Posts by Rob Hosking
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I heard sour queen on it the other day while driving and had to pull over to listen to it. I think it's the first time i've ever heard it on the radio! Made my day. :).
There's something about unexpectedly hearing a song you like that can do that. This is a bit spooky, but had a similar experience - with Sour Queen - back in July, driving into Murchison of all places. Saturday and I think I was trying to get the news on Nat Rad and spinning the dial to find it and that zooming "ahh-ahh..." bit came on.
'Cuppa Tea' was actually the first CD I bought when I began to convert to the new technology, and yeah, it was on my shortlist for best album. So was the first EP, Tired Sun, - a few songs from this made it onto the CD of 'Cuppa Tea' although they weren't originally on the album. 'Snow White Chook' is still a particular favourite.
Yes I think musical taste should be the deciding factor for any cohabitation arrangements!
Ideally, yessss... but visions of heaven aren't the only shared things that are hard to come by.
-
Are you familiar with the more recent Humphreys and Kean album? It's delightful.
Not yet, Russell. Had it strongly recommended to me recently though (funnily enough, by another ex-denizen of the Front-Lawn-owning flat mentioned above).
-
Schopenhauer…. And I’ve always wanted to start a comment on the Internet with ‘Schopenhauer’…. OK, now, in the remote possibility that anyone is still reading… Arthur Schopenhaur used to reckon music has a special place among the arts because it zaps straight past the intellect and hooks into the emotions.
He was a Raging, Keg-spearing Party Animal Supreme, Ol’ Artie S. Back people into the corner at someone’s 21st and bend their ear about how music is the most abstract of all art forms. He bunged in a lot of gloomy philosophical stuff, not to mention some really dense jargon, and also a lot of stuff about how artistic types are bound to have a miserable time of it. I’m jazzing it up a bit but that was the guts of it. (Back in the mid 80s a Philosophy tutor at Auckland Uni had a sign on the door of his office reading Schopenhaur is alive and well and writing lyrics for The Smiths).
My point – and I’m getting to it, I’m just taking a scenic route – is music’s ability to bypass where you are and what you are doing at the moment and wrench you mentally and emotionally somewhere else, evoked by either the music itself or memories associated with it. Of the arts, it is the equivalent of the sense of smell.
I posted at length last year during the general Flying Nun celebrations and I’m only slightly sheepish about linking to that lengthy, self-indulgent post here…
This one proved a challenge. I came up with a shortlist of personal golden New Zealand albums and EPs which very quickly grew to about 20. And that was leaving out some great compilation albums like Ak79, which some have already talked about, Goats Milk Soap, the Hits and Myths series…’Songs from the Banana Dominion’ was another favourite from early ’84. It captures the mood of that time pretty well, especially songs like Dangerous Game from Diatribe and Sonya Waters’ No Pain. Oh, and there’s a few CDs put out which are later compilations of an artists’ earlier work: The Chills Kaleidoscope World, and Tall Dwarfs Hello Cruel World being two. They’re great albums, and they do hang together as pieces of work (esp. the Chills) but they’re not the original thing. So they’re out.I’ve also monitored myself quite carefully: the power and the subjectivity of music is such that the experiences associated with it can overwhelm you. I’m not a huge Crowded House fan, for example (got their greatest hits but that’s it) but three of their songs have incredibly powerful associations for me.
Sooo…. whittled the long short list down to a medium shortie and then to a two runners up and a winner.
Runner Up One is The Chills Lost EP. There’s the fantastic opening song ‘¬__This is the Way__' a mournful anthem of wasted (in both senses) youth if there ever was one:Fill your head with alcohol
Comic books and drugs
This is the way…..Tell the world your problems
You’ve forsaken all your lies
Surely someone cares for you
Someone you won’t despise…And the urgent, gleefully hormonal, Don’t Even Know Her Name - a perfect burst of idealised lust. Never Never Go was similar in tone: Be Ba Be Ba Be Boe was more introspective with some lovely lyrics, words which slotted together like cobblestones… The more, umm, what I call “orbiting a personal planet’ stuff on side two didn’t do much for me a the time. I like it more now though. That goes for the whole EP.
First-Equal runner up: Yeah I cheated. It was too hard. Straitjacket Fits Life in One Chord. ‘Dialling a Prayer’ the music, the overall sound of the track reflects the lyrics in all its angst and turmoil. ‘She Speeds’…well, who hasn’t at some point fallen for someone ‘elusive as a thief in the night, stealing away?’ ‘Sparkle that Shines’ and ‘All that that Brings’…the first is a bit too earnest, but it’s a lovely shimmering piece. The latter is I suppose the runt of this particular litter, but it’s a pretty sturdy one.
Second runner up:Front Lawn: Songs from the Front Lawn. I saw the Front Lawn do their ‘One that Got Away’ show at the Maidment sometime in ’89: it was the first time I’ve been in an audience that just erupted into a standing ovation at the end. Also because a couple of years later, when a bunch of us set up a new flat together, we found we all had the ‘Songs from the Front Lawn’ tape. Except one guy who never quite fitted in. There is a huge saga with that but, some other time.
(Craig M, who posted a damn fine piece earlier about Brave Words knew that flat well and can perhaps vouch for some of this stuff, as his partner was then one of the flatmates.)And, besides, there's that great line in Tomorrow Night about 'Talking Loud in a Kiwi Accent' which I've always thought should be a title of a book about NZmusic...
OK, my top Kiwi album is Able Tasmans’ Hey Spinner.
The Able Tassies had a kind of left-field melodicism which is very like the early Split Enz. Very keyboard-led, with silly and often a bit dorky lyrics which nevertheless sort of work. There’s ‘Dileen’, which sounds like the name of someone but apparently it was untitled and one of the band described it at as “that one that goes ‘dileen dileen dileen dileen…’ and the name stuck. And they made it the opening track.
‘Angry Martyr’ doesn’t sound angry at all: I’d love to know what the words are but its busy, fast, and cheerful.Hold Me 1 and Michael Fay are probably the two best -known numbers…they got flogged on BfM in 1990, I remember that much. The first doesn’t have great lyrics but its exuberant cascading joyousness that puts me in a great mood whenever I hear it. The latter is a great performance – fantastic harmonies on the chorus; and that great line ‘Shared visions of heaven are so hard to come by”.
Other tracks …__Grey Lynn__ is pure summer, Sunday arvo picnic in the park… it always seems to me to be an Antipodean cousin of the Small Faces Itchycoo Park, this song.
There’s the more sombre tracks: Wednesday She’s Coming Round - full of pensive longing - and Theory of Continual Disappointment which sounds like it was produced by someone in a depression and determined to write themselves out of it…. The title track, Hey Spinner sums up the album in tone: it starts like one of the more sombre numbers and then zaps into good cheer.
The overall playing is great, not just the aforesaid keyboards but also bass and some particularly sharp drumming. A bit less experimental than their earlier and later works, but only a bit: and no weaker for that.
That's it. I know I've gone on a bit, but, well, you get that with the big jobs.
-
Different band, Rob, caused some confusion at the time though.
Hmm. Embarrassment.
Might have known it was an Aussie who came up with something that tasteless though...
-
Bressa Creeting Cake
Dodgy name? I preferred the original...Whoo, a dodgy band name thread could be fascinating.
My nomination for dodgiest: the original name of Fetus Productions was Scraping Fetus Off The Wheel.
-
Goering, I think, had two but small.
A favourite reference to that particular song was in an episode of Red Dwarf where they go back in time, Lister appears at a Nazi rally next to Hitler and yells to the crowd 'Don't listen to him! he's crackers!! And besides, he's only got one testicle!!"
-
Just a thought re: a couple of posts earlier on re: the Finn bros etc, and the more alternative approach to music..
Untitled on the Headless Chickens' Stunt Clown is very Neil-Finn-like.
-
This is a few years old now but its a good story...a mate of mine worked on a helpdesk at a certain nz university. Got a panicky call one day from a PhD student who had lost his work and, to make matters worse, could not get anything out of the backup work on the floppy disc.
For reasons I can't recall they wrote off what was on the computer and concentrated on what mgiht be wrong with the back up disc.
Did he back it up carefully, regularly? Yes, he said.
And he stored it carefully too.
He stuck it on the fridge.
With magnets.
-
Richard....by then I was flatting and Sunday night dinner was the late night horrors....the memory isn't what it was, so I'm prepeared to be wrong on this, but this listing site here has it in 1981: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Tall+Dwarfs
-
Emma,
BUGGER!
Someone else has mentioned the Daggys....Still got their single, 'sometimes Nothing' - they did an EP as well but it wans't so good.
Saw them live at Welly Polytech in '82, they were damn good live, in a meat and potatoes rock sort of way.