful as those reviews have been, I’ve been struggling with the idea of adding any of my own; in these days of free-music-for-all and a surplus of streaming services, does anyone really need to know my opinion on any specific album or artist when they can listen elsewhere and preview it themselves? And besides, Craig takes the blog places I wouldn’t have the nous to go … which can only be a good thing.

In terms of adding any other sort of post, beyond those gig reviews, I’ve also become quite lazy in my dotage, and truth be told, I probably need something resembling a rocket to get my own arse into gear.

I’ve actually been a little in awe of Craig’s capacity to keep finding words. As if having a day job in the media wasn’t enough, in addition to contributing to everythingsgonegreen and multiple other publications, he’s also found the time to write a book on New Zealand football (near completion, publication pending) called ‘Boots and Bombs’. The book’s central theme is the New Zealand national team’s hugely unlikely but scarcely documented trip to Vietnam in 1967. To take part in a football tournament. In the middle of a warzone. In Saigon, with the Vietnam war raging at something close to its horrific peak. Quite a thing.

I have had some involvement with that project – making connections, doing research, and doing some editing. It feels like I’ve read and re-read raw work-in-progress versions of the manuscript a dozen times. It is, admittedly, fairly niche subject matter, but football is a shared passion of ours, as is history, and it has (mostly) been a pleasure to help him out where I could.

Another reason for blog inactivity is that I simply lost momentum after a decade of relatively prolific blogging (700-plus posts). 2022 was a challenging year in so many ways – not least because I spent a large chunk of time in the middle of that year taking in the sights and sounds of Europe – visiting places like Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Venice, and Rome. Plus, I caught the dreaded Covid thingy - whilst holed up in a sweltering Amsterdam apartment amid record breaking mid-summer temperatures, sans the chilled comforts of home. So yeah, blogging just became all too hard for a while and even the idea of it seemed a little bit frivolous.

2023 has conjured up a lot less drama so far, so there’s probably less excuse for the lack of more recent posts. I can only refer you to the “lazy arse” disclaimer offered earlier.

That’s not to say I can offer any certainty about where everythingsgonegreen goes from here. I may post more regularly, I may not. The last thing I want is to feel obligated or for it to become anything resembling a chore. We’ll see.  

So anyway, that’s the update, and here’s the linky love bit:

With New Zealand music history site AudioCulture (aka “the noisy library”) celebrating its tenth birthday during May, I found myself the subject of some scarcely anticipated attention. It turns out that some nine years after its initial publication, my history/scene article on Wellington nightlife in the 1980s (link here) remained the most visited or read article across that site’s ten-year lifespan. Out of some 2000-plus submissions. It proved so popular, AudioCulture had its technical staff investigate to ensure all those visits were legitimate. According to Russell Brown, referencing the article in the New Zealand Listener magazine, checking “there wasn’t some bot in Russia delivering all the hits”. In the end they determined “the traffic was real and organic” … (thanks comrade Botolovski, my wire transfer is in the post. Or something).

The article also received a mention on Radio New Zealand no less, when Jesse Mulligan interviewed AudioCulture founder Simon Grigg about the site’s ten-year history. If that was an unexpected surprise, I was more than a little shocked when the local student radio station, Radio Active, asked to interview me for ‘The Vault’ segment of their breakfast show. That weekly segment of the show being dedicated to “the past”, where a life-weary greybeard comes on to reflect or to preach to “the kids” about life during wartime – or in my case, a life lived amid the seedy underbelly of Wellington’s nightlife in the 1980s. I took them up on that offer (link here).

The “follow-up” article referred to in that interview is this one (link here), where I choose and then dissect ten Wellington club bangers of the 1980s. Specifically New Zealand-produced tracks only, which, to be fair, probably accounted for less than five percent of tunes played in clubs during that era. That was a fun piece to write, and I make no apologies for its heavy synthpop bias.

Right, so that’s pretty much all I have for now. I may be back. I hope to be back. I may not be. Who ever really knows anything about anything?