Thirty Bangin' Years On...

Today is the 7th of December, and thirty years ago the Queen Street Riots happened.

I've blogged on this before, of course, and so I won't bore anyone with yet another gallop through my personal memoirs; although the Audioculture article above has been sgnificantly added to and fleshed out, wih anecdotes from such local luminaries as Russell Brown, Dylan Horrocks, Chris Bourke and Bryan Crump, and if nothing else thining back on it now has encouraged me to reconnect with a few of those friends via Facebook, who heard it all go down over the wireless.

So, what's left for me to add? Why, the music of course. Now, the music on the day was a live concert by the likes of Dave Dobbyn & DD Smash, The Herbs and The Mockers - classic Eighties Kiwi pop there, but quite accessible. My earlier post recalls the songs in my head at the time (less interesting., more individual and erratic), but the third 'soundtrack' to the event is worth another nod, as it's a rarity these days - Headbanga - a locally-made compilation of New Wave of British Heavy Metal (plus colonial additions) from a year previously. It got played a lot over that weekend by me and my friends, and a rendition of its rather fruity cover was faithfully reproduced on the inside of one of my school ringbinders in white-out and biro, such was its impact. Last time I blogged this I thought I'd seek out iTunes to build my own version, but one dead iPod later (pls of course at the time AC/DC weren't actually ON iTunes) that seemed a fruitless exercise. So what's left?

Why, my first YouTube playlist, with the album in full. You're most welcome. Let your own personal riot begin!

Photo copyright Bryan Staff

The Monkey's Paws

Last week I was perturbed to discover something that’s been creeping up on me with my right hand: it can’t make a Scout salute any more.

For the uninitiated, a Scout salute is the same the world over, and is only slightly varied for Cubs, Guides, Brownies and so on – the hand’s three middle fingers straight, with the farthest finger tucked under the thumb and against the palm. It’s always made by the right hand, as Scouts always shake a fellow Scout with the left. This, our Scouting Manual told us, would equip us well in future endeavours, as we would always therefore be able to recognise the friendship of a fellow Scout. Real life didn’t work that way, of course. Strike one.

But other things have happened since the last days of my Scouting, some twenty-six years ago. Obviously I’ve not been required to make a Scout salute in that time (I’m not entirely sure why I tried it last week, to be honest), but if Old Righty has seemingly forgotten how to make one – you should see it, it’s pathetic, fingers like a row of naked geriatrics struggling to rise out of their deckchairs – then ‘his’ left-side counterpart can make one whip-smart. And ‘he’ never had to practice. Why is that? I’m guessing it’s because I’m right-handed anyway, and roughly in the years between giving up woggles and lanyards and now, I’ve been a guitarist (primarily a lazy strummer), and consequently with the stretching of fingers into new positions my left hand has become nimbler, faster, and generally ‘smarter’ than its earlier outstripper. The whole thing has been some gradual, weird reversal of fortunes, with my right hand – my creative arm, literally, now slower off the mark than his opposite. Strike two.

I’m a right-brained, apparently, being less logical/mathematical and more creative, so perhaps there’s some cerebral shenanigans at play. Dunno. In the mean-time, Old Righty has practiced and is making some headway into recovering his Scout salute-ability. Maybe I should have worked more on my fingerwork during my band days. I do remember the quiet thrill of watching my previously 'dumb' left hand acquire the skill to form chords, find their positions in time without me having to look down to check. It was like getting an extra 'right' hand, but it was as simple as acquiring a new skill. Anyone could do it.

Writer Steve Braunias once observed in an essay for The Listener his fellow contributor, cartoonist Trace Hodgson, and how his middle finger bent away from his thumb at the tip, as though it was shaped with years of drawing. Mine do that, but on both hands - I think barunias' observation was a little off, sadly. But I do have a callus on my right middle finger from years olf holding pens and pencils (will future generations boats these, I wonder?), and of course the string-tapping fingertips of my left hand have the requisite calluses, the badge of becoming a musician, as my guitar playing brother told me. You carry the story of your life on your hands. Being fair-skinned, and living in a country which bakes its citizens alive in the sun I look with abject mortification at my old man hands, and yet they’re the ones I was born with, and intend to keep for as long as I live, scars (I have them, from infant accidents and unruly pets), and all.
   

Blanket Coverage

To the best of my recollection this is my old Scout blanket. I and my brother and sister each had one, each being decorated a different way depending on what we'd aggregated through Cubs, Scouts, Girl Guides (I should clarify that only one of us was in that) and possibly some parts beyond - although I suspect that by the time we were Venturers or Rovers the badge thing wasn't so prominent. There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing on the internet, and it was a NZ phenomenon, too, as a particularly fine example belonging to friends (but on an army blanket rather than the grey here) indicated a few years back.

My scouting badges are for the most part on the left - a mix of what the US scouts call merit badges and some other area badges I traded for at my one and only Jamboree. That said, I don't see any badge of my actual jamboree there... hmmm. The rest of the blanket interests me more these days, and actually has more personal relevance, because it tells a story somewhat of the family holidays we went on up to about the time I was ten. The wedge-shaped felt tourism pennants, the subject of ongoing back car seat debates about whose turn it was to get the next one; does anyone make pennants for towns and cities anywhere? I'm going to find out!

As campfire blankets go, this is a pretty modest piece, and as I don't have it with me right now (if indeed it is my blanket, etc - I can see a Kea Scout leader badge and an Oamaru Athletics RFC badge that distinctly point towards it being my brother's) then I might just have to start a new one for Jet Jr. On our recent trip home I collected a few stray badges lurking around nooks and crannies, so I have the beginnings, at least.

Strangeness on a Train

I am thirteen, it is the dawn of a new year, and I and am about to set foot on the North Island for the first time.

1983 was the first year I'd left the Mainland, spending a week on Stewart Island for a school trip in Second Form; but this time, for the 10th New Zealand Scout Jamboree, I would be in Fielding for  ten days of outdoor activities, burgeoning testosterone, cold showers, open-air latrines, physical challenges, military catering and some of the worst sunburn of my life.

Scouting for me was a central activity from the ages of around eight through to around eighteen, and being a young simian a lot of my early life experiences involved scouting or variations of it.  There had been an Jamboree at the local racecourse 'round the corner from my house in Oamaru in 1978, so when I was old enough to make the trip myself, it was a no-brainer. I reckon that in our town that summer of 1983-84 was a halcyon period for many parents who, given the choice, could have shipped their boys entering or in that 'difficult age' off to such parts as Fielding, Palmerston North (where my brother went for a Venturers camp), or Mystery Creek in Hamilton (for Boys Brigade. I distinctly recall checking off my backpack contents with my Dad (who hadn't put his teeth in... details...) in our post-Christmas lounge the day before I was to take a chartered train up the east coast, then over to Picton, across Cook Strait to Wellington, then another three hours to Fielding.

The train journey was long. Looong: around 24 hours on the rails with l only two Making of the Return of the Jedi, the first issue of my new comic order from the local bookshop - (I'd ditched Eagle for 2000AD), some preserved ginger (I hated the stuff, but my Gran, assuming the opposite, always made sure I got some for Christmas every year) and a carriage full of adolescent males shouting, wrestling, playing cards and generally stinking the place up to pass the time. It was Lord of the Flies on rails. But, we made it through the night, saw in the new year while  in transit (one of the lads was a Bowie fan and duly played 1984 at the appointed striking of midnight.) By morning we'd reached Picton, boarded the Interisland ferry and carried on over to a quiet and grey looking Wellington - I'd never have thought it would be my future home.

The main event was a hell of a thing - a virtual tent city with seemingly hundreds of camps for individual contingents from all over the Asia Pacific region. It was all pretty chaste stuff, while there were stories that a boy had been stabbed one night on the other side of the camp, I talked and swapped badges with kids from Australia, Canada, the US and the Pacific, left my own contingent for twenty-four hours on an overnight tramp in a nearby forest; and though I dreaded what I took to be an inevitability, in the end I was sad to see the camp's abseiling tower abandoned at the end, unassailed by me. The photos I took from the jamboree are, I presume, long gone, and by memory would have been dull fare indeed - camp sites, Manfield race track (where it was held), and a few other tricked up sites of other scout contingents (Mt Roskill had a banner based on the Return of the Jedi poster which I'd thought was very cool). My memories of the trip and the event are now nudged along by some remaining artifacts - the books I took to read with me, an open air film we watched en masse (weirdly, Battlestar Galactica: Conquest of the Earth) and pop culture snippets (number one at the time: UB40's cover of Red Red Wine, local high flyer - Split Enz's Straight Old Line.) I developed a strange addition to carob bars; and with my fellow troop devised ways to avoid the Roman-styled latrines and the regular wave that would pass under the unwary sitter as it flushed the rows of seats. The showers were something else: open-air, cold water and communal.  My friend Alister managed to brave the boggy entrance to the plywood ablutions block and exited cleanly laundered only to slip arse over kite and land back in the muck again. Ee, but we were 'appy...

So much for scouting and my one and only jamboree experience, but it was an exciting, tiring time, and looking back from thirty years on, a clear disembarking point for some old my pre-high school life (I was so glad to be shot of intermediate school - and frankly, Jedi saw the end of my Star Wars interest) and the hopping-on point for a lot of new stuff and new friends.

So - New Year's Eve 1983, thirty years ago.

Doodle a Day: 12/10/2013

Edited to add: By sheer coincidence, Russell Brown has recorded his memories of the Queen Street Riots over on Audioculture. Check this definitive record - and some disturbing 80s fashion, out!]

This is going to take some explaining, so bear with me.

Twenty nine years ago I had a legendary weekend. I remember it that way because in the main, it was twenty-nine years ago and time has been kind to my memories. I was fourteen, the first exams of my high school life were over, and my friends and I had ditched our uniforms to go camping. Being all still scouts then, for the most part the camp was the small matter of polishing off some requirements for our Duke of Edinburgh Awards by enduring twenty-four hours of dry rations and going on a very long walk. We saw there was nothing in the handbook that said we had to do any of it remotely, let alone in a tent, so off to the local Department of Forestries campsite we were driven, with Tony’s parents’ caravan on the tow bar. Left to our own devices for two days and two nights, we were determined to have a good time, free of the shackles of school and family. We couldn’t drink, and only a couple of us smoked, but at fourteen there are plenty of other diversions you can occupy yourself with unaided by chemicals: you can listen to loud obnoxious heavy metal music, fight, ogle the Girl Guides also camping nearby and show off in front of them. Reader, we did all four, and hold me back, but they were worth the flat batteries, the bruises and occasional tears, and the dark looks we got from Stanley, father to a certain young thing we each attempted to chat up by the river. Stanley needn't have feared for the safety of his daughter's virtue, really, although I can't say I blamed him when it looked like he was going to chase us back to our pop-up Crusader with murderous intent. In all we did the stupid things four adolescent boys deprived of real food and cramped in a small family-sized caravan in the rain might do. When left without a working fridge our jelly never set, and we ate it anyway. Rock and/or roll!

Not that it was Youth In Revolt that weekend; certainly not at the Herbert State Forest campsite. However, up at the other end of the country another story was unfolding, Friday night being the 7th of December 1984, which saw Auckland's Queen Street come riotously alive after crowd control at a free open air concert went oh-so wrong. Time having now passed considerably, the whole event is but a small footnote in the history of New Zealand music. But at the time, listening to the incredible news on our ghetto blaster radio, it seemed for a short while that the future was there for anyone young and hungry enough to seize.

The soundtrack to that weekend is in my mind a mix of the hits of the day ('Purple Rain', The Cars' 'Drive', 'Wild Boys', Scandal's 'Warrior')  and the track-listing to Jeff's brother's Heavy Metal compilation Head Banga, a blistering run-through of fantastic hard rock anthems, from Deep Purple's 'Black Night', through Iron Maiden's 'Run to the Hills', Billy Squier's 'The Stroke', Tygers of Pan Tang's cover of 'Love Potion No. 9' and 'Rock and Roll Outlaw' by Rose Tattoo. Anyway, that album is lost to the ages now, and if I ever remember all of those songs I'm going to burn my own version of it, Readers, and this picture is what I'll use for the cover.