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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!

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.

Image: Marcus Wright

Cy Winstanley and Vanessa McGowan are two New Zealand-born musicians based in London. Their songwriting/band project is called Her Make Believe Band. They’ve been recording their first album, and the first tracks are up on MySpace.

Years ago, back in Auckland, I played in a big band with Cy and Vanessa. Part of a web of musical contacts that now forms a network that these days spans the globe. When I knew them, they were playing a lot of jazz, and wasn’t aware of their mutual love of country music.

Image: janasfotos

You hear a lot of that country sound on these few tracks, but theres are lot more too: rich string arrangements and Fender Rhodes on Lonely Soul Blues, and assured song structures that recall Paul Simon. Cy’s voice on Last Hour is quite stunning – does this remind anyone else of Mark Hollis’ classic solo album ?  If these few tracks are a guide, then the full album could be very, very good indeed.

If you’re reading this in New Zealand, Her Make Believe Band is playing some shows in Auckland in May and June. Don’t miss them.

Ever get the feeling that the torch has well and truly passed to the next generation? When we were starting one million dollars back in 2001, Iva Lamkum was still at high school.

But today, Iva is fully-fledged solo artist from who seems to be following in the lineage of New Zealand contemporaries Ladi6 and Hollie Smith. Certainly her deep-throated soul-jazz style recalls somewhat both Hollie and Ladi.

Her 2008 single Kung Fu Grip plays on Iva’s Asian heritage (born in NZ, Iva is half-Chinese, half-Samoan), and is the centrepiece of a début EP that mines consistently popular characteristics of the New Zealand scene – live old-school beats, jazz, and an organic r+b/soul aesthetic.

Auckland producer/musician Andrew Spraggon featured Iva on Turn Around, a grack from the new Sola Rosa album Get it Together. If you want to know what the insides of an Auckland DJ’s record bag sound like, take a listen over on Bandcamp:

(A sidebar note: the trombone lick on Turn Around is played by Haydn Godfrey, an erstwhile one million dollars conspirator and one of a very few young professional trombonists in the NZ. He’s currently in Chicago studying with players from the Chicago Symphony.)

An email conversation I had earlier today explored the possibility that France might have colonised New Zealand. I had little bit of fun with my limited Photoshop skills, and re-edited the email as a blog post. All the sterotypes herein are for humourous purpose only.

Notre-Dame-des-Escargots and the skyline of Nouvelle-Marseille by night

Following the declaration of French dominion in October 1839, Nouvelle-Zélande was settled by thousands of colonists called Jean-Marc and Brigitte who hailed from mainly from Poitou, Brittany and Normandy (regions that were always disproprortionately represented in French colonial emigration).

Most of the British settlers already in the islands, finding that they were now ruled from Paris, either moved to Australia or returned to Britain, where they ended up working in the textile mills of the English Midlands. (Those who moved to the Midlands got the better deal, because their descendants can now buy a decent curry).

New Zealand was divided into two “départements”, Ile-du-Nord (101) and Ile-du-Sud (102), thus becoming an integral part of metropolitan France. Great Barrier Island was commandeered in the early 1850s for use as a flax plantation worked by Parisian convicts. Today the island is an ecological disaster-area.

For colonial administrators, Nouvelle-Zélande was for many decades considered a hardship post, run by second-tier civil servants who had failed in their application for postings to Ouagadougou. A ruthless campaign of francisation was introduced: by 1900 all Maori were speaking French, except in Taranaki, where local Breton school teachers rebelled against Paris by teaching their own language. To this day, the Taranaki locals remain incomprehensible to outsiders.

Port Nicholson (Crotteville-sur-Mer) is the préfecture of the Ile-du-Nord département. Crotteville is frequented by art lovers for its UNESCO-registered 19th century cast-iron pissoirs. Their pétanque team are world champions, thanks to training in such windy conditions.

The tricouleur flies proudly over the Préfecture building in Crotteville

Nouvelle-Marseille (known to early British settlers as Auckland) is reputed to be the “largest Algerian city in the Southern Hemisphere”, and the suburb of Ponsonbie is world-famous for its Hausmann-era and Art-Nouveau apartments. A marble-domed Catholic basilica stands prominently on the North Shore, built by public subscription as penitence for the sins of rioting citizens committed during the Great Camembert Shortage of 1887.

British plans to build a city called “Christchurch” were rapidly abandoned, but today Lyttleton and Akaroa are linked by government-subsidised trams.

Nouvelle-Zélande has become a popular holiday destination for French celebrities. Catherine Deneuve lives 8 months of the year in her luxury villa in Wakatipu-les-Bains (formerly Queenstown), a resort that hosts the Cannes film festival in alternate years and is famous for exorbitant real estate prices, industrial-scale skiing and several Michelin-starred restaurants.

The Pont Mitterand and the Monts du Kaikoura in Ile-du-Sud (viewed from l’Ile-du-Nord)

A few Scottish settlers chose to stay on in the south of Ile-du-Sud département under French rule, and today many of their descendants work in the world’s southernmost Peugeot factory in Sainte-Marie-des-Etudiants (formerly Dunedin).

Travel time from Sainte-Marie-des-Etudiants to Nouvelle-Marseille has been reduced to less than 6 hours thanks to a TGV line that crosses Cook Strait via the world’s longest suspension bridge, the “Pont Mitterand” (built in the 1980s as a magnificent but misguided gesture of state interventionism by the central government in Paris, and whose construction was characterised by strikes, budget over-runs and the arrest and conviction of local government officials for accepting under-the-table payments from contractors).

A TGV-NZ zooms past Mont Ngauruhoe

The seas around Nouvelle-Zélande are all fished out, and almost all food is imported from France, due to dirigiste agricultural policies in the 1970s and EU subsidies which led to the entire country’s production being converted to sugar beet and Roquefort cheese. The US tariff on Roquefort introduced by George W. Bush has hit the economy of Nouvelle-Zélande very hard.

Due to the need for imports and the compulsory adoption of the Euro, the cost of living in Nouvelle-Zélande is exorbitant. Regular strike action by local unions complaining about living costs bring few concessions from President Sarkozy in Paris. Marlborough vineyards (Côtes de Wairau appellation controlée) constitute 80% of the territory’s export revenue. The speed limit on the roads is 130km/h. Hawkes Bay is uninhabitable due to a massive accident at the Cape Kidnappers nuclear power plant in 1978.

Over 160 years, Nouvelle-Zélande has developed its own distinctive French-based Creole, mixing Normand dialect and Breton words with borrowings from a defunct Maori language and possibly some English terms derived from early trading contact with Australia. French is the language of education, commerce and government, but local inhabitants speak Creole at home when baking tartiflette or sitting down to a 4-hour Sunday lunch (the shops are closed on Sundays, so everyone gets together for a family meal).

Nouvelle-Zélande is really really rubbish at rugby, regularly losing to the Italians and Argentinians. But the inhabitants don’t care: they are experts at shrugging.

I’ve blacked out the blog’s banner images for the week as part of the “Black Out” protest at the mad new Copyright Act amendments being introduced in New Zealand.

Juha at Techsploder has a good summary of the law’s implications.  It’s a stupid law that effectively threatens NZ Internet users with cutting off their connection if they are merely accused (accused – not convicted!) of copyright violation. As Juha explains:

“I’m a “content creator” and a rights holder due to my work as a writer, but the new law won’t help me one iota. It’s there for the large entertainment organisations to terrorise Internet users. This is an important point to bear in mind, that the new law isn’t going to help artists and others rights holders.”