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?

 

Album Review: The House of Love - A State of Grace (2022)

Craig Stephen waited such a long time for the latest House of Love album to arrive he started to fear it never would …

It had been a long time since House of Love released She Paints Words in Red (2013), but in that intervening period gig-goers were teased with some new material that they rightly expected to form a new studio album. It would have been the third LP featuring Terry Bickers since he returned in the early 2000s following his acrimonious departure in 1989. But in 2021 Bickers was off again. This time there wasn’t the friction or enmity of the initial split, with a band statement blaming the pandemic for Guy Chadwick’s decision as he prepared for rescheduled dates in the United States. In a later interview the frontman suggested Bickers declined his invitation as he was loyal to Matt Jury and Pete Evans who had been sacked from the band because Chadwick didn’t want to work with them anymore. It seemed that the new album was in jeopardy.

 But, then, Chadwick announced a new line-up with ex-Idlewild man Keith Osborne on lead guitar, Harry Osborne on bass, and Hugo Degenhardt on drums. Degenhardt had previously worked with, ahem, Rod Stewart and Robbie Williams. These guns for hire would appear with Chadwick on the UK tour of autumn 2022 and the US tour soon after.

The album with the new line-up is a radical departure from the comeback album Days Run Away (2005) and its morose follow-up She Paints Words in Red. I’m actually being quite diplomatic about the latter, it was a stinker, very pastoral, placid and far removed from previous House of Love albums. Chadwick was keen to return to the sound of the band in its earlier days.

State of Grace was recorded in Hastings on England’s south coast and among the guest musicians are John Pilka, who was in Chadwick’s first significant band, Kingdoms, in the mid-80s. The cover is somewhat grainy and industrial and it looks suspiciously like a goth album with its font and monochrome style.

If Chadwick’s intention was to return to the band’s past sound he has largely achieved that, especially on the guitar-driven single ‘Clouds’ which is a call to someone to “Get your head outta the clouds”, a refrain that is repeated ad nauseum for the final minute and 40 seconds in majestical rock’n’roll style. The accompanying video features a greying Chadwick walking around a seaside town including along a pier and through a games arcade. There’s little in the way of politics or diatribes on the way of the modern world on the dozen tracks – that’s just not Chadwick’s style – and love and how it spins a web around our hearts and minds are instead front of house.

Any suggestion this might be a solo album is augmented by the resurrection of a song from Chadwick’s brief turn as a solo artist in the late 1990s. ‘Laughter and Honey’ was a beautiful, mainly acoustic B-side; as the renamed ‘Into the Laughter’ it is a full minute shorter but has electric guitars and a full band. That clearly is the intention: to turn a very much one-man effort into a team endeavour. And it certainly benefits from four pairs of hands working in unison with Keith Osborne’s guitar playing very much to the fore. Another highlight is the album opener ‘Sweet Loser’ which begins with harmonica playing which is superseded by a drone riff that builds into something quite stunning.

‘Melody Rose’ is quite grungy. If there is a past reference in this song, it is to the critically panned Audience With the Mind (1993), an album that probably should have been re-recorded or released as an EP. Nevertheless, like that particular work, I have come to love this in its own way. The bassline parties with the drums in a manner I never thought possible.

It is certainly a ubiquitous album, and there’s a couple of numbers in ‘Queen of Song’ and ‘In My Mind’ that suggest Chadwick has been listening to authentic Americana music. The former has touches of blues; the latter a tinge of country music. Curiously, Chadwick’s languid vocals on ‘In My Mind’ remind me of Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit. Without the deadpan humour.

State of Grace is a varied album that takes the listener on a trip across the Atlantic. Yes, it certainly sounds like peak House of Love from 1987 to 1993 but there’s traces of more recent work at times. It has the sound of four people gelling fairly quickly, but also of one man in charge and make no mistake this is a Guy Chadwick-fuelled project. How this record would have eventuated if Terry Bickers and his two mates were on board is impossible to determine. I suspect it would have been different in good and bad ways. But we have an album I think the House of Love can be proud of.