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Growing up in Auckland in the early and mid-1990s, it seemed that most of my friends had pictures of Kurt Cobain on their bedroom walls. An interest in ‘artistic tragedy’ and a fascination with death seemed to go hand in hand with our suburban adolesence. For earlier generations, it might have been Jim Morrison or Ian Curtis on those bedroom posters. But for teenagers of our vintage, Kurt Cobain was the musician-who-died who most fully embodied the angst and anger of growing up.

What goes around comes around. Alongside continuing economic slowdown, it seems safe to bet that the next couple of years will see a revival of interest in the late 80s-early 90s Seattle scene of which Cobain and Nirvana were the spearhead. Before long the kids’ll be wearing plaid shirts again. Just watch.

The signs are there… just in time for Christmas is launched Charles R. Cross’s new book Kurt Cobain Unseen (produced with the cooperation of the Cobain estate) featuring images and objects drawn from Cobain’s short life.

Possibly more evocative and accessible for the non-obsessive is AJ Schnack’s documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son, which is based on 25 hours of taped interviews with journalist Michael Azerrad, recorded in late 1992 and early 1993. The documentary weaves together excerpts from the conversations with images filmed around the towns Washington state that feature in Cobain’s life: Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle.

Just as the documentary does not feature Cobain’s face (a deliberate directorial decision), the soundtrack avoids using any Nirvana material. Cobain was a constant champion of relatively obscure rock acts like The Vaselines, Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers, and the soundtrack reflects this taste.

I remember a conversation I had years ago with a musician friend about how Kurt Cobain was, essentially, a writer of pop songs – one of the reasons that the Nevermind album succeeds is that it’s unrelentingly catchy. It’s all hooks and simple song-forms, like Thriller but with angst and a fuzzbox.

At one point in the documentary, when describing his love for Glasgow band The Vaselines, Cobain talks of his desire to write pop songs. Listening to the Vaselines again (Nirvana recorded three of their songs during their career), you can hear that pop music soul coming through.

Thanks to the realities of media and merchandising, Kurt Cobain has become a legend cruelly divorced from his real life story. His music will always be stained with the knowledge of his untimely death. But hopefully a film like About a Son will help remind us that people like Kurt Cobain are just ordinary people with ordinary stories. The only difference between them and us is the heat of the spotlight.

David Bowie in 1983 (Photo: jenniferrt66)

Last Saturday Radio New Zealand broadcast a short documentary on the visit of David Bowie to Takapuwahia Marae, north of Wellington.  Bowie was on tour in New Zealand promoting the Serious Moonlight album, after 6 months on the road. Just a couple of dates in Southeast Asia were left before the band returned home for Christmas.

Apparently this was the first time that a touring international artist had been given a powhiri (welcome) on a marae in New Zealand. (Bob Marley was given a massive welcome and powhiri in 1979, but at his hotel in Auckland).  Bowie even wrote a short song of reply for the occasion, which is included in the documentary.

The documentary says a lot about what New Zealand was like in 1983… the visit of one of the biggest pop stars in the world was obviously a big event, and it’s clear how “star-struck” many of the locals were. Indeed, the fact that a radio documentary was commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the event suggest things haven’t changed that much.

There are some some pretty classic strong New Zealand accents during the interviews, too. I know I probably sound like that too, but after almost 3 years away from home, our local dialect starts to sound a little bit strange…

At the Vermont state fair, Rutland, VT. September 1941

Old photos are cool. A good way to take a break from study is to browse the U.S. Library of Congress Flickr Stream . All of the photos are available without copyright restrictions.

The colour photos from the 1930s and 1940s are particularly fascinating – bringing an immediacy to an era often seen by us modern kids in black and white: women building B-17 bombers that will flatten Germany, farm scenes that seem pulled straight from the pages of a William Faulkner novel, portraits of people who seem to have a story to tell.

Irma Lee McElroy painting the wing of an aeroplane, Corpus Christi, TX. August 1942

What emotions are hidden behind the smiles of the evacuated Japanese-American ladies, deported to camps in the desert because of their race?  How long did the worker at the carbon black factory in Texas live?  Did the negro boy near Cincinnati, Ohio live long enough to vote for Obama a few weeks ago?

These are glimpses of America near the height of its industrial and military mobilisation. And yet amidst the images there is an intimacy that helps you realise how much has changed in 70 years, and how much is still the same.

At the Fair, Pie Town, NM. 1940

Baobab trees in Morondava, Madagascar. Image by Daniel Montensinos.

The Financial Times is growing in my estimation – picking up important leads that other papers miss. Today it ran a story about Daewoo Logistic‘s activities in Madagascar, where the South Korean corporation is on the point of signing with the Madagascan government a 99-year lease  on 1.3 million hectares of arable land.  Daewoo is getting the land for FREE, in return for some vague promises about investment in local infrastructure.

This land deal ties up 40% of Madagascar’s total available arable land for a century, in a country where 70% of the population lives below the poverty line according to the World Food Programme, and 600,000 people receive active WFP aid.  It’s indicative of a wider trend occuring across Africa, where countries like Saudi Arabia and China are entering into extensive land-leasing deals.

The motivation for Daewoo seems to be to provide long-term food security for South Korea, who is a significant net importer of food, particularly maize, of which it is the world’s fourth largest importer.  Daewoo says some of the land will be also be used for palm oil plantations.

As a rule, I don’t think we should fear private enterprise forming partnerships with the governments of developing countries.  They may well provide levels of skill, knowledge, resources and money that OECD and NGO programmes can never offer.  Viewed charitably, the Daewoo-Madagascar deal involves a poor country renting its land to a wealthier country to assist the wealthy country to grow food.

But when a private enterprise is given nearly half a country’s farmland virtually for free, there is no win-win. There is no clear assurance that the locals who live on the land will benefit in any way, except perhaps as low-paid labour.

In a separate and unusually strongly-worded editorial, the FT calls the deal “rapacious” and “positively neo-colonial“.  Daewoo’s actions may not be theft but they do resemble a cynical confidence trick of the highest order.

On odd occasions some wicked jazz turns up on YouTube.  This is an excerpt from the DVD Dave Holland Quintet Live in Freiburg.  Recorded in Germany in 1986, it’s only recently been released.

What a monster band – Dave Holland (b); Smitty Smith (d); Robin Eubanks (tb); Steve Coleman (saxes); Kenny Wheeler (tpt/flh).  It’s a pretty free-sounding date, and set free from chordal constraints the players can go some pretty interesting places.

Anyone’s who’s read this blog for a while will know I’m a bit of a Kenny Wheeler freak. This clip proves he’s a great “free” player. On this tune (Steve Coleman’s Vortex), he’s playing cornet. Sweet.

Kora are an AMAZING live act. Their gig last night last night at Barfly in Birmingham was like taking a journey home to NZ for a couple of hours, and the Kora brothers (yes, 80% of them are from the same family) were good company on that trip.

Having raved too much in the postgrad common room about New Zealand music, I had persuaded a classmate from Chile to come along to get “a taste of kiwi”.

When I last saw Kora play in New Zealand (at least 3 years ago), they were a solid reggae band from Whakatane with a few good songs. They’ve matured since then into a world-class live act. Their show is watertight, full of energy and good-natured.

Kora’s music has now pushed far beyond their easy-skanking origins. Apart from Brad behind the drums, the other 3 brothers and Dan Mcgruer swap instruments with alarming regularity (guitars/bass/Nord/sequencers/mixers), as well as sharing vocal duties.

Electronic bleeps and bloops in the mix hint at dark drum’n'bass moments (shades of another kiwi act, Shapeshifter, but with more soul). And at times the guitars march heroically towards metal.

The crowd at Barfly was small but enthusiastic – and happily it wasn’t all New Zealanders. I’d agree with Andrew (he saw them last year in Brum) who suggested that they’d work much better in a more intimate venue than Barfly like the Hare and Hounds. although the band did a fine job with the space and the crowd they were given.

A strange thing about being a New Zealander… you feel more like a kiwi when you no longer live in your home country. There’s something about roots/reggae/dub that (at least for me) speaks deeply of our landscape and people, a sense made all the more poignant 12,000 miles from home. Hearing Kora was like tapping back into those island origins.

We had a great night. Afterwards, my classmate from Chile summed it up in one word: “indescribable“.

Next time Kora is playing in your town, GO AND HEAR THEM. They are truly awesome.

I rarely blog about bad music – there is too much good music in the world to bother with the crap. But sometimes a recording pops up that is just so horrendously awful that avoiding comment is impossible.

Don’t ask how Jazz and 90s (The Coolest and Sexiest Songbook of the Nineties) ended up on my iPod. Like many avoidable accidents, the story involves a weekend in Didcot, home of the most famous power station in southern Oxfordshire.

The album didn’t quite make me puke, however it did inspire this short guide on how to successfully make will-sappingly turgid “Not-Jazz”.

“Not-Jazz”in 7 Easy Steps:

1. Use MIDI horns (or if you use real horns, make sure they sound like MIDI horns). Because nothing sounds quite as authentically Not-Jazz as digital horns.  An added advantage of MIDI is that you don’t have to pay a real horn player.

2. Don’t. Swing. Ever. For an example of how to accomplish this, learn from the Cooltrance Quartet’s inimitable phrasing in Wonderwall‘s bridge “And all-the, roadsthat-leeead-us, there-are-windiiiing “

3. In order to sound more sultry, sing the lyrics in a stage-whisper. Because everyone knows that sounding sultry is better than, say, actually learning how to sing.

4. Steal licks from Van Morrison’s Moondance, because you might as well pay homage to the archetypal Not-Jazz tune.

5. Ronny Jordan-style guitar tags on on the end of every line are ALWAYS a good idea and add style and substance to any tune.

6. There is only one tempo that works – insipid medium. Whether you’re playing Wonderwall, Creep, or Black Hole Sun

6.a) The only permissible variation to step 6 is to harness an irony-free bossa nova for a Guns’n'Roses cover:

7. Wait at your letterbox to receive your large royalty cheque because you’ll probably make a fortune selling this pap to cafés and airport duty free outlets across the planet.

Congratulations, you’ve just made Not-Jazz!

Last week, as part of its Neil Young season, the BBC broadcast a rarely-seen TV special recorded by Neil Young at the Sheperds Bush Empire on February 23rd 1971. Young was 25 years old, touring in support of After the Goldrush, and previewing some of the material that would appear on Harvest.

He starts the gig with a version of Out on the Weekend:

The quality of Young’s voice at this age is remarkable – controlled, strong and yet sounding so frail… a frailty accentuated on later work like 1973′s Tonight’s the Night. Young’s dry Manitoba humour is still intact, too, as he engages in some easy banter with the studio audience.

I watched the show in fairly hi-fidelity thanks to iPlayer – the sound and image quality is superb. Maybe one day it’ll be available somewhere as a DVD extra? The whole 30 minute concert is now available on YouTube (for how long, I don’t know).

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

My randomly generated band and album artwork, in response to Tash.

It always happens at 4am.

In November 2000, lying in bed, listening to the radio (France Inter as I recall- I was living in France), we hear the news that Florida, earlier called for Al Gore, is back in the “too close to call” category.  Two weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively declares George W. Bush the victor in Florida, and therefore the new President.

It’s hard to remember what the world was like in 2000… Guantanamo Bay was still an obscure footnote of history and geography. Most peoples’ internet connections ran at 56k. The founder of Facebook was still in high school. The World Trade Center was just another pair of skyscrapers in Manhattan.  At 4am on November 5th, 2000, there was no clue as to how fateful that presidential victory would be.

Cut to 4am in Birmingham, November 5th 2008. Lying in bed, listening to the radio. The BBC have just called Virginia for Obama. They’re about to cross to London for a news bulletin, when Jim Naughtie announces that the West Coast polls have closed: Oregon, California and Washington are falling into the Democrat’s column.  With 293 electoral college votes, Barack Obama is the new President.

In the ensuing hours, journalists try to write history off-the-cuff. First black president. The end of Reagan-era politics. McCain’s majority in Montana cut to 17,000. A re-drawing of the political map.

But he punditry sounds clumsy when faced with the image of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in tears as he awaits the president-elect’s arrival at Grant Park.  No other western [Correction - industrialised] country has ever elected a member of an ethnic minority as head of state. “I Am – Somebody” indeed.

But there are still fears. Can Obama ever live up to the huge expectation – that enormous weight of hope – that has accumulated around his candidacy?

Obama’s victory is an obvious milestone in American civil rights – and yet last night California, Florida and Arizona passed consitutional bans on gay marriage.

Given the burden of vested interests at home and overseas, how much reform is truly possible?  How much does Obama actually represent “change”? His platform is moderate – he doesn’t represent the radical agenda that some have ascribed to him. By world standards, Obama is more John Major than Hugo Chavez.

We can’t really tell at this point what an Obama presidency will bring. We don’t know what the world will be like 4 years’, 8 years’ time. All we do know is that Barack Obama is the best hope we have right now. On behalf of the 95% of us on the planet who aren’t Americans, America has made the right choice and that fact is worth celebrating.

*Photo credits – Getty/AP