Bond Street Bridge

Hope and Wire

2012-02-27T10:42:00.002+13:00

I just watched the video for the 'the letting go' from the Eastern's new double album Hope and Wire, and I don't mind who knows that I sat on my bed on on a sunny morning in Auckland City and cried like an orphaned baby seal. What a sad-sack, I guess, but I'm normally way tougher than this so don't worry about me. It's just, you know, theres a lot going on on this album they've made here. A lot more than you get in a lot of albums from a lot of bands: a lot more hope for one thing and also a lot more wire. Hope and wire - I couldn't think of a better line to capture the feeling of Christchurch since the earthquake, and I can't think of a better band than the Eastern to put it on a record.

I've seen this hope and wire in the past year. Playing music around the country I've been through Christchurch for shows a few times since the quake, throwing myself every time on the unstinting hospitality of the Eastern Family, the way we have done for years. In June I was travelling with the Teacaddies and we were booked at the Wunderbar. That was one of the very few venues that was operating at the time, having just reopened after the first quake knocked out the stairs back in September of 2010. Then the June 2011 shake happened and the place closed up again, so we needed somewhere to play. Not the biggest or most important problem by any means in a city of problems, but Adam and Jess got on the case, and I got my first taste of hope and wire in post-quake Lyttelton. We played at a jury-rigged weekly club night at the Naval Point Yacht Club hosted by Al Park of the red-stickered Al's Bar, with an ancient PA, Axminster carpet on the floor and a roomful of people happy that things were happening, that there was a place to go in a town in ruins. We went back to Eastern HQ that night with some guitars and we heard the songs they'd been writing, heard about all the street-corner and backyard shows they'd been playing since February, keeping the music going and spirits up. That was hope.

A couple of months later I came through with Luckless and we played a live to air on RDU. I'd been hearing about how they'd come through the early part of the year badly, they'd lost their studio on the University campus and they were broadcasting out of a van of some kind. What I hadn't heard was that the van they were broadcasting out of was actually the bastard child of Barbarella's deep space love capsule and a Mad Max war truck, as imagined by Heath Robinson after a solid morning in front of a bottle of absinthe - basically the best vehicle of any kind that I saw in all of 2011. Imagine this: It's a horse float. It's got a perspex bubble in the roof like the tank that Tintin drove on the moon. It's got a generator and all the switches, knobs, dials and oscillators you need to run a fully-functioning radio station. The inside walls are lined with astroturf. And! The side wall folds down into a stage, so you can set up a band anywhere you want, and broadcast the performance live. We rolled up to the show at C4 Coffee company on the edge of the red zone in Tuam street to find them set up and ready to go, Gabe the programme director grinning from ear to ear with dreadlocks all the way down his back.

'We've got a sweet signal,' he said. 'I climbed up the back of the building with the antenna cable and tied it to the downspout. Direct line of sight to the repeater on the Port Hills.' That was wire.

Ivy and Will rocking the RDUnit: Note the astroturf.

I can't think of Christchurch without thinking about The Eastern. They're a touring band, they work harder probably than any other group in the country and they're on the road a lot. As much as they're away, though, they're a local band. Their songs, their artwork, the way they operate, they're all about Christchurch and they're especially all about Lyttelton Harbour. Jess Shanks writes about being a Southern Girl, Adam writes about the harbour lights and the bars on London Street. There are pictures of the Port Hills on their album covers, and before the quake they could be found any night of the week playing in bars around town because that's their job. Like a lot of bands, we get help from the Eastern every time we come through Christchurch, and that night they were putting us up at this house they were recording at, in Dallington. We had a late show at the Brewery and we'd been up at all hours in Oamaru the night before when we managed to lock ourselves out of our accommodation at four am, so everyone was a little wired and shaky as we followed Adam's directions from Tuam street.

Dallington was fucked. Christchurch locals have got used to lumpy roads apparently, but to an out-of towner it's very disconcerting driving on tarmac rumpled like a quilt and full of holes. Crossing the Avon on a twisted bridge, we could see that this part of town was mostly abandoned. The verges were overgrown, the driveways were blooming with poppies, it was spring time and there was nobody mowing the lawns. Rooflines sagged and windows were empty; it felt creepy peering into people's deserted living rooms so after a couple we stopped looking. At what we thought might be the right letterbox we killed the engine and looked around, listened to the quiet. This was clearly not the right place, couldn’t be. Nobody lived here. This was Poland, this was East Berlin, this was an abandoned suburb in the second-biggest town in New Zealand. We were not ready for this, nobody was ready for this. These directions, we thought, must be wrong. Some tension in the car, cracks. Sobering. Depressing, even. Then we heard a guitar, laughter, people, a dog. We piled inside and there were amps and a drumkit, cables and mics, preamps everywhere, lyric sheets stuck up on the wall and guitars on every surface, they had the electricity going and there was beer in the fridge. In an abandoned house, in a suburb full of abandoned houses waiting for insurance companies to come and tear them town, The Eastern were making a record. Hope.

Sign on the wall at the recording house. Adam has also taken to carving his

name into the floors of venues with a knife, I am told.

A month or so later I came back through with the Broken Heartbreakers and we stayed at the recording house again. The whiteboard on the wall showed that the album was nearly ready, ticks in most of the boxes. There had been a couple more shakes in the meantime and the driveway was covered with fine liquefaction dust that got in your mouth when the wind blew. The house had settled a bit and some of the doors that opened last time were jammed shut now, but it felt like a place where a good thing was happening. I asked Adam to play me some of the tracks. 'You can wait,' he said. Fair enough.

We were playing at the Brewery again that night, but thanks to Carmel from Volcano Radio we had an afternoon gig as well, at the Lyttelton Petenque Club. Some years back me and Emily had stayed in a well turned-out hostel on London Street, an Art Deco place that wore its age well and kept clean rooms. It's dust now, a pile of gravel. The corner where it stood isn't empty, though - the gap has been filled by the open-air headquarters of the raggedy rough and ready Lyttelton Petenque Club, because really, can you think of a better use for a gravelly lot? There's a community garden there too, and people selling coffee and markets once a week: a place to go amongst the ruins, see the neighbours, chuck rocks about. We set up our PA in the corner of the dusty lot and played our set, got a sunburn. People were hanging out, smiling, filling the gap. For the rest of the tour all of our gear and our cables were covered with dust and we didn't mind. Hope and wire.

Listening to the new album this morning I could hear all of this and so much more. So much more – these guys live there after all and I just blow through sometimes. I’ve got some anecdotes, they’ve got a year of dust and rubble, friends killed and maimed, confusion, uncertainty, hope and wire. They put all of that into this record I think. The video made me cry though (not as in ‘brought a tear to my eye’ or anything so restrained, I’m talking about crying, Roy Orbison-style: no control, great choking sobs and tears rolling onto my laptop) it made me cry because before all this happened, I walked in those hills with that exact dog, I played in those bars with my friends, I rode the ferry to Diamond Harbour and looked back at the Timeball Station above the port, I woke up to the valleys around the harbour white with snow on a morning in August. I love that town and the ruins break my heart. Lyttelton isn’t my place, but it’s a place I love, and The Eastern have made the album that Lyttelton deserves.

Millicent Crow with Shank's dog Banjo above Lyttelton Harbour in 2009.

Out There Doing Things

2012-01-25T23:59:00.001+13:00

Clearly, nobody in this photo owns this truck. It's parked by the Dharma Bum's Club, Wairau
Valley and it belongs to a man named Trevor.

There may have been very little action on the blog for the past few weeks, but that's only because I've been Out There Doing Things. So I can report, in no particular order:

The abandoned former meeting-house of the Dunedin Theosophical Society in is full of weapons.
Oamaru is still a great place for albatross heads rendered in papier mache - and this time, Reuben, we had leave to wear them on our heads and dance around if we wanted. But we didn't want, because instead we kept the front bar of the Criterion open long after bed-time with David Bowie covers on a tiny guitar.
The Dharma Bum's club in Wairau Valley is one of the the best gigs in New Zealand right about now.
Nobody in Dunedin locks their doors - not the people who ring the bells at Knox Church, and not whoever it is who is currently responsible for securtiy at the former headquaters of the Dunedin Theosophical Society - which is full of weapons.
Chick's Hotel is still haunted.
The Bluebridge ferry is what sea travel should be all about. There are laminated photocopied lists of who gets to be in which life raft taped to the bulkheads, and reminders about which crew member is responsible for what in the event of a sinking. Sample text: 'Position: CAPTIAN Emergency Position: ON BRIDGE Duty: IN CHARGE.' No fucking about, and the decor is Soviet-era Black Sea Cruise Liner.
Two good songs for riding the pitching deck of a ship at sea in a gale: Stormy High by Black Mountain and Immigrant Song by the Zep.
It is very hard to find anything useful to do with and A-zero sized poster on a windy afternoon in Wellington with half an hour to spare, but the crack under the door at Evil Genius Records is large enough to carefully slide one through.
Some seriously cool things are happening in Christchurch at the moment.

The venue printed A0 posters and all we had was some sellotape and a half-assed can-do attitude.

This is not hipstamatic or any of that bullshit. It's 100% sneaking up the bell tower of Knox Church with Millicent Crow and taking photos through the stained glass. We make our own fun.

I want to be in the life boat with the Chief Engineer please

More on all of that later. Meanwhile, look at this cool blog. Also: Shows this weekend in Waterview, Raglan, and Karekare. Oh my heck yes!

Sweet Poster

2012-01-04T01:25:00.001+13:00

The tour starts in Nelson on Thursday and here is the amazingly cool poster by Ms Millicent Crow, who continues to produce beautiful artwork for Bond Street Bridge related things. So far a lot of people have told me that think that the chap in the picture is either a) themself, but with a beard, or b) somebody they used to know, but with a beard. In real life though, he's just a guy Emily made up, because that's what artists do: they make things up.

On the road again, again

2011-12-13T12:10:00.000+13:00

So John and Rachel from the Broken Heartbreakers are coming back for the summer, and I thought it might be nice if we did a little tour together. Basically I reckon they've probably written some pretty sweet new songs after kicking around in the overseas for eighteen months or so, and I'd quite like to learn them. The best way to learn songs is to get in a van and drive around the country singing them every night for a little while, stopping along the way to sit next to picturesque lakes and take photos of glaciers, so that is essentially what I have organised. Along the way we will play in some awesome places with some awesome people, including our old friends Matt Langley, John White and Rosy Tin Teacddy, and newer friends Delaney Davidson and of course the amazing Luckless, of which more later. Here are the dates, and I'll even copy and paste the press release for your info, underneath a couple of pictures from the tour I just finished with Luckless. You should never read press releases unless you're a journalist because they're full of lies and only real journalists can tell the difference, so it's probably best if you just look at the pictures.

Here are Ivy and Will outside the place we played in Okarito. Okarito is a tiny town on the South Island

West Coastwith signifacantly more birds than people, so you get the idea. It was amazing.

Here is Will in his Beastwars t-shirt next to the Franz Josef Glacier. Epic.

Dates:
All shows The Broken Heartbreakers Trio and Bond Street Bridge

Thurs 5 Jan Nelson Playhouse
Fri 6 Jan Wairau Valley Dharma Bums Club
Sat 7 Jan Chch Brewery
Sun 8 Jan Oamaru Grainstore Gallery 10th birthday with Delaney Davidson and John White
Wed 11 Jan Dunedin Chick's Hotel with Matt Langley and John White
Thurs 12 Jan Greymouth Frank's
Friday 13 Jan Wellington Meow with Rosy Tin Teacaddy
Sat 14 Jan Paekak St Peter's Hall with Rosy Tin Teacaddy
Sat 21 Jan Auckland Wine Cellar with Luckless
Sat 4 Feb Auckland Museum

Press Release: The Broken Heartbreakers and Bond Street Bridge on the road Summer 2012

The Broken Heartbreakers and Bond Street Bridge are delighted to announce dates for their forthcoming New Zealand tour in January 2012, bringing folk-pop harmonies and jangling guitars to some of their favourite venues around New Zealand.
The BHBs are returning briefly to these shores for a summer tour after over a year performing in and around Europe, (including Germany, Spain, The UK and France) and after an extended stay in The Irish republic. The BHB duo of Rachel Bailey and John Guy Howell will be rejoined on this tour by friend and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire, Sam Prebble.
Prebble will also be performing solo on this tour under his Bond Street Bridge moniker, playing material from his sophomore album Spring Summer Awesome Winter, released in mid-2011 to glowing reviews. The last time Sam played with the Heartbreakers was in mid 2010 on a winter tour to mark the release of the band's album Wintersun, and since then he has been touring extensively in Europe and New Zealand. The trio are looking forward to reuniting on this tour and sharing stories and new songs.
“It’s great to be hooking up with Sam again after a year and a half performing as a duo. The trio format retains the intimacy of the two piece, whilst adding a sonic dimension and colour that really brings the songs to life.” says Howell.
The Broken Heartbreakers released a debut EP Everyone’s waiting for their darlin’ in 2006 followed by two critically acclaimed albums, their self-titled debut (2007) and Wintersun (2010). The band will be performing songs from these recordings, and will be introducing new material that has been written during their European adventure.
The Heartbreakers music mixes the bleak with the beautiful, tales of love and loss, drawing on deep roots of country, folk and classic pop melody, but with a defiant and subversive twist and just a touch of modern electricity. Bond Street Bridge brings a touch of the cinematic, creating soundscapes out of live violin and guitar loops to frame his wry, observational lyrics. Both acts have toured extensively around New Zealand and abroad, playing community halls, art galleries, living rooms, dive bars and town halls, charming audiences with their rich harmonies and warm instrumentation.
Bailey: “John and I have just been through three winters in a row, well, two winters and an Irish summer that is...We’re really excited about getting back home this summer, reconnecting with people and places that seemed, at one stage, a very long way away. We’ve been humbled and inspired in equal measure, but we’re still standing. Our live show will be a celebration of that fact.”
After the tour, the Heartbreakers will be leaving the country again, heading to Melbourne for more shows and recording, so be sure to take this chance to catch the magic at a venue near you.

ENDS

What a load of twaddle! But come to the shows, by all means.

Rolling Deep at the NZ Green Party Election Campaign Launch 2011

2011-11-11T22:41:00.001+13:00

Last time we had an election in this country the good guys lost. I was in Queenstown that night playing a show and there was nothing I could do about it from there, so I drank some whiskey and I got in a fistfight with Dylan Storey, even though he's on the same side as me. I lost that as well, and the next day I jumped off a bridge.

My considered response to the 2008 election result.

I was a getting a bit worried about this election, because it looks like there's a good chance that the bad guys will win again and I'll have to get into another fistfight with Dylan, and I think he's still a little sore at me from last time because I definitely started it. So I took steps to mitigate this risk and arranged matters so that I would be playing a show in Westport on election night, in the middle of a tour, a safe distance away from wherever Dylan was going to be. Now, however, things have changed a little. History is repeating itself to the extent that once more I will playing a show on election night with Dylan, this time in Auckland, so basically I hope the good guys win this one for the sake of public order.

It was that or move to Canada.

Here's why I won't be in Westport on election night any more: A little while ago we recorded this song that Reb wrote called 'Set Sail.' Through some chain of events somehow it's ended up on the Green Party campaign ads for this election we're about to have, and when the Green Party had their campaign launch in Wellington the other day, they got Reb and Dylan and me to come and play that song and some other songs to them.

Usually whenever Reb and Dylan and me go somewhere to play a show it turns into a bit of a massive mission for various reasons. We tend to arrive at the airport late and with too much gear, and me and Dylan wander away and get a coffee while Reb negotiates with the airline staff. Then there are arguments at the gate about cabin baggage (too big), and at the other end about rental cars (too small) and on the way to the venue about the the venue itself (too elusive). Then we realise that somebody, often me, has left his wallet or bag or keys somewhere inconvienient, and we have to go back to get them or else endure my incessant whining.

This time it wasn't like that at all - granted, we did have to get up at some unholy hour in the morning before the sun was up, which meant I was surly and uncooperative - but after that everything went, from a logistical point of view, swimmingly. We made the plane just fine, and a Green Party person collected us at the airport in Wellington and whisked us around the city, picking up helpful people and bits of gear from various pre-arranged waypoints as we went. This is organisation, thought I. Then he took us to a cafe for breakfast with some of the campaign team, and I guess I must have been trying to impress the Green Party people, because I ordered muesli with seasonal fruit. I immediately felt grumpy and jealous when just about everybody else got the mixed grill and I remembered oh yeah that's right, this is the 2011 Green Party and they kicked out the hippies: nobody is impressed by your muesli.

I continued to be struck by the absence of hippies when we got to the venue (on time). Everybody was super-organised and really quite onto it, bustling about, setting things up, making things happen and so forth, and they all looked so very smooth and composed, like they knew what was going on - not only what was going on right there and then on the day, but also more generally in their lives, their careers, the world. I got this familiar feeling which goes something like: Christ, how did all you people get so able to do things? Why can't I be like that? Did I miss a memo?

This is a feeling I get approximately ten times a day on average, or whenever I see somebody who has a skill of some kind, and I'm pretty used to it. So I picked up a couple of cables and wandered around for a while pretending I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and soon the onto it people had the stage set up and it was time to soundcheck. Around then it became relevant that this song we had just been flown down to Wellington to perform was not one we had ever played live before. Also, I remembered that when we recorded it, which was a few months ago, I had been feeling passive-agressive and had insisted on playing the banjo. So, I realised, I had never actually played the song properly in front of other humans on any of the instruments I had with me. Uh-oh, I thought. I am going to fuck this up and break the Green Party campaign launch, and the bad guys will win again. Rats.

I've never been to a campaign launch before, and I've certainly never played at one, so I didn't know what to expect. It was in kind of a hall type thing, and there were a whole bunch of folding chairs set up in rows, and lots of people milling about as we played some kind of walking-in music. Then I saw my high-school music teacher in the audience and suddenly the whole thing felt familiar, like I was back playing in school assembly. She came up to the stage during a short break: 'Good to see you,' she said. 'Turn up your violin,' she added.

There were a lot of speeches of course, and Robyn Malcolm did some good jokes about John Key and how he's a bit useless, and lots of people clapped. Somebody who I went to high school with, who I think was maybe even a couple of years younger than me and is now pretty likely to be an MP after the election on current polling, gave an amazing speech and everybody clapped even more. She's a Rhodes scholar and will probably be the president of the Republic of New Zealand one day, and here's me standing in the audience going: I wonder how everybody knows how to do all of these things, and also: I wonder if I'm going to fuck up that song I'm supposed to know how to play. Very school assembly.

It pretty quickly turned out though that thing about playing at a campaign launch is that of course nobody was really there to see three scruffy musicians from Auckland, and as long as we didn't play anything absurdly cacophonic or by the Feelers they weren't going to hate us - we were basically there as symbolic background decoration, like the native plants in pots they brought in and dotted around the stage. That meant that we were actually in a pretty good position since most of the songs we play are in A minor or C and we know it, so even if we forget the specific chords to a given song (say, the one we came all the way here especially to perform) we're not going to stray too far into the sorts of challenging atonalisms that might antagonise this kind of crowd. And there's no way we'd play anything by the Feelers any time ever. The short version is that I didn't fuck up the song, or any of the other songs, and the Green Party people were happy because everything they wanted to launch got launched.

So happy were they, as it happened, that they asked us to play at another event they're having - on election night. Since they were prepared to sort out the necessary flights to extricate me from the tour I'll be on then, and return me to the West Coast the next day for the rest of the shows, it would have been churlish to say no, and now it's locked in: Reb Fountain and the Bandits, St Kevin's Arcade, Election Night 2011. Which means that once more, despite my admittedly lackluster efforts to avoid the situation, I will be in a position to get into a fistfight with Dylan Storey on election night if the bad guys win. So: I hope the right people vote, and I hope the vote for the right people, because nobody wants to see that again.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

2011-10-27T20:54:00.001+13:00

Sometime last year I was walking home from somewhere in the rain, late at night or early in the morning. This young guy staggered out of somewhere, some club or something, weaving on the sidewalk, blinking in the fresher air, and he vomited, efficiently, in a drain. He sat down hard on the kerb and pulled out his phone, and lounged there, rocking a little, paging through facebook and humming to himself while he flicked a silver cigarette lighter open, strike, shut. Cabs hissed through the puddles and the bass from the club pounded through the wall. The dude was clearly out past his bedtime.

All the way home, I couldn't figure out whether it was an awesome thing or a deeply horrible thing that this guy was essentially lying in the gutter, looking at the internet. I had this half-assed idea that the time a person spends sitting on a curb in the rain next to a drain full of vomit flicking a lighter and wondering whether it's time to head back inside to dance or call it and go home like a sensible grownup is a deeply personal and private time, a time for important introspection and personal growth. It is a time when a person gets to decide wether they will be ruled by reason or passion, I thought, a decision that will help them to explain to themselves and to others what they are really all, you know, about.

Looking at the internet sullies that time and cheapens it, I thought, it distracts a person from the here and the now. I became sullen on my walk, despairing of the human condition, nostalgic for the time before every idiot had the internet in his pocket. Then I thought that maybe I was just jealous because all I've got is this crappy old Nokia that you pretty much have to wind up with a key and no internet on it at all, and it sure would be pretty nice to be able to look at pictures of cats in sinks whenever you wanted. And what the hell is wrong with being distracted from the here and now anyway, when here is a spew-smelling gutter outside some skanky club on K rd and now is 5:45 in the morning and one of your eyes feels bigger than the other?

I think when I had had a refreshing sleep I decided that it probably didn't have to be either awesome or horrible, just a thing that didn't matter much. By then I had made up a song, and I spent most of the day obsessively recording it with lots of layers of vocals and some choice analogue synthesizers I was borrowing at the time. I got some static off the radio and it sounded like the taxis, so I put that in as well, and I found a cigarette ligher with just the right click and put that it too, and the track came together pretty fast.

I put it on my album and then I realised that sitting on the curb outside a club having a bit of an existential crisis is all very well as the subject of a song - but what was going on inside that club? I can't even remember what club it was, but there are plenty along K rd that I've never been into and I hope I never do. What goes on at the other ends of these flights of grimy stairs is anybody's guess really. At the time I assumed this guy had been drinking heavily and dancing, possibly getting excited and bumping into people by accident, talking too loud and so on, but I am fairly narrow-minded and I could be quite wrong. Maybe it wasn't that sort of club at all, I realised. Maybe it was the sort of club where three ceramic owls get into a fight with a pair of bug-eyed rabbits and a parasaurolophus, a shiny porcelain monkey with a broken paw spins around in aimless circles, and everybody gets eaten? I don't think we can rule that out neccessarily with the infrormation we have. That's why I made a video for the track where those things happen, more or less. And here it is:

If you quite like the song, you can download it for free from here. Again: Thanks bandcamp!

Before the Talkies

2011-10-03T12:33:00.004+13:00

I am exaggerating only a little when I say that the average age of the audience was north of seventy. The man from the Organ Society announced proudly that there were over three hundred people in attendance, and he was looking absolutely spiffing in a smart jacket with a spotlight on him, standing in front of red velvet curtains like a vaudeville conjurer. I did some mental arithmetic, which I am poor at, and decided that as an audience we must have a combined age of 21,000 years, or 2.1x10⁴ in scientific notation. You may do as you please with that figure; I report it here as bare fact.

We were here to see a silent movie, and it would be accompanied by that colossal curiosity squirreled away in the old Hollywood Cinema out in Avondale there: New Zealand’s only working Theatre Organ, by the fabled Wurlitzer Corporation. I didn’t know what I should be expecting, but we were given an introductory lecture, so I know more now. Introductory lectures are the mark of great entertainment in my book. I love the feeling of sitting there out of my depth, grasping a few fleeting facts delivered by an enthusiast in some obscure field. It's a brief glimpse into the inner life of a person with a consuming passion; a member in good standing of some organisation dedicated to the preservation of this or the promotion of that, where this and that are sufficiently far off the public radar as to require introductory remarks for benefit of the uninitiated. A couple of anecdotes to remember later on, jumbled up with salient points out of order and the dates all wrong - when somebody starts in on an introductory lecture I know I'm in the right place.

The organ was installed in the late twenties at the newly-completed Regent Theatre on Queen Street, said the man from the Organ Society. Ask your dad, he'll tell you it was a magnificent building, the Regent: a picture palace in the old style with marble polar bears and a man selling ice-creams from a tray during the intermission at three for a groat. They shipped that Wurlitzer in at some vast expense from New York City, but it wasn't set up and working in time for the opening season apparently so they had to get an orchestra in. I feel for that orchestra. Sixteen sweating hacks, sawing away, doing their best to keep up with Charlie Chaplain's hopping antics and Buster Keaton's prat-falling capers, sweetening the romances and adding drama to the newsreels, night after night in the flickering light and all the time knowing that as soon as the engineers from the Wurlitzer Corporation got their newfangled organ ready, they were all of them out on the street.

The Theatre Organ: Like an iceberg, most of it lurks out of sight.

Other that that, it is not at all like an iceberg.

Because this organ, said the man from the Organ Society, this organ could do the work of sixteen men. A 'unit orchestra,' said the Wurlitzer Corporation, capable of reproducing the majestic swelling of the violins, the silvery horns, the tootling flutes, thunderous kettle-drums and muttering contrabasses. And not through nasty digital sampling, by God, not back then in the 1920s and not now. This organ has twenty-foot pipes for those sturm und drang bass lines, rank on rank of them in sweeping hyperbolic curves, all the way down to tiny piccolos the size of a pencil. There are bells of course, and whistles - so many whistles! Mighty fans in the basement force air at the pressure of dozens of atmospheres through a cat's cradle of pipes and feedlines, through the stops and into whichever combination of the one thousand and twenty-four pipes the action calls for. This organ drives a real piano (Graham, bring up the spotlight on the piano would you please, said the man from the Organ Society) for that barrelhouse honky-tonk sound, and there are rooms - rooms! - full of drums, xylophones, an ironmongery of hardware, all struck by cunning little hammers quivering against springs, waiting to be released by magnets triggered by electrical pulses shooting along the wires in accordance with Maxwell's famous equations, and controlled from the console up there on the pedestal by one toe tapping, eye twinkling, white-haired, bow-tied magician: New Zealand's only practising Theatre Organist.

Remote-conrolled piano: The golden age of entertainment.

He prances, the Theatre Organist, he dances, he fairly flies around the console. Three manuals, a bank of pedals, more stops than the London Underground, an orchestra in a box - he is master of them all. But he harbours a great sadness, all alone in the dark.
'I hope you're sitting next to somebody you like,' He says on the microphone, spun round on his organ bench before the main feature and kicking his feet like Kermit. 'I wish I was.' The lonlieness of the Theatre Organist. In my head I become his protégé, sitting next to him on the bench, turning pages for him, fetching a cup of tea in the interval - a sneaky slug of gin for the late showing? Oh, why not - leaning over to pull out a difficult stop or jumping in to play a high glissando when the stage-coach flies over the cliff: New Zealand's only apprentice Theatre Organist.

But that will have to wait. For now I am in the audience, several standard deviations below the average age, an outlier on the bell curve. If you want to feel like the youngest person in the room, this is the place to be. They showed a colourised promotional film from the Auckland Transport Board, shot in 1952. 'Oooh, there's the Farmers!' 'There's John Court!' 'Remember, there were two, weren't there? John Court and George Court? Weren't there? High teas?' 'Young people these days!' They said that, they really did. I didn't catch whatever it was young people these days are supposed to be doing, and I'd like to know actually; I seem to spend most weekends at silent movies or curiosity shops. They played 'God save the Queen' before the feature, and the audience rose in a great clattering of walking sticks and creaking of knees, muttered through the first verse. I took off my hat, I put my hat back on, I felt subversive. 'We used to see if we could kiss right through the national anthem!' said an old dear behind me, she really did.

There was an intermission before the feature, of course, and the crush at the concession stand was a thing to behold. Old people can't queue, it's well known - their needs are immediate and pressing, their senses are dim, they are teenagers with Super Gold Cards. Umbrellas were used in anger, and I heard language that would have made the Queen blanch. They were, in short, loving it. Back in their seats, munching on ice cream, they settled in for an hour and ten minutes of vintage Buster Keaton: 1923's Our Hospitality, featuring antics on trains, horses dressed as ladies, Keaton's amazing aquiline nose, actual cliff-hanging, gentlemen dressed as ladies, and - spoiler warning! - love conquering all.

'I'm glad you're down there,' said the Theatre Organist. 'I wouldn't want to do this on my own.' And nor should he - the Theatre Organ is not for bedroom strummers or solo dilettantes. The Theatre Organ is part of the picture – on the screen the engine hilariously decouples from the train, the conductor blows his horn, and the Theatre Organ delivers a brassy squeal, right on the beat. An adversary is having trouble with his pistol, Keaton solicitously fires it off for him, the Theatre Organ provides the crash of cymbals. As the villains lay their nefarious plans, the twenty-foot bass pipes rumble threateningly; during the helter-skelter horseback chase through the forest, the Theater Organist winks and plays - what else? - the William Tell overture, double time. And when love conquers all, the music swells, 21,000 years of movie audience wipe their eyes, and they break into rapturous applause as the concealed hydraulics swing into operation and New Zealand's only practising Theatre Organist slowly sinks out of sight.

Noises Off

2011-09-22T09:11:00.001+12:00

A person asked me the other day how my new album was coming along and I said 'It's all finished, thanks, we released it back in June, although you may not have noticed because some guy called Avalanche City put out a record at about the same time and-' and she says no, not that album, the new new album. So I'm like come on, how many albums is a guy supposed to make? Christ! Et cetera. I thought I had at least until the end of the year before people would start asking me that, but OK, whatever, I'd better get to work.

So I plugged in my microphone and lit a fire under the boiler that powers the crusty old computer I use to record my music, and I blew the dust off an old cello that's sitting there in the corner of the room, tuned up a mandolin, and made a cup of tea. And I was about to lay down something sweet and a little bit awesome when this bone-curdling shrieking started up from just behind the wall in the neighbour's place and the cat leaped up, bit my leg, and hurtled into the laundry to hide in the hot water cupboard. A bad sign?

I don't believe in omens, but this was a pain in the ass. This was the sort of shrieking, grinding sound you get when you're pulling walls apart, ripping out old nails, clearing space and letting light in, settling down to some sort of serious remodeling. From my experience living in flats with landlords who will move the walls around at the slightest whiff of an extra buck, squeezing a bedroom out of a corridor at two hundred a week or throwing up a modish island in the kitchen to attract young professionals with hard-plumbed espresso machines, I could tell that the next step would be a hellish cacophony of banging and the wailing of power tools.

Looks quiet at 6:30am - too quiet, thinks the landlord.

What followed was a hellish cacophony of banging and the wailing of power tools. Plaster dust dribbled from the ceiling and lights flickered and dimmed as current was siphoned off to the diabolical machinery behind the walls. Much thumping went on, slamming of doors, stamping of feet. So many feet! Either these workmen had a horse in there or they were performing some sort of peasant dance, the kind with the stomping and the calling out of guttural obscenities. Plumbing began to vibrate, the water was turned off, and the cat climbed to the very highest shelf of the airing cupboard. Clearly, there would be no recording today.

'Doom,' said the hammers; 'gloom,' said the power drills. The spanners against the copper pipes clanged on about thwarted ambition and the dry tap whispered a sermon on the futility of effort. 'Forget about it,' said the skill saw. 'Shouldn't you be at work anyway? This album is not happening; it's time you got a regular job, and if you really need a creative outlet, you could think about lurking around the railway yards painting rude words on trains.' Grim? Yes indeed, and not very subtle either. They weren’t all so unfeeling, though. 'Next time somebody asks about your next album,' said the heavy footfalls (somewhat more pragmatically), 'tell them you're working on it. Why not just read a book instead? They won't know.' Good point, I suppose they wouldn't. 'Besides,' said the slamming of the doors, archly, 'shouldn't you write some more songs first?' Bastards. How did they know?

Obviously it was time to go outside, before I started answering back. Personifying everyday construction noises as robust critics may not be a sign of mental illness, but arguing with them definitely is, and it's important to be able to tell the difference if you want to get ahead in life. I'm not super-concerned about getting ahead in life, but I do like to avoid confrontation whenever possible, so I went for a walk around the block and wrote a song in my head. I'll record it another time, I think, and meanwhile the new album's coming along very nicely thank you.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press

2011-09-15T22:26:00.000+12:00

In the latest edition of North and South magazine, Simon Sweetman said of Spring Summer Awesome Winter that it is "hypnotic, exciting, enticing. Beautifully crafted, intriguing and wise, this is one of my favourite albums of the year." Graham Reid was pretty into it also, and so were Gary Steel, Wallace Chapman, and Amanda Mills. Meanwhile, a chap in the Waikato Times didn't like the album at all, and called it "bland."

What to make of this? It's hard to say. Perhaps people who live in Hamilton are just more discerning.

I wouldn't know. Every time I go to Hamilton I have a car accident, so I have taken to going the long way round to avoid the place. As a consequence, I don't have much recent data on which I might base an opinion. Here is my hunch, though: Proabably not.

But! That's only a hunch - we just don't know. All we can glean from the data we have is that at least one Hamiltonian is not getting a christmas card from Bond Street Bridge this year, bless him.

Not the Seahorse Emporium

2011-09-11T23:24:00.000+12:00

It was a shell shop. Here on the high street, just down the road from themall, the place sold seashells. There's a nursery rhyme about someone who sellsseashells; she does it at the beach. When I was a kid, and very much in thehabit of collecting and hoarding shells, even then I thought that this poorwoman was probably wasting her time down there on the sea-shore. Seashells are pretty, sure, and of courseeverybody wants them, but the point is they're free. You can pick them straightup off the beach, and looking for them is most of the fun. Well, ‘fun’ is toostrong a word - looking for shells is really just busywork. There’s not a lotelse to do at the beach, and finding more and better specimens than your sistersis a way to give the whole hot sandy beach-going exercise a point. Once they'rehome, dried off, no longer shiny, competing for attention withbrightly-coloured plastic and toys that actually do things, shells gather dustand lose their appeal.

If I thought about it - and I did, being somewhat given to pointlessintrospection, even at a young age - I assumed that the seashell lady wasprobably operating out of some kind of barrow, wheeling her shells throughstreets broad and narrow like Molly Mallone. Even if she wasn't shifting manyunits, competing as she was with an entire beachful of freely-availablesamples, I reassured myself with the thought that at least her overheads mustbe low. And, I reasoned, she probably had a comfortable side-line in ice creamsor hotdogs on sticks. The notion that peddling seashells could be sufficientlylucrative to sustain any more than an itinerant seaside stall never crossed my youngmind, yet here we were. Standing on the pavement, me a grown-up now but with ano less impressionistic grasp of retail economics, faced with the fancifulnotion that a person could pay high-street rent on the back of a trade in mankyold crustaceans.

I’ve walked down this road fairly frequently, and it is maybe a testamentto my general obliviousness that I’d never noticed this particular shop before.I mean, it didn’t really stand out; the signage was nothing flash. Faded painton cracked boards blended into a block of similar low-turnover mall victims, tiredbut trying. The neighbours were a hair salon named for some hilarious wordplay,a record store with a window display featuring an album released four yearsago, and a bridal boutique that just had to be a front for something moresinister. It rubbed up against them without catching the eye particularly,although once you registered the contents of the window cabinets you woulddefinitely look again. There were some impressive individual specimens –oversized conches, a delicately swirling nautilus, the sort of things thatwould really show your sisters who was boss, from a shell-finding point of view– but pride of place was reserved for the creative output of an artisan clearlypossessed of an obsessive attention to detail, a singular imagination, and considerabletime to combine the two. Dragons, horses, little dioramas, herds of elephants, flocksof geese, mermaids of course and dolphins of all sizes jostled for space in thewindow, each lovingly rendered in tiny seashells. I mentally raised my hat towhomever it was that had allowed their need for self-expression to take them tosuch a bizarre place, and to whatever quirk of the laws of supply and demandhad provided that person with retail frontage on the high street. The patina ofdust on several of the pieces suggested that this craftsperson was not in stepwith the tastes of the general public, which made the whole thing moremysterious, as well as totally awesome. Why had I never noticed this treasure house before? Particularlygiven that even out here on the pavement, the air smelled like thoseshrimp-flavoured ‘grain snacks’ that I seem to be unable to stop myself buying atthe Korean supermarket.

"Oh right, here we are." Ms. Millicent Crow sounded as thoughthis was where we'd been planning to end up all along.

"Is this where we'd been planning to end up all along?" I never know where we're going when we go forour walks. “I didn’t even know this place existed.”

"Yeah, I told you. I want toget a seahorse."

"Oh right, the seahorse. I thought that was just a sort ofaspirational goal, like how I want to get a 1970s telecaster. It never crossedmy mind that you were planning on actioning it. I didn't think such a thing waspossible."

"Well, here we are, actioning it. Watchme."

So we went in, and if you can imagine what a shop that sells seashellsmight look like, that's how the place looked. Long and thin, low ceiling, shelves, dust. And shells. A lot of shells. Whenyou find them on the beach, seashells come in all the colours of the rainbow,streaks and swirls of purples and reds, subtle yellows and faint tinges ofblue. You really have to see them close up, clean, and in good light to appreciatethat, though. En masse, in poor light,on dirty shelves, shells are basically cream, the colour people have beenpainting the villas around here since the mid-nineties. The colour charts call it 'Dutch White,' or'Belgian Vanilla,' but its more honest name is 'English Tooth,' a sort ofnicotine-stained shade of ivory, if the ivory had been soaked in a month of weakmorning teas. The light was dim, and the bone-coloured shells sat on long shelvesand racks like skulls in a catacomb. And there was the smell, of course. It’shard to describe the smell, but think about how even a very clean andsun-bleached seashell smells a little when you get up close. Salty, a bit fishy. Dry, sandy, sunny, dead. Multiplythat faint smell by the thousands of shells on the shelves here, and you getsome idea of the atmosphere in the shop. Not unpleasant so much as pervasive, notgoing away. You could touch the air, and it made me want to wash.

There was nobody else browsing in the shop, and the counter, half-way alongthe wall on one side, was empty. The low light and general cobwebbedness gaveme the impression that customers were an infrequent intrusion here, and it waspretty obvious that this was the kind of place where an odd-looking man ofindeterminate age could quietly appear behind the counter at any point,seemingly without moving or opening any doors. He would be wearing the sort ofgarment that I think people call a 'smock,' which is a strange word when youmutter it to yourself in a dimly-lit and odd-smelling seashell emporium on thehigh street.

"What did you say?" we were browsing aimlessly among shells thatseemed to be jumbled up, displayed in no logical order. But how would youlogically order shells? The logical thing would be to not have a shell shop inthe first place.

"Oh, nothing. Um. Smock. Strange word."

"What?"

"Smock. Sounds like hittingsomebody in the face with sock full of meat."

"Ok... why are we whispering?”

“Um, I dunno. Weird.”

“Have you seen any-"

"Can I help you?" An odd-looking man of indeterminate age had quietlyappeared behind the counter, seemingly without moving or opening any doors. Hewas wearing a smock.

"Oh! Ah yeah. Yes. Hello. Doyou have any, that is, I'm looking for and I wondered if you had one, I thoughtmaybe - do you have, ah, a seahorse? At all? A seahorse?"

Millicent Crow doesn't usually babble, but the man had the sort ofunreadable expression that a police officer wears when his partner is askingyou if there's anything else you’d like to mention in any of your otherpockets. An expression at once bored and disapproving, accompanied by anuncomfortable silence impossible not tofill with something that feels strangely like a confession.

"I just, I was going to do a picture. You know. Paint it? The ah, the seahorse? I wanted to painta seahorse. A picture of one."

The man looked around, left and right, apparently checking to see whetherthere was anybody else in his seashell shop. It was a pointless exercise; we were the only customers, and the thickdust on the floor towards the back of what I was starting to mentally call the'grotto' looked like it had been undisturbed for a while. He put his hands flaton the counter, paused significantly, then he spoke carefully, as though forthe record.

“A seahorse.”

“Mm-hm. To paint?”

"I wouldn't have one of those."

The only word for his reaction was this: disgust. This man, standing in his shop full of mustyold shells, the dried-up remains of a thousand sea creatures – not to mentionthe idiosyncratic artworks created in that medium, presumably by his own hands– this man was responding as though we'd walked in off the street and asked himto sell us a human fetus to broil up and serve at lunch with the Queen. Hewanted nothing more to do with us, these crass interlopers who had waltzed intohis shop and violated some sort of strict, esoteric taboo.

"Ah, no? I thought you might, you know, since..." Ms. Crow made agesture encompassing what was undeniably the sort of establishment that youwould think would sell a seahorse. "I mean like a dried one. You know, stuffed maybe? Not in atank."

"No." Disgust.

"Do you think you might be getting one?" The mind boggled at thethought of this man's supply chain. Armies of children combing the beaches ofthe South Pacific, a fleet of tramp steamers ferrying crates of shells to awarehouse in some port town, there to be cleaned and polished in a workroomfull of little old nuns operating clanking machinery, powered by a system ofleather belts connected to wheel driven in endless circles by a patient muskox. The retail product would be delivered to the shop once a week by bicyclecourier, and this man or the elderly aunt who was undoubtedly back in thestockroom somewhere would sign for it in flowing copperplate, slipping amimeograph of this week's orders into the delivery boy's saddlebag.

"No."

"Do you know where we might be able to -"

"Can't sell a seahorse."

"I beg your pardon?”

He sighed, as though dealing with a slow learner. "You can't sell aseahorse. Not these days."

"You mean-"

"That's right. It isn’t legal." From his fleeting grimace,it was clear that he pined for the halcyon days of the unregulated driedseahorse trade. It was easy to assume, looking at the yellowing price tags andthe clear lack of custom, that things had not been the same in the driedsea-creatures business since they banned all the cool stuff.

The three of us looked at each other awkwardly. We’d had no idea, walkinginto his establishment, that we’d be asking this guy to violate the CITEStreaty for us. All we wanted was to find a dried seahorse to draw, and now welooked like the sort of people who go about the place shooting elephants andturning their feet into wastepaper baskets. It seemed incongruous that such rules should even apply in this strangelittle grotto, this otherworldy sea-shell merchant’s where a mermaid fabricatedfrom hot-glued periwinkles was the standard stock in trade. It didn’timmediately make sense that what went on in this rarefied environment couldhave any material impact on the population of seahorses swimming gaily throughthe ocean blue, and the fact that this fantastical concern was bound by suchmundane constraints as fisheries regulations seemed bizarre when its veryexistence seemed to fly in the face of basic economics.

We couldn’t press the point. We had no leverage, and I think we felt out ofour depth – at sea, suddenly. If the man had an old stock of contrabandsea-creatures stuffed behind a loose brick in the chimney, he certainly wasn’tgoing to stick his neck out for day-traders like us. He didn’t say another word, but his expressionwas eloquent enough. ‘You people,’ the expression said, ‘you come and you go.You know nothing of the passion of the collector. My stock is wasted on yourkind – wasted! Coming in here, babbling about paints and drawing.’ We walkedout backwards, and his expression followed us down the street, muttering.

We went that way again a couple of weeks ago, and the place was boarded up.Almost like it was never there, but the air still smelled like starfish.

All of the pictures are by Emily Cater, aka Millicent Crow.

High Fidelity

2011-07-25T17:31:00.001+12:00

When I made my new album, I used just the one little microphone. I drove out to West Auckland to pick it up from the guy who had listed it on Trademe as 'slightly foxed but basically sweet,' and it served me well for the whole project. I put it in front of things and hit 'record,' and the results sounded like what the things sounded like in real life, give or take. I liked it, because it seemed to work - and, I realise now, I liked it because I was an ignorant wet-behind-the-ears hick and I didn't know any better.

Last week we started recording Reb Fountain's new album in at York Street Studios, which is where the grown-ups from the big cities go to make their records. And now - now I know better, by God. Here at York St, they don't use just one mic. I showed up at the studio on Monday morning and I walked into the tracking room to see not one, but sixteen microphones. And, reader: that was just on the drum kit. I don't want to belabour the point, but to an ignorant wet-behind-the-ears hick, that's a lot of mics. I was reminded of the rostrum at one of those triumphant press conferences that presidents of the United States of America give when their trained seals (at least I think that's what they said) hunt down public enemies in foreign countries, shoot them full of holes, and throw their bodies in the sea. It is very tempting to suppose that this is how things should be done going forward.

The view from the violin recording station. The microphone in the upper right corner of the picture costs more than my car. Just for your reference, other things that cost more than my car include: off-brand laptop computers, some kinds of pedigree dog, and vomiting eight times in a taxi.

You might be thinking that recording with this many microphones would go to my head. I mean, I only had about three pointing at my violin, but that's still two more that I actually own. Don't worry though, that's not what went to my head. The thing that nearly did go to my head, but didn't quite, was how when you record with that many microphones, you need to have a really massive mixing desk. The desk needs lots of knobs and sliders and a whole mess of outboard gear in racks, hooked up to big computers with flat screens and preamps with glowing vacuum tubes, and all this needs to be set up in a control room in front of a majestic triple-glazed window. You know where I'm going with this, of course. Yes, I can confirm that the control room at York St is way more like the bridge of a spaceship than any room I have ever been in in my entire life, and that is a significant milestone for me - but still that isn't what went to my head.

Simon flying the Battlestar Milllennium Enterprise

Klingons on the starboard bow, etc.

What did go to my head, and this is something I fear I may never recover from, was Morton the Assistant Engineer. Like I said, on my album I used one microphone. I also didn't have an engineer; I was the engineer. And that was fine, because I can just about cope all by myself with the range of sonic options provided by one microphone. Because I didn't have even an engineer, though, there was no room for an Assistant Engineer, and so I was blind and ignorant to the awesome possiblities afforded by this role. An Assistant Engineer is an invaluable addition to the creative process, and frankly I don't know what I ever did without Morton. As well as performing tasks like pointing microphones at things and patching preamps into mixers like a champion, Morton will stand next to the drum kit wearing a big pair of industrial earmuffs, ready to hand the drummer a different set of sticks half-way through a take so the sound can come out just right for the benefit of the sixteen microphones. He will run the protools console while Simon the boss engineer paces around the control room with his head cocked to one side, listening out for the perfect take. He fetches, he carries, he puts instruments in their cases - the right way up! - and as if this wasn't enough, he is constantly making coffee for everyone.

Dylan Storey and Morton getting just the right guitar sound. Two things to note about this photo: 1) Yes, Dylan has set up two separate Vox AC30s, just because he can. 2) Morton's head is way closer than a human head should ever be to a Fender Delux, and the fact that his ears aren't bleeding is evidence of his special powers.

Yes indeed, and not just coffee, either - really good coffee. As a rule I don't usually care much about the quality of my coffee as long as it kicks like an angry donkey, but sometimes in my life a coffee will stand out from the crowd and I will take notice. This week, thanks to Morton's expertise, that has been happening consistently. At first I was a bit worried about coming across like the greedy underemployed waster I am, out to get whatever free stuff I can lay my hands on, so I used my manners and just asked for simple long blacks. I was careful to wait until he offered, and to say 'no thank you' at least one time in three. Then about half-way through day two, I realised that there was really no reason to hold back here - Morton is used to bona fide rock stars, who generally have no manners and are not afraid to make unreasonable demands. I started getting him to concoct outlandish drinks with six inches of frothy chocolate milk piled on top of two or three shots of espresso, with an extra short black on the side for luck, and after that it got silly. It was around then that I realised that this was going to my head, and it was awesome. I stopped sleeping and developed a painful reflux condition, but I was preternatually alert, bang on the beat, and totally nailing my takes. The others were in pretty much the same condition, and so far the album sounds like what might happen if Orpheus had a baby with Thor and it got kidnapped by carnies who raised it up to be a pirate. So something seems to be working, and I'm pretty sure it's Morton's coffee.

Next time I make an album, I don't think I'll try to break into this flash studios for the grown-ups from the big city scene. I'll probably just stick with my ratty-tatty old hillbilly microphone and my temperamental laptop. Once you get the taste, though, there's no going back - I'll definitely be calling up York Street to see if I can borrow Morton the Assistant Engineer and his magical coffee machine.

Slow Burn Winter Tour Part 4: Misty Mountain Hop

2011-07-08T13:24:00.002+12:00

The first time I played at Vinnies Cafe in Raglan was early in the summer of last year, and I knew straight away that I'd found the right place. It wasn't that complicated - as I walked in the door the guy behind the bar put 'Immigrant Song' on the stereo and after that it was all Led Zep, all night long. In hindsight, this is an issue I probably should have covered with Billy Earl and Betty Grey when I asked them whether they wanted to be my tour buddies this New Zealand winter. I didn't say it up front, but the main reason that I wanted to make this tour happen was not to promote my new album, or to promote their new album, or to play in any new exciting parts of the country and meet new people, or even to hang out and crack wise. What I didn't tell them was the main reason I booked these shows was so that I could drive on winding roads through snowy mountains in a van, preferably in mist, and definitely listening to Led Zeppelin.

Mountains, misty.

For some people, the Lewis Pass is just a good way to get from Nelson to Oamaru, if that's what you need to do on a given day. For me, it's a sweet place to listen 'Misty Mountain Hop,' and I think the reasons for this will be obvious to the astute reader. For some people, the car deck of the ferry is quite a boring place to be while you wait for the boat to finish docking in Picton. For me, it's a chance to put on 'Black Dog,' turn it up, and rock out a little with the truck drivers. I think I have mentioned elsewhere that as far as I'm aware, the main reason we have the Homer Tunnel at all is so people can drive through it in vans full of amplifiers, listening to 'Kashmir' quite loud. Anyway, when we started talking about doing this tour together, it's possible that I may not have made all this clear to the Teacaddies.

'Is there anything other than Led Zeppelin on that ipod?' This was only about ten minutes, or a song and a half, into the Lewis Pass.
'I might just pretend you didn't say that.'
'Please don't make me do something to you that I will regret in years to come. I don't think we need any more Led Zeppelin right now.'
'But... the mountains! The kick drum sound! Come on!'
'The mountains were there before Led Zeppelin and they will still be there once you have turned it off. Also, where the hell has Oamaru got to? We've been driving for ages.'
'Because of the Led Zeppelin thing I'm not going to tell you how much further it is, except to say that it's still miles away. I already said I was sorry for booking consecutive shows in Nelson and Oamaru, so stop your whining.'
'Near Nelson.'
'Greater Nelson, yeah. People still came out though.'

Privately and secretly I was as surprised as anybody that we'd played to a full house forty minutes out of Nelson on a Wednesday night, but I was trying to maintain that it was all down to my awesome tour manager skills in some unfathomable way. I wasn't having much luck with this, since I'd spent the previous week attempting to manage expectations by carefully explaining that the Nelson show was probably going to be a bit shit, and I'd only booked it for the food and a place to sleep. Now that it had actually turned out to be a decent show, I was trying to spin the situation to make it look like good judgment rather than dumb luck. This is a trick that political PR people learn at university, and when they graduate they sell it to their clients to use on voters. I learnt it second-hand when I was working as a political studies tutor, and I used to make my students discuss it earnestly and write essays about it. It's quite a popular trick, but unfortunately I don't think it works on actual humans.

'You were as surprised as anybody. And it's still a pig of a drive to Oamaru.'
'Yeah, alright, I was quite surprised. But you know what would make the drive way faster? If we were listening to 'No Quarter' right now. I bet it would totally synch up with the road.'
'Trust me, it wouldn't.'
'Wouldn't be way faster, or wouldn't synch up with the road?'
'Christ, neither. And I don't even really want to know what you mean by 'synch up with the road.' Is that some hippie Wizard of Oz thing?'
'You're thinking of Pink Floyd. Which I also have some of and we could definitely listen to instead if you want?'
'Yeah, or I could drive over this massive cliff and kill us all in a fireball.'
'So you'd pretty much prefer to listed to Led Zeppelin then? That's cool with me.'
'I don't get it, it's like you won but you didn't win at the same time. Just for the love of God let's not have any more Led Zep for the next ages. Please.'

Taking time out to find devil horns is important.

It's surprising how often variations of this scenario play out in my life. It's good to know that I'm not alone though. Someone similar must have got to the barman at Vinnie's, because when we walked in a week or so later to set up for the Raglan show, with me hoping just quietly in my head that he was going to drop maybe 'Ramble On' or at least 'Celebration Day' as we came in the door, the guy was playing reggae. To his credit, and because it was in Raglan, it wasn't the piss-weak dinner-party kind of reggae that they've been piping out of Wellington for the past few years, but it sure wasn't the Zep. I like to think I might have not been the only person there who was a little bit disappointed.

Of course, and as expected, the show went swimmingly.

Slow Burn Winter Tour pt 3: Running a little bit late on the road

2011-07-01T10:34:00.000+12:00

You should take it as a good sign that it's going to be a good show when you're running a little bit late on the road - partly because you maybe slept in, partly because you stopped to look at the view too many times - and when you give the venue a call to sort of apologise and let them know what's going on, muttering some desperate excuse tailored to seem plausible without making you sound completely useless, instead of yelling at you to hurry up, time is money, the hosts say 'mate, relax. You need to stop at Ohau Point and look at the baby seals, you will not be sorry.'

Betty Grey and Billy Earl, stopping to look at the view

This was on Sunday, and we were on our way to the Wairau Valley, running a little bit late on the road. We were a little bit late because this was in the South Island, and on the South Island leg of the Slow Burn Winter Tour, I was the Sort Of Tour Manager. Unfortunately, it turned out that I was the sort of tour manager who would prefer to get a half-hour more sleep in the morning and another cup of coffee on the way rather than hassle everybody to leave on time, and after the least rock'n'roll car crash back in Wellington, I was not the sort of tour manager who was inclined to encourage people to make up for lost time on the road by driving like maniacs. Especially when we could stop to look at awesome things like the view or baby seals instead.

Sometimes, though, it probably does pay to adopt a less lackadaisical management style. The mood in the van was tense as we rolled into Blenheim, around ten minutes before we were supposed to be walking on-stage. I muttered "Ah, yeah, it shouldn't be more than about ten-fifteen minutes or so now."
"Ten to fifteen? How is that possible? Blenheim's not that big, surely? This is Blenheim, right?"
"Yeah, it is. But the show's more sort of near Blenheim. Um. I think I said."
"Ok."
"They did say we should stop to look at the baby seals. That's a good sign in my books."
"Right."
"Really, I'm pretty sure it'll be sweet. I don't think actually that we're going to get eaten probably."
"You need to stop talking about how we might get eaten at this show."
"Yeah, OK. Sorry."

Everyone was too nice to yell at me about it, but I was acutely aware that our ETA would leave us with approximately negative five minutes to lug all the gear out of the van and into the venue, set up the PA, run a sound check, set up the merch table, pull on our gig shoes, and start the show. Eight shows into the tour we were getting pretty slick at executing this sequence of tasks, but undeniably it was still taking longer, on average, than negative five minutes. There is also a school of thought that says you should try to sit down for at least ten minutes or so between driving for five hours and playing a two-hour show, but somehow that hardly ever seems to happen. It certainly looked like it wasn't going to happen that day, and I was starting to wonder whether I had really needed to insist on the second and third cups of coffee in Lyttelton that morning. It was difficult to see how it would be anybody's fault but mine if this show turned out to be pretty miserable.

There's something about the afternoon of a show that brings out the pessimist in most musicians I have known, and I include myself in that count. People will say of musicians (and performers generally) that you're only as good as your last show - you've probably heard that. When you're strapped in the back of a van though, running a little bit late on the road, on your way to only god or the tour manager knows where, and you know that when you do get there you're going to have to bugger about setting up the PA while the audience files in to watch you tripping over cables and squealing feedback in the monitors - or, what is worse, possibly they aren't filing in at all because somebody (me, in this case) has booked the show not even in Blenheim but near Blenheim, and on a Sunday afternoon at that - well, then it's not about the last show. The last show is forgotten, blurred into all the others, and your self-worth is now bound up wholly in the next show. It's the next show that's important, and it could all go horribly wrong.

That's why it's important for tour managers to project an air of confidence, and to have spreadsheets and ready answers. It's also why I'm not a very good tour manager. When a musician says 'so where is it we're going tonight?' they want to hear the tour manager say 'somewhere where there is delicious food and really good on-stage monitors, where they will tell you that you are awesome at playing your instrument, and after that you can sleep in a nice warm bed or stay up drinking the appetising local beer, it's up to you.' Unfortunately that isn't me, though. When I am pretending to be a tour manager and people ask me that question, I say: 'I don't really know. I think it's in a shed or something, and we will probably be eaten by hillbillies, if anybody turns up at all. We should probably figure out a) who's going to sleep in the van with the gear, and b) who we will let them eat. I hope everyone brought a sleeping bag and a gun.' I probably don't need to explain that this tends to erode morale.

It was really just my good luck, then, that I had been told to book that day's show at Las Fronteras. There aren't that many other places where they'll tell you to stop and look at the baby seals when you're running late for no good reason, and there's not many audiences who are that good-humoured about turning up at the same time as the performers and watching them frantically scrambling around setting everything up. There's not that many places where the hosts will diligently call around all the neighbours ahead of time to tell them there's a show on that weekend, so that when the band does turn up, late and smelling like seals, they find a warm room in a beautiful valley filled to the doors with what looks like everybody who lives in a fifty-k radius, as well as a pack of friendly dogs, all with smiling faces and not looking like they want to eat anybody at all. As a tour manager with a fairly half-assed approach to timekeeping and poor attention to detail, I really had no right to expect anything good from that show and I knew it. That day, though, my luck was good, the hosts were amazing, and the show went off like a double happy in a gas-tank. That was the final gig of the South Island leg, and it was one time I think we were all happy to be only as good as our last show.

Slow Burn Winter Tour 2: The least rock’n’roll car crash

2011-06-27T20:53:00.000+12:00

Anybody who knows me will tell you that if you want to get a moment’s peace around here then the last thing you want to do is ask me to start talking about myself. As a consequence, therefore, I don’t usually get the chance. For some reason though when you put out an album the convention is for people to ask you to talk about yourself, and often they tape you doing it and put stories on the internet or in the newspaper. It is fashionable during this process to pretend that you don’t like all of the promotional nonsense and the interviews and so forth, and you only go along with it all because it is how the game is played or because you are made to, perhaps by the man. I’m generally out of step with fashion though, and I find being given a chance to talk about myself in public really quite exciting.

St Peter's Hall - sweet gig.

So on Saturday afternoon, the day after a fine gig at St Peter’s Hall in Paekakariki, I was in Wellington, looking forward to the show at the Garden Club that night. I was feeling pretty chuffed because I had just been up to the radio station to talk to a nice man about my album and play a song, and then I had sat for quite a pleasant half an hour in a car-park talking to another nice man from a newspaper about what some of the songs on my album mean (again – usually not much, they just sound good), and before that I had done a fascinating questionnaire for a website (fascinating, obviously, because it was all about me), and the whole thing was making me feel like kind of a big deal. I was born in the eighties of course, and my teachers, following the educational style of the time, spent most of my primary-school years doing their utmost to build up my ‘self-esteem’ to borderline psychopathic levels. Like most people of my generation, then, it doesn’t take much external stimulus to make me feel like I’m kind of a big deal.

In and of itself this may not necessarily be a bad thing, but as Narcissus drowned in his own reflection (at least I think he did – remember, my teachers were too busy telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be to properly teach me the classics) so was my inflated sense of self-worth my undoing on this day. As I exited the car park, having finished discoursing at some length on the subject of me, and mentally congratulating myself on what I was deciding to call my lucidity and erudition, I somehow lost track of where my vehicle ended and other parts of the world began. Specifically, the parts of the world attached to other people’s cars.

‘Gosh!’ (You may recall I only say that when things start to go a bit wrong.) ‘Did I hit you?’

‘Well. My car wasn’t moving, and yours, I think, was. So yes. You hit me.’

‘Ah. Ok. And… your bumper. Was your bumper like that before all this happened?’

‘No.’

‘I see. It was… shinier? Less sort of scratchy? And more firmly attached to your car?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’

This was fine. This was sort of OK. This is what we have insurance for, to make these things go away. So we exchanged names, the way people do.

‘Prebble?’ She seemed aghast, or at least surprised. What was this? Was I being recognised, in a carpark, by a member of the public whose car I had gently nudged with my car? I was still thinking that I was kind of a big deal at this time, so you never know. I felt simultaneously awesome and not awesome.

‘Which Prebbles?’ She asked. I told her, as light began to dawn. This was going to be one of those ‘only in Wellington’ scenarios.

‘Young man, your uncle is a colleague of my husband. How are your parents?’

The awesome part of how I felt went away, leaving behind only the ‘not awesome’ component.

‘Ah. Well, actually. Yes. Quite well, thanks. Um. They own this car, in fact. I’m looking forward to telling them that I have driven it into a friend of the family.’

This is what touring in New Zealand is like.

Slow Burn Winter Tour part 1: And I haven't even left Auckland yet

2011-06-17T12:02:00.000+12:00

For the duration of the NZ album release tour, I'm doing a sort of a tour blog for New Zealand Musician over on their site here - here's the first post from that series:

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There's probably a lot of reasons why you might go on tour if you're a musician. Undoubtedly some people do it for fun, and I'm sure there are people who find the money attractive. There are all sorts of promotional benefits and so on also, but the main reason I go on tour is so that I have stuff to write about on my blog. I'm not sure what it is about touring, but for some reason things just seem to happen more when you're charging around different parts of the world trying to play shows. Maybe it's the momentum; when things happen on tour they happen harder because you're moving faster than you normally would. They also usually turn out to be funnier, these things that happen, I suppose because most things are funny with hindsight and when you're touring you move around a lot, so everything is hindsight.

I haven't left Auckland yet - that's going to happen at an ungodly hour tomorrow morning, by bus, of which no doubt more later - but already things are happening on this tour. I should make it clear here that when I say 'happening' I tend to mean 'going wrong,' often with reportable consequences. The main thing that's happened so far - and obviously, given that the tour hasn't properly started yet, it's early days - is that when I sent an email to the crew at the Wunderbar after this last round of aftershocks to say 'hope you guys are all sweet and stuff and also are you still, you know, open?' Debs replied pretty smartly saying essentially no, they aren't still open, because these plate tectonics just won't quit and this last hit has knocked them back into February. I cannot imagine what that must feel like for them.

The Wunderbar is hands down my favourite venue in the South Island. I was pretty excited when they re-opened after the last quake, I knew it was a big deal for Lyttelton to have iconic venues popping back up. I was even more excited when I found out that they had a free Saturday right when the Slow Burn Winter Tour featuring Rosy Tin Teacaddy and Bond Street Bridge Bringing Their New Albums To Life For The People Of New Zealand was planning to be in the neighbourhood, so of course I booked a show there. With the Wunderbar now closed for the duration, we now find ourselves casting around for a new venue. This is ten days out from the show, in a town where most places have already shut up shop.

I've found over the past few years that if I ever have any kind of Christchurch-related touring problem, I adopt one and only one problem-solving strategy. I continue to resort to this strategy because it is very simple, and it works every time. The strategy is this: When something goes wrong, get in touch with The Eastern, tell them your problem, and they will solve it. Have you accidentally double-booked yourself with The Feelers in the front bar of some horrendous meat-market downtown? Call the Eastern, tell them your problem, and they will take you down the road to the Media Club where there is an audience of nice people who actually want to hear music. Have you written off your car at the Sockburn roundabout, seven hours out from a show in Oamaru that is looking less and less likely to happen now as you sit on the side of the road nursing whiplash and surrounded by cracked guitar cases? Call the Eastern, and they will arrive at the roadside, wait with you for the towtruck, then lend you their van for the rest of your tour. Has the venue you were going to play at been stickered off the road? You know what to do.

So at press time, Adam McGrath is stomping around Lyttelton trying to find a venue for the show next weekend, and I must say I like his chances. I'm pretty confident that if a venue is to be found in that town, he's the guy to find it, and a fine venue it will be as well. For now, though, we have a bit of anticipation and tension happening, which I think is healthy.

Once I heard from Adam that he was on the case, I started to relax a bit. Then my phone beeped, and it turned out that Mr Nigel Wright, who is supposed to be adding his layers of sonic wizardry to the Bond Street shows in Wellington this weekend, is in line to get his flight down there pretty severely delayed or even canceled by this apocalyptic airplane-eating ash cloud we seem to be having on top of everything else. It may even turn out that he can't play one of the shows, which is very sad because he makes everything sound awesome and St Peter's Hall at Paekakariki would have worked a treat. I'm not too worried though - I called Adam again and he's having a word to the volcano, so it should all be sweet.

Spring Summer Awesome Winter Cover Art

2011-06-06T17:25:00.002+12:00

One day soon I'm going to release a new album, the second long player from this thing I call Bond Street Bridge. That day will be the 20th of June 2011, which is why I said 'soon.' I've been working on it on and off for a quite a while, in between things like sleeping in, feeding the cat, and cleaning out the fishtank, which keep me quite busy. It's going to be nice to have it out in the world, or at least out of the house.

The album, as I may have mentioned before, is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter. If I told you in the past that it was going to be called something else, it's only because I tend to just say things out loud as they occur to me and often they turn out to not be correct. Fortunately things don't occur to me that often, or I would talk even more than I do, and I don't think we need that. Anyway, I think you'll agree that Spring Summer Awesome Winter is a better name than whatever I might have said before - the only problem was trying to think of something to put in the press release about why it's called that, because people will ask. I can't remember what I said on that front, but the real reason is that it sounds cool. The rest is just hype.

Making albums. Really the best thing about making albums is that you get cover art, and if you need cover art the best person to go to is Ms. Millicent Crow. She's supposed to be writing a thesis at the moment, which you will probably be aware is reasonably time-consuming, but we have invented a machine that makes a couple more hours in the day. (We called them 12a and 12b o'clock, in case you were wondering. The best thing about these extra hours is that phone never rings during them, and the only other people on the internet seem to be experimental physicists). We use one of those hours for general relaxing, and the other one is for things like making awesome cover art for albums. Here's what Ms. Crow came up with for this one, using watercolours, ink and gouache:

This is the front cover. The red leaf has a halo because of how awesome it is.

This is the inside, the bit you see when you open it up. Each picture illustrates something from one of the songs, so for example one song has a line about a cigarette lighter, and one has a line about a feather and so on and so on. Incidentally, not many of the songs make a lot of sense now that I come to listen to them, but that will probably not come as a massive surprise to regular readers of this blog. People sometimes ask whether, given that the songs don't make a lot of sense in themselves, perhaps the things like feathers and cigarette lighters and so on might be metaphors for other things? Possibly more sort of significant things, like beauty or truth or the nature of love? The answer is no, they usually aren't. They're only in there because they sound cool. The rest is just hype.

This is the inside of the booklet that you pull out and have a look at while you're standing at the merch table in a dimly-lit bar after a show, trying to figure out whether I will shut the hell up and stop talking at you if you just give me the twenty bucks for the album, or whether that would only encourage me. The answer is almost certainly the latter, but you should buy it anyway because of the awesome cover art.

This here is the back of the album (on the left) and the bit that goes under the tray that the cd sits in (on the right). Now would be good time to reflect on how good the layouts are, which I think is this: pretty good. And I would say that, because I did them. I don't think they're necessarily so good that you'd be surprised that I did them, but I also think that they're just about good enough that you'd wonder whether maybe I did about half a semester of design school part-time at one stage and then realised that it was too much work and dropped out. Which is pretty good, cos I didn't even. Look, there's even crop marks and a 3mm bleed and stuff, cripes. If you pay me, I will do the layouts for your next record. You will probably not even need to pay me very much; for somebody who has spent such an inordinately long time getting educated it is amazing how little I will work for.

Big World

2011-05-19T00:39:00.000+12:00

My friend Tim Guy has just finished a new video. It's really good, and you'll probably like it; I know I do. He shot the video, I'm pretty sure he said, while he was on tour around New Zealand in the summertime. If you've ever been on tour around New Zealand in the summertime I urge you to have a look at it - you'll recognise a lot of the places you drove hundreds of ks on windy roads to play shows at. There's that sweet gig you can do at Milford Sound where they take you out on their boat in the morning, and then on the way home you can listen to Kashmir the way it was meant to be heard - in a van full of amplifiers driving through the Homer Tunnel, which looks very much like it was hewn by Dwarves with two-handed axes. There's the pass at the top of the Cardrona road, which isn't the quickest route to Queenstown, but if you have to play there you might as well go the pretty way. There's someone's house near Invercargill or somewhere with a cat and a dog, where you had a ridiculous party after a show where the drummer in the support band was probably dressed like a pirate and you woke up on the couch. Then there's the Wellington motorway just before you get to the ferry to play what is often the most hilarious set of the tour: 10 a.m in a fake Irish bar on a half-empty boat crossing one of the most notoriously choppy stretches of water in the Southern Hemisphere.

I like this video it because I've been on tour with Tim, and being on tour with Tim was pretty special. He didn't do any of the driving - I can't remember why - but it was cool with me because I like to drive. He would be in the back of the car, often keeping quiet, and he shot videos on his camera. Sometimes I'd sneak a look at them and there was something about each of them that made them better that the videos that people often shoot on their cameras from the backs of cars, like he would have noticed the way all of the windmills were turning at the same speed as they came over the horizon, or he'd be mumbling something hilarious and barely audible into the mic. When we were in Paris we walked for a couple of hours from where we were staying at the confluence of the Marne and the Seine, along the banks of the river and all the way into the city. I can't remember what we talked about but we talked the whole way, and when we got into the city we found just about the most expensive bar they had and got tall glasses of beer for around ten euros each.

In Berlin we stayed with my friends in a room with white walls and concrete everything, on the ground floor of a building that seemed pretty old. It was a good room with a big oak table and mostly we just sat around listening to the way our guitars sounded in the room. In Hamburg the show was just off the the Reeperbahn and Tim was looking for the ghosts of where the Beatles put in their ten thousand hours or whatever it was, but all we found were packs of Englishmen with loud voices and lots of hookers who frankly terrified me. In the countryside outside of Stuttgart we spent some nights in a barn made of stone in a compound on an old vineyard, and everything was solar-powered because the people who lived there were photovoltag engineers at the solar plant down the road. Power was supplied by a complex web of cables connected to a bank of batteries hooked up to solar panels in various stages of brokenness, and the lightswitch in the room where we slept was nowhere to be found as far as we could tell. We didn't want to bother anyone at night and during the day we would forget to ask about it, so we slept two nights with the fluorescents on.

The whole time, I listened to Tim play his songs most nights and sometimes we'd do some songs together because his songs are a lot of fun to play on. A lot of people's songs you'd get sick of after hearing them night after night, but Tim's just grew on me. When he came through Auckland a month or so ago it was a good feeling to sit down and play some of his songs together, and I got that feeling again when I saw his video just now. Go on, have a look:

Now We Are Twenty-Eight

2011-04-26T11:59:00.000+12:00

A while ago, actually last year, I turned twenty-eight. Twenty-eight isn't really a very advanced age I guess, but at the time I was tutoring at the university and my cohort of students hadn't even been born yet when C+C Music Factory's seminal track Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) reached number one on the U.S. Billboard hot 100 chart, so I was feeling old. These kids thought Robin Hood was Russell Crowe not Kevin Costner, and the scary movie that gave them nightmares when they were ten? That was The Fellowship of the Ring. So I was feeling old.

So of course I did what anybody would do in my situation, which was shut up and write a song about it. The song I wrote is called Now We Are Twenty-Eight, and it deals with, you know, issues. Like the feeling of feeling old. Issues and feelings, in one single song - that's value for money. What's also value for money is that you can actually download this song off my bandcamp site and stick it on your ipod or off-brand portable mp3 player for free, and here's why: it's the lead single off my new album, and we've figured out that secret about economics where you make money by giving stuff away.* The album is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter, it's out it June on Monkey Records/Banished From The Universe, and don't worry, we'll talk about that later.

The thing that's quite exciting about this song is that as well as giving it away free to the good people of the internet (that's you), Ms. Millicent Crow and myself have also done a limited edition hand-printed run of actual physical copies, handmade on this nifty little screen-printing machine called a gocco. I can't remember why we decided to do this, but here's what we did: each of us designed a cover based on pictures of a petrol can and a pile of books (which are kind of in the song), and then we printed up fifty of each of them, making a total run of 100 copies. These are available exclusively at shows until they run out, or if you see me in real life you can ask me for one.

What I will do before I give you one, though, is get you to look at both of the designs and make you tell me which one you like the most. I've been doing this to people for the past week or so, and the results so far confirm what I suspected, which is that I'm not as good at drawing as Ms. Millicent Crow is. So far 100% of respondents have said they like hers the best, but on the plus side they've given me feedback like 'Your one is actually surprisingly OK,' or 'that's not bad for someone who doesn't draw much. You don't draw much do you?' Which is pretty encouraging. I mean yeah, I don't draw much. I'm kind of an outsider with this drawing thing.

Millicent Crow's one

My one. I think mine has a naive charm.

The other quite fun thing about this song is that Nigel was apparently shooting video on his little camera the whole time we were tearing around Europe in an A-class mercedes on the tour with Tim Guy last year, and he's put together a video for the track using footage from that time that features me looking reasonably classic with my touring beard on, driving quite fast, sleeping in cars, talking to geese and so forth, which is a fair summing-up of what went on on that tour. Like the best music videos, the pictures don't have a lot of connection to the song, but it does feature a guy nearly setting his face on fire and it's definitely worth a look for the waterfowl alone.

And just in case you were thinking that there isn't another thing about this song - wait, there's another thing about this song: it's actually three songs! So both the free download and the handmade CD include the title track Now We Are Twenty-Eight, and also two more tracks from the Spring Summer Awesome Winter sessions. The first, The Old Place, is about accidentally telling the cab driver to go to the house where you used to live instead of wherever you live now and then rambling at him about it, which I think is something that most people do at least sometimes. For various reasons that song won't be on the album, so I guess its official status is 'outtake.' The other one is a complete reworking by Nigel Wright of another track off the album and one that he's been doing with me in the live set lately, and it's a totally unrecognisable and very beautiful reverby drone piece that makes me think about falling asleep in a long-range nuclear submarine, or maybe inside an empty grain silo on a hot day, and having a dream about alien monks chanting in slow motion, which again is something I think will resonate with a lot of people. So: Content! For you! Hope you like it.

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*If I tell you how it works, economics will stop working, money will become worthless, and we will all starve.

Melbourne

2011-03-31T10:43:00.001+13:00

The Shot Tower - a building so good they put it inside another building.

Last weekend Ms. Millicent Crow and I went to have a look at what Melbourne's been up to lately. We like to keep things authentic when we travel, so we were pleasantly surprised when we arrived at our hostel and discovered that, due to my reluctance to read fine print and general lackadaisical approach to booking things, it appeared that we had inadvertently availed ourselves of an opportunity to celebrate Australia's convict heritage by staying in accommodation that painstakingly recreated the conditions in one of the earliest European buildings in the Port Philip colony, which was of course a manky old jailhouse. Since it was me who booked the 'room' (and I don't use inverted commas lightly, so believe me when I say this was actually a 'room,' rather than a room) I got to be the one who slunk down to reception to have a chat with the night clerk, a man who turned out to not be my best-ever interlocutor.

Note the grimy curtains, concealing the horrors within.

"Um... mate?"
"Ungh."
"I was, that is, ah, we were wondering. Ah... What are the chances that we could maybe change our room, would you say?"
"Huh.'
"It's just, do you have any that have, like, windows, at all?"
The man just did a sort of grimacy eyebrow-raise.
"Or even one where the walls go all the way to the ceiling? Ours don't seem to do that."
"You on level two?"
"Yeah, level two."
"None of the walls go to the ceiling on level two."
"No?"
"Says on the website."
"Ah. OK. What's the, ah, the window situation then? Is there any chance of a window, would you say?"
"Mate. The Grand Prix's on. We're full up all weekend."

After having spoken to several native Australians and a few foreigners who have been there long enough to learn the culture, I now understand that the correct thing to do at this point would have been to offer the man a bribe. Apparently this works for all official functionaries from Night Clerk right up to State Premier level (with the exception of sworn-in police horses, who are incorruptible) and is a cornerstone of the Australian way of life. All I can say in defense of my failure to uphold this custom is that I'm bad at picking up on social cues, I suppose - and besides, if I was into paying extra for things I probably wouldn't have booked the absolute dirtbag-cheapest hostel in all of downtown Melbourne in the first place.

Police horses, Swanston St: The last honest public servants?

In fairness, though, it's a bit inaccurate to compare our hostel to an actual prison. In prison, for example, they usually have delousing protocols that take care of the vermin, and you don't have to pay a key deposit. And, while the strange odours, noises in the night, unsanitary blotches on the flooring, and the casual racism of the other inmates may have put us in mind of old Sing Sing, we should remember that in western democracies at least, prisons are generally expected to adhere to certain minimum humanitarian standards that just don't seem to apply to hostels. The real-world outcome of this is that, while in both types of institution you'll see bossy little signs on every available surface laying down the law on a whole range of human behaviours, only in a hostel will the signs be laid out in that least humanitarian of fonts, Comic Sans. That is cruel and unusual and it will not stand.

This bossy sign is actually from the train station - in our hostel, spitting on the walls, floors or stairs was one of the few activities not expressly prohibited. Although by God it should have been.

None of this was a problem of course, because we didn't go to Melbourne to sit in a hostel reflecting on our life of crime. Having lived in that town for a little while a few years ago, we mainly went back there to look at bats and ride on trams, both of which goals we achieved early and in abundance. We also wanted to find a statue of a giant owl that had been making us feel mysterious for the past four years or so, ever since we glimpsed it on a wintry morning from the window of the train that hauled us and all our bags and boxes out of the city and away from our insane flatmates and jobs in call-centres, to deliver us to Sydney and sunny points beyond. We wanted to see if the owl was as awesome up close as it was in memory - or if it was even actually real, because you know how sometimes when you've got all your bags and boxes on a train and you're leaving town early in the morning, you might accidentally makes things like giant owls up in your head? Well it turns out that it is real, and it lives on a traffic island on top of a big concrete pillar, and it might actually not be an owl, but a parrot. It looks very ancient, like it's been there a lot longer than anything else around, and it's as if maybe they found this giant owl statue perching there on the Yarra floodplain and said Bonza mate, let's make the town right here. Anyway, owl or parrot, it is just as mysterious and wonder-inspiring as we had remembered, and I'm not too sure but I think it was happy enough to see us back in town.

This is what calm and mysterious looks like.

Wait, what? Lost in the signal chain.

2011-03-10T01:26:00.003+13:00

I don't know if you've ever had a chance to smash up a hornet's nest with a light sabre but I wouldn't recommend going out of your way for it if you haven't. Hornet's nests, and the practice of smashing them, have inspired whole proverbs, so you might think that there would be a bit of a drama involved, complete with swarms of deadly little stingers, comic mishaps, and jumping over the fence into the drainage ditch to escape the excruciating pain. As it turns out though, smashing up a hornet's nest is actually not all that exciting, even if you do it with a light sabre. Sometimes, though, you just need to go there.

I had access to a light sabre because for some reason the studio we're mixing my album in is full of awesome Star Wars stuff. I keep forgetting to ask why, but pretty much every available flat surface up there is occupied by models of Imperial Walkers, X-Wings, Rebel Alliance robots and even a gigantic Millennium Falcon with a bunch of moving parts. That officially makes it the Best Studio Ever, and it's in a barn in Dairy Flat. No collection of Star Wars stuff would be complete without a battery-powered light sabre and a Darth Vader mask with a built-in vocoder to make your breathing sound emphysemic, of course, so naturally it's go those too.

From now on I only want to mix in studios with Star Wars stuff on the monitors.

You may recall how a few months ago I borrowed an analogue synthesiser for the weekend, and my studio looked sufficiently similar to the bridge of a spaceship for me to get a little bit excited and blog about it. Well, this studio, I'm sorry to say, makes my studio at home look like the bridge of a manky old Russian fishing trawler from a cold-war era action movie, the kind that you just know is going to get blown all to hell before the third reel. This studio has got racks, and things that go in the racks, and more channels on the desk than we know what to do with, and auxiliary sends, and stacks of monitors, and those things on the walls to stop the sound bouncing round, and big flat screens and synthesisers and beaut old guitars, and a range of couches for flopping on and a nice cold fridge, but mostly it's got enough patch cables to drive you hornet-nest-smashing nuts.

Every one of those cables is a potential failure point. So much potential failure.

We're being a little bit flash on this record, you see, and mixing it 'out of the box,' as they call it in audio engineer language. If you're not extremely interested in audio engineering at all (and I gather some people are not), I suggest you go and have a look at these pictures of orphaned baby sloths instead of reading the rest of this post, because the rest of this post is mostly about mixing audio and you're likely to find it so boring that you'll want to eat your own elbow. The sloths, on the other hand, set a new standard in baby animal cuteness, so you'll be fine over there until we've finished.

Mixing 'out of the box,' in this instance, means we're taking all the stuff I've recorded on my geriatric laptop and running it through a desk using a soundcard with heaps of separate outputs, then re-recording the desk output to produce a final mix. There are lots of boring audio reasons why you might want to do this, and lots more different boring audio reasons why you might not want to do this, and I understand that there are parts of the Internet where people spend a lot of time talking about this sort of thing and no doubt neglecting their personal hygiene. Mostly I just wanted to do the out of the box thing so that I could play with proper faders and dials and pretend to be Lee Scratch Perry for a little while, and see how long it took me to go talking-to-Jesus-on-the-studio-comms-mic crazy. It turns out the answer is this: not very long.

The reason for my speedy slide into insanity was the patch cables. The patch cables, and their relationship to a slippery, slimy, elusive, spirit-crushing low frequency hum. There is a formula for this, but I didn't use it - something like the number of tracks you've got on your song times the number of channels on the desk divided by the square root of the cicadas in the roof plus Avogadro's number equals the number of patch cables you're going to need. The thing is, each time you patch a thing into another thing, you add a bit more complexity to the system, which is another way of saying you create another point at which the whole thing can go disastrously wrong. That's why when I was left alone in the studio this afternoon, and I started to think that I could hear this unwelcome hum, once I started looking for it it wasn't long at all before I got irretrievably lost in the intricacies of the signal chain. This is a laughably reliable route to toys-in-the-attic, the-lunatic-is-in-my-hall insanity.

Yeah, it's laughing at you.

The problem is, you can't see a hum. You can hear it, of course - or you can think you can hear it. When there's all this other stuff going on and your ears are getting tired, the mind plays tricks. Or I think it does. Or maybe the monitors just have a little buzz. Or maybe the model of the Millenium Falcon is resonating with the kick drum. Or are the headphones just not handling the bass? Or is one of the channels on the desk burnt out? Did the fridge just turn on in the next room? Maybe I just got a text? Or maybe I put the hum in on purpose and forgot? Or wait, has it gone? What if I repatch the monitors? What if I reassign all the channels? What if I change all the compressors? Can we rewire the studio? Maybe it's just the cosmic background microwave radiation. What if there was never a hum at all? What if it comes back? Witchcraft? Aliens? The government? The answer to all those questions is: it doesn't matter. The answers will mean nothing to you, because now you're crazy.

That's why you need things like light sabres around the place. When you fall down the signal chain wormhole and lose your mind looking for a hum, running outside and attacking a hornet's nest with a light sabre can have a salutary effect on the constitution. Not because of the clouds of hornets and the running around screaming - this was a very small hornet's nest, so none of that happened. As I indicated above, the actual smashing part was anticlimactic, particularly given what one is lead to believe about these insects. Thing is, though, it's true what they say about getting out in the fresh air. They might have been exaggerating on the hornet's nest thing, but I can confirm that sitting in a darkened room playing with machines all day will make you lose your mind. Going outside once in a while will make you saner, even if saner still means that you are wearing a Darth Vader mask, waving a light sabre around, and yelling about signal flow. When you go back inside, that hum will have vanished, every time.

To my friends in Christchurch and Lyttelton Harbour

2011-02-25T00:15:00.003+13:00

Christchurch and Lyttelton friends: I know that some of you take a look at this blog occasionally (Google analytics is watching you sleep), so I thought you guys might be interested to know what the underemployed waster community in Auckland is doing to help you out, as far as I am aware. Just so you know that we've got your backs as far as we're able and that we care about you.

I was heading off to the studio today and I noticed that the old villa by the Grafton bridge has turned into some sort of cafe, the kind where eventually they're going to probably have some noise problems with the neighbours and so on but right now it's early days and everything's peachy. I don't know whether they're doing a roaring trade or not, but they told me that everything they make this Friday is going straight to earthquake relief. So you'll get that.

I've got a couple of shows this weekend, and I'd like you guys to know that all of the money I get from CD sales at these shows will go straight to the Red Cross. An Emerald City have also announced that they'll be giving money from the next few shows on their tour to earthquake relief, and on Sunday at the Wine Cellar and Whammy there's a fund-raising show with an almightly lineup that should hopefully get some money coming your way as well. People have been busking. Ms. Millicent Crow is going to give all the money she makes from her felt shop until the end of March to the cause. Musichype have a thing going on where you give a donation and get a bunch of downloads, and a lot of us have sent them songs to use for that. People without a lot of ready cash are trying to figure out how to raise some to send south.

Friends with bigger houses and less violent pets than ours have been offering accommodation for refugees - we though that maybe our place was too small, but I look on quakeescape.org.nz and see that people down your way are saying things like 'we don't have power or water yet but the roof is still up so come stay in the lounge' and I wonder if we should reconsider that position. People are collecting food for displaced pets, and blankets, and analogue telephones and all of those sorts of things. Materially it doesn't amount to very much maybe, but it's all done in the spirit of showing you that you aren't alone here. Mainly we're all trying to find ways to remind you that we care a lot, and we want to do what we can. We don't know what it's really like down there, but we are thinking of you and we want to help you to get through it, so hang in there.

Some announcements: Next week just got more exciting

2011-02-17T08:31:00.001+13:00

Next week was already going to be quite fun, because I'm playing at the Leigh Sawmill Cafe on the Saturday supporting An Emerald City. They're in the middle of a massively epic tour of New Zealand to promote 'the fourth' which is their new album about things like Mars and the fourth dimension and all those sorts of good things. I'm looking forward to that. Shows at Leigh are always a good time because you're just down the road from a marine reserve, so you can do your soundcheck and then go and have a swim with lots of shiny snappers and stingrays. Then you get back to the Sawmill and quite often they give you a delicious pizza, and if you're lucky the pizza also has snapper on it. Presumably it's not the exact same snapper you were swimming with just before, but if you want you can pretend it was and so feel a little bit closer to your dinner than you might usually. Also for some reason they close the bar at about midnight and kick out all of the people, so then the bands and stuff can all go upstairs and sing 'Up On Cripple Creek' as late as they want so long as they don't wake up the other guests too much, and for some reason the beer doesn't run out up there. Also there's this cat that's only got three legs or so and she's really good at snaking through the crowd without getting trodden on.

This happy snapper lives at Goat Island marine reserve so I won't be eating him. Snapper snapped by Travis Wiens, original here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/traviswiens/4352757129/in/photostream/

So that's something I've been looking forward to for a while, but then I found out today that also on the Friday I'm going to be opening for The Books at the King's Arms as well. I saw them play I think it was last year when they came, and it just about 'blew my mind,' as we used to say back in the seventies. There's two of them up there on the stage with cellos and laptops, and one of them back in the crowd playing with a real-time video editing suite, and altogether it's a thing of rare beauty and very close to how I always hoped the future would turn out. The abiding impression I got from that show was that if I ever was to open for these guys I would definitely need to get somebody onstage with me rocking a laptop pretty hard, otherwise nobody in the room would possibly take me seriously. Being taken seriously is obviously quite an important goal of mine, so fortunately, now that the occasion arises, I know just the laptop person for the job. Mr. Nigel Wright does a most excellent line in staring intently at a laptop and creating vast waves of hauntingly beautiful reverb and droning synth echoes, which is basically exactly what you need for this kind of show, I would say.

So, in the spirit of using my blog to announce things ahead of time, some announcements:

1) I'm opening for An Emerald City next week at Leigh Sawmill Cafe, Saturday the 26th of February, and I will get to eat a snapper and hear the new music that they honed and polished in the chill Berlin winter after I left them last year for balmy summer climes.

2) I'm also opening for The Books on Friday the 25th of February at the King's Arms, and I'm really quite tickled about that.

3) I'll be joined onstage for the Friday show by Mr. Nigel Wright and His Remarkable Laptop, which will cause your face to melt right off of the front of your head if you happen to be at the King's Arms at the right time.

4) And, completely unrelated to the other announcements, there are a couple of new videos on the video page, depicting me playing the same song in two different glittering European capitals. The song is called 'Beartown' and we've just finished mixing the version that's going to be on the album, which I will definitely tell you more about in the coming weeks. Gosh!

Actually, just in case you hate clicking through to new pages, here's the videos right here. Who says I never do anything for you?

Beartown in Paris and London:

Brixton Sessions #020 - Bond Street Bridge 'Untitled' from Blindeye | Films on Vimeo.

Things fall apart, and I grow an extra finger, probably.

2011-01-26T13:57:00.003+13:00

I mean, you pretty much expect things like mandolin strings to get old and break, and the coronation china won't always be there. Parts are going to fall off your instruments. Inevitably, you will do something dumb and somehow end up with your cello spike lost inside the instrument, clattering around ominously. It's not a massive surprise either when you buy a car off a guy for a sweet deal and it starts spraying manky orange water all over the windscreen just as you head out onto the desert road, and the engine begins to rattle and clank like when you've run over too many cops in Grand Theft Auto. It was pretty annoying, though, when the actual screen on my laptop stopped working, and I realised that without those glowing, flickering images, it gets a lot harder to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing here anyhow.

Mostly at the moment I spend all my days staring at .wav files on my laptop screen and playing the same thing over and over again into a microphone, which is to say I am really pretty much quite close to being about to nearly finish, almost, my next album. That's pretty exciting, but really for that kind of thing you need a computer with a screen that works. I mean, I do, anyway. I'm sure that in the olden days people didn't need laptops to make their pretty little folk-pop records, but I find that my productivity is vastly increased by being able to stop what I'm supposed to be doing every ten minutes or so and click through to see if anybody has put any more awesome pictures of cats on the internet. How Nick Drake ever got anything done in the days before memes I frankly do not understand.

So I had to take it to the doctor, the laptop, which meant leaving the house anyway, so I figured that I might as well just make a day of it and get heaps of stuff fixed. That car I mentioned is long gone now - it lives in Turangi growing geraniums - but things like the cello could be taken care of by my grinning instrument repair guy over on Dominion Road, and I passed a happy couple of hours in various hardware stores discovering that the sort of screws I needed to fix the pickup on my mandolin are not really available outside of the Soviet bloc: absent a time machine and a whole lot of extra visas on my passport, I was going to have to improvise. So I did, and the mandolin is now as good as ever it was. I still had time to kill though, so I though I might as well go see a doctor about this extra finger I seem to be growing.

'You're not growing an extra finger.'

'Are you sure? I mean, I've been playing all these David Rawlings songs and I though maybe the fingerpicking might require more digit -'

'No.' The thing on the wall said that she got her Doctor degree from the University of Ceylon, so my vague grasp of geopolitical history told me that she'd been doctoring for longer that I've been alive to date. She probably knows a thing or two about a thing or two, I thought.

'Well I mean what do you reckon it is?'

'The lump? It's likely to be bit of bone. Perhaps.'

'But all my bones seem to be in the right place, broadly speaking. Are you saying I have extra bones? Isn't it more likely to be some sort of tracking device, perhaps implanted by either aliens, shadowy government agencies, or some sinister alliance of the two?'

'Sometimes you just get extra bits of bone. I'll order an x-ray and we'll have a look.'

So that was that, and I think the takeaway from that conversation is as follows:

1) It's not impossible that I have an alien transmitting device implanted in my hand,
2) I probably actually am growing an extra finger, and she just said that I wasn't because she's jealous, and
3) I get to go to hospital and have an x-ray, which is pretty freakin' awesome, because x-rays are totally amazing if you think about it.

So basically, it's all upside. With any luck, if this exra finger thing works out, I'll be as handsome as this fellow.

When a cat has extra fingers, it's called a 'polydactyl' and I'm totally not lying about this.

The cat pictured above lives in Paekakariki and he's a little bit clumsy.

The future? Here's hoping.

Introducing the enhanced 2011 blog, and a review of 2010.

2011-01-02T14:03:00.002+13:00

What are you doing on the internet? It's the holidays. Go outside and hunt snakes or something. Since you're here, though, take a look around: My blog just got a little bit more awesomer. Now there are all these tabs at the top, with extra pages hiding behind them: you can go and listen to songs, look at videos, see where I'm playing, and stuff like that. The idea is that this should be the only website on the entire internet that you ever have to visit in your life, which will boost my traffic and help me to make more money to invest in turtles.

Anyway, now that it's just turned 2011, it seems like a good time to do one of those 'year in review' sort of things that people do, like with best ofs and worst ofs and stuff. This one is purely and solely about me, so you are bound to find it less interesting that I do. Trust me though: I'm having fun.

Here's what the Bond Street Bridge 2010 looked like as a series of isolated and loosely-related facts:

Total shows: Something like 83, but I lost count. That's not just as Bond St though, that's everything. Heartbreakers, Reb's band, Hannah's band, An Emerald City. But: not couting busking. Nights where I played in more than one band on the same bill, like Bond Street Bridge opening for the Hearbreakers, count as one. Not that the rules matter much, given that I lost count, but it's around about there somewhere.

Most Southerly show: Chick's Hotel, Port Chalmers, NZ with the Broken Heartbreakers and Death By Silo: 45°48'51.90"S

Most Northerly show: Loppen, Christiania, Denmark with Black Mountain and An Emerald City - 55°33'37.42"N

Shortest time between shows in different locations: Mauersegler, in Prenzlauer Berg in the afternoon to Tacheles, in Mitte in the evening: 1.5 hours by foot and two trains in a 39 degree heatwave with all these amps and stuff that looked light to begin with but became heavier and less wieldy as as the day got hotter. Not complaining, just saying.

Longest drive between consecutive shows: Berlin on the Friday to Lewes on the Sunday, 1,147 km.

Top speed on land: 181 kph between Hamburg and Berlin.

Scariest place to wander around before a show: Reeperbahn, Hamburg. Lots of third-day-drunk Englishmen and massive Polish pimps, as well as obsessive middle-aged fans looking for the Beatles.

An Emerald City on the Reeperbahn. I can't decide if we look cool or not, but I'm leaning toward yeah, definitley.

Biggest venue: Auckland Town hall with the Broken Heartbreakers at the music for 1,000 lovers show that Rohan put together sometime in May.

Smallest venue: The back room of East of Eden Bookstore, Freidrichshain, Berlin.

Most surfabilly werewolves on a single bill: High Seas Capsize party at the wine cellar with a whole bunch of Stink Magnetic awesomeness. Also a very good poster:

Best tour buddy: Ms Millicent Crow.

Worst tour buddy: Would you believe me if I told you there wasn't one? There wasn't one. Actually Mavis the authoritarian GPS was a bit annoying, but on average she got us out of more scrapes than she got us into, which is what you want in a tour buddy.

Most solar-powered show: In southern Germany, near the Rhine, there was this 400-year old barn on a vineyard in a town called Botzingen, where a bunch of solarelectrical engineers live. They recycled broken solar panels from their work and used them to power their postapocayptic solarpunk lifestyle. We stayed with them for a few days in August and played a show to their friends and neighbours. When civilazation collapses and the zombies are chewing on the power grid, all shows will be like this.

Most incongruous lineup at a gig: Would have to be at Ieperfest, where An Emerald City shared the bill with Agnostic Front and Converge. This fixture also takes the title for:

Most ridiculous chain of events following a show: The thing where I fell over, smashed up my face, bled my way through UK immigration, missed a train, slept on the pavement, and got laughed at by seagulls.

Most fun onstage at a show: Broken Heartbreakers album release show at the Grey Lynn Library hall, because we were on form and the room was full of love. This is a tie with An Emerald City at Loppen, because we were on form and the room was full of vikings.

Most opportunistic jumping-on-a-bill to get a free ticket to see a band I like: Dylan comes to band practice and goes 'Hey I just got asked to open for the Mountain Goats at the Kings Arms,' and I go 'I bet you need a mandolin player, eh?'
'Well I hadn't really though about it. I was just going to do it solo probably.'
'No, you'll definitely need a mandolin player. What if John Darnielle challenges you to a fight or like an arm-wrestle or something and you don't have backup?'
'That's pretty unlikely to happen I would think.'
'Well, OK, that's up to you if you want to take that kind of risk. But we could do a Midlake cover.'
'Van Occupanther? With harmonies?'
'You got it.'
'OK, the gig's on the tenth or something. Let's maybe have a pratice first.'

Best use of Led Zeppelin in a touring context: Rolling off the fery into Denmark rocking Immigrant Song pretty hard through a ten-watt amplifier with everyone doing the screamy bits at the beginning of the verse. Happy days.

A brief and partly accurate history of the NZ rail network

2010-12-15T13:55:00.005+13:00

The last time I caught a train from Auckland to Wellington it took all day and half the night. In the early nineties, you may recall, it was decided that the best way to make the trains in this country run on time was to sell them to a mob of shameless profiteers. The assumption was, I think, that if the railways were owned by companies who had no particular interest in maintaining them or investing in new infrastructure, we would end up with a state of the art rail network that would be the envy of the world. We shouldn't laugh - the decisions were made by policy-makers who cut their teeth in the eighties, remember, when governments everywhere were motivated by strange ideas. Ronald Regan, for example, wouldn't even get out of bed without consulting his astrologist. Here in New Zealand, our economic policy was mostly informed by a machine called the MONIAC, which modeled the domestic economy using a baffling system of water-filled tubes and counterweights. That mistakes were made in this environment is unsurprising to say the least.

What the MONIAC and the occultists who interpreted its gurglings failed to predict was that the company that eventually ended up owning what was left of the railway lines by the mid-2000s would try to increase its margins by firing the maintenance staff. Actually, maybe they did know that. It was fashionable for a while there for politicians to complain that as they rumbled along in their state-owned trains, they looked out the windows and saw all these guys leaning on shovels, not doing much work and generally representing a check on economic growth. I think privitisation was supposed to make the organisation leaner and meaner or something, removing all these make-weight layabouts from the payroll. It turned out that this might have been a case of selective perception - the maintenance workers were generally quite busy, but they weren't going to be doing very much with their shovels while the politicians were actually rolling past, because they would get hit by trains and die. This is kind of like a train driver wondering why all the level crossings in the country are closed all the time. Anyway, after ten or so years of Tranzrail's ownership, what with the asset-stripping, large-scale redundancies, and the massive reduction of investment in maintenance, the tracks were a mess. It sometimes took as much as fifteen hours to get from Auckland to Wellington, which is insane.

More selective perception: from a train, all the towns look like this.

That's why I had some misgivings about catching the train to Wellington last week to play a show in Paekakariki with Rosy Tin Teacaddy. Don't get me wrong - I love playing in Paekak, and I love playing with the Teacaddies, and I really love their new songs. Thing is, it sounds pretty romantic to catch a train to play a show, and just about every folk musician you talk to will tell you that they've got plans to do a tour of the main trunk line or something, but it can be a bit of a pain. I mean, you spend all day traveling, and then you wind up in a railway station with about half a ton of gear. Profit-driven delays on top of this is just adding insult to inconvenience. As it turned out last week, though, catching the train from Auckland to Wellington is quite a lot of fun these days if you're in good company and the weather is nice. Ms. Millicent Crow was plying her wares at Craft Country Wairarapa in Greytown on the Saturday, and I had the Paekak show on the Friday, so we put on our best traveling outfits and escorted one another on a Grand Day Out.

They didn't actually let me drive. But they did let me pretend to drive, which is basically all you can do with a train anyway.

There's a balcony now! But they won't stop if your hat gets blown off.

The main thing that's changed since last time I caught that train is that now I own a part of it again, so it's working a whole lot better. A few years ago, the government bowed to pressure from just about everybody, and admitted that maybe the MONIAC crew had made a mistake - actually, private companies don't seem to be that good at making trains run on time at all. They admitted that yes, this was embarrassing, but they did the decent thing and renationalised the whole show. Now it's actually quite lovely, and not at all like a train in, say, North Korea or 1970s Poland. It turns out that state ownership does not have to be highly correlated with surly train guards, back-breaking seats, and salmonellous dining options. In this case, we had things like leg-room, reasonably priced and quite tasty refreshments, and a pleasant stop at National Park so we could take photos of trucks. And, although I hate to belabour the point, it was even on time.

Mountains, a tractor: what more could you want?

Don't go changin'

2010-12-05T22:46:00.000+13:00

You might have noticed that musicians are getting smellier lately. That's not just because you're getting a bit older and more respectable and noticing these things more keenly, and it's not even because we're in the grip of the nineties revival and we've gone all, ah, 'grunge,' as we used to say. There are actually sinister forces at play here; forces that conspire to keep our musicians down and out and smelling like socks.

What's going on is that these days, if you want to fly in an Air New Zealand plane, you get to check one bag. It used to be, you may recall, that you got the twenty kilos, which you could spread across as many bags as you thought might be useful. In fact in our healthily sports-focused democracy, you actually got a bit more weight for 'sports equipment,' so if you were up for trying to convince the staff that your massive bag of effects pedals was actually golf clubs, you were basically home and heading for the showers. You could check in your guitar, your pedal board, your merch, a sack of brightly-coloured educational toys for the rhythm section, and, crucially, a change of socks. Or even two, if you were going to be gone for more than a week. Recently, though, they changed the rules. Everything is a bit more efficient, and the staff have been replaced by cheery robots who are not easy to trick. One bag means one bag.

That means you have to prioritise, and plan ahead. The one bag, in the first instance, is going to have to be your guitar case. The massive pedal board may seem important, but let's be honest - no-one really knows the difference between 'fuzz,' 'overdrive,' and 'distortion.' There's probably going to be pretty serviceable reverb on the amp when you get there, and nobody, nobody wants to hear 'flange.' All you need to do is stick your delay in one pocket - get that small one by Boss and stop your whining - and shove just the one fuzzy sort of overdrive pedal in your guitar case. The guitar is the main thing - arrive without the guitar and you will find that you don't look so cool when you walk out of the airport. Merch is more tricky. Apart from the bit where you get to walk out of the airport looking cool with a guitar case, there's not a lot of point in going on tour unless you're going to sell merch. Now, it won't fit in your guitar case, so what you'll need to do is fill your hand luggage with CDs or vinyls or commemorative dolls or whatever the kids are buying these days at their concerts, and carry the whole thing on board looking all nonchalant like 27 kilos ain't even a thing.

That pretty much takes care of the checked baggage and most of the hand luggage, especially if you're like me and insist on taking your violin everywhere (that's kind of a looking cool thing as well - nothing says 'I may not have a job but at least I can complain about suffering for my art while you buy me a drink' like a battered old violin case). That means you really don't have much room left, so you're not going to be able to bring anything to keep the rhythm section busy. Which means honestly I think they shouldn't come because they'll just act up and it will be a headache.

The upshot of this is that not only is there no room for the rhythm section, which is not in itself a bad thing, but there is also no room in the modern musician's touring kit for a spare pair of socks. Or, say, a clean shirt. Sometimes you even have to only bring one cape, which can be a hard decision. You see where I'm going with this, of course. A few nights of the devil's music, no change of socks and whoops I forgot my toothbrush, and it's no wonder if that musician in your life smells a bit like teen spirit.

The Dylan Storey Story

2010-11-29T10:36:00.002+13:00

The first I heard of Dylan Storey was about six years or so ago, when my flatmate gave me a three-track promotional CD and said 'hey, check this out, I bet you'll like this.' I had recently moved to Auckland at this point and maybe I was a little bit lonely, becuase I remember that I put the CD on and thought 'man, that's a really amazing guitar sound. I wonder if this Dylan Storey wants to be friends with me?' In those days, of course, we didn't have the Internet beamed directly into our brains yet, so if you wanted to be 'friends' with somebody, you had to go and meet them in real life. This is actually a bit easier for musicians than it is for real people though, because whereas if non-musicians want to cultivate a friendship with somebody they have to try to think of interesting things to have opinions about, musicians can just invite each other around to their houses to play with their toys.

Dylan always says he doesn't like cats. You decide.

I seem to recall that shortly after hearing this three-track promotional CD, I went along to the Odeon lounge to see the release show for 'Up in the Rough,' Dylan's first album, and I became a fan. This is probably a rare example of one of those little promo CDs actually achieving its desired effect, although the fact that I don't run a record label or a powerful music publication concern has probably limited the positive impact I have been able to have on Dylan's career to date. What I did do, though, was ask him to join my band. I may have at the time implied that we would shortly be making heaps of money or something to that effect, because he said yeah, OK, and suddenly I had a band. The other person in the band was Ms. Kate Whelen, who is now the mother superior of the Sisters of Saint Rupertsberg, who I gather are a force to be reckoned with. It wasn't too long before we were loading everything into the back of Kate's van and heading off on this ridiculously error-prone tour around New Zealand in the dead of winter, during the course of which we dealt with snowstorms, landslides, lost wallets, empty gastanks and storms at sea, and all this before the second night when we got Christchurch to discover that we'd been double-booked with The Feelers. Fortunately, we had Reb Fountain along, who is pretty good at driving in snow, and she also saved the day by finding us a better place to play that night, which incidentally is how we met The Eastern.

The other thing Reb did, though, was steal my band. I am not bitter about this, because while having a band is quite good for things like getting out of the house and having regular contact with other humans, it does necessitate getting out of the house and having regular contact with other humans. Also you have to organise things and it's sort of your fault when you book a tour that turns out to be riddled with snowstorms, landslides, storms at sea and The Feelers. As well, since I was part of the band that she stole, I got to keep on playing in a band with Dylan Storey, it just wasn't my band any more. That was actually pretty good, because a) I didn't have to organise anything much, and b) we got Simon Gooding in to play guitar too, so he and Dylan could play these really nerdy harmony solos and crack each other up on stage.

Dylan explaining how glaciers work

So basically, I've been playing in bands with Dylan for about five years or so, and we've spent quite a bit of time hanging out in vans together. He knows the names of all the birds and most of the stars, and he likes to play Led Zeppelin songs at soundcheck. His song 'the water' was to my knowledge the only bFM #1 hit single ever to have both a 5/4 time signature and a flute solo, and he writes songs about awesome things like space. He's got this way of playing guitar solos that pretty reliably makes me grin like a dog at a duckpond, and he knows all the words to 'Up On Cripple Creek' by The Band, even though they don't make a lot of sense. Since I've know him, he's released two more albums, both of which are amazing, especially 'Out Of The Soup.' I had a lot of fun while I was overseas playing that album to people, who would invariably say things like 'what? Who's this guy? This is awesome! He's from New Zealand?'

Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that last Friday, Dylan released a new EP of some stuff he's been working on lately. It's called 'the power of suggestion,' and I suggest that you will like it. He's doing that thing where it's free to download, so obviously he's figured out something about economics that I don't understand or maybe he reads those blogs about the future of music distribution or something. Anyway, what I'm saying is, it's really good, and you can have it for the price of a glass of water, so go get it from here. It's got harmony guitar solos.

Multimedia Millicent

2010-11-24T22:25:00.001+13:00

Last week Ms Millicent Crow and myself went to the opening of Sophie Oiseau's exhibition Ghoul Friends at the High Seas Gallery, and now I am the proud owner of half an artwork. It's a screenprint that depicts Millicent herself, overcome by postprandial somnolence, having just devoured either a person or one of the higher apes. People tend to think that she's a vegetarian, and mostly she is. I suppose that sometimes she must devour her victims though, otherwise Sophie would be lying to us through art, which is a thing she would never do. A lot of her other work, for example, is about animals that most people don't believe in but nevertheless probably exist.

You're probably wondering what a lot of people are wondering: Are Millicent Crow's feet that pointy in real life? The answer is no, dear reader, they're not. In real life, her feet are less pointy than that.

I'm not much in the habit of buying art, not because I don't like it, but because I have a nerdy habit of paying my rent each week. At the moment, that doesn't leave a lot left over to put in the art jar. That will change of course once either a) we move to Whanganui, or b) I figure out a way to monetize my turtle. Then I will have the means to buy so much art that I will be able to eat my dinner off it. In case you were wondering, I do have some preliminary ideas for getting rich off my turtle, but at the moment they hinge on me owning a zeppelin and the turtle being able to fly it, so they're still very much in development. It's having ideas like this, I suppose, that explains why I have not yet become rich through the natural course of events.

Ms. Millicent Crow is popping up all over the place at the moment. When she's not devouring people or featuring in artworks lately, she's getting hounded by the press. You could probably not find nicer press to be hounded by than the good people at Extra Curricular Magazine, though, so really it's not that big of a problem. They were around here the other day taking photos of the cat and chatting about craft and the Nature of Art and so on, and now they've run a story on Ms. Crow's gocco prints in their latest edition. It's a cracking read, and it's available from many reputable dealers (including the High Seas Gallery, in fact), so if your turtle has been paying dividends I urge you to rush out and buy a copy immediately. As if that wasn't enough, there is also an interview with Millicent over on the Craft Country Wairarapa blog, in which she reveals why we're probably not going to get our bond back when we eventually do move to Whanganui. I'm a tiny bit jealous of all this actually; nobody has put me in a screenprint for ages, and I certainly don't have anybody soliciting my opinion on the Nature of Art. Fortunately, though, I have a blog, so my opinions are available unsolicited.

Analogue Starlings

2010-11-18T23:39:00.004+13:00

An important development since last week is that now I have access to two analogue synthesisers. I'm not really one of those people who can wax lyrical about the difference between analogue stuff and digital stuff, but I do get a strong impression that as a general rule, analogue stuff is more hip. Having analogue synths on your record is a bit like buying locally grown produce from the market, or going to see a proper shrink instead of hooking down antidepressants and vodka - the effect is more or less the same as the bogan alternative, but it gives you something to talk about at dinner parties. Ordinarily I'm more of a supermarkets and fluoxitine kind of guy, but the presence of analogue synths makes my studio look a little bit more like the bridge of a spaceship so I'm all for them.

Here is a picture of my studio, looking about thirteen percent more like the bridge of a spaceship than it used to. It probably isn't the sort of spaceship you would want to take into hyperspace or rely upon to ensure the survival of humanity or anything, but I'm pretty happy with some of the sounds it's been making. A couple of months ago, though, two pairs of starlings built their nests in the roof, and their chicks have just hatched. That means that everything I record at the moment includes a sort of ambient chirping at around four kHz, which isn't really ideal. In the nineteenth century, I would have solved a problem like this with a ferret; in the sixties I would have been able to purchase some sort of DDT-based bird repellent from my local hardware store. In 2010, I can blog about it and download a parametric EQ to notch out four thousand Hz, which is good because I'm quite fond of starlings.

All animals are psychotic

2010-11-11T11:45:00.003+13:00

What's going on in this photo is that for the first time in a long while, I don't have an out of town show this month. That means that Millicent Crow and myself have been spending as much time as possible hanging around down at the docks pretending to be in classic action movies and mucking about with the self-timer mode on the camera. There are probably other ways to spend a sunny weekend in Auckland, but we personally find this one quite fulfilling.

The docks can be more relaxing than the park near our house, because the wildlife is on the whole less disturbing. The other day, as we were running* next to the duckpond on a tranquil early summer evening, we witnessed two very unnerving incidents of duck-on-duck violence. Those of you who actually listen to the words of my songs (and don't worry, I'm aware that most people don't) will be aware that I like to use birds quite a lot, often as metaphors for things like love. One of the reasons for this is that several species of bird mate for life, which is a handy fact to use in songwriting if you want an excuse to write about ducks. The paradise duck, in particular, has this habit, so I like to think about paradise ducks quite anthropomorphically and imagine them growing comfortably old together in their swampy paddocks, perhaps reminiscing to each other about how they met and telling the same stories over and over again but not minding.

Me, singing a song about ducks. There are others.

It turns out, though, that there are problems with using ducks like this. Unfortunately, they're not mating for life because they're in love with each other. Actually, they're mating for life because they have adapted through natural selection in such a way as to more effectively pass on their genetic code and ensure the survival of their offspring, given the environmental conditions in which they find themselves. To this end, one quite effective strategy apparently is to eliminate competition for scarce resources. That means that at this time of year, as well as being all clucky and looking after their fluffy little chicks, they're also doing their best to harrass and murder the fluffy little chicks that belong to the other ducks who live in their pond.

See the love in their eyes?

Did you ever wonder why you see a mother duck waddling along with between seven and ten little yellow ducklings in tow? It's not because she got a bulk order; nobody wants that many ducks. They have this many ducklings every year, but we are not yet, as far as I can tell, up to our necks in ducks. The reason she needs so many ducklings is that if she wants even a couple of kids to look after her in her old age, she has to factor in attrition. A lot of this attrition comes at the hands, or beaks, of other ducks. That's right - those ducks you feed, those ducks I carelessly turn into symbols of undying love in jolly little folk songs - if they were humans, they'd be in jail or working as bouncers. They are basically just vehicles for genetic code, and if they see a threat to the survival of that code they will move swiftly to neutralise it. The word for this if you're a human is 'psychopath.'

So the other evening, as we were jogging through what should have been an idyllic pastoral scene, we were confronted with the sight of a male paradise duck (that's the one with the dark head) holding at bay a pair of mallards (those are the ones with the green heads on the boys and light brown heads on the girls) and systematically drowning their fluffy yellow offspring by holding their little heads under the water. This elicited an immediate crisis, to whit:

'He's killing them! what shall we do?'
'Um. Maybe nothing? This is probably how come we're not overrun with ducks.'
'No, we have to stop him! I'm going to hit him with a branch.'
'Really? That's not very vegetarian.'
'I won't kill him, I'll just teach him a lesson.'
'He's a duck. I bet he isn't good at lessons.'
'But we have to try to stop him!'
'I mean, do we? Probably if we scare him or whatever he'll just get more stressed and then he'll want to kill more ducklings.'
'How could you know that? You're just making it up and using your authoritative voice that you use when you're making something up but you want people to believe it anyway.'
'OK, you're right about that, yeah. But it seems sort of plausible, doesn't it?'
'It always seems a little bit plausible, but you're still making it up. If we don't do something all these ducklings will die!'
'I think maybe that's what has just happened, in fact. Um.'
'Oh.'

A little bit further around the lake, the scene repeated itself. This time, though, the principle actors were a pair of black swans. The difference is important, because it's a bad idea to interfere with black swans if they're on a rampage. Firstly, there's that thing that everyone knows about how they're super-strong and they can break your leg with their wing. Or maybe it's just your arm, but either way it's pretty serious. Then there's the legal question. The other thing that everybody knows about swans is that in England, all the swans are the property of the Queen. That means it's best not to hit them with branches because she can probably have you hanged or something. By extension, then, all swans in New Zealand must be the property of the Governor-General. His powers are mostly of the arcane constitutional kind, and probably don't extend to having people hanged for interfering with the viceregal swans, but we're pretty fond of the old G-G. We wouldn't want him to hear that we'd been going round hitting his swans with branches, so we just let that situation lie.

Watch out. Insanely powerful and protected by royal decree.

Altogether, then, the park presents a much more stressful moral environment than the docks. No doubt nature is just as red in tooth an claw down there, but at least the baby animals are less cute - baby seagulls, for example, are pretty hideous; and I don't know that we'd get quite as exercised about a similar situation involving fish. When you're recreating and hanging out you don't always want to be faced with moral dilemmas or threats to the anthropomorphic order you've imposed on the animal kingdom; it's not relaxing. I think we're going to have to avoid the park for a while, at least until the ducklings have become better able to take care of themselves.

-------------------------------------
On an unrelated note, the other thing I do when I don't have any out of town shows is play shows in Auckland - like this one for example, which is this weekend at Cafe 121 in Ponsonby, with Hannah Curwood:

The birds on the poster are sparrows - Danish ones - which Ms. Crow adapted from a Danish banknote.

*Yes, we run. I like to keep in shape, just in case I have to thwart something one day, like say a bank robbery or an assassination or something. It would be a shame to not be able to thwart something like that just because you were a bit puffed.

Whanganui: the new Berlin?

2010-11-03T15:02:00.004+13:00

When I said the other week that I was going to Whanganui for rock'n'roll reasons, you may have thought something like 'bah! How disappointed he will be, searching for the Devil's music in that forsaken pile! There will be no joy for him on this journey, mark my words!'

Well.

Well, well, well.

To that I would reply that a) your internal monologue is really smug, and you sound a little like a cranky old wizard, and b) actually you're also Wrong, because is turns out that Whanganui is not only awesome, it's also quite rocking. Because I like to keep my ear to the ground,* I had been hearing rumors that Whanganui was cool for a little while. Mostly I had been discounting these, because you know how people will talk. After a whirlwind seventeen-hour visit last weekend however, and some subsequent rummaging around on the internet, my opinion has changed. I now feel like I've gathered enough evidence to justify a mental reclassification, which means that Whanganui has been officially added to the list of Places We Could Move To For A Little While Sometime To Make A Thing Of Some Sort.

The first point in Whanganui's favour is how extremely grampire it is. As we were looking at photos of some of the available rental property on the internet, Ms. Millicent Crow remarked of one place that it looked like somebody's grandad had actually exploded in the middle of the room, such was the degree and quality of Axminster carpet and floral wallpaper. That kind of decor would be perfect for living in for a couple of months trying to write some songs or something. If ever you couldn't think of something to write about or if you were bored or whatever you could just watch the cat constantly freaking out, partly about about how much the carpet reminds her of a snake-filled jungle, and also because of all of the scary grandad ghosts that only she could see.

Gampire as, and full of ghosts.

Whanganui is a proper city, you know. It even has suburbs and beachside communities you can move to if living uptown on the dole writing the occasional song becomes too stressful. Out by the sea there's a suburb callled Castlecliff where a particularly attractive cottage caught our eyes. If we wanted to live there, for example, it would cost us exactly half of what we pay in Auckland, for a place twice the size. In fact, right now, the most you can pay for a house in Whanganui is $380 per week, and that's for somewhere that's about the size of Graceland and comes with a full complement of monkey butlers and a shark tank. The great thing about this place out in Castlecliff, though, is that as well as it being close to the crashing waves and the cries of the gulls and so forth, the ad says 'no pets.' If you look in the photograph below, however, you will see most clearly that there is a horse in the yard. I swear I didn't photoshop it cos honestly, look at the shadow, I'm not that good. This is great, because what it obviously means is that in Whanganui, a horse is not a pet. It's a car.

House with a horse. If I had a job, I could ride it to work.

I don't want to give you the impression, dear reader, that life in Whanganui would be all about old person houses that smell a bit funny and riding your horse to town every Tuesday to change your library books. There's more to it than that, and when I said above that Whanganui is actually rocking, I did mean it. If you walk the echoing downtown streets on a Saturday night, between rows of mostly empty-looking turn of the century stone buildings with their faded advertisments for Epsom Salts and names like 'South Pacific and Orient Meat and Wool Co.,' you are likely to hear the sound of ghostly voices and laughter. Follow the sound, turn a corner, and you'll start to see a drift of tight jeans and full skirts. Just as you may begin to notice that the walls are covered with stencil art and photocopied A3 posters, you'll hear a 'one, two, you know what to do' crackling from a fuzzy PA upstairs, and the windows of the old Wanganui Chronicle building will commence to shake with the sound of a telecaster slamming the valves of not one but two towering and ancient Jansen amplifiers. This will be followed half a bar later by a rattly snare drum playing the Johnny Cash freight train riff, then the rest of the band will come in and you'll suddenly realise that there's something seriously rockabilly going on here and if you'd better leave town quick before you put a quiff in your hair and get hooked on diet pills.

Or you could just jump right in and take the stairs, which would lead you to the headquarters of Stink Magnetic Recording Company, where there will be a party happening. These guys are one of the things that make Whangnui a rock'n'roll town, and their commitment to fuzzy surfabilly psychowerewolf zombie music is a cedit to the whole community. The building they're in, which I think used to belong to the Wanganui Chronicle, is a maze of art studios and open liftshafts, with a basement so haunted the locals look at you funny if you ask them about it. There is talk of another venue opening next door, and if you ask about noise control they just laugh and open a beer. When we played there last week the crowd looked like the sort of people you get in Oamaru or Lyttelton, or Berlin for that matter - people who can't see the point in working stupid hours for idiots in order to pay rent in a big city when they could live cheap in a town with lots of space and do things like build robots out of bike parts or work on their guitar sound. These people are essentially my target market, which is a bit of a shame because their lifestyle choices mean they tend to have no money. But: they usually let you stay at their house, and they often have heaps of cool things to play with in it.

So basically all I'm saying is don't be surprised next time one of your friends says they're moving to Whanganui for a little while. They're not a junkie, and they're probably no more mentally ill than the rest of us. They just want to live in a town where they can concentrate on writing and illustrating their book about birds and still have some money left at the end of the week. Also, now that Mr Laws is no longer the president of the place, it has again become a safe envioronment in which to raise your turtle.

*this is an actual lie, the first to appear on this blog. I hate keeping my ear to the ground; most of the time if I look like I'm listening I'm really doing something completely else. Sorry about the lie, I will try to make sure it doesn't become a habit. If I lose credibility with my readers I may damage my chances of getting rich by selling advertising here.

On tour with John White in the Dominion of New Zealand

2010-10-29T11:56:00.001+13:00


No hurry here.

When I took a tumble in Calais that time, as well as smashing my face up a bit I also dropped my ipod and my violin. The violin is something like a hundred years old and protected by powerful gypsy force fields, so it was fine. The ipod is about four years old, which in ipod terms means that its been obsolete for about three and a half years, and presents a case similar to your neigbour's blind and deaf eighteen-year-old terrier. No surprise then that that brush with the pavement was enough to send it scurrying to the Great Consumer Electronics Graveyard On A Beach In China Somewhere. This week, with the ipod gone to its rest, we had to rely during the trip to Wellington on a bunch of mixtape CDs I made. This was not a problem, because Ms Millicent Crow came along for the ride also, and making mixtape CDs is still really the only trick I know for impressing girls. As we passed through Cambridge, a particuarly fine track came on, towards the end of my 'quiet but still awsome driving music' compilation.

'Hey!' Interrrupted I. 'What do you think of this track?'

'It's alright I guess.'

'Would you say you 'like' it, do you reckon?'

'OK, yeah. Like.'

'Really? Sweet! Do you know what that means?'

'Sigh. No. What does that mean?'

'It means you like Led Zeppelin now! Yess! My work here is basically done.'

'What? So no. Is this Led Zeppelin? I thought they were all denernernerner boom sort of stuff.'

'Yep, this is 'Going to California' off Led Zep four, and you just told me you officially 'like' it.'

'Did you just put this song on the CD so you could put on your blog that I like Led Zeppelin?'

'Wow. Um... Kind of, yeah. But also because it's a good song.'

'I think you should stop thinking about things to put on your blog before they actually happen. It's weird.'

'Maybe it is, but you like Led Zeppelin. That's actually not weird because they are one of the best if not the best band of all time. So on average, we're not weird.'

'I'm not going to respond to that except to say it makes no sense. And I'll be pissed off if you say that I like Led Zeppelin on your blog.'

This got us as far as Putaruru. Money is worth a lot more there than it is further up the line, so I was able to purchase a suit from the Baptists for a very reasonable price. That night, I left this entire suit behind after the gig at the Frederick Street Sound And Light Exploration Society, which is not a thing I habitually do. In fact, it occurs to me that over three months of touring around Europe, forty shows and forty-one thousand-odd kilometres by planes, trains, ships and busses; back-rooms, bar-rooms, mattresses in living rooms, heatwaves, thunderstorms, psychedelic rock'n'roll and acid rain; countless metros, tube-stops, u-bahns, s-bahns, stables in the forest, solarpunk vineyards and walks in the park, all I lost was this: a single red patch lead, the sort you can get five for ten bucks down at Surplustronics. I actually even know who has it, the swine. BUT: Driving my own car from Wellington to Auckland and back via Whanganui over roads too familiar to even write songs about, two shows only over the course of a single weekend, I mislaid or left behind the following items:

One three-piece suit, including the waistcoat
A deliciously warm jacket (twice)
My actual glasses that I need in order to see properly
My hat
A tin of tobacco (wasn't mine, don't smoke, long story).
Three dollars and change.

My sister asked me how come I never lost anything in Europe, given how uselss I clearly am. 'I had a system,' I replied. 'It's important to have a system. Also, I didn't change my clothes.'

'That's gross. I hope you're lying.'

I know what you're probably thinking: 'Jesus, this is boring. I wonder if anything cool happened on the weekend, like maybe Sam fell over and hurt himself again?' The answer is well, yes, actually, cool things did happen. I got to go on tour with John White and Ms Millicent Crow, which was pretty much a Tour Dream Team. We had picnics and talked about how the fourth dimension works until our brains started to hurt.

Millicent Crow, stealing own soul.

John White with Squizwot.

John White thinking about hypercubes.

Mangaweka: Quiet. Too Quiet.

We visited the haunts of those denizens of Wellington and Whanganui who have most to do with spiky interdimensional freakout music and fuzzy psychedelic werewolf music, respectively, and when we had finished doing that we drank some wine and sang some songs.

The Frederick Street Sound And Light Exploration Society, Wellignton:

Interdimensional General Store

Stink Magnetic HQ, Whanganui: Home of NZ's finest purveyors of psychowerewolffreakout surf jams.

In Wellington, we went head-to-head with the Sisters of St. Rupertsberg and Stefanimal, who were playing down at the Mighty Mighty on the same night we were at Fred's. The Mother Superior of St. Rupertsburg used to be in the Bond Street Bridge Band, and Stef used to be in John's band Mestar, so the stage was set for some sort of teen movie show-down battle of the ex-bandmates. As things turned out, that proved to be unnecessary: John phoned Stef from the stage during his set, and they did an across-town phone-in duet together. If there was a dry eye in either house, I'm sure I didn't see it.

John at Fred's: photo by syncretismassociates

We should have a jam sometime, are you busy? photo by syncretismassociates

Yeah, now is good: Photo by Syncretismassociates

Look, a winner:

2010-10-21T00:53:00.000+13:00

And the winner is: Maja. Even though she pretended to be her dad, and tried to start rumors about me which are mostly unfounded. That's how fair the process was; I asked the cat and she chose without fear or favour.

Tomorrow I will drive to Wellington for these shows I mentioned. People who aren't from New Zealand may not be aware that that's actually a fair way away, even though our country is just a pair of islands in the middle of a large ocean full of sharks. The island thing can be confusing for people, I think. Once upon a time I had a job selling liquor and cigarillos to Americans off the cruise ships, and middle-aged rich people would ask me things like 'is there a Hard Rock Cafe on the island, sweetheart?' It took me a while before I figured out that the island they were talking about was the North Island, which is not usually thought of as an island in the sunny South Pacific atoll sense. I didn't know the answer, so I would alternate between yes and no depending on how much I felt like making up directions that day. For all I know, there are to this day Americans in places like Dargaville or Fielding looking for this elusive cafe. I wish them luck.

The Broken Heartbreakers and a sweet giveaway

2010-10-18T14:38:00.000+13:00

For the past few years, I've been playing space mandolin and dark, tremulous guitar (See what I did there?) with The Broken Heartbreakers. It's been a blast. Then I turned my back for five minutes, and half the band ran away to parts unknown, so we're having a little break at the moment. It turned out, though, that in a classic case of how you never really know what drummers are up to back there, our drummer Myles had been quietly shooting really grainy footage and taking low-resolution photos of us (mostly of our backs) for the duration. Earlier in the year, in the moments when his new baby daughter was asleep, he edited it together into a sweet little video to go with the title track of our new album 'Wintersun.' For reasons best known to himself, he decided to use a version of the track that is actually quite different to the one that ended up on the record, in that half the vocals are missing and the guitars in the bridge kind of sound like Supergrass. Such nitpickerry notwithstanding, the results of his efforts warmed my heart when they emerged from the internet into the Berlin apartment where I was sitting listening to the rain and missing my band a couple of months ago.

I don't think this is the kind of video that will ever get played on the television, partly because it's just too awesome, and also because it actually doesn't get any bigger than the little window here. Also, the section between 2:43 and 2:46 features rare footage of the only time Rachel has been know to lose a game of pool, so it's kind of embargoed. So for now, this is an exclusive, which is sure to boost my traffic and help me to monetize my blog.

I'm kind of interested to hear whether other people enjoy this video quite as much as I do. I mean, for me it's memories of touring with a good people for the past couple of years playing awesome music; to you it may look like a bunch of grown-ups failing to act their age. Perhaps it's the same thing. Anyway, since the Broken Heartbreakers usually appeal to a more sensible and mature demographic (as well as our hordes of teenage fans who were devastated when it was revealed that John was actually married to Rachel and hence unavailable), here's a video of us being accepted by the cultural establishment:

Yep, that's Finlay MacDonald there, who edited the NZ Listener last time it was a good magazine. If that's not cultural establishment, I quit.

Why am I telling you this? I thought you might want to get a copy of the newish Broken Heartbreakers album, is why. Ms Millicent Crow has been telling me that I should do a giveaway on my blog for quite a while, because that's what people with blogs do, apparently. So here goes: What you have to do is leave a comment below telling me your favorite thing about the 'Wintersun' video, and sometime before Thursday I'll choose a winner. I will probably do some sort of names in hats or random number generator type procedure in order to ensure fairness, or perhaps I will get the cat to choose. The winner will receive this princely prize pack:

One 'Wintersun' CD, to be posted anywhere in the world or to the Mars colony, and
Two free passes to any of the the shows I'm doing with John White over the next couple of weeks. If you're not in Wellington, Whanganui, Raglan, or Auckland, these are transferable, so you can nominate two people in one of these towns to get in for free. I probably can't give away free passes to the South Island shows because I'm not playing at those ones, but I'll check with John and get back to you. Similarly, if you already have a copy of 'Wintersun,' because chances are if you read this blog you're either a friend or a relation and you got it at one of the release shows, take the free one and give the one you already have to your aunty for Christmas. If you are a relation, though, please don't give it to one of the aunties we have in common because then she'll get two.

Pretty sweet deal, huh? Comment away.

UPDATE: It was drawn to my attention that I had set my settings such that you needed to do stuff like sign in to leave comments, which a lot of people find quite difficult apparently. This blogging thing is clearly more complicated than I had anticipated. Anyway, I've changed it now, so everybody can comment, even spambots.

Spambots: Even if you win the competition, you can't come to the show. Sorry.

The Brokem Heartbreakers will see you now.

Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie

2010-10-12T23:07:00.000+13:00

One thing I realised when I got back to New Zealand is that we need a new pet. We already have a cat and a fish, and we used to have several more fish until the remaining fish ate them, but there is room here for a newcomer I think. Fish are good because you can ignore them. They don't need to be exercised, and if you forget to feed them for a while they pretty much sort themselves out, at least until they run out of smaller fish. The fish is called Leviathan and he's fine, we quite like him, he can stay. The only real problem with fish is that they aren't particularly fulfilling as pets because it's hard to tell what they're thinking and they don't really listen if you've got something you want to talk to them about. The cat is a different story, but I did not fly all the way around the world to write a blog about the cat. All I will say on that subject is if anybody wants a violently deranged and overly furry housecat who likes to drool on keyboards and destroy people's stuff, send me a stamped, self-addressed envelope and you can have her by return post.

I want an animal less homicidal than a cat, but more interesting and interested than a fish. It's a difficult balance to strike, because the pet must also not need exercising or training at all. A pig is a possibility; I have always been fond of pigs. My friend in Berlin has a pig called Kenny Powers, who is obviously a very fulfilling and faithful companion, but the impression I get is that he requires a lot of attention and training. That's fine if you've got the commitment and stickablility to maintain a good training regime, including walks in the park and jumping practice etc, but I fear that I lack that stickability. It would be a shame if my pig lost condition and became lazy due to my want of focus. A dog wouldn't work either, because you can't ignore dogs. If you ignore your dog for too long, pretty soon it will be running around the neighbourhood eating children, and that attracts journalists. I need a pet I can ignore sometimes, but one that will be there when I want a bit of a gossip.

So what I decided was this: It's turtle time! What this house needs is a tank with a serious turtle in it, the kind that you can feed meat to when you're bored, the kind with red dots on its ears and a leathery head that it retracts into its little shell when it's eaten too much meat and it has indigestion. Turtles make great pets because they are virtually self-sufficient: They don't need to be walked or burped, they don't crave attention, and you don't have to try to teach them things because you just can't: turtles don't do tricks. They just hang out, swim around, and look awesome. But: if you want to, you can talk to them, and they will be a lot more interested than a fish would be. That's because while fish have no knowledge of the world beyond the aquatic, turtles are amphibious, and therefore have a broader perspective on life. They hunger for knowledge, and in their little turtle brains lurk the rudiments of empathy. Once you have won its trust (with meat) your turtle can be a very sympathetic listener.

Another strong advantage a turtle has as a pet is that when we go away, lots of people will be happy to look after it. Nobody who's met her wants to look after our cat any more, because everybody knows that she's trouble. It's pretty hard to find a dog-sitter as well because of the regular exercise thing, and the problem with leaving your pig with someone is that pigs can easily be turned into a range of delicious meats and it can be hard to explain that your particular pig wasn't for eating. Turtles are no-fuss and pretty much all look the same, though, so nobody will have any qualms about turtle-sitting because a) it's easy, and b) if you still manage to make a horrible mistake and kill my turtle, you can replace it with a similar-looking one and I will never know.

I am strongly looking forward to this turtle, and I know that pretty soon people will start asking me what I'm going to call it. Well, I can reveal that I've thought quite a lot about this, and my first and well-considered choice was 'Led Zeppelin.' That would be a rad name for a turtle. Here's the thing though: you can have that name for your turtle if you want, because I'm not going to use it. I realised that I'm really looking forward to people meeting my turtle and going 'pretty cool turtle man, what's its name?' and me just saying 'The Turtle.' Because really, that's all the name it will need. It's not like it needs to get a driver's license or vote or anything, it's just a turtle. Using its powers,* The Turtle will know when it's being addressed or spoken of, so no fancier moniker is necessary in my view. When we talk of 'The Turtle' in this house, everybody will know who we mean.

So obviously nothing much exciting has happened this week, but sometimes it's good to be able to take a breather and sort out your life, particularly vis-a-vis turtles. Next time something interesting happens you will be the first to hear about it, and you can also expect more pictures of turtles here in the future. I'm thinking of subtitling this whole thing 'the blog that keeps on giving,' so feel free to let me know what you think about that.

Next week: In which I go to Whanganui, for rock'n'roll purposes. We'll see how that turns out.

----------------------------
*Yeah, The Turtle has powers. What of it?

I'm a lot like you were

2010-10-07T11:56:00.000+13:00

Did you think maybe that just because I'm back in Neuseeland I might stop it with the blogging? No such luck. Auckland is a lot like Berlin, I have found, except that everything is further away and it costs more. The main difference is that when people are rude to me on public transport here I usually know what they're saying, and I have a chance to respond with a witty remark. The situation doesn't arise much, of course, because Auckland doesn't have any public transport to speak of. If it did, though, I would be prepared with some of the pithy comebacks I've been saving up for when I got back to an English-speaking country where they would appreciate my ready wit. This may not sound apropos, but I've been working on my witty comebacks in my head for the past couple of weeks, ever since I got heckled by a toothless busker in Freetown Christiania.

It was just another day at the An Emerald City office - we were rolling through the lawless streets of Copenhagen's autonomous anarchist zone in Jim the Eagle, the German ex-police van with crow-black bulletproof windows. I was perched on the windowsill of the shotgun-side door, ostensibly the better to navigate through the windy hodgepodge of stalls and hawkers with their t-shirts and overpriced cannabis, but actually because I was pretty sure that I looked kind of rad sitting up there all rock'n'roll with my leather jacket and my top button undone. We were in good spirits, heading for a venue called Loppen, where we had been told we could confidently expect to have a very pleasant evening. As we slowed to negotiate a bottleneck, a wizened fellow banging on a five-stringed guitar looked up and called out to me something I didn't quite catch about my hat. Because objectively it's a very good hat, I figured it must have been an unsolicited compliment, so I smiled benignly and gave him a regal wave. I share this story now because I suspect that this was my mistake - behaving like royalty from the comfort of a police-looking Volkswagen may not endear one to the kinds of anarchists who get by playing five sixths of a guitar to broke wasters in open-air drug markets, and if you dear reader are able to profit from this insight one day then more power to you, I say.

Jim the Eagle, roosting outside Loppen.

After we'd found the venue and packed the gear in using their Steampunk Family Robinson freight elevator, we decided to go an have a look around the neighbourhood. Christiania is a good place to play a show, because it has something for every member of the modern psychedelic instrumental rock ensemble. If you're a political theory nerd (and every band has one) it is an interesting case study in spontaneous organisation and the effects of a power vacuum on the marketplace. If you're into weird little houses that look like they were built for hobbits by wizards, it has those in spades. If you need a new hat for the stage, or a cape for everyday wear, the selection is wide and relatively inexpensive. If you like to get into conversations about the relative merits of Moroccan versus Tibetan hashish, you will find plenty of people to talk to about your hobby; there are also swings and slides for the rhythm section to play on.

Anarchist goods elevator. Don't bother looking for the
inspection history or any of that bourgeois nonsense.

To get to all of these diversions, however, it was necessary to pass by the toothless busking man again. We were strolling, you know, six deep, looking kind of like a band with a couple of hours to kill and probably also like we knew it, when the busking dude calls out 'Hey! nice hat man!'

'Thanks dude.'

'Yeah man, nice hat! Shame you're yuppie scum!'

'Beg your pardon?'

'Nice hat! Shame you're yuppie scum!'

'Oh. Yeah. I um, I guess it is.'

This was really confusing. I mean, I'm used to getting yelled at by people, don't get me wrong. Usually though, it's for doing things like Looking Like a Fag in Public, or Not Paying Attention During a Discussion, or Playing a Noisy Solo While The Guy Who Wrote the Song is Singing About His Feelings, all of which I have been guilty of and actually quite enjoy doing. Getting a yell in these situations may not be always welcome, but at least it is not unexpected. Strolling through Hippietown with my musical co-conspirators though, wearing not even a suit, but my busking hat with the lucky crow's feather in, I would have thought I was safe from accusations of yuppiedom. Particularly when these accusations are leveled at me by a busker with few teeth, the kind of guy who usually winds up on my team, these things can smart.

Pretty good hat, for a yuppie. Note that the coffee is a long black,
not like a cappuccino or something that maybe a yuppie would have.

In the absence of a witty comeback from the proud owner of said hat, Dan, bless him, was all for going back and starting something with the guy. He was in the army down in Israel for a while, and sometimes the esprit de corps comes out I guess. Rob, however, was quickly at pains to appraise us of the sociopolitical realities of the situation in which we found ourselves: when you're in an autonomous zone controlled by an anarchist tribe who have thrown out the cops, it's a good idea not to start altercations with people with no teeth. I didn't have much to contribute; I was sulking a little bit, which is what I usually do when people call me a yuppie and I can't think of a funny thing to say back.

I don't know about you, but when people call me things I tend to go through a brief period of introspection to determine whether or not the new label is accurate. I mean, there is every chance that the broken-down minstrel hanging out on the fringes of the cannabis bazaar shouting at strangers has some sort of insight into my life that has hitherto been hidden from me. It would be a shame to forgo this chance for self-improvement just because I find the messenger's behaviour boorish. I also probably needed to walk past the guy again in order to get back to the venue for soundcheck, so I wanted to have a think about how things stood and where our relationship was at so I would know how to interact with him should the opportunity arise a third time.

As the others tried on hats and chatted with the pushers, I considered the situation from a few angles. The first thing I thought was that I hadn't heard anyone say 'yuppie' for quite a long time, really since the nineties if I think about it. Maybe it's common in Denmark, though, and the guy didn't have to be down with the latest slang if he really had a point, so I let that slide. Was I dressed like a yuppie? I didn't even have to check, I had been wearing the same clothes for several days and none of them would have earned me rapid preferment in an office context. So not that then. Could it be my overall appearance apart from my clothes? Yuppies, I'm pretty sure, shave a lot, and generally engage in grooming. Like cats, they wash themselves frequently. They are well turned out, and their nail polish is usually not chipped as far as I am aware. I, on the other hand, had left my razor in a gas station restroom in Calais over a month ago, I was beginning to smell faintly ursine, and I lost points in the nail-grooming category as well. In short, I was well prepared for playing space violin in a psychedelic rock band, but I would not have even made Casual Friday in most downtown workplaces.

Guys, to smell 'ursine' is to be like these chaps. Not whatever you were thinking.

Perhaps it was something more intangible then, like attitude? It's true that I am arrogant and I tend to walk around with a vast sense of entitlement, but I would have though that 'asshole' was a more appropriate label for someone with those traits, and in any case I'm working on it. Perhaps he meant that I have an eye for the main chance, a keen instinct for the vagaries of the market, and a razor-sharp focus on my career? How to tell the poor man, then, that I am used to playing for little or no money beyond costs, and my idea of career development is a day spent listening to every single Led Zeppelin album, back to back and in order? It made no sense. This aggression, I decided, would not stand.

I will not trouble you with the range of options I went through in my head regarding the inevitable future encounter with this heckling busker. The problem I had was that any verbal riposte on my part would inevitably come across as prepared and stilted, since he would know that I had spent the past couple of hours thinking about it. That essentially meant that the better it was, the more it would seem like I'd thought about it, which would mean he'd got to me; whereas if it was lame I would look extra-dumb because after all, I'd had a couple of hours to think about it, hadn't I? Any non-verbal response, though, would be very far out of character for me because of how well brought-up I am,* so I really was in a bit of a bind. I guess I could have mooned the guy, but that seemed, and still seems, tacky. My least bad option, as far as I could see it, was to embrace the yuppie/busker dichotomy and offer the guy twenty Kroners to shut the hell up. As it happened, I was spared the decision by my old allies: social confusion and my congenital inability to recognise humans.

What happened was, the group of us became separated for various reasons and me and Rob were the last to wander back to Loppen together for soundcheck. As we approached the spot where the busker had been, I could hear a cracked voice singing 'Old Man' by Neil Young, and all I could think was you've got to be fucking kidding me. We stopped by the guy playing the guitar and he's all like, do you like the song? And I'm like, yeah, I mean, I like the song I guess but to be honest it isn't his best work and you really need more strings for that shit don't you? Rob kind of gives me a look like don't be a dick, man, and the guy asks what we're up to in Christiania. Rob says we're here to play music and the guy says cool, he plays music too. Rob says uh-huh, cos the guy is holding a guitar and has just been observed to sing.

'Whereabouts you boys playing?' He sounds Canadian. Whereaboots. Come to think of it, he looks kind of like Neil Young, if Neil Young smoked crack.

'Over there. In um, in Loppen?'

'No way. Tonight? With that Canuck band?'

'Yeah, I guess.'

'Wanted to get to that. Couldn't get a ticket.' Yeah, because you spent all your money on crack, Neil, thinks I. But doesn't say it.

'Oh, well we've got some door list I think. Have we still got door list, dude?'

'What? Um I guess so. Maybe we shouldn't -'

'Yeah OK, cool man, we'll get you on the door. What's your name?'

So the guy gave us his name, and I was very confused because that wasn't how I expected it to go at all. At the same time I was quite impressed with Rob because I figured that this had to be the last thing the guy was expecting, and it was a pretty masterful comeback, if that's what it was. We didn't discuss it though, and the two of us walked back to the venue, speaking of more lofty matters. Later on, however, over dinner, Reuben suddenly remembered the guy.

'So did you see Toothless Busking Man again today?'

'Yeah man, saw him again on the way back.'

'Did you give him a karate chop?'

'Um. Yeah nah that didn't seem appropriate really, after Rob had like invited him to the show and whatever.'

'No way! Did what?'

'Wait, what? No I -'

'Yeah he did! Dude, you totally did invite him. Do you have a hole in your brain?'

'Yeah, well, yes. I mean I do, but what? Holy shit, was that the same guy?'

'Yeah, the busker, man! The one who saw through my disguise? That was the guy we were talking to on the way back. Who you said to come to the show. Wasn't it?'

'Really? Are you sure that was the same dude?'

'Fuck I don't know man, people are people, right? These broke-down old junkies all look the same to me with their guitars and their Neil Young and shit. But yeah, I think so.'

'Nah look I'm pretty sure that was a different guy from before. No way was I going to invite that guy. Jesus.'

'For real? You're sure?'

'Yeah, like, ninety per cent?'

'OK, that's pretty high. Far out, this town bugs me out man. I totally thought it was the same guy.'

'Oh man, and you didn't say anything?'

'Yeah well what was I gonna say? You were just about pashing the dude.'

Social confusion, retarded development in the part of my brain that recognises faces, these are powerful forces that conspire to strip meaning from my life. It's possible that the guy came to the gig that night, but to be honest, the Danes really like their Black Mountain so the room was pretty full and I didn't see anyone with that many gaps in their teeth. Basically, this kind of incident is by no means isolated for me and it often takes me about four goes before I recognise people's faces at all. This often has hilarious consequences for everyone except me, which is fine, because it's good to make people laugh, but it can be inconvenient when it comes to things like revenge. Dad reckons that it means I should never try to be a politician, and he's probably got a point. I reckon the main thing it means though is that I need to work on my comebacks, because when you're me and all the faces look the same, you only get one chance with the haters.

-----------------------------
*and also a bit of a sissy.

Done all I can do in this town

2010-10-02T20:58:00.000+13:00

After three months on this side of the world, the seasons have taken a turn. The weeping birches by the Treptower memorial are colouring, and honking great skeins of geese cross the sky from the North. As the evenings begin drawing in, the drug dealers in Gorlitzer Park have started to fight each other with baseball bats, and finally I can wear all of the layers of wool I laughed at myself for hauling over here in July. I like to wear wool, and I like the geese. Riding around a park in a big old railway yard while the leaves turn gold and the various crews of pushers pursue diplomacy by other means is a fine way to spend an afternoon if you're not busy, but despite these attractions it still feels like it's a good time to head home.

I try to remain vigilant in life when I can, but I do find that things tend to sneak up on me. Opening for the Black Angels with An Emerald City was a good way to celebrate my last week in Europe, but it was only a couple of days before my train to Frankfurt international airport that I really started thinking in terms of leaving town and making sure I did what I'd come to do before I had to go. You will be aware that the main thing I came to Europe to do was ride purposlessly around Berlin on my bike Philip, so I made sure I did that first. Me and him have had some good times together over the past few months, and I think he realised that our time was coming to an end, because he was a little subdued on our last few outings. Usually he is a very spirited bike and he likes to throw his chain at inoppourtune moments, or lock up his wheels in the middle of bustling intersections to show me who's in charge, but as we've cruised around our favourite parts of Neukolln and Kreutzberg this past week his behaviour has been very proper.

Another of my key mission objectives for the Berlin Operation was to spend a good part of most days cluttering up a particular cafe in Oppelnerstrasse where you can get the best long black north of Midnight Espresso. I don't usually care that much about how my food and drink taste, but these long blacks are very fine and the company there is often worth getting out of bed for. If you ever feel like maybe your pants don't match your jacket and you're not ready to face up to the beautiful kids in Berlin just yet, a leisurely bout of coffee consumption here should put you in the right frame of mind to stroll down the strasse with your freunden, ready see and be seen. I think the rule is that it doesn't matter if band practice starts a little late if at least half of us need to stop at Passenger for a coffee before we feel like we can make a useful contribution to the session, and band practice has been starting late a lot recently. This is a good thing, and it meant I was able to put in a bit of quality time with the motley Passenger crew before I left town.

One of the few things that I really needed to do in real life, though, I predictably ended up postphoning until my last day. Those of you who have kept clicking back here hoping for something worth reading* since a couple of months ago may recall that at one time I was bragging about how busking has made me rich as a troll. I'm not apologising for bragging here; people who dislike bragging typically have nothing to brag about. However, I feel I should clarify my financial situation somewhat, in order that readers don't develop the impression that the people of Berlin have handed life to me on a plate, or in a hat, if youlike. The thing with busking is that people usually give you coins. Sometimes notes, but usually coins, and that's fine - I like coins. They make me feel like a character in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. (I.e. awesome). The problem I had in July, though, was that I liked my coins too much. Like some latter-day Midas, I hoarded them and gazed lovingly upon them, enjoying them both as objects and as tokens of the esteem I felt I could purchase with them from my peers. It is true that I should have been more out in the fresh air, but my behaviour did have a rational basis, which was this: I figured I might as well take them all to a bank at once and get them changed into notes in one go rather than in time-wasting dribs and drabs. As you will be aware, my time is precious and my days are crowded with purposeful incident.

It was reasonably important for me to get these coins changed into notes, because bureaux de change typically don't handle coins; presumably because they are not run by trolls or aficionados of fantasy fiction. My plan was to not be completely broke when I got back to New Zealand, so I needed to convert my hoard into a form that I could reconvert into NZ dollars later. So it was that on the last day of July, before I left Berlin to hoon around Europe in an A-class Mercedes for a month, I carefully counted all of my loot. I divided it into bags by denomination and multiples of ten, and set off to find a bank. It was raining a bit and I was toting about fifteen kilograms of coins in a calico bag, looking very much like a traditionally-minded bank robber. My spirits were high as I approached the first bank, just around the corner.

'You would like to do what please?'

'Um, change these coins? To notes? Ah, bitte?'

'Change to another kind of money? For um, for foreign? This is not-'

'Um, nein. I mean like change the coins to notes? In Euros?'

'Ah so. This also is not possible. You may deposit this coins, but to do this you must first have an account. With this bank.'

'Was? Ok. Gosh. Um, I think my friend does.' I tend to only say 'gosh' when I'm a bit flustered, and it's usually a sign things are not going well for me.

'Your friend, is he with you?'

'Ah, no. Nah. He's not here.'

'Without this friend, sorry we can do nothing.'

'Serious? You can't just swap them for me for like a commission or something? That would be totally sweet in Neuseeland, they really like doing it. It gives them a chance to play with coins and stuff.'

'Sorry, you talk so fast! What did you say please?

'Um yeah nah don't worry about it man, eh . Danke.'

'Please have a nice day.'

The story was similar at the next establishment, and at the one after that there was the added twist that they don't even handle coins at all, and the thought of it seemingly makes them ill. The next place turned out not to be a bank at all, but a mortgage broker, with hilarious consequences. By this time it was raining quite hard and I was beginning to wonder how much fifteen kilograms of coins is actually worth in real life, and whether it was much, and suspecting that in fact it wasn't. In mounting frustration and dampness, I tried a series of casinos, figuring that they would be used to coins and probably had a system. They may very well have had, but unfortunately I was insufficiently charming and nobody wanted to try to understand what I was talking about. Probably this was because I was dripping wet, speaking English, and waving around a shopping bag full of cash. Not a threat, necessarily, but probably not worth going out of your way for.

I had a show to get to, so I decided that since I had about twenty-five kilos of instruments, amps, pedals and sundry other equipment to schlep up to Fredrichshain on the U-Bahn, I might as well haul the coins along as well. Improbably, this proved to be a good move, and set a pattern for the rest of the tour - after the show, the host very graciously agreed to take a hundred euros worth of ones off my hands, in exchange for their face value in paper money. I was pathetically relieved, both for my own financial situation and for the state of the Euro in general. After all, money is only worth what we agree it is, and the evidence from that day suggested very strongly that nobody believes in coins any more. It was nice to feel that both I and the European Union might be less broke than people thought.

So the next day, when we set off to London very very fast on the autobahn, I had in addition to my usual kit about four hundred Euros worth of one and two Euro coins. For the next few weeks I would gauge the atmosphere after each show, and if the host was convivial I would tell the sorry tale and do a deal to swap twenty or fifty of these shiny tokens for real plastic money. Between this and our practice of paying for petrol with one-Euro coins when the gas station staff were surly, my piratical hoard gradually converted into a much more freely convertible, and still satisfyingly solid, pile of cheerily-coloured European banknotes.

When I got back to Berlin at the beginning of July though, and retrieved the flight case for my guitar from the friend's apartment where it had been stashed, I looked inside and was reminded that while I had taken care of the ones and twos, there were still about a hundred and fifty euros worth of twenty- and fifty-cent coins sitting there in envelopes looking like a job to do. I hadn't taken these on that part of the tour, partly because they were really heavy, and partly because I decided that it was unlikely that even the most helpful venue owner or bar manager would remember the New Zealander who insisted on counting out hundreds of twenty-cent coins on their bartop with much fondness at all. It was this last pile of coins that became my final task in Berlin - in addition to playing shows, riding my bike and a rigourous schedule of hanging out, converting this final stack of silver became a useful thing to procrastinate about.

That's why, when a kindly soul finally took pity on me and walked me the ten minutes from Passenger cafe to her bank, and we stood and watched while the teller succumbed to her own rulebook and labouriously counted the whole jingling stash into a legitimate, numbered account, returning the pile of crisp banknotes so desirable to international money-changers, I felt a satisfying sense of a mission accomplished. The task had been hanging around for weeks, not getting in the way so much as providing a useful ambition around which to organise my plans. That was the task, and it had been ticked off - time to leave this town and follow the geese.

------------------------
*Sorry.

Teufelsberg

2010-10-01T18:58:00.000+13:00

Berlin is not a hilly town. There are very few hills here at all, in spite of the fact that several of the suburbs are named after various notional mounds of dirt that you'd really need to be quite worked up to try to make a mountain out of. The area is well served by lakes and even fairly extensive forests, but hills really aren't a feature. The largest hill in the district, in fact, is artificial. It was built in the late forties after five years of aerial bombardment and several months of sustained artillery barrage had left approximately sixty million cubic metres of rubble lying around in Berlin, generally cluttering the place up and getting in the way of efforts to rebuild the city. So far, so WWII, you may be thinking, but the location of the hill is not a coincidence either. Faced with a decision about where to put all this rubble, the occupying Allied military commanders decided that they might as well make it useful. In the Western sector, in the area administered by the British, there stood a Nazi military college that Albert Speer had designed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to demolish, even with the kind of ordnance the Royal Corps of Engineers had available to them in that part of Europe in the late forties. It was the kind of place where a range of terrible things had happened, and the general feeling was that it should be gotten rid of. Since it was so hard to demolish, and they had all this rubble all over everything, they came up with one of those elegant solutions that can only ever be carried out by organisations like armies of occupation, which are unencumbered by civil engineering regulations or the need to consult with residents: they decided to bury it. So they built a hill on top of the military college and called it Teufelsberg - the Devil's mountain.*

This would be worth a look in itself, I would imagine, if you were the sort of person who went out of their way to visit enormous rubbish heaps. I have my quirks, to be sure, but an abiding interest in piles of rubble has not hitherto been one of them. What I do have though is a serious weakness for abandoned Cold War-era military installations, particularly the sort where you get to climb through holes in barbed-wire fences and risk possible cross-cultural misunderstandings with bored security guards. Lucky for me then that the US National Security Agency in the seventies took advantage of the elevation provided by the artificial hill and put up one of the most aesthetically pleasing sorts of Cold War military installations there is - a radio listening post, which they used to spy on the radio transmissions of the DDR. Radio listening posts have such a strikingly attractive aspect partly because they tend to be situated in areas free of physical interference, which is to say the tops of hills, and partly because the best way to protect all the fantastically expensive receivers and knobs and dials and so on from the elements whilst still maintaining a decent signal quality is to construct buildings that resemble either giant golfballs, enormous fungi, or a space station, depending on your frame of reference.

Space Base Golfshroom.

Once the DDR shut up shop in the 90s, the NSA pulled the plug on the facility and went, I imagine, closer to people they actually wanted to listen to. They took all of their receivers and most of the knobs and dials with them, but they left the buildings, and they left the enormous mushroom/golfball/space station things on top of them. Since that time, the area has been largely ignored apart from an abortive attempt about ten years ago to turn the whole thing into an apartment complex. There's a couple of fences, but they're full of holes, and climbing through holes in fences around abandoned military installations is the height of entertainment for a lot of people. Apocryphal security guards with theoretical rabid dogs on hypothetical chains are said to roam freely in the grounds, but the day we where there I think they might have been spending time with their ideal families, because we were able to stalk our way in through the trees unmolested.

This is a little deer we surprised in the forest. He proved impossible
to catch, so we had to eat the lunch we'd brought from home.

The possibility of imaginary security guards makes the whole thing a lot more exciting, of course. It's pretty lucky that I used to train intensively in the pine forest behind my house for just this sort of mission, and it was even luckier that on the day we infiltrated the facility I was accompanied by my main training partner, who remembered all the signals and protocols that you have to use when you're busting into a highly secure US radar installation on top of an artificial hill in Germany with an indestructible Nazi military college buried underneath it like some sort of secret level. Our combined experience gave us a pretty serious bonus when it came to pulling off moves like avoiding imaginary security guards, and I can report that at no time were our ranks decimated by withering fire from camouflaged bunkers, nor were we caught by any deadfalls, tripwires, or gin traps. Not even imaginary ones.

Johnny Law is around here somewhere, I can feel it.

Once we'd had our fill of sneaking through the forest cover like some sort of elite Ewok commando strike force A-team from 'Nam, it was time to check out the primary mission objective: the domes themselves. As in the best sorts of computer games, we were working against the clock, because one member of our party had heroically elected to stay beside the hole in fence. She said it was because she didn't want to both break her neck and get German arrested in a single day, but I think actually she was Providing a Diversion and Covering our Escape Route, which are crucial and often overlooked roles in a mission and will still earn you lots of experience points. We were fortunate though to have Mr. Tim G. in the team, who is able to move pretty smartly when he needs to, and has a lot of tricks up his sleeve when it comes to being on the run from Johnny Law and keeping a unit moving efficiently in the field.

Wikisign - add your own hazard warnings.

The buildings that the radar domes sit on are really quite fun - they're huge abandoned concrete bunker type things, with lots of exciting-looking cables and broken glass and inscrutably twisted bits of metal lying about, all covered with the Graffiti that spreads in this city like mould in a fruit bowl. There were a few giddy minutes when were looking for a way up, and we were unable to find the official quite safe concrete stairs.

'How do you reckon we get up?'
'Do you reckon you can't get up maybe?'
'Nah you can definitely get up, I saw all this stuff on the internet.'
'Right.'
'And plus how did that guy get up there?'
'What guy?'
'Johnny Law?' You know who that was.
'Nah, that guy on the roof with the macbook. That's not Johnny Law, that's just some hipster writing a screenplay.'
'Oh, OK.'
'Maybe... do you think you have to climb up these ladder type things? On the outside of the pillars?'
'Yeah no, I'm definitely not going to do that.'
'Ah, yeah, I'm also not going to do that.' Naysayers.
'What if these really rusty-looking ladders are the only way up?'
'Then I'm going to probably just not go up.'
'It's only that last bit that looks hard, where you have to sort of reach -'
'I am not going to be climbing these ladders of which you speak. Nor are you. We're not climbing these ladders. They're not even proper ladders anyway, they're like reinforcing or something.'
'I'm not saying we should necessarily climb them, but like if these ladders are the only way up -'
'Stop calling them ladders!'
'Um, guys? I think these things here are the stairs?' T.G. often wanders off when people are having productive discussions, but he usually comes back with useful intel.
'Real stairs? Or fall seven stories and break your neck stairs?'

They're definitely not ladders. Don't climb them. Indiana Jones
would climb them perhaps, but he does lots of things you shouldn't do.

This is why real Ewok commandos mostly communicate with hand signals I think. As it turned out, the stairs were built to exacting US Army standards, and will probably still be there when you and I are stardust again. They were certainly adequate anyway for the task of conveying us safely to the best view of Berlin I've ever seen.

Berlin, with screenplay-writing hipster in foreground.

It really is a long way up.

Go on, look down. That's not a ladder either.

That's an open lift shaft. I'm not sure what motivated some vandal to prise open the
lift doors on everyfloor, but it certainly makes the whole experience a bit more vertiginous.

There are very few towns in the world where you can catch a train to a man-made hill and walk into an abandoned military base in broad daylight, but not get shot at, mugged, or blown up by landmines, and you can also drink the water and call a cop if your bike gets stolen. Third world levels of awesome and poorly-guarded ruins combined with first-world civil society and governance make for a pretty rocking playground. The view from up there in the radar domes is all the sweeter for the fact that you wouldn't even be able to get that high without all of this history going on underneath you, layers and layers of it piling like sediment and forming the foundations for the next outlandish structure somebody takes a notion to put up. From the top of the Teufelsberg you can see a communist TV tower, a fascist airport, a capitalist nuclear plant, and acres of forest teeming with enough wild boars to give Obelix a stomach ache next time he comes to visit the Visigoths. You can see the stadium where Jack Lovelock and Jesse Owens won their medals in 1936, and you're standing right under the flightpath of the C-47s that fed West Berlin for two years during the luftbrücke. The last military casualty of the cold war was shot by DDR border guards somewhere on the plain to the north, and red squirrels run up and down the telephone lines that the CIA used to use to pass on propaganda to Radio Free Europe. These days it's a great place for hipsters to come to do their photography assignments, although I'm told it's considered a bit of an easy brief for obvious reasons.

Me, walking on history. Tim S snapped this shot.

If you ignore things like the piles of radioactive waste and the possiblity of
catastrophic failure, nuclear power stations are pretty cool.

-----------------------------------

*The video that the link in this paragraph takes you to is way better than most of the ones I link to, so go watch it.

Straight out of Copenhagen

2010-09-25T14:16:00.000+12:00

On the bus from Copenhagen, I felt like a bear. It had been a few days since there had been an opportunity to change my clothes, and the day before that, when there had been, I had for some reason failed to avail myself of that opportunity. Three nights supporting one of the heaviest psychedelic bands to come out of Vancouver in recent years had left me with a certain aroma, because as these guys say, if you're not sweating, why are you on stage? I felt bad for my fellow travelers, but I felt good for myself because unlike on the DBahn between Prague and Berlin the previous weekend, at least I had my own seat. One must relish these small mercies.

It isn't as if though I needed any more small mercies - I was spending the spare moments between idly tapping on my laptop and staring out the window at one of the most beautiful cities in Europe to reflect on the fact that if a series of bizarre coincidences hadn't lined up in precisely the right way, I wouldn't even be here. Since here was such a well-set-up place to be, peopled by such friendly aliens, that would have been a real shame. Not being here would also have meant that I wouldn't have got to spend the previous few nights supporting a premium quality band playing heavy rock n roll in the old-fashioned devilhorned sense. Not doing that would mean that I wouldn't have been given the opportunity to spend my time on this side of the world playing violin for a band I have been in awe of since I first heard their record on bFM, nearly three years ago. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have had the chance to infiltrate the tweakingest tribe of international misfits and wizards to hit Neukolln in 2010, which might mean that I wouldn't have even been in Berlin in 2010, which would have been a waste.

Clearly it's a good thing that I don't usually take the trouble to record my idle musings as they occur in real time. I wouldn't want the above chain of poorly-reasoned connections to give the impression that I believe in fate or destiny of some kind - far from it in fact. That kind of thinking I will leave to hippies and wasters, who are better at it than me. I do find though that taking the trouble to revel in the chance encounters that make whole chunks of life more interesting is a good way to maintain a positive mental attitude in the face of things like smelling like a laundry hamper on a crowded seven-hour bus ride.

The bus ride was to be my second to last intercity trip in Europe this time around. Since I was travelling back to Berlin to play one last show, though, I still had a sense of anticipation to help me through the less diverting parts. The show was to be a continuation of a recent trend that An Emerald City had been displaying as a band, which was to open for heavy psychedelic bands from overseas whose names start with the word 'Black' and finish with a highly powerful noun like 'Mountain' or 'Angels.' This is a trend that will continue until Sabbath play a show in Berlin and we get to smash the back out of Ozzy's rider. Anticipating this event is a good way to distract yourself during even the crawlingest budget coach experience on the rush-hour clogged Copenhagen freeway.

Driving South is usually a good feeling, particularly at the beginning of a European Autumn when the birds start to head in the same direction. If feeling a kinship for the long-distance migratories is a common experience for musical refugees from the Southside of the world, it may be because both try to understand what it is to feel the pull of two places on far sides of the earth, each with its own set of attractive feeding grounds depending on the position of this planet relative to the Sun. Flocking birds must have to put up with the same sorts of heavy traffic, delayed departures and missed connections that the rest of us are used to, and the limp, feathered carcasses that dot the sides of the highway are a reminder that it's not always an easy trip. The road home is a bittersweet place to end up. And so forth.

It is precisely this kind of thinking that anticipating the next show is designed to avert. Having a show coming up is a useful reminder that the esoteric skills you spend so many secret hours developing in bedrooms and practice spaces have some kind of purpose beyond the satisfaction they bring to you and your musical accomplices. Knowing that tonight, tomorrow, or very soon you will need to stand up and do what you came to do, on a stage and in real life, is a great way to avoid thinking mawkishly about endings and focus instead on the start of whatever's going to happen next. Last night a guy asked if we were waiting for a revolution. I said no man, we're not waiting, we're working every day to bring that shit on. Everyone laughed of course because it was such a stupid thing to say. Regular readers will be aware that to say stupid things is one of the reasons I came to Europe in the first place though, so I still won.

Despite my carping about traffic and the cramped conditions in which I found myself, I actually enjoy travelling by busses and trains. Being somebody else's problem on somebody else's time is liberating, as long as you don't actually want to exercise any real liberty and are happy to go where you're sent. In this respect, one may wish to argue, intercity travel is much like parliamentary democracy. It is usually just as convenient, at least in the developed nations. I will abandon this analogy before it collapses under its own weight and creates a black hole that destroys the internet, but you get the idea: during the long hours between A and B, the mind is at liberty to wander.* Not having to be anywhere because you're already on your way to somewhere else removes all sense of responsibility for the duration of the trip, which means you don't even have to read a book if you don't want to. I like to sit and look at the view with my brain set to scatter, and sometimes even when my legs start to cramp and I can't eat any more salted nuts I don't want the ride to end just yet.

This liberty I guess is how you end up with the above. I wrote everything up to this line on the bus on the way out of Copenhagen, typing until the battery ran out on my laptop. From now on, I'm writing on the ferry and I promise I'll wrap this up before I have to change tenses again.** I realised as the bus pulled out of the station earlier that I was already writing in the past tense, because leaving a town can feel like that. I was thinking, I think, that given that my camera had run out of batteries it would be a good idea to try to remember Copenhagen by writing it down, in the past tense, the way a photo is. Unfortunately I kept on getting distracted by things like geese, which is an occurrence that disrupts my plans surprisingly often. Also distracting were roadkill, car accidents, food, wondering about music, and a lingering anxiety about whether or not I smelt too much like a human to be out in public. Therefore what I seem to have ended up with is a bit of a meander through a selection of those barely tangentially connected fields, which is going to make it difficult for me to find a journal to publish this in. I think the best way for you to read this is to imagine me muttering it to myself slightly too loudly on a bus full of young Scandinavians on their way to Berlin to run the marathon they have there, and sometimes trailing off to stare out the window with my mouth open a bit. You would be sitting two seats away wishing that your State-funded education hadn't included such a firm grounding in English, so it would be easier to tune me out.

When this ferry stops we'll get back on the bus and ride it at autobahn speed until it hits Berlin at around midnight. Then we'll will cast around for an UBahn to ride back to HQ, there to reconvene and anticipate opening for the Black Angels at the Comet club on Monday. As Tim G. says, just trying to make ends meet on a day to day basis.

*As in parliamentary debate, it sometimes comes back with poorly-chosen metaphors.
**Update: sorry.

Praha

2010-09-18T22:14:00.000+12:00

I wrote the following on the train yesterday, and things are turning out pretty much how I anticipated. So far, I haven't been robbed, but it's early days. Prague is so pretty that I can only look at it for short periods before my brain starts to hurt and I have to look at my shoes for a while.
---------------------

Ouch, brain hurts. Shoe time:

Shoes, Prague

Here I am on a train in the Republic of the Czechs, and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've come here. Ordinarily when I get around the place playing music, I hitch my wagon to one of the bands I play with and trail around without having to think very much. So Bond Street Bridge will support the Broken Heartbreakers or the Reb Fountain band or whatever, and I basically get to sit in the back of the van and crack wise while somebody else makes the decisions. Sometimes I drive; sometimes I even navigate, but very rarely do I sign off on calls like 'where shall we stay?' 'what time do we need to leave town in order to not be soundchecking at the next place while the audience are filing in?' or 'what was the name of the venue again?' Last summer I did a little solo Bond Street Bridge tour round New Zealand, but Ms. Millicent Crow came too on that one. That was great fun, and we even had a car crash in Christchurch, back when that town was still more or less a going concern. When I went to Amsterdam and Belgium recently I travelled alone for a while, but I had bands to meet up with when I got there, and schedules to work around. What I'm getting at is that this trip here, to Prague, is maybe the first time I've actually travelled alone to somewhere to do a solo show all by my very own self.

How I roll

This is probably not a very big deal to many people, but consider this: until quite recently I thought that Prague was in Hungary. Now I think about that, it still seems very plausible, although I can't remember very much at all about Hungary. We just went past a massive gorge sort of thing with mighty castles on either side rearing up out of the bare cliffs, and villages clustered on the banks of the river around churches topped with onion domes. All of my photos will be blurry and full of train window smudges, but all you need to do is imagine any fairytale castle, but about thirty per cent more grim. As it happens, we just passed another one. I suppose this river has been much fought over, but you'll have to be content with my suppositions because this train is about the first place I've been in Europe that doesn't have wi-fi, so I can't confirm my hunches with fifteen seconds of desultory Googling. Update: yep, they've certainly had a bunch of wars in these parts, don't worry about that.

Told you, blurry as all hell. Still, the guy who decided to put a bridge over that massive chasm must have been stoked when it ended up looking as awesome in real life as it did in his head.

One of the things people have been telling me when I tell them I'm going to Prague is that it's a very pretty place. The next thing they tell me is that they or their friend got robbed there. To date, that is the sum total of my knowledge about Prague: Handsome sort of town, you get robbed. I understand also that they have a river, and tomorrow night I will play a show at some bar and no doubt they will give me some delicious food and some money, which I think will be Kroners. Or Dinars. Anyway, it's something hyper-inflated so they don't want it the European Monetary Union. That's fine with me, because it means that I will get to change my money, which I like doing, and I will get a fee that will be expressed in thousands of whatever unit it is that they use here, so i will feel rich very briefly. Regular readers of this blog will realise that I'm getting my familiar 'forgot to google the town I'm playing in next' feeling around now. Actually I'm not even sure whether it's in the same time zone. I mean, I think it is, but I'm not sure, you know?

The other thing that is likely to happen is that I will probably wake up tomorrow without a voice. A week of R&R in the Beartown seems to have left me with a slight cold, which seems to be turning into a slightly more serious cold. Fortunately for me, this is one of the parts of the world where people with well-developed drug habits have access to real drugs. That means there is very little demand for methamphetamine, which is widely regarded as one of the least pleasant drugs in the world, and is really only consumed in places like New Zealand where the tyranny of distance inflates the price of the alternatives. A low demand for methamphetamine means that they're a lot more relaxed about whacking a whole lot of pseudoephedrine into their over-the-counter cold medication around here, because nobody's going to bother blowing up their apartment and frying their sinuses cooking meth from flu meds when they can stroll down to the corner and buy a gram of Colombian cocaine. The upshot of this set of circumstances is that there's a pretty good chance that I can get some cold medication that actually works, and put this thing on hold until after the Black Mountain shows next week.*

Thinking about walking into a pharmacy in Prague and trying to buy cold medication without looking like a P addict has made me realise that I don't even know what language they speak here. The train stations seem to have a lot modifiers over a lot of the letters, so I think we can say that it's very likely that not only will I not know what any of the words mean, I won't even be able to pronounce them in any identifiable fashion. It's not German, which is fine, because I can't speak German. It's not French, which I also can't speak, although slightly less badly than I can't speak German. It's not English, and after that we might as well just go back to the old hand signals and the horrible rictus people use to mean 'I'm trying really hard, but it seems that our communications systems are incompatible. Have you checked your warranty card?' I think this is going to be a good weekend.

This is my first Czech swan. Note the proud and extensive national history.

*Yep, that whole paragraph was an excuse to mention the Black Mountain shows. Also I wanted to see how many people would get lost in my chain of reasoning and think that I was the one with the well-developed cocaine habit, and what they would think about that. For the record: I’m not. I can’t afford a cocaine habit, even in Europe.

Out on the weekend

2010-09-15T02:45:00.000+12:00

'When the Levee Breaks' is a very long song indeed, so if you start dancing to it at about six a.m. when the dancefloor is beginning to thin out, you'd better be prepared to stick around for the long haul or you're going to make the DJ feel bad. It would be pretty criminal to go and get a drink halfway through a song this powerful, and besides, if you're still dancing at six a.m then it's probably time to give the barman a rest for at least seven minutes and eight seconds, which is how long a song 'When the Levee Breaks' is. In the song ‘North American Scum’ by LCD Soundsystem, there's a good line about parties in Spain where they go all night, and in Berlin where they go another night, alright. A lot of people at the September 11 Emerald City show at Loophole the other night looked like they'd been going since some time in the mid-eighties, when they hopped in a time machine to the 25th century on the Mars Colony to get their wigs, then came straight back to Berlin 2010 to show us how awesome people will look in the future. It was one of those nights.

A little while ago I was staying with a friend on Stafford Street in Dunedin, which is one of the towns in New Zealand that's still standing, and he took me down the road to what he warned me was likely to be the 'quintessential Dunedin experience.' He was right, I think. It was around three a.m. and quite cold and we walked into a basement room where there was a band playing something ear-bleedingly loud in one corner, and another guy playing some repurposed keyboards at industrial volume on the other side of the room. In the middle there were a couple of tweaked-out looking dudes playing with an overhead projector and some shapes, making patterns on the walls, and a bunch of people mooching around with boxes of wine under their arms. The band stopped and the guy playing the keyboards, who has a name but you won't hear it from me, started a fight with them and bit a chunk out of one of their arms. It was a night of surprises for me, but just another Tuesday night in that town.

I'd like to think that the night An Emerald City played at Loophole represented a quintessential Berlin experience in a similar sense, so I’m blogging about it in order that people will know what to expect when they come here and accidentally start playing in the best instrumental psychedelic rock band in Europe. The first inkling that I had that it might be a better-than-average evening happened just as we'd finished setting up and we were waiting for the beautiful people to leave their houses and come out dancing. A couple walked in and I looked up and thought about what a strange and wonderful world it is when Dancing Stevie, last spotted in Auckland city, has an identical twin in Berlin. Of course in actual fact there's only one Stevie, and as far as I know he has no twins, and he is just as capable of hopping on a plane as the rest of us, so really there were no surprises when I realised that he was there in Berlin in his own person. It was a good feeling though to see him rocking out at an Emerald City show in a living room/artspace/bar thing in Neukolln. Perhaps I am starting to get a little homesick here on the far side of the world.

We'd set up in a circle around the outside of the room, amps firing inwards, with Sam and Rob up by the DJ booth, Dan and Jess in one corner, and Reuben and me in another. I was standing on a sort of a bench, so once the people came in and started dancing in the middle, I was the only person in the band who could actually see everyone. It was only my third show with An Emerald City, and Jess's second, so anything could have gone wrong. Sam had just presented me with a pretty special leather jacket with a massive rip under one arm, though, so we knew no fear and I'm not sure about anybody else, but I started to have a lot of fun once the rhythm section kicked in on the first song. At one point I was going to do a stage-dive right into the middle of the room, but you're not supposed to do that when you're playing a 125-year old violin, even if your signal chain includes a Space Echo and a Rat distortion pedal. I definitely did it in my head though, and it was delicious.

We finished the show at about half-past midnight, which tends to be what happens in this town because of the neighbours. The rest of the evening we spent doing my favourite thing to do after a show, which is to dance spastically to tunes my friends play on whatever sweet PA system they have in the venue we've just played in. There's a great bit at about six minutes into 'Levee,' after the second guitar solo, when you think it must be just about to finish, surely, because how can there be enough space in the world for that much pure rock'n'roll? But the band just crashes back into the riff for another go around, and the stitching that holds together the fabric of the universe starts to give way in the face of the dimension-bending power of the Zep. It feels good to know that a three-note guitar riff can sound that amazing, and at that point in the song you start to get the idea that it just might keep on going forever and ever and never stop, but in a fantastically good way. This is the sort of idea that starts to develop in people's heads at around 8 a.m, when they're dancing to 'Jeepster' by T.Rex and the sun is invading the bar through the cracks in the curtains. That's when it's time for the DJ to put on 'the Case for Mars' by Symphony of Science, which is the universal signal for everybody who is still awake to put on their sunglasses and climb onto the roof of the highest building in the neighbourhood.

When they recorded 'When the Levee Breaks,' the drum tech set up the kit at the bottom of a huge stairwell in a castle, with mics on all the landings to capture the thunderous reverb. That's why when Bonham kicks into the riff it sounds like you're sitting inside Helm's Deep sharpening your sword while rocks from Orcish catapults bounce off the walls, shaking the very mountain with their infernal weight. This just goes to show how important it is to find just the right location when you're planning on having a good time. If you have the right guide, and you are game for climbing a spiky sort of fence at considerable altitude in high heels, then the roof of the Neukolln Arcade is such a location. There are few hidden treasures left in this satellite-mapped world of ours (which is a good reason to start sending humans to Mars to set up a colony) but the rooftop garden on top of the Neukolln Arcade is definitely one of them.

I don't know how much time you spend on the tops of buildings, but you may be aware that some of the larger ones have gravel on the roof as a way of managing rain and so forth. Up on the roof of the Neukolln Arcade, though, this gravel has trapped enough dirt and seeds over the years to grow into a mossy garden reminiscent of an alpine meadow ten or so stories above street level. At a few hours past dawn on a Sunday, with churchbells ringing and doves flocking through the canyons below, a dozen well-dressed and fine-looking party people can get a very good idea of how the birds see Berlin. The light is golden and it hits everyone just so, with horizon to horizon a mess of spires, radar domes, and the haze caused by five million souls just trying to make ends meet day to day. If you want to dance to no music at all, that is for sure the place to go.

Meg took this photo of me being awesome. Jump up from your desk and run round the room if you love my leather jacket.

When we climbed down a few hours later, our fingernails were painted with racing stripes and Reuben had lent me the official Bear and Cougar gang cape from Poland. That gave us enough power to confuse the security guard, who hadn't expected so many people to be in his shopping mall when he came to unlock it. He seemed happy enough that we were leaving though, and nobody got bitten by anyone. By then it was getting to be the time of the morning when some people just disappear singly or in pairs and tell you sheepishly the next time you see them that they went to bed, singly or in pairs, so it was a smaller group of us that hopped the U-Bahn to an address somewhere in East Berlin. Naturally we were the people in the railcar talking too loud, but we did perform a public service by increasing the local cape and wig quotient by an order of magnitude. Berlin doesn't really have any squares to freak out, so there were no problems there.

The day continued in and around an apartment which was home to the kind of people who always look amazing, because they are actually amazing in real life and they only look like that to warn people how amazing they are. When I meet them again, I will not recognise them because no doubt they will look amazing still, but in a different way, and my brain will become confused. In most cases that would lead to social awkwardness, but I think these people will just laugh and all will be well. They will recognise me of course because I've looked pretty much the same since 1997, and most people are better at telling other humans apart than I am. They sing in a calypso band and they make their own costumes and they're quite the best-dressed people I've met for a while.

Just in case you're getting the impression that I don't spend my days productively in this town, I can assure you dear readers (mum, dad) that we worked pretty hard on our careers for most of the day. That is to say that we took advantage of the fact that we were hanging out with gifted costume designers and asked them if they had any ideas about what we should wear when we go on tour with Black Mountain next week.* This led to a game of dress-ups that lasted most of the day, and took us on several trips around the neighbourhood to see how walkable-in our costumes turned out to be. So far my favourite is a grey and pink body suit that makes me look a bit like a parrot (in that I appear while wearing it to have the intelligence of a three-year-old child), combined with my purple socks with silver stars, my trusty waistcoat with Broken Heartbreakers campaign medals, a pink wig, and Reuben's Bear and Cougar Gang cape. He probably won't be able to let me wear the cape next week because I'm not actually in the gang, but we'll see how it goes. The consensus was that I looked like what would have happened if Marvel Comics had bought the rights to Charlie and the Chocolate factory in the seventies and developed Willy Wonka as a superhero (with the power of turning everything he touched to delicious candy), and then hired Ralph Steadman as the lead illustrator. It's a look, and you have to have a look in this industry. A day wasted, perhaps, but not a wasted day.

PS There are no photos of this because I don’t want to get involved in expensive litigation with Marvel Comics. They would lose, but it would be a bore.

*I only put in this sentence so I could write about how we're supporting Black Mountain next week, which is probably something I would fly to Europe to do even if I wasn't coming over here anyway to do other awesome stuff like hang out on rooftops painting my nails. I think we probably only asked at the time for the same reason.

On the run from Johnny Law

2010-09-12T04:14:00.000+12:00

'Guys? Is this the autobahn? Are we on the autobahn now?'

'Yeah man, this is the autobahn. We're driving on the autobahn right now.'

'I hadn't realised, I mean... It's a lot bigger than I thought you know? I'd thougt I guess that it was just maybe one road by like Berlin or somewhere.'

'Nah, it's bigger than that, man. A lot bigger. It's more like a state of mind.'

'Yeah, that's it - I hadn't realised that it was a state of mind.'

It's a state of mind, apparently.

This was on the road from Hamburg to Berlin, which is a hell of an address. At the time, the second biggest city in New Zealand had been pretty much obliterated as a consequence of it having been built on a swamp next to a big pile of volcanoes, but we didn't know that yet. We had to get back to the Beartown by noon to return the A-Class Mercedes to the people at the rental place and convince them that we'd driven it around Europe for exactly one calendar month without damaging it, so I was distracted. I was also thinking about a story a guy had told us in Botzingen about a mate of his who'd been booked in Switzerland at 250 ks an hour, and been given a ticket for seven hundred thousand Euros. I was hoping it was a lie.

4493.4 kilometers of mindless drivel.

'Do you think Johnny Law can catch up to us on the autobahn?'

'I doubt it. He's probably a couple of towns back still. Offenbach?'

'Saw him in Hamburg on the Reeperbahn I think. He wasn't ready to take me in though.'

'Bigger fish to fry do you reckon?'

'Could be that.'

'Hope it's that.'

Driving around in a whole lot of countries on very similar-looking roads, we'd sometimes lost track of the local customs around things like speed limits and the conventions to do with who should give way to whom. There was a good chance that there would be a pile of infringement notices in a range of languages waiting for us at the rental place, and I was trying to figure out how much it might cost if it turned out that we'd accidentally driven the wrong way round a roundabout in Paris or collided with a civilian in a country lane south of London.

'You know Offenbach?'

'Yeah I remember Offenbach.'

'Where was it again?'

'Not sure. By a river I think.'

'Was it the Rhine?'

'Nah that was the other place. With the swans and those ducks with the funny noses. Beaks.'

'Don't remember the ducks.'

'I remember the ducks.'

'You like ducks, eh?'

'Yeah, I'm pretty fond of ducks. Wrote a song about them actually. Wanna hear it?'

'Again? Nah I'm OK thanks.'

Ducks with funny noses, Offenbach

The other river. That's France over there. The swans are German swans.

Part of the problem was that we had one of those ipod radio things that the Devil designed as a way of causing road-rage incidents. We kept on trying to play Led Zep tunes to see if the stereo could handle the power of John Bonham, but interference from two hundred identical European radio stations playing that song about how it's a quarter after one, I'm a little drunk and I just wrote a really annoying song would always spoil the listening experience right when Plant really starts to wail. The only other options were my CD, Tim's CDs, and a bunch of World Jazz cuts that Nigel had had thrust upon him at some trade fair. It's important to at least once in your life listen to your own record in an A-class Mercedes at a good rate of knots on the autobahn, but you don't want to do it more than a couple of times in a trip. The world jazz CDs were really only good for beer coasters, and option three was conversation. A month of tour conversation is a special kind of torment and I reproduce excerpts here only as a cautionary example of what might happen if you fail to bring a good range of Led Zeppelin records in a playable format on your next tour.

'How much more gas do you think we'll have to put in this thing?'

'There's a good chance it won't be more than a hundred Euros.'

'No way, it'll be heaps more than that. Closer to two hundred I'd say.'

'Why did you ask then?'

'I was just trying to make conversation, man.'

'I bet Mavis knows' from the nest in the back seat.

'What?'

'What was that man?'

'I just said I bet Mavis knows. How much the petrol would be.'

'Yeah well maybe she does man, but she's not talking to us anymore since you swore at her in Paris.'

'Look I said already I was sorry about that. I'm not proud of it.'

'Yeah, he did say he was sorry man.'

'Well it's not working, whatever he said. She's still not talking and I'm missing turnoffs now.'

For hours and hours this goes on, and there is nothing in the end to distinguish this sort of conversation from the mindless barking of baboons.

Fortunatlely the autobahn provides plenty of stimulus all by itself. If you're into wind turbines and really big skies, you'll certainly have a good time. If you like trucks, a real treat awaits you, because there are certainly trucks. The autobahn also plays a valuable role in holding together the social fabric, however, in that it is the place where Germans are allowed to vent whatever feelings of frustration and tension might arise in their workaday lives by driving expensive cars very very fast. Much as Londoners are able to work out their stress by poking tourists in the ribs with umbrellas on the tube, many Germans maintain their legendary affability by taking their cars out to the autobahn once in a while and winding them up to respectable fractions of the speed of sound. It is very important not to get in the way when they are doing this, because that spoils it for everyone. The unsuspecting antipodean driver tooling along in the left lane at a speed that would get him ostracised from decent society back home is liable to be surprised by a sudden flashing of headlights and a horn blaring in Teutonic major thirds, demanding that he either accelerate to mach 0.3 or move to the right lane where the trucks and foreigners drive. I read recently that the government here is considering authorising the drivers of German-registered cars to carry high-powered handguns for the purpose of firing warning shots through the rear windscreens of cars travelling at less than 160 kilometers per hour in the fast lane, on the grounds that this would reduce accidents in the long run. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.

This is what I look like when I'm blogging. The deer is called Reichstag, which is probably a lot
funnier if you've been travelling for a while with your brain turned off.

Paris, Je t'aime un petit peu

2010-08-30T23:22:00.000+12:00

This post is out of chronological order, so if you have strong opinions about the linear nature of time then I suggest you email it to yourself last Thursday and read it then. Otherwise you could just marvel at the fact that this is the 21st century and I'm sitting in a four hundred year old barn in Southern Germany rocking a solar-powered wi-fi connection at about a zillion bytes per second. This means you can read about the events of last week now rather than in three months' time when they reach you by sailing ship, which would have been the situation as recently as a heartbeat ago in geological terms.

The barn is important, because it's really the second barn in just over a week. I'll fill you in on this barn another time - the focus at this stage is really the last barn. You should know though that in this barn there are two German lads dicussing the best way to make their old yellow Volkswagen truck go, and I am bound to say I like their chances. Not because I know a thing or two about old Volkswagens, which I don't, or because I understand what's wrong with it - even if the problem was in English I would be unhelpful. But they are approaching the project with such calm enthusiasm, and an air of such compentence and optimism, that it would be nothing short of unjust if the god of old yellow VW trucks (Thor, in case you're wondering) didn't throw them a bone. Plus they've got these guys to help them out:

The last barn was about forty ks outside of Paris, which is a good place to be. Louis XIV knew that, so he put together a pretty serious sort of a house and garden arrangement just down the road from where we where at, and the two places couldn't be more different really.

Louis's place

Nicolas's place.

Both places do show a strong commitment to indoor-outdoor flow, and to an understanding of the fact that Paris smells like a sewer, so the best way to live there is actually to live nearby. Beyond there, the similarities end. At Versailles, the gardens are mostly laid out in the sort of straight lines you get when you give a monomaniac a large budget and a free hand. At the place we stayed, which belongs to a composer called Nicolas and I didn't catch his last name, the garden is much more curvy and interesting. What happened was, he found this enourmous barn about twenty years ago, after it had been empty for long enough that the forest had moved in. He cleaned it out, fixed it up, built some rooms down the side, put in an amazing recording studio, and laid out a really quite tasteful garden. There's a couple of other families living there too, in flats down the side, and there's a gypsy caravan and a hillbilly cabin in the woods for travelling musicians to sleep in. In short, the whole place is pretty much a three-dimensional dictionary definition of the word 'haven.'

As well as being a haven, it proved to be a great place to practice what I call 'my French,' and the others call 'Samlish.' France is a great nation because even though everyone there speaks English, their national sport is pretending not to. Under cover of making an effort to foster international understanding, I took this as an open invitation to do frankly horrible things to their language. Mostly they were too polite to tell me that I make even less sense in French than I do in English, which only drove me to further excesses. What I like to do is start a conversation about something really quite boring and complicated, like the differences between race relations in New Zealand and in Australia, and pass it through the filter of my two and a half years of Hutt Valley High School French. When I run out of French words to express my poorly thought-through opinions, I just use an English word but with a sort of Inspector Clouseau accent, and wave my hands around Gallically. It usually doesn't take long for people to give up, politely congratulate me on my attempts to communicate en Francais, and then switch to flawless English for the remainder of the evening. After that we can talk about more interesting stuff like which is the better Led Zeppelin album out of Led Zep two and Led Zep four. (Four, for my money.)

And yeah, there was a little orphaned fawn there too. He looked delicious but it would have been rude to eat him.

I know I sound like I didn't like Paris much, but the truth is I actually did like Paris a bit, it's just that I'm not very good at communicating. I didn't really hit the best side of Paris until the afternoon of my second day there, though. The first morning was pretty blurry because we'd just spent the night driving from England, taking a midnight ferry to save a lousy ten euros, which will buy you about half a beer in Paris. Most of the rest of the first day was spent sleeping, which is a great thing to do in any city of the world. Then we had a show, and a stage is pretty much a stage once the lights are on, so it wasn't really until the next morning that I got to take a look round.

At this time I was still quite gammy from my tumble in Calais, so I spent the morning limping painfully around the centre of Paris getting annoyed at all the big old buildings in my way, waiting for the romance to kick in. Basically, though, Paris is only romantic if the one you love is actually there at the same time as you, otherwise it's just a big pile of stones beside a mucky river that smells like wee. If you're in a certain frame of mind, or if you have a guitar on your back and a limp and the sun is very hot, then the people who are there with the ones they love, or the people who were only there for the weekend but hooked up anyway and who spend an inordinate amount of time snuggling in front of postcard-like scenery, just become a gigantic pain in the ass. So I spent the morning seeing things like this:

And this:

And pretty much ignoring things like this:

And this:

Then I remembered that I wasn't actually in Paris to look at stuff, because it's all been looked at such a lot already, so I went to Montmartre to do some busking. Suddenly Paris got way more fun, and I didn't even mind limping around as long as people kept throwing Euros at me. Money is a good painkiller, and it's a lot eaiser to see the point of the most romantic city in the world when a lot of people's idea of 'romance' seems to include giving money to buskers. Still a very smelly place though.

Nice quiet place to count your money after an afternoon's busking

Paris is burning

2010-08-27T20:23:00.000+12:00

To clarify: Paris isn't burning. But St Vincent sounds really good on the Paris-Bern autoroute.

But: if ever you are in Switzerland, go to Cafe Kairo and eat all their food. We did, and it was amazing. Then this morning we were going to swim in the river they have here, but the risk of death was assessed as too high. Now we have to get to Stuttgart before the anarchists reclaim the streets at six p.m. They're German anarchists, so they've politely told everyone what time they're going to do it. Perhaps Stuttgart will be burning by the time we get there. I'll let you know.

This is just a fawn I was hanging out with the other day. I pretty much felt like I could control animals with my mind.

This is hardcore

2010-08-25T01:48:00.000+12:00

I mentioned the other day that I have a number of ambitions for this tour, of which growing a beard and making money are only two. One of the others, and a very important one, was to be invited to play violin in a psychedelic instrumental band at a hardcore metal festival in Belgium. Everybody said that it was unlikely to happen and that I should probably think of a different ambition if I wanted to actually achieve my goals, but I like to aim for the spectacularly unlikely in life. And now I can report that the events of last weekend permit me to type a sentence people thought I never would, which is this: I went to Belgium to play violin in a psychedelic instrumental band at a hardcore metal festival. A lot of this blog, like much of my life, is pure fabrication, but that sentence is nothing but the truth.

Here's how it went down: a couple of weeks ago, Reuben got an email from these guys who run an event called Ieperfest saying essentially that an Emerald City were booked to play at it, along with Agnostic Front, Converge, and a bunch of bands with names like Alien Foetus and Satan's Autopsy and basically combinations of words calculated to trouble peoples' parents. He was confused, because who wouldn't be? But he replied and said yeah sure we'll do it, but you have to get our violinist over from the UK and back in time for him to play at the 12-bar club on the Monday. I guess he thought they wouldn't go for it.

We should be clear: An Emerald City are not a hardcore band. They rock out and stuff, and there's probably a few bands out there that they could beat in a fight, and they like to jump around, but they're not hardcore and I'm pretty sure they don't want to be. I'm not hardcore either, for the record. I play the violin, and when I'm not doing that, I play noodly fingerpicking guitar, and when I'm not doing that I play mandolin in a psychedelic folk band. I write songs about birds. Hardcore isn't on the menu ordinarily.

Nevertheless, on Sunday morning, after playing four of our London shows over the previous few days, I dragged myself out of bed and onto the Eurostar, which dropped me in Lille. While I was in Lille I experienced a feeling that I'm coming to associate quite strongly with that part of the world, which is the one you get when you forgot to Google the town where you were supposed to end up to find out what country it's in. I was thinking France, but Belgium was a contender also, then there was a good twenty minutes when I couldn't remember if Belgium's even a country, and if it is, where it is. Then I remembered about places like Luxembourg and I stopped trying to figure it out.

As it turned out I didn't need to know where I was anyway, because these two guys picked me up with a little sign and a chillybin full of beers, and I don't know what language they spoke at all. They drove me down some motorways past a whole heap of cemeteries, and it started to dawn on me that Ieper is actually the same place as Ypres, but in a different language, which means it's one of the places where a lot of people's great-grandfathers got sent to die face-down in the mud. That kind of made the whole thing a bit more hardcore.

If you close your eyes and imagine what a hardcore festival might be like, you've pretty much got Ieperfest sorted. A lot of black clothes, a lot of guys who looked like they could waste me at Dungeons and Dragons, and a lot of guys who looked like they could waste me in general. Actually, mostly just a lot of guys. I think hardcore music might be more of a boy thing. Certainly my brief and unscientific observations of the bands playing on the same day as us revealed that Jess Emerald City was one of only two women playing that day, and the crowd was mostly boys. Nobody was as well dressed as Sam and Reuben, and you can read why here. Actually, just look at them:

We played our really not hardcore set, which was mine and Jess's Emerald City onstage debut, and it was tons of fun for everyone. So we all went back to the van and had a little disco with music we'd brought with us, because honestly and with great respect, hardcore music is really quite hard to listen to for any length of time. Even very short lengths of time. It wasn't long at all though before I had to jump in a van with a guy called Paul, who runs a bookshop, and had been dragooned into driving me to Calais. Unfortunately for him, he spoke pretty good English, so he had to listen to me talk the whole way there.

What with one thing and another, one thing being the GPS and the other being a pretty casual approach to programming the GPS on the part of whoever's job it was supposed to have been, we were running late by the time we got to the ferry at Calais. That meant that I was moving pretty fast towards the terminal as I pulled my ticket out of my pocket to check the fine print. Trying to do two things at once has ever been my downfall, but usually my downfalls are of the more metaphorical kind. This time, though, a poorly placed flowerpot type thing combined with my inability to multi-task to make the metaphorical literal - I tripped over it and executed a beautiful swan-dive into the pavement.

I must have really had my eyes on the prize, because I rolled to my feet spitting out bits of tooth and barrelled straight up to the check-in counter, where the nice man told me firstly that my ferry was delayed so I needn't rush, and secondly he would get me something for my face, which I then realised was bleeding enough to make me look seriously anti-social. Going through UK immigration looking like I'd just been in a fight was a lot smoother than I'd thought it might be, which gave me a fair bit of time before my boat to investigate the tooth situation. It turned out I'd broken the top of one of them. I didn't really mind, though, because it's one of those stupid teeth you don't really need. It's one of the plant-eating ones that are basically just an evolutionary hangover from when humans were herbivores, before we developed better teeth to eat awesome things like meat. I try to only use my meat-eating teeth anyway, so it's no loss really.

When we got to Dover, the implications of a delayed ferry in England on a Sunday night began to sink in. I hadn't had much of a hand (actually any of a hand) in booking my travel, so I was only when I limped up to the Dover train station that I realised that my ferry had been perfectly timed to connect with the last train to London, which wasn't going to wait forty minutes for no delayed boat. Fortunately I tend to not really experience emotions when I'm by myself, beacause there's no point really unless someone's watching, so the situation didn't get me down much. I thought 'that's a bit shit,' made myself a little camp outside the station out of an umbrella I had with me and the outside of my violin case, and spent the night on the pavement. That was about as comfortable as it sounds, and my face hadn't even stopped bleeding. I did have the enormous satisfaction of being the only person on the first commuter train to London the next morning with two seats to myself though, because I looked like I'd played at a hardcore festival, fallen on my face in a carpark, and slept in a train station, so nobody wanted to sit with me.

I got back to London about 24 hours after I left, and way more hardcore. That night me and Tim did a gig at the 12-bar club, and I had a lot of fun walking around looking like I'd been in a fight. That's what I thought, anyway, until I had a conversation with the barman as I was packing up my gear.

'Do you reckon I look like I've been in a fight?'

'Not really mate, no.'

'what are you talking about? I've got a fat lip and chipped tooth, and I'm limping like a pirate.'

'It's just that you're a bit of a skinny lad, and if you'd been in a fight I'd imagine you'd look a lot worse, you know what I mean?'

'But what if I knew karate or something?'

'Wasn't that you playing the violin earlier? I doubt you know karate, mate.'

'What if you didn't know that I'm really a bit of sissy, would you think I'd been in a fight then? I mean, look at my lip and stuff.'

'To be honest mate, when you walked in I just thought you had a coldsore and a gammy leg. You can't really see the tooth.'

'Oh right, thanks then.'

Why did I say thanks? Because I am well brought-up, that's why. Not really hardcore at all in fact.

London Calling

2010-08-22T00:47:00.000+12:00

The best thing that happened in London was firing the cork from a four pound bottle of fizzy wine bang into the middle of the pond below Camden Lock, scattering the swans while a pack of wasted youth beat the guts out of 'London Calling' on their acoustic guitars. I promised at one point that I would use this blog to write about my feelings, and the feeling I had then was one of the ones that the Germans have a word for but we don't - the nostalgia for a thing that never happened. Because when was their age, I didn't know all the words to London Calling, or even any songs by the Clash, but I sure could beat the guts out of an acoustic guitar. So to make it even better, we joined in on the bits where you howl 'I live by the river' and the night was pretty much perfect.

The worst thing about London is trying to drive in it - especially in Darth the Merc, who is left hand drive, and has a tendency to take the bit between his teeth when he sees a car with French plates. Mavis the authoritarian GPS was intermittently helpful, but she has a fondness for uncontrolled right turns, and she reserves the right to change her mind in the middle of roundabouts. Basically, we gave up on the driving thing pretty early on, and got to all of the gigs on the tube. I really like the tube - it's a great excuse for grown men in suits to run down really long flights of stairs and bump into people. I think Londoners would be a lot more aggressive above ground if the weren't allowed to push each other around in the subway. On the whole, though, I found that the best way to travel was to walk around central London pretending to be in a book. You've got a lot of material to choose from in that town.

Senate house at London University - the
inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in 1984,
and it's in the Day of the Triffids too.

We discovered pretty quickly that if you want to make money playing music in London, the best approach is to take all of your instruments and gear to the pawn shop on the morning of your first show. This will give you a little bit of ready money, and you won't have to pay any sound engineers or anything for the duration of your stay. Fortunately, making money is only about fourth on the list of ambitions for this tour, after growing a beard and a couple of other things. That meant that the shows were all really pretty choice, especially the Spice of Life in Soho, where apparently Bob Dylan and some other famous dudes used to play when they were considerably less famous. They like to claim that this is the bar where the Sex Pistols played their first and famously poorly-attended show, but seriously I don't think it was. There are so many places in the UK that make this claim that it's no wonder there were only seven people at the show - the Pistols must have been playing in about a hundred venues across the country on the same night, so the audience was bound to have been thin on the ground.

Hyde Park

We're in Paris now, and it's a pretty OK town if you like to watch people pashing. Personally that's something I can take or leave, but I understand that some people are into it. Also you pretty much have to like churches and the smell of ten million people pissing under bridges. The churches are really quite fine though.

Bond Street Bridge has left Berlin

2010-08-10T20:25:00.000+12:00

If you ever have to leave Berlin, it should be done in a late model Mercedes-Benz. Take the autobahn. You will need to drive faster than would ever be sane or legal in most territories, and you will find that still you will get overtaken by families in Smartcars. Navigation will not be a problem - Mavis the authoritarian GPS unit will see you clear through the thousand kilometre haul to Calais.

I have a peculiarly arrogant habit of second-guessing information sources that I know to be fairly reliable, so I didn't believe google maps when it told me that it was possible to drive from Berlin to Calais in nine hours. It took Hitler ten days, for heaven's sake. Since his day, however, the autobahns have spread their tentacles all over Western Europe in a vast web of mixed metaphors, which speeds things up considerably. Since I had formed the impression that we would need to drive for at least twelve hours to cover the distance, I experienced some trepidation when a combination of factors delayed our departure until just before midday, to catch a ferry in Calais in the middle of the night. These factors were, in order: A hardcore festival in Belgium (of which more later, I hope), which necessitated an Emerald City practice to see whether we have our act together (we do); a gig at a very nice cafe in Fredrichshain called Klaus Abendbrot, which meant that said practice had to be scheduled for midnight the night before the drive; a broken U-bahn line on the morning of the drive on the way to pick up Darth the Merc, which led to a baffling series of line changes and delays; and finally Darth the Merc himself, who wouldn't start.

There's a trick to starting cars of this kind, which I won't relate in case somebody uses it to steal him. I am more sensitive to matters of security since having my identity stolen by an East Berlin spambot over the weekend, so the only clue I will give you is: you won't be able to figure it out, and you'll be sitting in a parking garage in Tegel airport for quite a while before you finally swallow your pride and go and ask the rental car guy how to start your car. He was pretty reluctant to rent it to me anyway, since I look like this at the moment:

And my obvious inablity to drive only made things less groovy. Since he couldn't find anything in the regulations to authorise his summarily repossessing the car, he had to tell me the trick and we hit the road.

As is usually the case when I make things up in my head in the face of reliable evidence, I was wrong. Which meant Google was right - you can drive from Berlin to Calais in nine hours. What I suggest you don't do when you get to Calais, if this should ever arise, is pick up hitch-hikers and take them on the ferry. The term UK immigration officials use for this practice is 'people-smuggling,' and I understand that it is frowned upon. Our hitch-hikers fortunately had the right papers, so we avoided the inconveniences that accompany detention under the Suppression of Terrorism Act. Once we were off the boat in the UK, though, a whole new set of inconveniences arose - Mavis decided that the best way to get to Lewes was via a series of hair-raising sunken lanes somewhere in the depths of East Sussex. At 1am, in a left-hand drive car, after a thousand kilometre drive from Berlin and a brush with British Cuisine on the ferry, this was hard work.

When we hit Lewes, the reason why they have to hide it behind a whole network of twisty lanes became obvious. It's a small town in the South of England, surrounded by idyllic countryside, locally brewed beers, and vicars in thousand-year old churches so picturesque you have to take a look around the back to make sure they're not stage flats. Clearly, then, it is one of the most dangerous places in the world, and it needs to be concealed from casual visitors. We know that towns like this have a murder rate of about one a week - sometimes more towards the end of the season if the ratings are flagging. Fortunately there's also likely to be a hardbitten old DCI with a heart of gold, and his younger and more impulsive assistant, who will act within the law to keep the murder rate to a sustainable level in order that the town can continue to flourish into the next series.

Lewes: Watch your back

Ostensibly, we were in Lewes so I could play at the Lewes Arms. In fact, the main purpose of the stop proved to be to receive what I can only describe as a two-day hospitality assault from Sul and Jaime Regan. They basically were such good hosts that I think I'll move into the spare room of their idyllic country cottage and just let them feed me delicious food, take me for gentle walks on the downs, tell me stories about the local customs (all of which seem to involve burning things to a greater or lesser extent), and introduce me to a fine range of local ales and musicians, until I get murdered by the vicar. Jaime played with me at the Lewes Arms, and I really don't think I could have asked for better company or a better venue for my first gig in the UK. I've got a series of shows coming up in London, and I confidently expect to get mugged, heckled, ignored or bottled at some stage over the next week, because I understand that's how people tend to interact with musicians in London. The Lewes Arms show was lovely, though - a good bunch of regulars in a room above a pub that was probably built by King Canute's uncle. See you next time, Lewes Arms.

99 luftbalons

2010-08-03T22:03:00.000+12:00

So the other day I was riding aimlessly around on my bike Philip, which is what I tend to do here during the hours of daylight, and I hallucinated that I saw 99 red balloons rising over Berlin. That was my immediate assumption, anyhow, because nobody else seemed to be looking at them, and if you're riding around in the hot sun beside the Spree with a powerful combination of Cloudboy and John White's Balloon Adventure pumping on your portable mp3 player, that's the sort of thing you'd be likely to hallucinate I would think.

Like a fool, I whipped out my trusty 8 MEGApixel camera and flailed wildly at the sky, in an attempt to record this phenomenon. It turns out that my camera must have been equally affected by Cloudboy and the sun, because I was able to capture the following chilling images:

Obviously they have not been altered in any way. Is this evidence of balloons? Or are the objects merely visitors from another solar system, harbingers of the great invasion? Either way, the incident gave me pause. There is clearly more to this city than meets the eye.

What I was really supposed to be doing was taking photographs of some of the remarkable things the Soviets did to this town while they were living here. There are few things your average totalitarian architect likes better than straight lines and lots of open space to put them on. Fortunately for the architects of the DDR (but not so much for the people who lived there), the Red Army did quite a good job of clearing a lot of space in East Berlin in 1945, by blowing it up and driving their tanks all over it on their way to the Reichstag. This meant that when city planners decided that they needed two kilometres of identical apartment buildings in Soviet Modern style, with good sightlines down towards a projected really quite extraordinary TV antenna, all they had to do was point their labour force toward the patch of rubble by the Frankfurt gate and put them to work. The results were more or less what they had in mind, I think:

All of the buildings, for nearly two km, look like this:

They liked the street so much, they named it after Joe Stalin, which is what you did in those days if you liked a thing. After he became unfashionable, they changed its name to Karl-Marx Allee, because there's something timelessly uncontroversial about a really good beard.

I think it's possible to learn a lot about a place by riding around aimlessly taking photos of it. I certainly haven't learnt anything much myself, but I think it's probably possible. Most of what I've learnt I've really just made up in my head. Did you know, for example, that the town planners of the 1950s thought that the streetlight of the future would look like this?

No question, those guys were onto something. When they get around to installing municipal lighting on the Mars colony, they'll definitely be paying a visit to Berlin to sort out their style guide.

In another part of town, down by Treptow, there was enough room to put up a war memorial large enough to be seen from space. In keeping with the straight line thing, its design incorporates a lot of really straight lines. Looking at parts of this memorial, you could be forgiven for thinking that one of the things that Soviet architects were trying to do was make it look like they lived in some sort of evil empire from a computer game. I'm pretty sure that's not really the look they were going for, but honestly, take a look at this:

That is totally where you would have to fight some really badassed dude who shoots fire out of his eyes. Once you had defeated him and levelled up, you would see this:

Which is way bigger than it looks, and really so full of straight lines it made my eyes hurt. Those concrete blocks down each side are massive, and they're covered with bas-relief carvings that look like this, for example:

This is a Soviet Realist artist's way of telling you that you don't mess about with the Red Army, because they will kick your ass with the ghost of Lenin. See what I mean about making things up in my head?

Once you've made it past all of these extremely large blocks of marble, you get to this guy:

He's about three stories tall, not even counting the hill and the concrete thing he's standing on. His sword is about as big as he is, and he's just used it to cut up an enormous swastika. He has a kid hanging onto his shoulder, because as well as being a tough Nazi-killer, he's a family man. Apparently the child is German, and he's saved her. They had to make the statue this tall so that they could fit all the metaphors in.

The thing I should probably mention about this place, at risk of turning this into another sad-sack post about fascists, is that it's one of the mass graves where a lot of the Russian soldiers who died in the 'Berlin Operation' were buried. About 5,000 of them, in fact, which is about six percent of the Russian soldiers who died in this operation alone. And about 0.02 per cent of the Russians who died in the whole of the war. So they had a pretty good reason for putting up such a big war memorial.

Just in case you think that the reason I'm in Berlin in the first place is to form amateurish opinions about their architecture, here is a picture of me doing what I am really here to do, which is grow a beard.

Here you can see me growing a beard on the stage at a bar called Schokoladen, where I played a show with the Mamaku Project the other day. They were extremely good, but you probably knew that already. The photo is by Ms. Elsa Thorp, who has a website here: www.elsathorp.com.

C.ash R.ules E.verything A.round M.e

2010-07-31T11:47:00.000+12:00

OK, no more writing about fascists and stuff for a while, it's basically a major downer and if you want to know more about that sort of thing you should probably watch Schindler's List. Because let's face it, Spielberg has a bunch of interns to do his research for him and all I have is google and a propensity to flesh out my hunches by making things up.

Instead, today's post is about how hilariously easy it is to make money in this town by going 'on the busk,' as we put it in musician language. A lot of towns hate buskers, and consider them to be a problem akin to sewer rats or football hooligans. In London, for example, if you play music on the street you are just as likely to get set on fire by street kids or arrested for treason as you are to be given actual cash money, and if they do give you money it's likely to be foreign. In Berlin, though, they treat you almost like they would treat a normal person, and when they give you money it is done with good grace and in respectable quantities.

Here's the thing, though: unless there is more than one of you, or you have an awesome trick like the ability to set yourself on fire or dislocate all your joints at once, there's not much point in standing on the street noodling away on an old Neil Young song waiting for the good folk of Berlin to pay you. Tried that, total waste of time. I would have made more money fishing empty beer bottles out of the canal. If you're like me (and I understand that I am in many ways a typical example of my kind) the way to work it is to go to the cafes, of which there are about seven million in Berlin. What you do is, you go ask the bar staff if you can play a couple of songs. Mostly they say yes, sometimes they say no, quite often they ask to hear a bit of music to make sure that you're not going to be playing Pantera covers. If alles is gut, you go outside to where the tables are, you introduce yourself, play two or three songs, then pass a hat around.

If somebody tried this in New Zealand, they would either get ignored, punched, or told to get a real job, depending what suburb or time of night it was. In Berlin, what happens is people stop talking, look up, applaud, give you money, and buy your CDs. Perhaps they don't have very good TV here or something, but these people are totally ready to be entertained. I don't really have much perspective beyond my own experience (you can put that on my headstone if you want) but I've noticed that it helps if people know you're playing your own stuff, and I also hand out flyers for my 'proper' shows, which I think is useful as well. Being from New Zealand I think is a good thing too, because often people think that I'm a hobbit of some kind and if they give me money I will be able to cure their diseased livestock or place curses on their neighbours. Also I have a hat with a crow's feather stuck in the band, which is my secret weapon.

For tax reasons, I cannot reveal exactly how much you can make per hour with this method, but I can say that on average it is more than a nurse and less than a doctor. It seems to work best between the hours of about seven and ten pm, which is pretty much my ideal workday. Nothing much cool happens here before about 10:30 (or 2230 uhr, as we say in the Deutsch), and daytimes are for cycling around aimlessly taking photographs of Soviet architectural monstrosities, so there's about three spare hours in there for honest toil if you're up for it.

This is what it looks like when you empty out your guitar case at the end of the evening.

The great thing about busking as a way of earning your keep is that the rewards are immediate and tangible. Instead of waiting two weeks for a paycheck, you get one every ten minutes or so, in jingling cash. This is wonderful if, like me, you have an inner troll who really likes counting money, and placing it in piles ten euros high.

I am a little bit worried though that some damn knight will find my lair and kill me and steal my hoard.

All you fascists are bound to lose

2010-07-30T02:03:00.000+12:00

One of the things that Germans seem to be proud of as a nation, and rightly so in my opinion, is that in the thirties and forties they weren't all Nazis. This is non-trivial. When a country becomes infested with jackbooted thugs, it's really quite difficult for people do anything about it - a point that is made succinctly in nerdy rhyming couplets by Maurice Ogden in this poem.

The majority of Germans who weren't Nazis were passive about it, as most people are passive about most things. A significant number, however, made a point of expressing their disapproval in a variety of ways. Throughout the twenties and thirties there was significant organised opposition from democrats, socialists, communists and anarcho-syndicalists, who distributed propaganda, organised escape networks, sabotaged infrastructure, and fought the Nazis in the streets. Many many people were arrested for these activities and incarcerated in concentration camps. Many of those incarcerated were tortured and murdered.

The thing to remember about a lot of these people is that if they had stopped doing the things that got them put in concentration camps (ie resisting and generally getting all up in the faces of the Nazis), there's a good chance that they wouldn't have got put in concentration camps. That's one of the reasons totalitarian regimes often use things like concentration camps against their political opponents; the threat of being arrested and tortured and murdered tends to have a chilling effect on political opposition. Many of the Germans who resisted in this period weren't the 'social undesirables' who were the specific targets of the Nazi death machine - Jews, homosexuals, mentally ill people, people classed as Gypsies - they were people who believed that the Nazis were evil and should be stopped. If they'd kept quiet, it's likely that they wouldn't have been arrested and tortured and murdered.

But! Lots of them didn't keep quiet, and they did resist, which is a pretty amazingly courageous thing to do.

This guy here is off to Spain to fight the fascists in the Civil War. A lot of German anarchists did that, understanding that despite the wide selection of domestic fascists they could have been fighting, their services were more urgently required in Catalonia. Many did both, of course, and I imagine that for a lot of people getting killed in Spain was preferable to getting killed in a concentration camp.

In the Freidrichshain Volkspark, a very pretty part of Berlin, there is a memorial to the Germans who resisted the fascists in this period. It was put up by the DDR in the 70s to commemorate communist antifascists and Polish soldiers who died in the war, but was rededicated in 1995 to commemorate all German antifascist resistance movements. These days it's a great place for people to skate, which I think is totally the best thing you could do on a memorial to antifascists.

The posters are by John Heartfield, who was a German photographer and montage artist who produced a lot of antifascist material. They're from this site: http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/

The Arrival

2010-07-28T00:58:00.000+12:00

As I wander around in Berlin, in search of the fame and fortune I feel are my due, I am often struck by how much of the place looks like Shaun Tan drew it. This is probably because my own experience maps so closely onto the story of the nameless protaganist in The Arrival - I don't speak the language here, people are generally nice to me, and I left my own country because forces loyal to the government were threatening to destroy my way of life.

I don't understand a lot of what goes on here, and this is not limited to what happens outside my door. In my very bathroom, for instance, there exist inexplicable alcoves and strange extrusions of pipe and wire, the purpose of which I can only guess at.

This cupboard, for example, looks relatively innocuous, if inscrutable.

Upon opening it, however, questions arise.

It is filled with ashes, and it leads to a hole in the wall that appears to be bottomless. That's fine; clearly it's just a portal to another dimension. What I don't know, though, is the precise species of the fire-breathing lizard creature that obviously uses it for a nest. Not knowing its species, I can only guess at its habits, and I'm worried that all of my guesses will be hopelessly antipodean. In New Zealand, of course, the fire-breathing lizards nest in late winter, and are usually off on their annual migration by high summer - is the pattern the same this far north though? Should I leave the cupboard open, so that the lizard can fly out the window and catch mice for its young, or should I leave it shut until the rainy season starts and the young metamorphose into the aquatic stage of their life cycle?

Perhaps it is time I left the house for a while.

Amsterdam

2010-07-27T00:36:00.000+12:00

Because one of the things I often fail to do is anticipate the obvious, the other day I found myself on a seven-hour train ride without a packed lunch, and of course I became hungry. Intercity trains anywhere seem to be great places to explore that shady part of the food pyramid where 'eat least' intersects with 'pay most,' and I can report that the trains of the DeutschBahn adhere firmly to this rule. My camera had run out of batteries (see 'failing to anticipate the obvious,' above) so I am unable to post a picture of what I ate, but I can report that it was called a fleischkäse, which, if you include the umlauts in the right place, translates to the English as a 'meatcheese.' This sounded promising to me, and the fact that it was to be served im brot suggested that maybe I was in for a filled roll of some kind.

What I think happens with the fleischkäse (and this is pure reverse engineering, I should emphasise that I have not researched this) is that they get all the meat that they haven't sold that week from the butchery or wherever. Most of it hasn't sold because it has fallen on the floor and been stood on, and that's fine, that's part of it. Then they go down the road to the dairy and see if there's any really old cheese - the kind that's so yellow it's actually orange, and the orange is sulphur, which they put in to stop it decaying when they accidentally leave it in the sun for about a month. Then they take the cheese, and the meat, and they whack it in a big blender and give it a good blend until the bits of gristle and whatever are just the right size to get stuck between your teeth if you are foolish enough to actually eat one of these things. After that, they fashion the whole thing into a kind of pattie that is stored for several weeks at room temperature. When they see people like me get on their train, they heat it to just north of tepid, about the right temperature to really get the e. coli pumping, they chuck it between two lumps of bread - no butter and you can forget about salat, my friend - and they sell it to me for, like, heaps. So basically it's a steak and cheese pie, but without all of the sissy bits like gravy that we put in in New Zealand and which make us so soft and underachieving as a nation. Sure do miss those pies.

The reason I was on the train at all was so I could get to Amsterdam, which proved to be a good move. The place is full of louts, obviously, but on the whole many places are so this shouldn't count as immediate disqualification. I was there to play a show with Ms. Hannah Curwood, who I played with in Berlin a couple of weeks ago and whose songs seemed to be crying out for someone to play wailing fiddle parts all over them. She says she doesn't mind. The show was at a place called Bitterzoet, opening for Mr. Don McGlashan, so the whole thing was worth sitting on a train for.

Amsterdam is pretty famous for a bunch of different things. I abstained from most of them for a number of reasons - partly because I think my mum reads this blog, partly because the fleischkäse did enough weird things to my head for one weekend, but mostly because I had to learn a whole set's worth of Hannah's songs in an afternoon, and some of them had more than three chords, because she's been to music school she reckons. We had a practice in a park by a canal - the place is built on a swamp, so they've got a pretty serious canal problem - and after a few false starts the applause of passers-by gave us the confidence to think that we could maybe share a stage with the Don that evening. We were playing in the same key, at least, and I had brought my best suit jacket, so what could go wrong?

As it turned out, nothing really did. I think this shows that sometimes failing to anticipate the obvious can pay off. It should have been apparent to both of us, I would have thought, that playing a show in Amsterdam opening for one of my (and, it turns out, Hannah's) all-time favourite musicians and songwriters, after having played together before only very late at night in an art gallery down a side street in Berlin, and that very afternoon beside a canal, and zero other times, was a plan doomed to fail spectacularly and publicly. That kind of thing goes down fine at the wine cellar, but this was one of those kind of grown-up shows with a promoter and stuff. Could have been a very bad call.

Must be something in the air in Amsterdam (well, duh) but we totally pulled it off. There was a really nice bunch of people at Bitterzoet, and we completely fooled them into thinking that we knew what we were doing. I suspect it was mostly my suit jacket, but I also did some witty banter that I imagine helped. This is something I often imagine when I am onstage, despite the kind advice of colleagues and friends who don't always understand my jokes. Anyway, people said nice things, bought some records and stood us drinks, so it looks like maybe I've got a new band to play with back in Auckland while the Broken Heartbreakers are off finding themselves.

Don McGlashan was amazing as well, of course, but he can write about that on his own blog.