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

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

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'

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.