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Of the all cities in New Zealand, I think Wellington is the one that has “got it together”. I’ve never been fortunate enough to live there, but every visit is enjoyable. It’s home to some great bands (not least among them OdESSA and Fat Freddy’s Drop), has public transport that actually works, and the downtown area is compact and walkable.

Indeed, the city is small enough that even visitors like me randomly bump into people that they know on the street. This time, it was outside Te Papa that I ran into Paddy, the first keyboard player in one million dollars. He seems to be doing well for himself these days.

You can eat very well in Wellington. There’s some great restaurants and cafes, all within walking distance. This time I only had 24 hours in town, but I managed dinner at Chow and a big cooked breakfast with Ben at Maranui Surf Club in Lyall Bay.

Luckily, the Wellingtonians don’t seem to suffer from this surfeit of super food. The city is full of hills, so everyone can keep fit. Like San Francisco or Hong Kong, some streets are so steep that they have been turned into flights of steps. Even the cats have to stop halfway up to catch their breath and admire the view.

Auckland, as I’ll always imagine it

This week I’ve been a sort-of tourist in my home town. Taking photos. Buying ironically tacky souvenirs for people in England. Visiting the museum. Nothing seems to have changed very much here. Lots of old friends, extensive amounts of food and too much coffee.

I drove out to Remuera and took a walk around one of my old schools. There’s a lot of new buildings since my last visit, but every corner of the place still is full of stories. Some places play crucially in forming our concept of the world, and for better or worse, “KP” (King’s Prep) is for me one of those places.

A fantastic wedding on Saturday night featured the Lex Pistols, lavalavas and lamingtons – they sure don’t get married like that in Oxford! Then the evening finished at Rakinos, one of those old Auckland venues that never changes, to hear Tangent play their final gig. And that’s before catching up with Bruce, Karl and Tash. All in all, I didn’t expect that coming back home would be quite so exhausting…

Nick Atkinson sits in with Tangent, Rakinos – May 24th 2008

It’s strange what you notice when you come home after a time away.

First of all, New Zealand can be a remarkably empty country – even close to a big city like Auckland. Driving back through the countryside to my parents house from the airport on Sunday night, (40km), we didn’t come across a single other car. Just 6 rabbits, scampering through the glow of our headlights. Empty, and quiet.

Also, I’d never quite appreciated the effort that some kiwis go to in personalising their houses with their own artwork – this seems especially common outside the cities. There’s something rather charming about a letterbox turned into a cat. Further down the road, a rather weatherbeaten lizard displays a house number on his back.

My parents’ own letterbox was painted by my sister with scenes of the nearby bay… even Dad’s sailboat makes an appearance, cruising out in the Hauraki Gulf…

Pat Metheny Group - Last Train Home
From Still Life (Talking): [Buy]

Pat Metheny is not really a musician I listen to much, but his composition Last Train Home I really like. It’s a deceptively simple song that somehow conveys the bittersweet urgency of travel, the necessity to zoom through new landscapes, to see what’s beyond the next hill. But every journey seems to be a wide arc that will bring you back home, eventually.

Tomorrow I head back to New Zealand for a short three-week trip. It’ll be great to see a whole bunch of friends and family again. Although it feels like just 6 months, it’s actually been two years since I’ve been home. Will be interesting to see what’s changed, and what’s still the same.

I plan to post a few short “postcards” on the blog while I’m there. So see you soon, on the other side of the planet.

Alan Wilkis – It’s Been Great
Alan Wilkis – Milk and Cookies

From Babies Dream Big: Independent [CD Baby]

Brooklyn’s New Power Generation? (Photo: Alex Marvar)

In our continuing search for intelligent life on planet Earth, we have found some compelling evidence in the form of Alan Wilkis, a multi-instrumentalist and independent musician from Brooklyn.

His début album Babies Dream Big references a whole spectrum of pop, funk and soul from the 1960s onwards, and comes out sounding pretty darn awesome. White soul moments burn out of I Love the Way, and we get a deep-down Sly Stone-style singalong in the chorus of It’s Been Great. The acoustic guitar underpinning Astronaut (Would You Be One?) is such an obvious reference that you expect Major Tom to splash-down inside your stereo.

The Wilkis aesthetic is best exemplified in the meisterwerk of the album, Milk and Cookies, which is built on successive episodes of 808 drum loops, synth-laden power pop and an 8-bit Sega-style break 2’25 that sounds like its lifted from Super Mario (or should that be Sonic the Hedghog?). The hedonistic mix provides a reminder of Beck’s Midnite Vultures (1999), but Milk and Cookies is such a blast that I don’t think anyone will mind.

Wilkis plays almost everything on the album, apart from Eric Biondo on trumpet (Antibalas Orchestra) and Jason Treuting of So Percussion, who plays drums on a couple of tracks. For more of this soul-and-funk tinged fun, the album is available from CD Baby (CD and mp3), and songs can be heard on Wilkis’ myspace.

I had to post this video by John Kelly, because it sums up so much of what fascinates me about the English attitude to tradition, (and more specifically the more stubborn Oxonian sub-species of tradition, which seems impervious to both change and logic).

I did go to the 2008 edition of May Morning this year, but Beating the Bounds is probably an even older and possibly odder ceremony.

Every year or two, the parishioners of St Michael at the Northgate in central Oxford walk around the historic boundary of their parish and beat the boundary stones with willow rods. Of course, being in the centre of a modern city, many of the boundary markers are now inside shops, in carparks or basements. But this does not stop the intrepid parishioners of St Michaels…

The short documentary does a good job of explaining what is going on. You get to see a lot of the places I go shopping – Cornmarket, M&S, the hideous Clarendon Centre and the Covered Markets.

Daniel Bolton‘s music career lasted just over 12 months, from early 1997 until March 15th, 1998, when he was found dead at home, aged 25. He had committed suicide.

During his short period of notoriety, Daniel Bolton (stage name D’Arcy Clay) gave New Zealand a bona fide classic hit and left us with the memory of a talent so compelling that we all wondered what might have happened, had he lived.

Recorded in his bedroom in Auckland on a 4-track in 1996, D’Arcy Clay’s song Jesus I Was Evil exploded on the b.net university radio stations across New Zealand in the summer of 1997. It didn’t quite sound like anything you’d heard before – a sort of punk/rock/thrash-funk singalong that you couldn’t get out of your head. After the initial success of JIWE, the follow-up EP on Antenna Records reached number 5 in the New Zealand pop charts.

While today D’Arcy Clay is remembered in New Zealand mainly for his only hit, his entire recorded output of 12 songs remains fascinating – including a psychedelic take on the Dolly Parton song Jolene. His trademark fuzzy funkiness also featured on songs like All I Gotta Do. All 12 songs are available on the posthumous Anthology 2 CD set, through amplifier and smokecds.com

Probably the most comprehensive account of D’Arcy Clay’s short life is a recent article in the NZ Sunday Star-Times, written to mark the 10th anniversary of his death.

Clive James‘ BBC Sunday morning monologue focuses on on the delinquency of Amy Winehouse via Snoop Dogg, Charles Dickens and Billie Holiday.

Text here, audio here (Realplayer)

“The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life…. perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. “On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes.”

“Dude they played ****ing naked!”

It must have been about 1994. A mate of mine was telling me about an all-ages gig he’d been to at the Powerstation in Mount Eden in Auckland. The headline act was Head Like a Hole (HLAH). The gig was awesome, apparently, and the HLAH turned up onstage wearing nothing except their instruments. This seemed pretty hardcore to us.

Formed in Wellington in 1990, HLAH were an unvoidable feature of NZ music in the 1990s. It seemed they played every darn venue and festival, and drew larger and larger crowds each time. They started out as a straightforward Sabbath-style metal band, but by the mid-90s were scoring local hits with catchy anthems like Hootenanny and Spanish Goat Dancer:

Their fourth and last album HLAH IV demonstrated what an interesting band they could have become had they stayed together – exemplified by tracks like Maharajah and Comfortably Shagged.

They even out-Springsteened the Boss with their cover of I’m On Fire and shot a rooftop music video in central Wellington: probably the biggest event to happen in that town until Lord of the Rings started filming:

HLAH disbanded in 2000, but they left behind some happy and sweaty fans, and memories of riotously fun live shows that some think were the best ever by a NZ-based band.

phil b over on klariscope has described a concert last weekend in Paris by Sebadoh, one of the bands from the last decade that I hadn’t quite forgotten, but couldn’t quite remember.

Sebadoh was a band you started to like when you had passed through your Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden stage. Your hormones had started to settle down, so you bought smelly $2 second-hand shirts from charity shops made from ghastly polyester blends banned back in 1974 because of the fire hazard.

Pavement – the original American Idols

Sebadoh, alongside Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and Pavement bestrode the local university radio station playlist like shaggy philosopher-kings. They seemed to offer intellectual street-cred when you hadn’t quite yet discovered John Coltrane. They made us dream of becoming bass players and singing like J Mascis.

We played Unwind by Sonic Youth while we tried to write a movie script that never got past the first scene. It rained all that summer of unrequited love, we read Kerouac and a cheaply-bound commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita given to us in a kebab shop on Queen Street.

Gold Soundz was my favourite Pavement song, thanks mainly to the final line of the first verse: “And they’re coming to the chorus now!” We didn’t care what the song was about, and it didn’t matter that Stephen Malkmus couldn’t really sing. Because it all sounded so damn cool.

As well as these usual American indie suspects, there were a bunch of New Zealand bands that belonged to this same era of musical education. None of those bands exist anymore – but since it’s New Zealand music month I’ll write about a few of them over the next few days…