Hard News by Russell Brown

This just in: the Herald has the video of 'Think You're So Free' from the forthcoming album FVEY, recorded at York Street. It's bloody crunchy.

Not digging that Reckoner remix, though I usually like the Leftside Wobble. Phil Selway's drums are Radiohead to me, and they're buried here.

James Blake looks like a lot of fun though. I'm often apprehensive about this style of music in the open air - unlike stadium rock/EDM it doesn't have noise to sustain it - but it seems to have turned out rather well.

There's been some Beatles in the ear, so for your Friday chilling via boingboing

I like Courtney Barnett. Her font of lyrical wisdom does have a bottom but she has a great schtick and her voice is deceptively strong for one who wishes to sound so diffident. And her record is called "A Sea of Split Peas" which is awesome. I hope she makes it here too but I get the feeling she's working the Northern Hemisphere pretty hard right now.

Mind you, this is even better.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbFp1Q_Z8mM

Seems like an appropriate place for this: I was too slow to book for Nick Cave in Auckland in December. All tickets, all gone. So, jf someone finds them with a spare ticket they want to on-sell, I would be ever so grateful. Unless, of course, they add another concert in NZ, as they have in Oz.

Do they still stage concerts in the Waitomo Caves? Because poor puns be damned that would be a once in a lifetime gig.

But think of the poor glow-worms ....

Why should they miss out?

They used to stage recitals there previous years.

Part One of Jen Ferguson's Glastonbury blog review -- it's amazing how so many of her highlights were away from the big stages: brass bands, a New York-style gay disco. It sounds wonderful, actually.

Alan captured the memories of the band’s irrepressible guitarist, Michael O’Neill, before the severe stroke that Michael suffered recently. I hope the recovery is going as well as it can do for Michael and his family.

I hope so too. That is sad news.

Here's one of the Meemees photos that I sent to Simon today for the Audio Culture page. It was taken in 1981 when the band played a show in a circus tent at Okahu Bay. It was the first time I took a camera to a gig, and this was the best shot.

Cheers for the link, Mr B. With more than 100 stages, big and small, Glastonbury festival-goers really are spoiled for choice - every year I'd say about 50% of our highlights turn out to be things that hadn't even been on our radar when attempting to plan some semblance of a schedule going in. I think my ultimate highlight this year was the very last act we saw, a New Orleans-style band from London called Tankus the Henge, which we stumbled across (literally) at 5am on Monday. Thirty happy and tired strangers, arm in arm, yelling along with a top-hatted piano player in a tiny tent - you just can't beat that.

That James Blake set is so wonderfully vague.

I gotta say, that Dolly video didn't strike me as mimed at all. She is doing some kooky phrasing, it would be tricky to fake that. Where did these claims come from?

I actually thought it was quite widely acknowledged (it came up after she played here), but this guy seems to have demonstrated it:

Here's the footage from Glastonbury 2014. The left-hand-side audio is from Perth, Australia on February 27th. The signal in the middle is from Manchester on June 21st. The right-hand-side audio is from Sydney, Australia on February 18th. All varying quality audios, all recorded from different vantage points in different rooms - but all with one thing in common: Dolly's voice track is exactly identical. (The Glastonbury audio is absent entirely, to underscore the point... but rest assured, it's the same.)

Rather than dissing Dolly for this, I'd say there are several performers who should be treating this as an absolute MASTERCLASS in miming. Dolly has drilled herself on the departures from the original melody in the vocal track and, yes, her timing is slightly out at times, but mostly she's right on the button. She would totally have gotten away with saying it wasn't mimed in a pre-Youtube age, despite the audio/video of the performance being widely posted. That's NINJA MIME.

This probably is the right thread to mark the passing of Peter Dawkins, perhaps our greatest record producer, and a man who, with a handful of very talented other young men in the 60s and 70s, wrote the book on record production in New Zealand (and Australia later in the 70s).

The media has largely ignored his death in New Zealand which doesn't really surprise me but we published a profile of Peter earlier this year, written by his long-time friend Gordon Spittle: http://www.audioculture.co.nz/people/peter-dawkins

There are warm tributes to Peter from Shane Hales and Mi-Sex's Kevin Stanton at the link.