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Former All Black Byron Kelleher has found a new home in Toulouse, and after three years here, he’s become one of the key players for Stade Toulousain, and a crowd favourite. He’s also learnt to speak French…

As another anglophone in France who still struggles sometimes with the language, I don’t want to seem like I’m mocking him: learning a new language as an adult is not easy. But Byron’s mixture of Otago English and the accent de Toulouse is, er, original…

He says he wants to stay in France after he retires from the game, and I wish him very well – there are much worse places in the world to settle down than the southwest of France.

Psalm 23 (for Toby) (arr. Rowley)
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

Back when the world was a little younger than it is now, I sang in the chapel choir at my prep school. Recently, an mp3 conversion of a 1991 recording of the choir (complete with tape hiss) has fallen into my hands. Hearing this music again provoked reflection on an important phase in my musical education.

Surprisingly, 18 years later, the cassette doesn’t entirely make me cringe. We were a pretty decent choir – nowhere near the standard of King’s Cambridge, but entirely respectable for a bunch of 10-to-13 years olds. A few flat kiwi vowels rather ruin the Latin of Fauré’s Ave Verum; the phrasing and timing of consonants is a little haphazard, but overall, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s strange knowing that all those unbroken voices now belong to men who are fathers, engineers, lawyers, marketing lecturers and dentists, living in half a dozen countries. One of us has even served tours of duty in Afghanistan. At one time we were all choristers.

My four years in the choir were entirely formative. First of all, we learned performance discipline. We had four 8am rehearsals on weekday mornings, and four sung services a week (3 weekday chapels and 1 Sunday service), all year outside school holidays. In later musical projects, that sense of committment remains: if you’re in the band, you’re part of a team: turn up to rehearsals, and do the gigs. No excuses.

Benjamin Britten – There is no rose from Ceremony of Carols (Op.28)
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

For me, one piece we performed stood out from the rest of our repertoire – Britten’s There is no rose from his Ceremony of Carols. It sounded deep and ancient, a hint of a wider musical world that we might encounter in years to come. At 13 years old, singing Britten somehow seemed serious work, like we were actually performing real music, whatever that was.

Hindsight is treacherous. The imagination has a habit of creating links to the past that perhaps aren’t there. But I can’t help believing that a big part of my love for music finds its roots in endless winter mornings spent in chapel, all those vocal exercises, the routine of robing and the inexorable rhythm of the Book of Common Prayer.

We probably didn’t completely appreciate what we were doing at the time, but almost two decades later, all that singing starts to make sense.

Stephen Sondheim – Send in the Clowns
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

Sir Howard Morrison died today. He was one of New Zealand’s most popular entertainers for 50 years, and a man who used his talent and energy to advance the causes of his people.

A humourist,  a musician, a quietly committed activist, he will be remembered for many things, but his performance of Whakaaria mai (How Great Thou Art, sung in Maori) will remain a treasured memory for anyone who heard it live or on television.

[Edit: for a more nuanced and detailed appreciation by a knowledgeable critic, Graham Reid's piece on Public Address is well worth reading]

Kua hinga he Kauri nui i roto i te waonui o Tane. Hoki atu ra ki o tuupuna Matua i Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao.

Thought this was worth posting… the video for SJD/Sean Donnelly‘s new single Baby You’re Oh So. A really nice concept, which takes me back to my earliest computer experiences on the neighbour’s Apple IIe in about 1984.

(Hat tip – video found via Andrew Dubber’s tweet.)

Nice to see Sean working with Chris O’Connor on drums these days. I’ve worked with both Tom Atkinson (Sean’s previous drummer) and Chris, both excellent musicians. Among various improv and jazz projects, Chris also plays with Don McGlashan, and probably will lend a more organic sound to Sean’s live set.

Here’s my photo of Chris at the beach in New Zealand a few years back.

Back in the 1980s, Tip Top Ice Cream advertised its Popsicle iceblocks with a group of animated pop stars, called the “Popsicle band” (a strawberry iceblock played drums, a negroid cola-block played bass etc etc). The Popsicle Band still exist as a marketing campaign, but their title as the “coolest band in the land” has well and truly been usurped by seven musicians from Wellington.

Fat Freddy’s Drop‘s first studio album Based on a True Story went seven times platinum in their home country in 2005. The band has made ripples elsewhere too, with props from DJs like Gilles Peterson and several sell-out tours to Europe under their belt (where tellingly it’s not just expat kiwis in Grey Lynn t-shirts turning up to gigs).

This week,  their second studio album Dr Boondigga and the Big BW got dropped into the pond, complete with right-on vintage Maori ghetto cover artwork by Otis Frizzell. The release is probably a small event in the global scheme of things, but pretty big news in New Zealand.

Fat Freddy’s Drop live at Zenith, Paris in 2008

Is the new album any good? The answer, at least to this pair of ears is: indubitably YES. The sound and approach is more mature, the tunes gel as an album. This is still the downbeat-electro-souljazz-dub-reggae of their previous efforts, but somehow all these dimensions have been pushed further out.

The horns are more in the pocket than ever, Mu‘s beats are deeper and fatter, the soul tunes sound like The Commodores remixed by Sly and Robbie at Parihaka. And perhaps as a recognition that the band now has a 9-year heritage, the horns make a sly reference on Wild Wind to the hook from their 2001 Live at the Matterhorn EP.

Points off? The opening hornline on The Nod which sounds so scarily tripletised when played live, loses some its impact in the studio. And lyrically, I’ve never been satisfied with the bands  “I want to wake up with the sunshine on my face/Yes let’s all live in peace and unity at the beach” themes. But Freddy’s is a dance band, so quibbles about Dallas‘ words are probably missing the point.

Mu at the Roundhouse, 2008 (Photo: Eric Wang)

Early reports indicate that the disc is flying off the shelves in New Zealand faster than the first album. It deserves to, because this is a better album than their studio debut. Pop industry forces will likely militate to ensure that this music doesn’t get as broad an international audience as it deserves, but most kiwis will be content with Fat Freddy’s Drop simply being the coolest band in the land.

You can hear the new album on their site, on theirspace and the album is available as mp3s or as a CD via amplifier.

Dallas Tamaira (Image: Eric Wang)

The Bay

On the road to the bay was a lake of rushes

Where we bathed at times and changed in the bamboos.

Now it is rather to stand and say

How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere,

The alley overgrown, no meaning now but loss:

Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy.

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names

And a hut on the shore by the Maori ovens.

We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek

Or swam in those autumnal shallows

Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs

Upstream, and waiting for the taniwha.

So now I remember the bay and the little spiders

On driftwood, so poisonous and quick.

The carved cliffs and the great outcrying surf

With currents round the rocks and the birds rising.

A thousand times an hour is torn across

And burned for the sake of going on living.

But I remember the bay that never was

And stand like stone and cannot turn away.

-James K. Baxter (1926-1972)

The weather’s too good this weekend to spend time indoors writing a long blog post. So here’s Another New Zealand Music Month Post, immodestly featuring my old band… I discovered this clip that I didn’t think was online, but someone’s posted it. The song is The Original off our first album. Luckily I don’t appear the clip at all!

Filmed over a weekend on a road near Muriwai beach, in downtown Auckland, and on the cycle path along the Northwestern Motorway… shoestring budgets and digital post-production all the way!

Here’s a little Web 2.0 story. Over the past few years blogging has become an increasingly integral part of the media, for better or for worse, and one of the side-effects of this is that content produced by “normal” people (like me, I suppose)  is more likely to be picked up and used by major media outlets.

ReadWriteWeb is a tech blog run out of New Zealand, rated by Technorati as one of the top 20 blogs in the world. They published a piece yesterday about Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Harvard inspiration for Facebook. Prior to Harvard, Zuckerberg was a student at Phillip’s Exeter Academy, and the photo they chose to illustrate the piece was a photo I took last year during my short trip to New Hampshire:

Phillips Exeter Academy in the snow – March 29th, 2008

I found out about the photo’s use via Paul Spence at Genius Net, who tweeted the news overnight. (See, I told you it was a Web 2.0 story)

For extra coolness, ReadWriteWeb content is syndicated to the New York Times site, so although the New York Times version of the story doesn’t contain the photo, I still get a credit at the bottom of the article.  Does this make me a citizen journalist or something ?

Keep cool till after school…

I have no idea how to dress myself. For example, I just bought a couple of t-shirts from New Zealand. An impulse purchase, but I can sort of justify it. On Thursday last week we finished classes for the MBA course, so it seemed to be a good moment to give myself a little reward for getting this far (“celebrate milestones and success” they said on our leadership course). And I needed a few new clothes for a hot summer in the south of France.  Oh, and Tash told me to.

I got an Olly Ohlson After School design, and a Longest Drink in Town tee. They now sit proudly alongside my favourite 1974 Commonwealth Games logo shirt from Little Brother (4 years old and still going strong!). I’m also waiting on a smiley cloud-muffin shirt from JohnnyDurham19 in the UK.

But I’m not sure that my NZ t-shirts translate very well here in France. This summer, while I think my shirt is making a semi-ironic reference to a brand of milkshake from Auckland, the Montpellierians on the tram will think I’m just a sunburnt Englishman with a cartoon giraffe on his chest. But vive la différence and all that…

Well, it’s New Zealand Music Month again. A good excuse to dig up this old classic from 1984: Poi E by the Patea Maori Club.

It’s probably the first pop song I remember: kids in the school playground would run around singing and shouting “Taku poi porotiti, taku poi e!“. We didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but it sure made a change from playing Ewoks and Stormtroopers.

Poi E sounds like no other pop song before or since. Everything about the song and the video is awesome – fusing poi dance with breakdance, mixing kapa haka with MPC beats, and providing a 16mm picture into New Zealand at a transitional time in its history. Magic.