Friday Night Local: Shihad - Pacifier

Hey, and welcome to another May, another NZ Music Month. You know the drill. There's gonna be a viidjio.

And look, it's not a very imaginative pick this week. Another Shihad video, another one from The General Electric and another single. But dammit, it's a great one from one of our best bands who are getting a lot of airplay at the Monkeyhouse this week. I want to play this live one day.

Here's Shihad's Pacifier, recorded in 1999 and apparently written for Jon Toogood's friend Aaron Tokona of Weta/Cairo Knife Fight.  A bit of a family favourite, and even quite playable on a ukulele:

It's also a cool video, even if this one really needs to be in high definition. Yes, it's a Clockwork Orange pastiche, a bit like the Blur one, or the Rob Zombie one, but different because it's ours.

That's all I have, really. See you next Friday with another video!

 

Friday Night Local: Shona Laing - 'Soviet Snow' (1987)

Let's go back to the Eighties. The mid-Eighties. The Cold War's not yet over, and we don't really trust those Russians, but we also don't want to go to war with them because what would follow would be a Very Bad Thing for the entire world. This dread of brinksmanship and the possibletipping point into nuclear oblivion is seeded throughout a lot of creative works from this era - even music. Even here in little old, Nuclear Free (tm) New Zealand.

Soviet Snow hails from Shona Laing's big comeback album South (1987); this version is a revamp of the earlier one on South's predecessor, Genre. In the time between albums the Cold War has lingered, perhaps a little less worryingly than the early 80s, but other, equally worrying events have unfolded.

At the time of its release I took the song's title literally, being aware of panic across Europe of fallout drifting with weather currents across Europe and as far as Ireland following the catastrophe at Chernobyl. Laing's song of course was composed before the reactor meltdown, but the incident allows a second reading of the song's chorus and, if I might be so bold, grounds it a little:

Now we're wide awake, the world's aware
Radiation over Red Square
Creeping off to cross Roman roads
Fear of freezing in the Soviet snow
One eye on the winter - oh, just a hint of Soviet snow.

So there's that, at least.

The video is pure Eighties - all big caps CG text buzz words and video montages. And of course, there's the Soviet and Russian imagery and iconography, none of it demystifying the Soviet Union of the Eighties, but anchoring it in a jumble of popular associations, a visual word association game. Laing is a far cry from her long-haired, freckled teenaged Seventies self with spiky, cropped hair (the infamous 'femullet' is, as far as I can remember, only a feature of the video of her bigger hit (Glad I'm Not a) Kennedy), her face intruding from angles, like Rodchenko's Lilya Brik. One more single, Drive Baby Drive and Laing's career would shift again, back out of centre stage; but this song at least freezes a moment of Southern Hemisphere pre-Glasnost anxiety, two years before the Wall would fall and the thaw would begin.

Friday Night Local: Neil Finn - She Will Have Her Way (1998)

God I love the Nineties. It's close to being the last decade I ever took notice of the pop charts, regularly watched daily music channels (initially the local Juice TV channel over breakfast, but later MTV in the UK when it had a brief life here in NZ), and when buying a CD happened more than once or twice a year for me. You never think that this sort of thing will leave you, and for some of my friends it hasn't entirely, but for me it has. The Nineties are now for me a golden age of grunge, Britpop, a glam revival, electronica, and ready-access to alternative and local music.  New Zealand music was begining to find its feet in a new way in the Nineties - Flying Nun had become part of the Establishment, and local artists were begining to get international recognition. Were were, in a small way, as it seemed on those music channels at least, in amongst it - part of the conversation.

All of which has little to do with the fortunes of one Neil Finn, whose music career in 1998 was already twenty years old through Split Enz and Crowded House, and for whom a first solo album at forty would seem a curious prospect. I've not heard anything more from its parent album Try Whistling This, but 'She Will Have Her way' is a personal favourite, with reliably enchanting Finn harmonies between chorus and verse, and some lovely production, not to mention a very infectious "to doot doot doo!" vocal refrain that makes this song a winner with Jet Jr at bedtime.   
The video is a hoot, too. A fun play on Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock - both as old as Finn himself, but also somewhat redolant of Nineties pop culture as well, to me. In film andTV weird science and UFOs were making a comeback with a mini Roswell craze, Independence Day and of course the runaway success of The X-Files. I'm drifting, and this is a topic I may return to shortly anyway. In the mean-time here's Finn's goofy unlikely wooing song, slightly delayed from its intended ANZAC eve posting, but better late than never.

Good Friday Night Local: Easter Edition.

Tonight I wasn't gong to do a Friday Night Local, I was going to post about Easter instead. But then inspiration struck and I thought to myself, as they say in Mexico: 'Why Not Have Both?' Welcome then to a very special post.

I am not a religious Simian. Oh, for a while in my past I definitely was; and then, almost overnight, I wasn't. A story for another time, perhaps. Despite this, I do find myself reflecting on the origins of Easter a this time of year. What a surpirse, you might think. Funny old world.

Here in NZ Easter comes at the begining of autumn, so any sort of hissiness about the appropriation of traditional seasonal festivites by the Christian church sounds about as silly as complaining the same of Halloween or Christmas down here. Our seasonal festival calendar just isn't working out being project-managed from the other side of the world. But here we are with Easter anyway, the spring festival at the end of summer.

In the Simian household we've settled into some traditions around Easter. You can't guarantee the weather will be good, but it's harvest time for the garden, and so the tomatoes are coming in, the bok choi is being picked over daily for bastard cabbage white butterflies, and planting for spring (dill, garlic maybe, broad beans) will start soon. Feijoas are in season, and after a delightful Easter in Rotorua a few years ago, they've become something of an Easter treat for us now - muffins and crumbles alive alive-o! nd of course, though summer is no time to be scoffing fruit cake, April in the southern hemisphere is quite fine for tucking into hot crossed buns, true comfort food. With one day left of daylight saving I've started fixing up some dodgy bits of paintwork around the house exterior. The spirit was willing over summer - it really was.

Let's talk about the video, though. ere's Shihad's Stations, from their debut LP Churn, now a sprightly 21 years old. Crikey. I do like this song, but even at the time I didn't receive the song's title as anything of religious significance (it was the future Mrs Simian who took me aside to tell me, you see); and so the video with its Christ (played by Headless Chickens' Bevan Sweeney) walking the stations of the cross seems to match the title of the song, if not the lyrics themselves. Anyway, as far as I can recall, this is the most Easter-y of all NZ music videos, so why not?


Have a happy and safe Easter, everyone!

Friday Night Local: Sharon O'Neill - 'Words' (1979)

Whups, I may have forgotten a couple of Fridays.

ANYWAY, when last we met I issued a challenge to readers on Twitter to nominate a Sharon O'Neill song for the next Friday Night Local post. How did that turn out? Variably.

I can only conclude that because O'Neill is such a significant figure in the not-small arena of Kiwi women in rock, that simply coming up wth consensus was just too darned hard. Guanolad nominated 'Physical Favour's, but lost his bottle on it. Frankly, the late Eighties are not O'Neill's happy hunting ground, and I really think the other end of the decade is where her star shone brightest. On that note, Jamas sggested 'Maxine' - ah, but which video? The Australian one or the NZ one?  Answer: the Australian one is the more recognisable, with its quasi-narrative about the ill-fated streetwalker, but I prefer the local version. It's familiar without being overplayed - and 'Maxine' got a lot of play on both sides of the Tasman.

That was it for the punters, besides occasional commentor Tim who wanted a Shona Laing number (sir, hang your head in shame), and to be honest I thought I'd see Paul S chime in with the theme from 'Smash Palace', a great opener to Roger Donaldson's early masterpiece of kiwi mateship. 'Asian Paradise' has its fans... I'll leave that there. Here's mine instead:


'Words' is from O'Neill's debut and frankly, I can't hear it wthout wanting to sing along, surely the mark of a great pop song. Her voice doesn't have the husky, Christine McVie sound of some of the aforementioned tracks, but melodically it's very sharp, with some great backing vocals (check out the number of mic stands in that video!), and hell, any upbeat song that opens with the line "let me out like the new blood at the slaughter." is worth listening to I reckon.

Friday Night Local : Jean-Paul Sartre Experience - 'I Like Rain' (1987)

The nights are getting darker earlier, the mornings stay gloomy for longer. There's a slight bruising to the clouds, and afternoons have the watery light of sun through old glass. Yes, Autumn is finally here.

It's not time for winter songs yet, though - oh no! I have some sweet little mid-year ditties to come yet, but in the mean-time we've had quite the day today with- shock me, some rain! This is a big thing, because for overseas readers, growing parts of the country are in drought or near-drought conditions, and even poor Sticky Al has lost a tree or two in his country abode to simply not enough water. So it's not all fun in the sun this year, and as more of an indoor Simian I for one celebrated some change in the weather with today's rather heavy precipitation, and what it might mean for our poor garden.

So this video says it all, albeit with milk bottle top foil cutouts, some easy-to-learn shape throwing moves, and a handy bottle of fabric softener in the first verse. No David Yetton here, as this is presumably during his OE away from the band, but the requisite amateur Flying Nun look and daggy JPSE humour is there. It's a fun, audience-friendly song, as was road-tested by my band during a Southland tour many years ago. Grab your gumboots and enjoy!


POstscript: Next week for a change I'm crowdsourcing this puppy with some audience participation. The subject will be the one and only Sharon O'Neill - but which video should I play? Answers below, or on twitter, hashtag #FridayNightLocal.

Friday Night Local: David Kilgour - 'You Forget' (1992)

Ah, summer’s lease is nearly at an end here in New Zealand, and already with the mornings growing darker and the breeze cooling by the day the early sun-bleached weeks of 2015 are becoming a memory. We’ve not had a lot of rainfall over the country – worryingly little, in fact, with several areas including North Otago and South Canterbury (locations of the Simian ancestral pile) declared drought zones – so the image of your New Zealand summer and its blue sparkling waters and blessed friendly sun seem a little far removed at present. Let’s get them back for a bit – all the way from 1992.

David Kilgour’s solo debut was an album remarkable for its lateness. For the best part of the previous decade Kilgour had spent his career alternately providing signature riffs and hooks for The Clean, The Great Unwashed and latterly his own trio Stephen. By the late 80s he was a quiet member of the alternative music establishment, while the reunion and resurgence of The Clean with brother Hamish and Robert Scott providing a new lease of life and to my generation of students at least, a new generation audience. When it arrived Here Come the Cars with its faux-Dylan cover portrait was like the proverbial beam of golden sun, jangly, poppy, melodic and upbeat.


David Kilgour’s part in The Clean was always the most significant to me, his guitar riding over sometimes weedy vocals or leaden one-two drum falls, the eccentric dancer in a very Dunedin drunken reel. I adore the Clean, but Kilgour’s solo showing in Cars, as well as the likes of Sugarmouth and The Far Now broaden his talents even farther, with some lovely piano and sensitive production pushing his more melodic songs further forward. For a while it seemed Flying Nun finally had its first real solo star, and 'You Forget' is probably when Kilgour shone brightest. It's one of my favourite summer songs, from one of my favourite guitarists, and it takes me immediately back to the summer of 1992 and 1993, which was a very good summer indeed.

Here he is, with surfer car, a sparkling Auckland Harbour and Rangitoto, and an enviable collection of colourful footwear, to send summer on its way.

Friday Night Local: Minuit - 'Aotearoa' (2012)

Happy St Andrew's day, everyone!- whups, no, I'll do that tomorrow I think.

This is a quick post anyway, to get a few words in before the month expires and to allay the fears or at least one individual that I haven't fully slipped off the radar. I am in fact ankle-deep in plastic and tree bark, painting up my Mirkwood Elves, but more on that for another time, as they say. Let's do a belated Friday Night Local instead - and hopefully my worried reader won't think the song choice is something of a set-up...

Now, when Mrs Simian and I were new to Wellington we used to entertain our visiting guests from outside town by taking them to the national museum, Te Papa where they could feast their peepers on the tat and taonga of this young little country, the highlight usually being 'Golden Days', a sort of mini tableau history of New Zealand as a country set in a mock antiques shop cinema replete with animated curios choreographed with the action onscreen. We stopped taking friends to this some time ago, because the exhibit was never updated, and 'ends' in the now wide-eyed halcyon days of the late 1990s and, well, it's a bit tired and twee to the converted now.

"And if the past's a distant land
Maybe there is no rhyme or reason

And if we salvage what we can

You and me."

Minuit's video for Aotearoa, off their third album, the wonderfully-titled Find Me Before I Die a Lonely Death dot Com, could have repeated the mistakes of Te Papa's hoary old nostalgiafest, opening as it does with some familiar images to a local. There's a bit that's familiar in the song itself, I could add - the keyboard line in particular strongly recalls Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill, but the rumbling bass and the trip-hop drums carry it through well enough. The cleverness instead unfolds slowly.

Past a first full minute of largely black and white chronological images recalling the birth of a country and the usual suspects - Kate Sheppard, Earnest Rutherford, ANZACs on parade, Ed Hillary, Aunt Daisy, to a gradual splash of colour in tragedy and public outcry - the Wahine, Vietnam protests, Bastion Point and the land hikoi, the 1981 Springbok Tour, the Rainbow Warrior, the Tino Rangatiratanga flag and then Dame Whina Cooper weeping followed by... a child dressed as Batman?

"And yes it's true we're very young
And we have sticks and stones and bruises
Can we undo what has been done
Is this the way destiny chooses?"

Past the 1:30 mark history is quickly superceded and the present dominates the rest of the song, matching singer Ruth Carr's rallying call "It's you and I-I-I-I-I." Here's Aotearoa New Zealand as a fresh landscape, and its people represented by young, physical, happy, optimistic faces in a land of adventure and aroha. Minuit's fans submitted photos of themselves to create a montage of (allegedly) nearly a thousand faces, emblematic of a multicultural, self-aware country - stranded by geography, but one in which I am daily thankful I live. The stark contrast between the known and the famous of the past, and the suddenly anonymous present and future is a striking gesture, and though I swear it's not parochialism it gets me every time I watch this video. And I could swear that at 2:55 I can see Dr Morgue, though it's probably a doppelganger. Still, you know what they say about degrees of separation down here...

 Minuit performed their farewell gig and called it a day here in Wellington a mere few weeks ago, adding to the musical legacy of the little city of Nelson that already includes the likes of Sharon O'Neill and, er, Courtney Love. I've tried - a little - but I've not been a fan, but that's no criticism. Minuit were a nuggety little band who survived tours, illnesses and a fickle local industry to clock in a respectable number of albums, some overseas airplay and an enviable and frankly good-looking fanbase. So good on ya, Minuit, and all the best for future endeavours.

Friday Night Local: Skeptics - 'Agitator' (1987)

This post comes a little late tonight as ths evening the Simian family were down at the waterfront following Wellington's Light Trail, a rather fun collection of international light installations, some animated, some fluorescent, some interactive, and many doubled in the reflection of a black, glasslike harbour. Gorgeous - but never mind the crowds...

It's the last Friday of the southern winter-we're nearly into spring, folks! And to mark the cold season's passing, here's one of the starkest, discordant, contemplative and gorgeous songs Palmerston North ever created. It's not going to be for everyone, but I'd suggest sticking around to the end if you can. No other song comes close to evoking the three bleak months of an Antipodean winter, with the sun farthest from the soil and the southerly ripping straight up from the Antarctic.



There aren't too many Skeptics video out there, and besides this, probably their most well-known and most infamous is AFFCO, which surely ranks alongside The Smith's Meat is Murder for warts-and-all coverage of what goes on inside your friendly local abattoir.

Despite the sensationalism, and maybe the dated sound of the sampling and drums (not to mention the dancing of Skeptics' late, great David D'ath), Skeptics were an important Flying Nun band, influencing the likes of Headless Chickens, Bailter Space and even non-Nun acts like Lung and Shihad, who, as mentioned in an earlier post, consciously doff their hats to this song in one of their own. In the last years of my own band back in the day Skeptics informed the big sound of my friend Victor's band Age of Dog. And so this one's for Victor, Piers and Tane, wherever they may be.

And here's to spring!

Friday Night Local: Graham Brazier - 'Fight' (1986)

As I'm typing this I'm watching Queen City Rocker, known outside NZ as Tearaway. It's not a particularly flashy movie, and the song below, Graham Brazier's promotional video for the movie, isn't either. But at sixteen the video and the trailer for the movie were enough to convince me that I had to see it some day, and Reader, today is that day.

It's earnest in its intentions, including some assured and un-selfconscious portrayals of a mingled Maori, Pakeha and Samoan gang culture, but it's not aged well. 1980s Auckland is very much a different country, populated by younger versions of some of New Zealand's best TV actors including Roy Billing, Peter Bland, Michael Moriarty and the late Liddy Holloway, whose son Joel Tobeck has an uncredited role in the movie as well. Seemingly inspired by real events and produced not long after the Queen Street Riots, it references a very different time, and boy has it dated. Still, there's local music royalty all through this, from ex-Gurlz singer and future When The Cat's Away vocalist Kim Willoughby's female lead (I had such a crush...), Willoughby's future partner and former Dude Ian 'Tex Pistol' Morris in the soundtrack, a cameo by Brazier and the rest of Hello Sailor cameoing as in-movie band 'Nite Attack' (the much-missed Dave McCartney also provided the soundtrack), along with Ardijah, and there are snippets of NZ punk bands No Tag and electro-avant garde Flying Nun outfit Fetus Productions. And the riot scenes are pretty well done.


Somewhere out there is a cassette of my band's earliest jam sessions in our bassist's parents' garage (he had the soundtrack), and me in the mix gamely trying to replicate Harry Lyon's urgent stacatto guitar work from Fight. Ironically, a similar, slower riff appears in the National Party's campaign ad, launched just this week. Critics were quick to point out the similarity to Eminem's Lose Yourself - but maybe the ad's Australian music maestros sourced their inspiration from closer to home?

Friday Night Local: Headless Chickens, 'Mr Moon' (1991)

A quick post tonight, and it's dedicated to two sterling chaps: firstly to my friend Dave, who I know likes this song a lot (a Happy Birthday for last week!), and secondly to Mr Moon himself, Jim Moon of Hypnogoria fame, who never fails to bring a smile in his wonderful podcast series...
Director: Jonathan Ogilvie
Film Archive
I had to hunt for this video, wanting the Fiona MacDonald piano fade-out of the music video version of the song and not the single or album mixes - inevitably, it's via MTV Australia rather than NZonScreen or YouTube, which is at least telling of the Chickens' Trans-Tasman success at their mid-life peak [link replaced, cheers even-bigger-HC-fan Jamas!] Have a good weekend, folks!

Friday Night Local: Look Blue Go Purple, 'Circumspect Penelope'

More women in rock! More Dunedin Sound! More Eighties! Yes, it's a trifecta.

Look Blue Go Purple deserved more press, and better press. That rare thing, an all-woman group in an industry - a scene, even, which was dominated by young white guys with guitars and baggy jerseys. While the likes of The Clean, the Stones, Doublehappys and Verlaines were hapy to fill a room with squally guitar sounds and loose, alternative power pop, LBGP came across as a little more studied, a little more psychedelic in influence (the literary aspect is evident here, as also in later songs - Virgil's Aeneid inspires Winged Rumour, and Hiawatha borrows its lyrics from Longfellow's epic poem). The difference is refreshing, as is their choice of instrumentation - debut EP Bewitched from which this single hails is notable not only for Norma O'Malley's keyboards, but also the odd jab of flute in As Does the Sun. And, of course, there are five strong personalities here in the writing and composition, and a shared creative spark that makes for an interesting looking video below as well as some allegedly wild gigs back in the day. Penelope seems to be Kath Webster's creation, but equally strong songs from Denise Roughan (I Don't Want You Anyway) and O'Malley (In Your Favour) rightly endure. And there's Cactus Cat, too - but everyone picks that one, so here's my favourite today, filmed once again on the ubiquitous Otago Peninsula (maybe through the car windows you can see a young Marty Phillipps filming the Pink Frost video? Nah, probably not)


I previously had ambitions on devotng a longer post to LBGP here, but apart from a few asides to future projects (Roughan went on to be a 3D, Kathy Bull a Cyclops, O'Malley a Chug and Webster now edits the NZ Automobile Association magazine) there's little mroe to say. LBGP had their three Flying Nun EPs (Bewitched, LBGPEP2, This Is This) compiled onto a CD in the early 90s, but there's at least an EP's worth of uncollected tracks to be found on You Tube, including a rather good cover of Buffy St Marie's Coedine, and if nothing else This Is This desperately needs remastering. Fingers crossed, maybe.

Friday Night Local: Chris Knox, 'My Dumb Luck'

Now, there have been a few upsets to a rough schedule in this Friday Night Music column, and today's entry is yet another. I didnd't intend to return to Chris Knox's music so soon after posting the Tall Dwarfs video a fortnight ago, and yet I didn't intend to go all J-Pop lat week either. This week was to have been either another female or all-female act, or a non-Flying Nun band from yesteryear, but instead I'm putting up another favourite video from one of Invercargill's finest former inhabitants.

My Dumb Luck is from Knox's 1988 solo sophomore effort Seizure, and is a typical track from the record (albeit a favourite song as well). I love the animation - it's simple, witty and creative, which are three things I also admire about Knox's compositions, as well as video and song here sharing a cyclical pattern. To this day I'm torn between appreciating Knox as a solo artist and for his collaborations, particularly with Alec Bathgate as the 'Dwarfs. By 1988 Knox's style was working its way into something of a groove, with buzzing guitars and looped percussion that wasn't a million miles from some Dwarfs songs (say, Crush), while the Dwarfs tracks remained more eclectic, sometimes more inventive and less direct, sometimes less accessible. I still like them both, although at the time I recall swinging fro Knox quickly and back to the duo just as soon. Was it the emergence of Knox's most famous solo song Not Given Lightly - a rueful, slightly cynical pitch at mainstream success (which did come after some time)? Perhaps. I never bought another Knox album after Seizure, with the exception of a cassette of Polyphoto Duck-Shaped Pain and Gum (whose stand-out track Inside Story was nearly a candidate for inclusion here - it's just not as fun as Luck) and the tribute album Stroke, featuring Knox's past work solo, as half of Tall Dwarfs or as frontman for The Enemy and Toy Love interpreted by his friends, colleagues and devotees. It's an impressive set of songs, and a testament to a creative spark whose work in music, film, animation, writing and cartooning seems to have been all but curtailed by a series of strokes five years ago. And I'm only just now thinking about how much Knox has inspired me in nearly all of these areas since I discovered him in my teens.

I'm posting this because there is a crowdfunding campaign underway to collect Knox's visual works in book form, Grafix Knox, next year - it's a great idea and deserves a wider platform, and you can find out more here!

Friday Night Local: Doprah, 'Strange People' (2014)

I don't normally do requests, but this was suggested by Jamas this week and, well, it's probably the least apalling thing covered in recent reportage - particularly today of all days.

Doprah's video for 'Strange People' is apparently controversial, as Stuff.co.nz would have you believe or question or something. I dunno. Am I offended? Nope. Do I like the video? I like it the more I see it - and I quite like the music - a little bit Bjork, a little bit Fetus Productions, and that's not a bad thing. Perhaps Jamas will tune in here with his thoughts? (he has an alternative tune for the style depicted here, also a local act with a female singer, but the act's such a good pick I think I'll use something of theirs in a later post!)

Appropriating J Pop doesn't begin and end with this video, and if you're viewing this as appropriating another culture for kicks then I'd at least remind you of Gwen Stefani's Harajuku girls, who seemed to me to verge on novelty ornamentation for her videos. As for 'Strange People', it's eerie, it's discomforting, and it's perplexing - three things I could equally say about my reaction to kawaii - or J Pop. Seems like a pretty good match to me. Like!

Friday Night Local: Tall Dwarfs, 'Nothing's Going to Happen'

What, more dwarfs?

No, not really. It's Friday - time for another New Zealand video! And this one goes out to my big brother, who introduced me to Tall Dwarfs, had a D&D character (guess what race - go on) named after one of their EPs, and who eventually accompanied me to see them play on an especially brilliant night at Sammy's Cabaret in Dunedin, long ago in a New Zealand winter.

The memory cheats, of course. My teenage mind would have had it that a Tall Dwarfs video could be viewed on local music magazine show radio With pictures most weeks, but it seems the Dwarfs did very few videos at all, probably because the stop-motion nature of many of them would have challenged even a Flying Nun release schedule. But what we did get is strong stuff indeed, even in a low-fi sense. Tall Dwarfs proved to be a big influence on me and my friends, each in our own way, and its been fun to reconnect with the band after too many years' absence. Its difficult to pick a favourite - the mouldy orange peel faces of euthanasia anthem The Slide? The rumbling cut-up montage that accompanies Turning Brown and Torn in Two's anti-sexism polemic?  Or what about the loopy too-many-f-stops-in-a-suburban-basement Frankenstein shenanigans of The Brain That Wouldn't Die? All too tempting. We'll just have to revisit the works of the great and much-missed Chris Knox and his stalwart fellow ex-Toy Love-r Alec Bathgate some other time. Instead, let's go back to the beginning, back to the basics, back to the classics:



Oh, and Stu - that Wall of Dwarfs version you told me about back in '85 can be found here.

Friday Night Local: Shihad, 'Sport and Religion'

Sometimes this blog writes itself (not literally, that would be TOO useful). Sometimes it's a bit trickier.

Last week Shihad launched their new single Think You're So Free - yay! I really like it. Today the NZ Herald got the exclusive rights to the official video, but I don't like the NZ Herald. My job requires me to scan it every day, and you know what they say about familiarity. Plus, y'know - crap journalism, but I digress.

 Let's show a video! A Shihad video. Not the new one - it'll make it onto YouTube sometime, it's okay. An old one. Now, Shihad have a lot of good videos to go with their songs, and in honour of the new single (did I mention I really like it?) here's one of my favourites from one of my favourite singles of theirs.

So is it Stations? It's twenty-one years old, man! Deb's Night Out? Did it already! Home Again? Jamas did it already! Comfort Me? Well it's no Run, and Run's not a single. All the Young Fascists? Love it! And the album, but no, not that one. Beautiful Machine? No, that's Jet Junior's favourite song, which he used to call "Having a Cuddle" and rightly so. Ignite? Yeah, it's okay, but thta's not it. No, this one is off probably their biggest and best album, 1999's definitive The General Electric. Some very cool videos from that - the Matrix-esque title track, Wait and See, the Clockwork Orange-esque Pacifier... it's none of those. It's Sport and Religion, shot live in Wellington Town Hall in early 2000 during the triumphant General Electric Tour. It's a great, addictive singalong song, has an exciting video, and I love it. Because I'm in it, somewhere...

 

Friday Night Local: Strawpeople - Crying (1994), 'Taller than God' (1996)

I feel like hearing some smooth female vocals for a change, so it's a Strawpeople song tonight. Or is it?

Oh, Strawpeople. I didn't even know I was a fan - but it seems obvious now, I like at least one song from each of their albums, have enjoyed most of their singles from the early days with Merenia and Stephanie Tuavehi, the sultry Victoria Kelly and the precise Fiona McDonald. Vicarious is as much McDonald's album as it is Mark Tierney's and Paul Casserley's, and yet its predecessor, Broadcast's, Crying, is a ripper. Ladies - you're both pretty! Can't we stop this fighting?

So tonight, as it's ladies' night, here are two videos, one opener from each of the aforementioned albums. I coud have done other songs - like Jamas I rather enjoy Beautfiul Skin (Trick With a Knife is a personal fave, too), but maybe another night, eh?

Friday Night Local: The Datsuns, Harmonic Generator (2002)

Richard O'Brien of Rocky Horror fame, Mastermind Jon Preddle of Doctor Who research fame, alleged comedian Jesse Mulligan of TVNZ fame... Hamilton, is there nothing you can't impress us with when it comes to the arts?

Certainly when it comes to 'New Garage', the city affectionately known as the Tron has it covered, for it is the birthplace of The Datsuns, and need I say more? No, I didn't think so.

Okay, so it's not Hamilton but Cambridge, but what's 24 kilometres down the Waikato River, eh?

The Datsuns' first album is a winner, and I know this because I own it, though I've never listened all the way through - a rainy day listen, maybe. It was a cheap purchase from the Oamaru Warehouse on a road trip down south. How do you make a lo-fi CD jacket even grungier and lower-fi? Why, lose the jacket and leave the CD in its case at quarter of the price - and so, a very cheap pleasure was made for me. But yes, three stonking singles and two of those have very cool videos to go with them. Now, MF from Hell really is my favourite, but for obvious reasons it doesn't get played in the Monkeyhouse very often, which is a shame as it would really rev up some winter workdays. However, if I can't have that song then the Wire-y Harmonic Generator is my next pick, so here it is.

Oh, one last piece of fact: this song gets namechecked in a Doctor Who Companion Chronicle (Eddie Robson's The Apocalypse Mirror) as a piece of TARDIS kit! I wonder if Jon knew that?

Friday Night Local: JeanPaul Sartre Experience, 'Flex' (1987)

A quick post because it's getting late. Here's another Friday night music and paint me blue and call me Sally if it's not another act from the legendary Flying Nun label.

This one's for Christchurch. The rebuild is finally starting and visibly underway, and the city's still feeling the pain of post-earthquake rumbles, floods and inftrastructure headaches. I can't fix any of those things, but what I do have, as the man say, is a very specific set of skills. I'm a NZ music nerd with a blog. That's it, really. But this video has so much more - Christchurch's lovely Port Hills with its rocks intact and where they used to be, and the music of some of its best sons, the weird, daggy, Southern humour of the Jean Paul Sartre Experience, and one of their best songs from their early years, the lumbering, lustful and louche Flex:
 

Friday Night Local: The Verlaines, 'Anniversary' (1990)

As promised in my land of the Long White Sound week of Kiwi music videos, here's my first Friday night flick - and it's a Flying Nun act. Quelle surprise...

The Verlaines are a great Dunedin band. On some days I think they're the greatest ever Dunedin band - certainly, frontman and band engine Doctor Graeme Downes is nothing short of a genius; criminally talented and a classic in the mould of modest local frontmen without a skerrick of ego to them.

Back in the day a young Simian and his band (let's call them the Organ Grinders) supported The Verlaines at The Penguin Club, so yes, I have a stake in this choice of video. However, memory does not inform whether they played this song, from the understated 1990 album Some Disenchanted Evening on the night. Eh, I was too much in awe to remember the details. Here's one of my favourites from their too-impressive canon - Anniversary: