Posts by philipmatthews
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That Fallowell column that Geoff Lealand refers to is here:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200802140010
And Fallowell's right -- his book has been "absurdly distorted". That's a polite way of putting it. I think that everyone who got worked up about it and attacked him now owes it to him, and themselves, to actually read the book and assess it. There was a weird, defensive, ugly nationalism playing out there.
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Re Tom Cruise remixes -- have a look at these. The top two -- the Hillary/Cruise and the Craig Ferguson -- are especially good.
http://gawker.com/349857/the-ultimate-tom-cruise-scientology-parody-video-roundup
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If anyone's tragic enough to be reading about the BDO online, the Stuff blog is much, much better than the Herald one. Are there others going in real time? The Herald one is mostly the blonde at the bar complaining about how hot it is. The Stuff one seems to be about the actual music. How novel.
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I've been convinced it's Joey for ages. Not that I watch it or anything ...
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Not music critics so much, I think. It seems to me that it's been taken for granted for ages that NZers feel warm or proud or affectionate about Split Enz - one of those NZ success stories that you're not allowed to question. People get stuck into the Finns from time to time, but we act like Split Enz, as an historical entity, are hallowed.
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I'd have to say the first Headless Chickens record, the self-titled mini-album. Still. Hugely evocative of its time and place - Auckland in the mid-80s, which was a darker, nastier, weirder place than now - and of the impressionable age at which I played it to death: 18. It was the perfect record for someone aged 18 - dramatic and sorrowful, all that stuff - but it was also very, very funny in parts (Chris Matthews, no relation, never really got his due as a satirical writer) and more sonically inventive than almost everything else going on in NZ at the time. There's a kind of laughing contempt for suburbia, normality, rules, authority on that record - "We could wreck dad's car/and put ourselves in traction" - that's very typically "kiwi", but I've never heard it expressed better in NZ music.
I don't know if that record is in Grant's book, but I've got to say I was massively impressed when he opened his appearance on Kim Hill on the weekend with a dissing of Split Enz and the parochial assumption that All Things Finn have a deep and lasting place in our hearts. Talk about clearing the air: some of us have been waiting ages for someone to say that.