Introducing the Wine Cellar Strings

Here's how it happened: Dave said to Rohan, or maybe Rohan said to Sam, and Sam's pretty sure he said to Will at some stage and Will's not sure that he remembers the conversation but he doesn't deny it, and Dave definitely mentioned it to Emily but she's overseas right now and she'll probably do the next one, but Dave and Sam both talked to Brendan about it one night at the Sawmill after the bar staff brought out a bucket - a bucket, mind! - of bourbon, and then Louise got involved, probably, and what they said was this, more or less:

"Look here, the Wine Cellar is awash with these underemployed wasters slinging their violins, their violas, their upright basses and their cellos. They all seem to know what to play on all of these different songs, and when they're not playing their instruments  they just drink the bar dry and holler at the customers, getting in the way and breaking the crockery so by god let's make them useful! What can we do with all these dirty folk-inflected string players, many of whom don't or can't or won't even read music, or at any rate they deny they can, with an insouciant shrug of the shoulder and flick of the quiff, oh it's all so off-the-cuff and spontaneous isn't it, this devil's music that we play? With their tight jeans and their hand-made cigarettes. Unseemly! What can be done with such people?"

So sort of in the manner of a social programme, the kind that local governments introduce to keep youths from vandalising public property, it was decided that there  should be inaugurated a Wine Cellar String Section.  It would be called, for the sake of simplicity and for arcane tax reasons, 'The Wine Cellar String Section,' and it would operate in the following manner:  Every once in a while, at a prearranged signal, these various fiddlers and cellists, violers and bassists would gather at the Wine Cellar. They would invite along a handful of songwriters who pass one test, which is that the members of the string section have  to think that they are awesome.  The songwriters would sing their songs, and the Wine Cellar String Section would do what they do well, which is play strings.  There are no other rules.

The first time this happens will be August the 17th.  The String Section will include at least Dave Khan, Brendan Turner, Sam Prebble and Will Wood (who between them have played with Don McGlashan, The Grifters, An Emerald City, Paul Ubana Jones, The Broken Heartbreakers, The Broadsides, Reb Fountain, The Bads, Luckless, Charlie Ash, Hannah Curwood, Tim Guy, Bond Street Bridge, White Swan Black Swan, Rodney Fisher's Backyard Orchestra, and a whole bunch of other things) and probably some other people as well.  The songwriters, this first time around, will be Gareth Thomas of Goodshirt, Bernie Griffen of the Grifters, and Reb Fountain.  You are warmly invited to come along and see what happens;  Bond Street Bridge will get things started atnine sharp and after that all bets are off.

The Diamond Age

I sometimes have this wild feeling that perhaps we are living in some sort of Golden Age of New Zealand folk music.  This is probably an example of what social researchers call 'observation bias:' most of my friends are folk musicians and they're writing a load of very good songs right now; my memory is not good so I tend to focus on the present, much like a fox terrier; and my awareness of the history of New Zealand folk music is really pretty patchy to be honest although of course I do my best.  So given all of these perceptual filters, it's not surprising that I would say that right now is a great time for New Zealand folk music, in the same way that a fox terrier might say that today is a good day for running around and barking at ducks.

But I do think that I might be on to something.  Thanks to the economy - thanks, economy! - Christchurch and Auckland are brimming with underemployed wasters who can holler along pretty well on a range of stringed instruments, so some of the bands are getting really pretty hot.  Also thanks to the economy, and our  reasonably terrifying government - thanks, the government! - there's quite a lot to sing about at the moment, Wellington is full of laid-off public servants with banjos, and we've got a bunch of very good writers writing very good songs about actual things, not just their hair or how hard it is to be in your twenties.

I mentioned Adam's song State Houses by The River the other day and that's a good example of what I'm talking about.  Twenty-Nine Diamonds is another one - it's by Bernie Griffen, who knows a thing or two about a thing or two and he wrote this song around a year or so ago I think.  It's exactly the kind of folk song people should be writing.  It's simple, it's direct, it's got a whole lot of heart and only three chords so any idiot can play it, and by god it's on the money.  Me and Will played it on the ferry on the way back from a tour down south last year, in that strange Irish bar they have there. It's one of the oddest gigs you can do in this country, rocking back and forth with the swell as travelers and truck-drivers try to watch the league on a  muted TV, but everyone does it because your get your van across the strait for free so you might as well. Hardly anybody ever listens, but I remember that when me and Will played Bernie's song there quite a lot of people did listen and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a few people are still humming it because that's the kind of song it is.

Anyhow we're playing a couple of shows with Bernie Griffen and the Grifters this weekend so come along, by all means.  The Broadsides are playing as well and they're just the kind of band I'm talking about that's getting really pretty hot, as of course are the mighty Grifters. The first show is tonight at the Thirsty Dog on K rd at around 9, and then we're all going up to Leigh on Saturday night to play at the Sawmill and howl at the moon.

Touring with Luckless

I went on tour with Luckless last year in the springtime and I came back with a head full of new songs, glass in my foot, and a broken rib.  I maintain, at least, that it was broken: others claimed, rudely I thought, that if it was 'really broken' I would have been complaining more - both at the time and subsequently.  This is an attitude that betrays a fundamental lack of understanding (sadly all too common in these morally degenerate times) of the virtues of Putting Up and Making Do, of Carrying On and Suffering In Silence (or as near to silence as makes no odds) - the virtues that sustained the brave members of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedidtion in their times of hardship, that kept Scott's men trudging through the snow, finally to attain the South Pole a polite, modest and plucky second.  If Oates was capable of walking uncomplaining to his death on feet like sides of frozen mutton, if Shackleton could have a cat shot in the head and calmly order a round of warm milk for all hands, surely I can sustain a broken rib or two with only a small amount of perfectly understandable whining?

One of Captain Scott's dogs recreating the HMV logo on the ice.  Photo by the acclaimed Herbert Ponting, available from The National Library website, where one can spend many a happy hour looking at photos of explorers.

The glass in my foot came from Chick's Hotel, that haunted and crumbling pile next to the wharves at Port Chalmers.  There's supposed to be a tunnel there that runs from the docks to the basement of the pub - in days gone by they used to bring contraband, both goods and people, off the creaking tall ships and through the taproom in the dead of the night, apparently.  Although why you would bother to do this is anybody's guess, given the innumerable small coves around the harbour that would seem to present far more convinient smuggling routes.  I do know, though, that the crew of the Aurora, the ship that broke her moorings in a blizzard down in McMurdo Sound, abandoning Shackleton's ill-equipped Ross Sea party to the horrible privations of an Antarctic Winter, spent about six months laying up in Port Chalmers in 1916 while the Expedition Committe in London argued with the Colonial Governments of Australia and New Zealand, the British Crown, the Royal Navy, and an endless list of creditors about who would pay to go and rescue the men left on the ice - 'those penguins!' according to one W. Churchill (at that time first lord of the Admiralty) who was all for leaving them to their own not inconsiderable devices.  There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that the Aurora crew probably spent a lot of time at Chick's Hotel as they waited for orders and patched up their ship, and I like to think that it was a shard of one of their whiskey bottles that lodged itself in my foot at some ungodly hour while I stumbled about on the axminster carpet looking for my sleeping bag.

Donovan's Store: A cold day in Okarito

That tour was a great one for down time - we spent a misty day at Okarito, over on the West Coast where the white herons live, sitting in Donovan's Store drinking bad wine and playing all the songs we could remember in a room with wooden walls lined with photographs of everybody who lives in the town, all sitting in their living rooms. After that Ivy from Luckless kindly agreed to join my band and now she sings and hits a drum and it's just right.  After I came back from that tour I wrote a whole lot of songs that I haven't finished yet, and a a few that I have, and most of them seem to be about the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration: of which more later. The point is, Luckless have just released their debut album, which is called Luckless, and I urge you to go and buy it at once. To facilitate this, we're doing another tour, this time in the dead of the Winter, mostly in the South Island again because the South Island is a good place to be in the dead of the Winter. The album is a soaring, sweeping, serious piece of work, it's a hell of a lot better than most albums and it has not a shred of lazy hipster irony to it, which is refreshing and welcome in a time when so many damn things do. So come to the shows, by all means, and tell your friends: the Bond Street set will be all about explorers and the Luckless set will be awesome.  Here are the dates:

LUCKLESS AND BOND STREET BRIDGE NATIONAL TOUR DATES

Friday 22nd June – The Moorings, Wellington with French For Rabbits (early-ish show, 7.30pm)
Saturday 23rd June – The Free House, Nelson
Sunday 24th June – The Dharma Bums Club, Wairau Valley (early show, 4pm)
Monday 25th June – Donovan’s Store, Okarito
Tuesday 26th June – Cooks Saddle, Fox Glacier
Wednesday 27th June – Theatrette, Oamaru
Thursday 28th June – The National, Dunedin, with Matt Langley
Friday 29th June – The Brewery, Christchurch
Saturday 30th June – The Darkroom, Christchurch, with Aldous Harding