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. 

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?

 

Disjecta Membra on AudioCulture

New Zealand pop culture heritage site, AudioCulture, recently published my profile of pioneering local darkwave band Disjecta Membra. A band I’ve mentioned a few times already on the blog, and although I’m a big fan, writing this became quite a mission. It started out as a labour of love and wound up being something else entirely. 

I think the initial bare bones of the piece were drafted in early 2019, maybe earlier, then it was abandoned for months, before I could finally summon the energy to finish it, edit it, and submit for publication late in the year. It became something of a huge “mental block” for me - I carried on with various other writing projects throughout the year while this piece sat lonely and unloved in my work-in-progress file (aka, the “too hard” basket).

What I learned most of all during this protracted process is that you never quite know a band as well as you think you do. Even after it was published, after further editing by the site, the band’s key protagonist Michel Rowland politely contacted me to ask if a few factual errors could be corrected (done, to some extent, I think). When you’re writing a profile about something niche for a site as widely read and mainstream as AudioCulture, there is a danger that your account becomes definitive by default, and it’s hugely important to get timelines and band line-ups absolutely spot on. Otherwise, why bother? 

Another thing I learned is that it’s very difficult to condense 20-plus years of band history, particularly one with so many band personnel changes across that period, into a manageable, readable, digestible 1500 to 2000 words. Nobody visiting a pop culture website wants War and Peace, after all. 

Initially, back when the idea of a Disjecta Membra profile was still forming in my befuddled brain, I had approached Rowland to ask if we could sit down to record a conversation about the band’s 20-odd year journey. We’d previously met at one of his gigs a few years back, we shared mutual friends, and tentatively planned to co-author a piece about local musician Chris Sheehan (R.I.P.) for AudioCulture. Rowland is something of a keen historian and researcher, and a Sheehan fan, and I was hoping my own fandom and knowledge of Sheehan’s early years would help shape that piece. For one reason or another, that idea has been (temporarily?) shelved, and it turns out that life also got in the way of Rowland and I sitting down to chat about Disjecta Membra. I’d have transcribed the chat and use his direct quotes to form the basis of a band profile. 

With the benefit of hindsight, that would have been the best thing for all concerned. It is certainly what worked best for three of the four profiles I’ve previously submitted to AudioCulture, and it is a process I’ve become more used to when writing similar stuff for NZ Musician. Left to my own devices, without the time, will, or any real insight, it became very difficult, despite the band’s own meticulously detailed website being on hand to guide me. I still feel I didn’t do a particularly great job.

Anyway, you’re not here for War and Peace, and I’m most definitely not Leo Tolstoy, so just click here (Disjecta Membra profile on AudioCulture) to learn a little bit more about one of Aotearoa’s most underrated bands of the past couple of decades … 

New Zealand Music Month, AudioCulture, and All That Jazz ...

New Zealand Music Month has its critics. For many it represents little more than an inward-looking self-indulgent “pat-on-the-back” fest, and I understand that argument without necessarily buying into it. My own point of view is that NZ Music Month comes from a good place, has good intent, and if we – as New Zealanders – don’t celebrate this stuff, then nobody else will. It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t all that long ago we had to introduce quotas just to ensure New Zealand music was played on local radio. 

For this May’s annual celebration of New Zealand Music Month, I’m posting a series of classic (and some not so classic) local music clips on the blog’s Facebook page. You can check out the page and perhaps even give it a 'like' or a 'follow' (steady on!) here …

But it also seems timely to once again celebrate the ongoing contribution to the rich tapestry of New Zealand music history currently being made by the AudioCulture site (click here), which documents artists, bands, scenes, venues, and just about every other conceivable angle on pop culture in this part of the world – archiving stuff from days gone by right up to the present day. There really is nothing else like it. The “noisy library of New Zealand music” is an incredible resource that will only continue to get bigger and better as more boxes are ticked, as more artists/bands are profiled, and as more scenes and venue histories are explored.

I feel lucky to have been a part of it, and to have been paid for being a part of it, with site content dudes Simon Grigg and Chris Bourke having indulged a few of my own ramblings about various things near and dear to my own nostalgic heart. With – gratuitous plug alert – my “scene” contributions about nightclubbing in Wellington in the 1980s (here), the fabulous Soul Mine record store (here), the long-running retro Atomic and 24-Hour Party People club nights (here), and my band profile of early 90s Wellington funk-rockers Emulsifier (here). 

I appreciate that I’m not a particularly great writer or wordsmith, but these articles are born from a passion I can scarcely contain, one driven by a love of all things “us” and local, and I’ve always felt that unless those of us who were there at the time (pre-internet, pre-Social Media) make an effort to document the regional grassroots stuff, much of it will fall between the cracks and be lost forever. 

It’s also something I try to achieve on this blog. I take some heart from the fact that as I approach the blogpost number 600, all lack of direct feedback aside, everythingsgonegreen is fast closing in on some 250,000 unique page hits. Small beer in the wider context of things, I know, but it may surprise you that local or specifically New Zealand-based content accounts for three of the four “most read” posts. The most read being a very niche piece about 1980s um, nightlife, in the sprawling metropolis that is Palmerston North. Who knew nearly 13,000 readers even cared? 

So I guess people love nostalgia, especially smalltown/local nostalgia. Go figure. 

Finally, just quickly, I also want to give a shout out for NZ Musician magazine (see here). Writing various bits and bobs (features and reviews) for that publication (unpaid) over a five-year period – although I’ve contributed very little of late – has been a pleasure, and I guess it gave me the confidence to write that other stuff for AudioCulture. 

Things don’t get much more grassroots than NZ Musician. It really does dig deep, and although it too has come in for some unwarranted criticism over the years, specifically for being unable to pay its contributors, so many artists and bands have received an important leg up from the exposure provided by that particular mag for the 30-odd years its been doing its very funky thing. Long may it continue … online or otherwise. 

When all is said and done though, the absolute best way to celebrate New Zealand Music Month is to find some time this month to go to a local gig. Pay on the door. Support young up and coming bands. Buy something local from Bandcamp (or elsewhere if you can find an actual store). Buy something direct from the artist or band itself … and keep doing it, not just across May, but all year long. And tell your friends to do the same.

The Return of Beat Rhythm Fashion

For me, Beat Rhythm Fashion were always one of the great lost New Zealand bands. Indeed, one of the great lost Wellington bands. A near mythical band I’d seen on Radio With Pictures back in the distant sepia-tinged days of 1981 or 1982. A band I was unable to witness live and up close, simply because I was too young. By the time I was of an age to start attending gigs, they’d long since disappeared. Over before they really got started. But I loved what I’d seen and heard, and over the past couple of decades I’ve regularly sought out YouTube clips of the band’s precious early singles, 'Beings Rest Finally', and 'Turn of the Century'. What I never expected to happen was that in 2019 there would be a new album, Tenterhook, or that I’d finally get the chance to see Beat Rhythm Fashion perform. Albeit a version of the band without founding member Dan Birch, who died in 2011.

Dan & Nino Birch, photo: Charles Jameson

That gig is at Wellington’s Meow, this coming Saturday night, and it will feature original guitarist/vocalist Nino Birch (Dan’s brother), well-travelled drummer Caroline Easther, whose connection with Birch and BRF extends all the way back to 1981, and Failsafe Records’ main man Rob Mayes, who produced Tenterhook. It is, to some extent, a bucket list event for me, and for the past few weeks I’ve had Beat Rhythm Fashion’s music on high rotation. Ahead of the gig, I want to share a few interesting/related links for the curious (see footer), and to record a few thoughts about each of the band’s albums - not comprehensive reviews - just a few notes on each.

Bring Real Freedom (2007) 

One of the reasons I refer to Beat Rhythm Fashion as one of this country’s “great lost bands” is because for some 25 years its only material legacy was three early singles, and no accompanying album. Failsafe Records put this right with the release of this 2007 compilation, which included those singles, the related B-sides, and a selection of live tracks from that same early period. It’s essentially the album we didn’t get at the time. The first two singles, ‘Beings Rest Finally’ and ‘Turn of the Century’ are obvious stand-outs, as are ‘Welfare State Rent’, ‘Song of the Hairless Ape’, ‘Art and Duty’, and ‘No Great Oaks’, although it remains something of a mystery to me all these years later which of the latter pair was the actual third single. I’d always thought it was ‘Art and Duty’ but I note that the band’s “Discogs” page lists ‘No Great Oaks’ as the A-side, not the flip. There’s also an early version of the current (2019, digital only) single ‘Hard as Hell’. Bring Real Freedom’s live material, recorded by Chris Cullinane, restored by Rob Mayes, scrubbed up very well, and was a long overdue bonus for those fans seeking a more expansive set than anything offered at the time. The belated album served to document the band’s pioneering post-punk roots and strong early-Cure influences, and given the overall strength of this work, I’m left to ponder what might have been had Dan Birch not made the decision to relocate to Australia in 1982. A move that ultimately meant the end of Beat Rhythm Fashion, or at least, what might become known as “phase one” of Beat Rhythm Fashion.

Tenterhook (2019) 

If there is a “phase two”, or to be a prolonged phase two - and Nino Birch has suggested there’s more to come - then Tenterhook is a great way to kick things off. There’s a lot to like here, and lost brother Dan’s influence remains omnipresent, with four co-writing credits on some the older material featured - ‘Hard as Hell’, ‘Freezing Mr Precedent’, ‘Optimism’, and ‘Property’ - plus there’s a Dan Birch original (from 1993) in the form of the excellent ‘Nothing Damaged’. More than that though, Nino Birch’s own songwriting on Tenterhook’s newer material is exceptional, and there’s a sense of genuine progression here, with an expansion beyond the band’s original palate to include more pop-styled hooks and a much fuller sound. I wouldn’t go so far as to say any of it is particularly uplifting, but it does feel less gloomy, less generic, and perhaps more personal than the circa 1980-1982 stuff. Particularly on the track ‘Dan’, where Nino Birch attempts to offer some context around his brother’s death, with that tune’s lyrics resonating most, to remain firmly stuck in my head long after the track has finished. Credit must go to the work of Easther and Mayes too. In fact, perhaps the biggest triumph of all, on an album full of them, is the fragmented way Tenterhook was pieced together, with the three core constituent parts - resident in Australia, Japan, and New Zealand - somehow managing to produce an immaculate fully formed whole. 

Sample lyrics from ‘Dan’ … 

“You were never at home, so you got wild with all your drinking
Your common pathways were lost in the acute darkness of your thinking
And your friends watched you leave from the tyranny of distance
But you never achieved from this path of least resistance

Oh your mind, twist and turned
As your soul crashed and burned
You were never up for this ride
So what the hell were you thinking
Damn it Dan, Damn it Dan!”

Some great links if you’re keen to learn more about Beat Rhythm Fashion, both past and present: 

Andrew Schmidt’s Audioculture profile from 2013

Radio New Zealand’s interview on the second coming (broadcast last week)

Gary Steel’s recently published Q&A with Nino Birch. A prolific writer about the Wellington 1980s post-punk scene, Steel was there for the first incarnation of the band

Beat Rhythm Fashion on Bandcamp

AudioCulture: Atomic

Just published this week on AudioCulture, my fourth contribution to a site which documents the who, what, where, and why of all things New Zealand music. 

It’s a “scene” story about the popular Atomic club night in Wellington, which by my reckoning is the longest-running regular club night in the country - 22 years and counting. It’s also about DJ Bill E’s wider obsession with all things retro and post-punk, and the various archiving projects he’s involved with. 

Check out the story at the link below ...

https://www.audioculture.co.nz/scenes/atomic-club-nights

Book Review: In Love With These Times, My Life With Flying Nun Records, by Roger Shepherd

Published a few years back, In Love With These Times is Roger Shepherd’s memoir-come-history of the Flying Nun record label. It’s taken me an age to get around to reading and reviewing it. Never let it be said that everythingsgonegreen is anything other than current and relevant …

There’s a sense that Roger Shepherd is something of an accidental hero in the Flying Nun story. The notion that he founded the label - on the whiff of an oily rag - primarily to release the highly original music being made by local bands he was enjoying live, and regularly networking with as a record shop employee, makes for a wonderful backstory. It becomes quite clear he did so on little more than a whim, without much thought, forward planning, or finance. At the outset at least.

All of these things would come back to haunt Shepherd, and his label, at various junctures over the course of the next three decades. Yet, in many respects, it was Shepherd’s determination to trust his instinct, to embrace the DIY ethic, aligned with a fierce sense of independence, that came to define the label. It was precisely the same modus operandi employed by the many bands that eventually benefitted from his risk-taking. 

The Clean, The Chills, The Gordons, and the rest, would all have existed regardless, sure, but it seems doubtful anyone associated with the conservative major labels of early 1980s New Zealand would have had the vision to release their music. Shepherd grasped their (collective) appeal immediately and made sure the rest of the country - and eventually, more curious or enlightened individuals globally - would get to hear the music. 

Shepherd pays credit to the crucial roles played by the likes of Chris Knox and Doug Hood, among many others, along the way. He writes extensively about the label’s evolution, the rise, particularly through the fledgling years of the 1980s, the relocation to Auckland, the fall, the (forced) financial and artistic compromises, the post-millennium rebirth, plus his own travels, and his personal battles with addiction and mental health.

Shepherd writes passionately and candidly about all of that stuff. He’s a decent writer, an engaging and witty mine of information throughout. 

And while the guts of the Flying Nun story may have been told (elsewhere) before, it’s never been told with the same level of insight and colour as provided here by Shepherd. Just as you’d expect from the man with the most intimate insider knowledge of the label. And it’s this level of detail, the highs and lows associated with that, alongside the personal anecdotes and the frequent self-deprecating stories around his own journey as a man - as opposed to a reluctant businessman - that make In Love With These Times the definitive account. 

Recommended. 

Here's Shepherd’s own account of writing the book, as published by Audioculture:

https://www.audioculture.co.nz/scenes/writing-in-love-with-these-times

Emulsifier on AudioCulture

The blog may have been neglected recently but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy with other projects. Here's one of them, a profile I wrote for NZ music history site AudioCulture, looking back at the life and times of early Nineties Wellington funk/rock/party merchants Emulsifier ... another one of those lost-between-the-cracks stories I felt compelled to expand upon.

Special thanks to Adam Bennett (aka King Ad B) and John Martin (Juan V) for sharing their time and some laughs. Click the link below.

AudioCulture on Emulsifier

Blog Update: Taking Stock ...

Okay, so once again I've broken The Golden Rule of Blogging by failing to come up with regular fresh content. Not even a short post or two to keep things ticking over. No surprise then, that page hits and views have fallen right away. It's the way things go when you've lost your blogging mojo – or to put it another way, when you've been unrepentantly lazy.

Only that's probably not true. Lazy is such a cruel and unforgiving word ;-)

It's actually been somewhat chaotic up here on the top floor of everythingsgonegreen towers in recent weeks, and for one reason or another, I just haven't been able to post very much. There was a rather pressing deadline to meet with the day-job, there’s been a lot of family-related travel, and a whole raft of other real life matters to contend with.

I have actually been writing – there’s a feature and two album reviews in the latest issue of NZ Musician, and I’ve just completed a major project on early Nineties Wellington band Emulsifier, which involved a lot of research, and I plan to submit that work for publication on AudioCulture. I’ve also got a couple of other little AudioCulture fires on the backburner, which I hope to get back to eventually.

But mostly I’ve been going out and enjoying life, rather than sitting in front of the PC. Not just in terms of emerging from the obligatory winter hibernation, with summer just around the corner, but also in terms of trying to achieve that much coveted work/life balance thing that all the experts tell us is one of the keys to happiness in life (ya what? - Ed).

In terms of music and nights out (my default discretionary leisure time activities), I’ve been learning to go out and enjoy gigs sober (gasp); something I would not have dared to imagine five years ago, and in fact, something I would not have thought possible, even as recently as two years ago.

Last Saturday I attended Bodega’s celebration of all things UK ’79 – with cover bands Splintered In Her Head (who had an old friend of mine making his debut on drums), Wazzo Clash, and Permanence, each giving us their own take on tunes from The Cure, The Clash, and Joy Division respectively. I had one beer the entire night, and while I might not have been the life of the party exactly, I still caught up with a number of old friends, and felt all that much better (for my sobriety) the following morning. I mean, who knew it could be that easy?

I’ve also been getting to wear my “proud Dad” hat quite a bit over the past few weeks – as we approach the end of the 2015 academic/school year. My eldest daughter has just graduated high school (year 13, or 7^th form, as my generation knew it) as the recipient of her college’s major music prize, The Kapiti Cup, for her “outstanding contribution to music composition”. Next year she’ll attend Victoria University in Wellington, to commence a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Psychology and Music Composition. Meanwhile my youngest daughter completed her year (year 11) with a first place in Dance, and a second successive (invite-only) appearance at “the Nationals” (a workshop/dance scholarship awards weekend). To say I’m proud of their achievements in the arts is something of an understatement.

So blogging has tended to take a back seat for a while, and everythingsgonegreen has been rather neglected. I suppose if I’m being truthful, it could have been a lot worse. At one point a month or so ago, I seriously considered taking the blog offline altogether. I felt like taking a long break from all forms of social media, but worried about losing momentum – or whatever little blogging momentum I had! … while in terms of my other vices, Facebook and Twitter, well, let’s just say my “fear of missing out” got the better of me again.

So here I am. Feeling refreshed and ready to resume semi-regular posts again. I think. Partly motivated (possibly only temporarily motivated) by some unexpected positive feedback I received last week, when a complete stranger contacted me via email to say how much she enjoyed a blogpost I originally wrote some three years ago. It was one of those self-indulgent grassroots scene/nostalgia-type posts I enjoy writing so much, one where I was really just documenting something low key and niche, mainly for my own benefit. Which made the feedback all the more surprising (and special). It was exactly the positive reinforcement I needed at a time when I’d all but given up on the idea that my writing was actually reaching anybody.

Sometimes it's just the little things. Yes, it’s true that I write this stuff for me, as a form of catharsis in many cases (like this post), but it’s always good to know that others are getting something from it as well. So thanks Melody, you rock!

Right, back to the music …

Over the coming weeks – as a lead up to the end of the year, when everythingsgonegreen will highlight its “albums of 2015” – I plan to post some clips, a dozen or so, of the biggest or most-listened-to tunes of my year. The songs that meant the most to me over the calendar year. Songs that helped shape my year. An annual “festive dozen”, if you will. I’ll try to mix things up a little with that, to cover off the various genres I enjoy.

See you again soon (but no promises!) …

Bourke remembers Brazier on AudioCulture …

There has been a lot written about Graham Brazier over the past week. Brazier died on September 4 and all forms of the media here in New Zealand have been awash with obituaries and tributes. Which is fair enough, Brazier died a true icon of the local music scene and his music touched many lives.

Brazier's solo debut

For me personally, his startling early Eighties solo hit ‘Billy Bold’ stands as his finest moment, by some distance, but beyond that I probably couldn’t be classed as a fan. I do have a particularly blurry memory of seeing Brazier perform live at what would have been either the Albert or Lion Tavern in Palmerston North sometime around 1982 or 1983. It won’t have been with Hello Sailor (I was never really a fan of that band either) and it seems most likely it was a Legionnaires gig rather than anything else (solo, etc). I can’t really be sure.

Anyway, as such, since I was only lukewarm on his music, I’m not about to embark on any sort of clumsy obituary. Rather, I want to direct you to a fine piece of writing by local music historian Chris Bourke over at the AudioCulture website. You can feel the love and the passion fair dripping off the page:

Chris Bourke profiles Graham Brazier here 

R.I.P Graham Brazier 1952-2015

The Soul Mine Revisited

A couple of years ago I wrote a series of posts (under the Retail Therapy banner) about a handful of Record Shops that had, in one way or another, been a huge part of my life at various points along the way.

Included in that series was a post on Wellington’s The Soul Mine (1985-2006) which neatly framed my relationship with that particular shop. That post turned out to be one of the blog’s most popular in terms of page hits (even attracting, gasp, some comments), but I always felt that it was incomplete and lacking somewhat in terms of wider reach.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Tony Murdoch, owner of The Soul Mine, to talk some more about the shop and I used the guts of that conversation for a piece which I submitted to AudioCulture, a widely read website dedicated to documenting the history of popular culture in New Zealand – whether it be people, bands, venues, or “scenes”. Murdoch kindly supplied photos, flyers, and quotes, I added some words, I deleted some others, and we ended up with this (click here to read more about The Soul Mine on AudioCulture).

Dix remembers Bruno on AudioCulture ...

I quite often use everythingsgonegreen to link to my own work published elsewhere but very rarely do I feel the need to blog or re-publish the work of another author. Sometimes though I come across a piece of writing so compelling I feel I have to share it. Whether it’s something I think will be of specific interest to regular readers of this blog, or just something I wish to link to purely for my own future ease of access.

A few weeks back the 20^th anniversary of the death of iconic Kiwi actor and musician Bruno Lawrence passed without much fanfare. To New Zealanders of a certain generation - my own, those of us growing up in the 1970s and 1980s - Lawrence’s work was pretty much everywhere and he was an unsung local hero for many of us. Not only was he an inspiration as a musician, as the leading man behind Blerta or as the drummer for pub-rockers The Crocodiles, I believe his lead performances in movies such as ‘Smash Palace’ and ‘The Quiet Earth’ established Lawrence as New Zealand’s first genuinely world-class actor (alongside Sam Neill, perhaps).

As close as biographer Roger Booth was to Bruno Lawrence the man, I’ve always thought Booth’s ‘Bruno’ was a something of a bore to read, and it failed to do any real justice to Lawrence’s otherwise wildly entertaining life story. A couple of times I’ve tried to read it all the way through but Booth’s account is rather sterile, and each time I’ve faltered, putting the book aside, and opting to read something else (anything else) instead.
 
Finally though, over at AudioCulture, thanks to 'Stranded In Paradise' author John Dix, we have ‘I Remember Bruno’, published a week ago, a 4000-odd word offering/profile on Lawrence - and his friendship with Dix - that explores some of the less public, and rather more intimate or personal aspects of his life. It’s a wonderful piece of writing by someone who was obviously very close to Lawrence. Dix’s passion for his subject fair drips off the page. I recommend you click on the link below and have a read:

AudioCulture: I Remember Bruno by John Dix

Going Going Gone ... reflections on 2014

So here we are in 2015 already, and once again I’m running a little late. Where every other self-respecting music blog on the planet has long since signed off 2014 with some sort of “best of” list, everythingsgonegreen has once again been found wanting.

Not so much on purpose or anything quite as strategic as that. I guess I just decided the short break from my day job also signalled the chance to step back from discretionary night job stuff like writing blog-posts. I just decided to do nothing for a fortnight, and besides, there was cricket to be had.

And there was other stuff involving food, and drink. Lots of drink. And it’s been hot, which makes you thirsty. So you drink more. And before you know it, you’re face down on the carpet doing slug impersonations, humiliating yourself in front of visitors on a daily basis.

 

exiting the Eighties, zombie-fied NYE 2014

And NOTHING gets done.

Am I right? …

Oh. Just me then.

All carpet surfing aside, it’s not as though I haven’t been using the time constructively. I’ve been thinking about that annual list thing. It’ll be the usual everythingsgonegreen effort (or lack thereof) – not so much a “best of 2014” album list but an offering of those “most played in my house” during 2014. You know the drill.

But I think that post is a few days away yet and I’m back here temporarily only to make promises, and to do that thing I do when I just want to keep the blog ticking over – to post something about nothing and everything.

Getting reacquainted with the shagpile also had me reflecting on a whole lot of other 2014-related shenanigans. A year tinged with so much irony I just gave up and rolled over to it by the end (possibly quite literally – kissing those woolly strands).

The year I didn’t resolve to stop smoking proved to be the year I finally did. The year I decided to embrace healthier lifestyle choices found me visiting Wellington hospital more times than I had in the previous twenty years. For a variety of reasons. Most tragically on one occasion, when I visited only to say goodbye to a good friend just before they turned his life support off … R.I.P. Ciaran aka ‘El Presidente’.

There was a load of other depressing and sad stuff too, some family illness, but hey, let’s not do that here. There was overseas travel and at one point, my first ever exposure to a luxury remote island resort. Actually, given that I worked in hospitality for the best part of a decade, that’s perhaps a sorry admission in itself.

There were some writing-related highs: I got paid to write, and my Audioculture piece on Wellington nightclubs in the 80s was that popular site’s most read contribution of the year (!), clocking up over 5,000 hits within 12 hours of being published.

From a personal perspective, that’s going to be hard to top in 2015.

And there was the NZ Musician thing – seeing my work in glossy print, and getting the chance to chat with a few seriously talented local heroes.

If not reward for perseverance over style, then at the very least the chance to finally put those years of drinking in dark smelly clubs to some semblance of reasonable use.

So goodbye 2014, and a happy New Year to you, patient blog reader, I’ll be right back with that album list just as soon as I pick myself up off the floor …

 

From the Doctor to the DMC - the rise of Wellington clubland in the 80s

I wrote a little bit about the AudioCulture website when it was first launched back in June 2013. Since then the "noisy library" has taken on a life of its own to become an incredible resource. Not only is it archiving information about all of the key bands, people, and events that make up the rich and vibrant history of music and pop culture in New Zealand, it's also digging deeper to look at some of the more regional and peripheral scenes. The sort of pre-internet era stuff that is otherwise in danger of falling between the cracks. And that's where history nuts like me come in.

Having already documented (for the blog) the strange phenomenon that was the early Eighties nightclubbing scene in little old Palmerston North - a blogpost that is fast closing in on 4,000 individual page hits (go figure) - I always intended to do something similar to cover off the Wellington scene of the same era (having moved to the capital mid decade). An approach from AudioCulture to do just that was the proverbial rocket I needed to get the project beyond the "great idea" stage and turn it into something rather more tangible - safe in the knowledge that anything published on AudioCulture will reach a far bigger readership than the blog itself can attract.

One of the main problems with attempting to provide an overview of events - a full decade's worth - all these years on is that stuff gets missed. Or gets lost in the mist. Important stuff. And everyone who was there at the time will recall things differently. For the AudioCulture piece, which amounted to some 4000 words, I stopped short of interviewing key personalities within the scene. Had I decided to colour in the framework and source quotes, I would have ended up with a book, or at least 30,000 words. So it reads as one man's perspective only and I left out far more than I was able to include - for a variety of reasons. Anyway, have a read (link below) or just enjoy some photos and flyers ...

 

From the Doctor to the DMC - the rise of Wellington clubland in the 80s

 

 

 

AudioCulture

AudioCulture is a brand new website documenting the rich history of pop music and wider pop culture in New Zealand. If you’re a fan of NZ music you’ll know about it already – unless, of course, you’re locked up in a padded cell somewhere, sans computer and have no contact with the outside world. Or live in Whakarongo, which is pretty much the same thing.

The website is the brainchild of longtime NZ music industry identity Simon Grigg, and it brings together a quality set of knowledgeable writers to document the good and the great of this thing we often refer to by the catch-all “Kiwi music”.

We’ve had some great books on the subject over the years – John Dix’s bible ‘Stranded In Paradise’, Chris Bourke’s ‘Blue Smoke’, Grant Smithies’ excellent ‘Soundtrack’, and most recently Simon Sweetman’s thoroughly enjoyable ‘On Song’. But apart from a few key individuals keeping the flame burning online with independent blogs (such as the sadly now defunct Mysterex), we’ve never before had a website that digs as deep and covers as much territory as AudioCulture.

Congratulations and a big thank you to all involved in AudioCulture (aka “the noisy library of New Zealand music”), it looks terrific, it’s a wonderful resource for history boffins, and the best thing about it is that it will only continue to get better ... if any everythingsgonegreen reader hasn’t already done so, I strongly recommend you take a squizz:

AudioCulture