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?
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