Our Giants

This may be heading us deep into trivia territory, but it might give the world an idea of the iconic status that Tim enjoys in New Zealand.

Big new winery opened in Havelock North in 2003, big open air concert to celebrate with folks traveling from all over the country. (We were there from the other side of the world, but that was more coincidence than planning...). That's the view of the natural amphitheatre (aka sheep paddock...) and the winery from Te Mata peak.

Tim Finn
Kiri Te Kanawa
Ed Hillary

Lots of people will say "OK, rock singer, pass, pass"

Kiri Te Kanawa's is the classic "Maori kid from the East Coast makes it huge" story. Adopted as an infant and having been born into an indigenous society that - more so back then than now and it's not good these days - doesn't give you much of a kick start in life. "Whalerider" country.
So if Covent Garden, the Met, La Scala, Washington National Opera, Paris Opera, Sydney Opera and the Vienna State Opera mean anything to you, you'll already know how good she is.
And if you don't, then listen to her reading of Vissi d’arte from Puccini's Tosca and you'll understand.

Ed Hillary was the first man - together with Tensing Norgay - to climb Mt Everest.
Came down and said "Well George, we finally knocked the bastard off".
He's the only living New Zealand to appear on a banknote. The image of the $5 fills the street front of NZ's equivalent of the Fed in Wellington.
Beekeeper.
Too shy to propose to his future wife, so he asked her mother to do it on his behalf.
The first man to stand at both poles as well as the summit of Everest.
Spent years building schools, hospitals and bridges in Nepal.
He's still listed in the Auckland phone book.
He's New Zealand's moral pinnacle.
He once called for more honesty in politics, to much aggravated moaning from the political class and cheering from the rest of us.
America just doesn't have an equivalent.
No-one does.

Tim sings a duet in Maori with Kiri and then kicks into a set ("wound up like a two bob watch" as he put it at the time) with the Dirty Creatures that was amazing. "I see red" - this is from the Bic, Tim and Dave live concert - was unforgettable.

And Ed Hillary tells it like it was 50 years earlier.
"We got up there and there was nothing but space in every direction. We had reached the top of the world"
He's here in a BBC interview later that year.

So for Tim to be on stage with these two....

Well, if you were to ask him, I think he'd have difficulty getting the words out.

No, not Alvin Lee. Not Arthur Lee, either. ALBERT Lee....

"When St. Peter asks me to chronicle the highlights of my time down here on earth, I'll be able to say (with pride, if that's allowed) that for a while I played rhythm guitar in a band with Albert Lee."
Emmylou Harris wrote that.
She should know.

Albert Lee
- was voted Guitar Player Magazine’s “Best Country Guitar Picker” five times
- won the 2002 Grammy for best Country Instrumental Performance
- was in a band called Heads, Hands and Feet in the early 70s. Landed what was at the time the biggest record advance ever offered to a
band - half a million dollars up front..You can get their CDs on Amazon for upwards of 100 bucks. If you're lucky.
- Played guitar [Under the falling sky] on Jackson Browne's eponymous (or "Saturate before using" - take your pick) album
- was in Emmylou Harris's Hot Band [Luxury Liner]
- toured with Clapton for 5 years
- worked with Glen Campbell, Dave Edmunds, Dolly Parton, Joan Armatrading, Ricky Scaggs, Joe Cocker, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt,
Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Earl Scruggs, Nicolette Larson, The Everly Brothers, The Crickets and Bo Diddley
- Tours with Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings

And I bet you've never heard of him

I'm lucky. I saw him first with Bill Wyman at KUZ in 2004 and I saw him again last night (for the third time) at what used to be the village movie theatre in Lorsch (and is now the Rex Musiktheater. About 3000 square feet, bistro tables and bar stools for the very geriatric, "backstage" for the band is the old projection room upstairs, so they move through the crowd to the minuscule stage. Good camouflage. They're about our age. They could be us.
Jeff Beck's played there. So have Plant and Page. Paul Carrack's there next month. As is Colosseum. And The Yardbirds. And and and.

Two and a half hour set with his mates (Hogan's Heroes).Country shuffle, boogie, hardcore flat-out picking.
Everything from his own stuff [Payola Blues] to Everly Brothers [Brand new heartache] Presley [Don't], Buddy Hollie [Ollie Vee] Beach Boys [Only with you], Johnny Burnett [Tear it up] Ralph Stanley [Man of constant sorrow] Hoyt Axton [Evangelina],Jerry Lee Lewis [Wild One], Motown [That is rock'n'roll] Delbert McClinton [Two more bottles of wine] and Richard Thomson [Dimmin' of the day]

Just the nicest guy. Comes out after the show, flogs and signs CDs (and the set list I got from Ian, the mixer man) and chats away.

And he's so fast.

Even with the shutter speed set at 1/2000, his fingers are still a fucking blur....

Joni @ The Beeb Part 2

So here's Part 2 (24.9MB 56:00) of "Come in from the cold - The return of Joni Mitchell", courtesy of the folks at Rogue Amoeba
and again with thanks to Croz.

To whose semi-collaborative Monday Mix you should definitely listen.

And if you enjoy that, you'll might like the Contrast podcast. Totally collaborative - post an intro and a song and you're part of it.
(YMBFA's there this week with CK Stead's "Birthday Sonnet"

And thanks to the Beeb again for the sort of stuff that 's really worth the license fee - Voices

Click on a point on the map for local dialects, slang and accents.

Good accessible research.Delightful stuff.

The Midweek Mixtape - 28 March 2007

At this stage, I hadn't really seriously worked on a concept (apart from Guess Who binding Mix & Match #1 with Mix and Match #2. Duh.)

OK - the "Cocaine" link between Jackson Browne and JJ Cale.

But not really a duff track among them and a mildly obscure (Forbert) one for good measure.

Note also the skillfully offset stereo tracks on Forbert. Which is what happens when you kill a click on one track using Steinberg's CleanPlus and don't cut the equivalent out of the other. Steep learning curve.

Visitors with constrained musical taste found it "grating" at the time, so it must be OK......

Dancing fool - Guess Who
Never Been to the Islands (Howard & Hug's Blues) - Amazing Rhythm Aces
Diamonds & rust - Joan Baez
Call it a Loan - Jackson Browne
Cocaine - J. J Cale
Make It All So Real - Steve Forbert
You Got That Right - Lynyrd Skynyrd
Sad boy - McGuinn, Clark & Hillman
The joker - Steve Miller Band
Devils sidewalk - Graham Parker
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
From a whisper to a scream - Robert Palmer
Thrasher - Neil Young
Sleep come free me - James Taylor
Watching the wheels - John Lennon
My old school - Steely Dan
While you see a chance - Steve Winwood
Help Me Thru the Night - Joe Walsh
Romeo And Juliet - Dire Straits
Take the money and run - Steve Miller Band

Mix & Match #2.mp3 82MB 1:27:42

John Peel @ Bayern 2

John Peel has been instrumental in providing exquisite entertainment, expanding my musical horizons and driving me down the slippery slope to insolvency for going on for 40 years.

He still does.

Just happened to be listening to Bayern 2 - NPR sort of, we get it on cable - a week after his untimely passing and he was suddenly there in the room.
Too slow to record it and BR2 isn't too clued up on podcasts or "Listen again", so here's a recreation of the set.

It's choice. Don't know when the interviews were recorded, though.(And I haven't got them anyway)

Hana - Asa-Chang & Junray - Lost for Words
Cars - To Rococo Rot - The Amateur View
Teenage Kicks - The Undertones - John Peel - A Tribute
Give It Away - Zero 7 - Simple Things
The Way It Is - Laura Cantrell - Not The Tremblin' Kind
Children of the Revolution - T-Rex - Cosmic Dancer
Walking Barefoot - Ash - Intergalactic Sonic 7"s:The Best Of Ash
Haus Der Kunst - F.S.K. - Unter Unserem Himmel 3
Micromanaged - To Rococo Rot - Veiculo

And an extra treat from Fabric Live 07 - "Hana" as a backdrop to a 1981 magic moment for Liverpool.

Enjoy

Don't ask me (about Eläkeläiset) - #1

This is what you get from indiscriminately listening to music all day long.

I wouldn't have it any other way....

The band is Eläkeläiset.

They're Finnish.

They play Humppa - somewhere between jazz and a very fast foxtrot, 2 beats a bar, 250 to 280 beats per minute.

Which is 140 bars a minute. Which is even faster than Jefito can write

Their tour bus is a truck.

They do covers.

Kylie Minogue. Buzzcocks. Neil Diamond. Hank Williams. Madonna. Buzzocks. Children of Bodom.

Humppaneitsyt
Viinaa hanuristille
Hävisin lotossa taas

You work it out...

Do you sprechen Denglish... ?

The parliamentary caucus of Germany's Conservative Party met in Berlin this week to kick off an initiative to highlight the encroachment of Anglicisms into German everyday life.

Superwash, for example.

It was held in the Presselounge and it was announced that there would be Handouts after the press conference (at which one MP referred to Gender Mainstreaming.)

Upon which the chairman unleashed a resounding bollocking in the direction of the offending party.

To which she snapped back "Well, do you have a better expression...?"

Hmmmm.....

Bob, meet Walther. Walther, meet Bob...

This was one of 2006's more unusual - and better - musical events.

Heike Makatsch, reformed Viva (local MTV competitor) VJ, sometime companion of Daniel Craig and actress of mild renown ("Love, actually") reads Bob Dylan and Walther von der Vogelweide at the Nibelungen Festival in Worms, accompanied by a lute player (whose name escapes me) and her Dad on guitar.

It was impressive.

Her diction is immaculate, her interpretation enthralling and the selection and juxtaposition of songs of freedom and independence - in both politics and in love, separated by 800 years - an absolute joy.

Can't oblige with the original - just a playlist of the Dylan readings.
The best (or rarest or most interesting) takes from my library, plus a surprise guest,

Bob Dylan's Dream
When The Ship Comes In
Mr. Tambourine Man [Live]
Masters Of War [Live]
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Like a Rolling Stone
John Brown
Don't think twice, it's alright
Tomorrow Is Such A Long Time
Wedding Song
Things have changed
Let Me Die In My Footsteps
Forever Young - Bob Dylan

Enjoy anyway

Heike Makatsch reads Bob Dylan - Playlist.mp3 56.6MB 1:01:49

Payback time

Croz over at Patrick Crosley.com is a constant source of enjoyment.

Not only do he provide a constant stream of TTRH, you'll also find wondrous mix of classical music, links to the New Yorker, gardening videos and sources for blank manuscript paper.

In other words, important stuff

And lots of Joni.

Also important

So here's the stream of last night's BBC Radio 2 show "Come in from the cold - The return of Joni Mitchell", courtesy of the folks at Rogue Amoeba

Part 1, that is. More next week.

Cheers Croz

The Midweek Mixtape - 21 March 2007

Blame Croz for this one. Jefito too, for that matter.

These truly are mix tapes: facsimiles of the C90s I've still got in the loft, digitized from the original and cleaned up a bit. (And occasionally a clean version substituted)

They're pretty random.

There's occasionally a link to be found, depending on the mood or creativity prevalent at the time - Dire Straits and Springsteen are linked by Roy Bittan - played piano on both sessions; Ronstadt and Feat by the sequence of tracks on "Heart like a wheel".

But it's mostly a collection of "Good Bits" - the raunchy guitar solo at the end of "Wake up dreaming" or the stunning kick of "Stone's throw"

And the last track tends to be one that the stopwatch told me I needed....

Don't know about you, but these tracks are so embedded in the grey matter that whenever I hear "Against the wind" on the radio, I still always wait for the first notes of "Chuck E"...

Track listings are tagged in the lyrics

Enjoy

Mix and Match #1.mp3 76.2MB 1:23:16

Tunnel Of Love - Dire Straits
Adam raised a Cain - Bruce Springsteen
How I Spent My Fall Vacation - Bruce Cockburn
Against The Wind - Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band
Chuck E.'s In Love - Ricky Lee Jones
Lonesome loser - Little River Band
(Goin') Wild For You Baby - Bonnie Raitt
Star baby - Guess Who
Days gone down - Gerry Rafferty
When will I be loved - Linda Ronstadt
Willin' - Little Feat
Wake up dreaming - Little Feat
Baby come home - J. D Souther
Hotel California - The Eagles
Darkness on the edge of town - Bruce Springsteen
Walking in the wind - Traffic
A Stone's Throw Away- Valerie Carter
Albert Flasher - Guess Who

Snail Mail

This arrived today.

Only took 2 months.

And they're sorry if there was a delay.

I've been wondering about the "alternative service", though.

9 miles a day?

They didn't send someone off on foot, did they...?

A pretty good haul

Zweitausendeins (Two thousand and one) is a cool outfit.
They're CD, book and DVD mail order with a few brick and mortar locations around the place.
Mine is in Frankfurt, just up the road from a good Japanese supermarket and stand-up sushi bar and across the road from the oldest coffee roasters in Frankfurt.

Their catalogue's great. They have stuff like

• The Blues Archive - 40 CDs for €70

• Mozart's entire output (170 CDs) for €85

• Plus all sorts of obscure stuff

The shop's even better. They've got Inara George (I had to order my copy from the States...), the wonderful John Peel's collection of 78s, (here he is being interviewed on bfm in Auckland), Johnny Clegg, Johnny Cash stuff you've never heard of.. You won't find any Top 40 stuff, but who cares.

This was yesterday's haul

Shawn Colvin - These four walls
Free - Live at the BBC
Claire Waldorff - Perlen der Kleinkunst
Das Boot on DVD

Free and Shawn Colvin are linked irrevocably on my "Stop You In Your Tracks Tracks" playlists thus.

Shawn Colvin I heard knowingly for the first time in Eddie Bauer's outlet shop in Kittery, Maine. There was a bibabibabiba lead-in bass line and then the three steps forward- three steps back riff and at that very instant it was mine.
As was everything else I've stumbled over, either accidentally or via Jefito's excellent Idiot's Guide to...

"All right now" really stopped me in my tracks. I'd just turned up at my uncle's place in Leeds sometime in 1970 and Top of the Pops was on and THAT SONG was playing.

I just stood there with my mouth open.

And pretty much my reaction when I heard "Doctor my eyes" in the Ops office at Lufthansa at Heathrow.

So finding Shawn Colvin was really good, but not earthshattering.

Free - Live at the BBC is.
Disc 1 is a series of sessions that survived frequent spring cleanings at the Beeb to make shelf space for more episodes of Gardeners Hour and Blue Peter.
Disc 2 is even better - live broadcasts that someone recorded off their radio in 1970. Which might have involved sitting there with a tape recorder and a microphone in front of the speakers, for all I know. Here's "Be my friend" for good measure. And "Fire and Water"
And it still really pisses me off that I never got to see "All right now" live.
Went to the concert at the Lyceum in London with my mate Lothar Lehmann and we had to leave at 11:30 to catch the last fucking Tube back to Hounslow West. From where I had to walk 5 miles home.
Which was obviously before the end of the concert.

And don't tell me that Cameron Crowe didn't base Jeff Bebe in Almost Famous on Paul Rodgers. And yes, I have kept the cover of the Daily Telegraph magazine for 37 years. (You don't want to know about the rest of the stuff...)

And here's a neat little story . David Kossoff - well-known British actor - was at a do sometime in the 60s with Cliff Richard and the Shadows and they got chatting along the lines of "Well, my boy wants a guitar for Christmas, what should I buy him"

"My boy" was Paul Kossoff, later of Free and dead at 25.

Postscript: This is unreal. Listening to Bob Harris on BBC Radio 2, I find out that he died 30 years ago today. Fuck me sideways.

And (Sir) Cliff Richard was the Brit equivalent of Elvis in the 60s (and who's still going strong these days at 67, plastic surgery and all) and I hated him with a passion. But I rate Rock'n'roll Juvenile where he at last acknowledges his roots and tongue-in-cheeks his own born-again Christianity - "I'm a rock'n'roll holy roller". Bloody good live performer.

So it's really good to have those.

Then I see "Shellac" and "€4.99" and I've just decided to buy 48 tracks by Claire Waldoff.
You have to understand the context.

Cabaret (yes, there was a film...) blossomed especially in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. The political censorship of the German Empire (censors in every theatre...) had been lifted, allowing artists to deal with social themes and political developments of the time with texts written by people like Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Klaus Mann and Joachim Ringelnatz. Biting stuff.

Claire Waldoff was right in the thick of it. Drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, died a pauper.
Adolf turned up in 1933, censorship came back in with a vengeance, writers and performers were banned, forced to emigrate, imprisoned or shunted off to concentration camps. Tucholsky committed suicide.

Claire Waldoff was blacklisted - think Kafka-esque McCarthy-ism - for her socialist leanings and later again - after a period of rehabilitation - for "Hermann heest er" ("Hermann's his name") - a dig at the narcissistic Hermann Goering. Goebbels supposedly foamed at the mouth when he heard it.
"Wenn die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren" (When the soldiers march through the streets" wouldn't have gone down too well, either.

All very reminiscent of "The life of others" which has the same sort of claustrophic grittiness that "Das Boot" has. See it before Hollywood gets hold of it and rewrites history in the same way they did with "Das Boot" and U-571

A pretty good haul.

That - along with some good sushi, a latino next door and the OpArt exhibition at the Schirn - made for a pretty good day.

One good turn....

Jefito''s currently and unfairly hostless for the time being

I've uploaded his second-but-last post content for anyone who'd care to avail themselves.

Blue Moon” (download) (featuring vocals from Tanita Tikaram), “Honeymoon Nights” (download), “Marionette” (download), “Toward the Infinite White” (download), and “Turkish Delight” (download).

Enjoy

She'll be right, Jacques....

There's an outfit here in Germany called Jacques Weindepot.

They've got a great concept - a limited range of good, reasonably priced wines from small producers, you can taste everything, they have sensible opening hours and pleasant and knowledgeable people.

They've even got a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which gets them a big tick from me.

Shepherds Ridge.

They've got this nice blurb about a father and son who run this small outfit and that they're Keepers of the Tradition wugga wuuga blah blah.

But the name rang a bell and then it clicked - Brent Marris ...

He's the guy that Cuisine magazine excluded from their December wine judging for presenting a Sauvignon Blanc that wasn't a lot like the stuff that the regular punters could buy in the shops

Brent Marris is also the guy who runs Wither Hills - 300 hectares, millions of bottles a year.

Small producer.

Yeah right.

The same old greasy number

They called back.

They didn't really want to answer any questions, but I heard all sorts of fuzzy-feel-good crap about how BAT wants to promote coexistence between smokers and non-smokers and how they're going to exchange the air in pubs so that no-one will notice that cigarette smoke is slowly killing anything that gets in its way.

They won't exactly reduce the CO2 concentration to 20% of the value set by Health and Safety. "We reduce it to 20% of the Treshhold Limit Value of 5000 ppm."

(At 2000 ppm the majority of occupants of a room will feel a significant degree of discomfort, and many will develop nausea and headache)

And by shoving the CO2 back into the atmosphere, "it can revert to oxygen and nitrogen".

New to me. I learned that it was removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis.

"That's what I mean"

So that's OK then.

So you remove all the bad stuff from a confined space and replace it with good stuff.

Nitrogen and oxygen, too?

"Yep. All that bad stuff"

Except they don't remove

Carbon monoxide Hydrogen cyanide Formaldeyde Acrolein Acetaldehyde Hydrazine Vinyl chloride Urethane Quinoline Benzopyrene Methylfluoroanthene Dibenzacridine Chrysene

Which shouldn't be there in the first place.

This stinks....

Germany's politicians have finally seen the light and are actually going to introduce non-smoking legislation.

So it's not a big surprise that British American Tobacco - around 25% of the market in Germany - had a full page advert in our (only) quality Sunday paper yesterday.

It's a brilliant idea to save us from global warming.

Ventilation.

Yep, they've come up with the idea of pumping 1000 litres of fresh air per customer and minute into pubs/restaurants/bars.

That'll reduce the CO2 concentration to 20% of the limit set by the Health and Safety people for working environments.

That must be good, then.

(Although I imagine it might be a bit like being stuck in a wind tunnel. Talk about blowing the froth off a wet one....)

So I called them up to congratulate them.

I also asked them about stuff like....

Carbon monoxide Hydrogen cyanide Formaldeyde Acrolein Acetaldehyde Hydrazine Vinyl chloride Urethane Quinoline Benzopyrene Methylfluoroanthene Dibenzacridine Chrysene

(Just some of the toxic and carcinogenic constituents of secondary cigarette smoke)

Hmmm. Didn't have any information about that.

And why CO2 is such a bad thing in the first place.

Or are they just climbing on the global-warming-CO2-is-bad-for-you bandwagon?

I mean, it's naturally present in air to the tune of 300-600 ppm and they're planning on reducing it to... 300ppm.

So the air in a pub where people are smoking is going to be as good as (or better) than fresh air?

Hmmm. The chappy I talked to wasn't too sure about that either

They've promised to call me back.

Just how stupid do they think we are?

Brain fart #3

Kurt Beck never was the sharpest knife in the drawer.

How he made it to head honcho of Germany's (SPD) Labour Party and to the exalted position of Premier of Rhineland-Palatinate is beyond me, but I don't claim to be an expert in these matters.

It's all too greasy for my liking.

But this is a classic.

Our friend Kurt got involved in the CO2 emissions discussion and it was all a little too much for him.

He said " Nuclear power - if you look at the entire process, from ore extraction, purification, processing and power generation - generates more CO2 than burning coal"

And everyone said (or thought..) "WTF are you talking about, Kurt?"

So Klaus Kleber picked this up on the main news programme last night and demonstrated that - even if you took the ENTIRE process chain from construction to decommisioning of a nuclear power station and mining, purification, transport, operation etc - into account

Coal fired power stations generate ONE THOUSAND TIMES MORE CO2 per unit of energy than nuclear power stations do.

None of the scientists who provided the data could work out how Kurt came up with the idea.

Neither could his own party.

Neither could anyone.....

Sweet Little Sixteen

Chuck Berry sang it first. Lyrics

The Beatles sang it second

The Beatles sang something else, too

Happy Birthday, Elise...!

The Singles

Music at home until I was 11 was radio.

1YA mostly - BBC World Service news, light classical, that sort of stuff - with a bit of Sunday Morning Requests as a treat.

Courtesy of the NZBC.

Then we got the radiogram.

And 4 free LPs.

Julie Andrews. Peter Sellars. The Edinburgh Tattoo. John Raitt. (Yep, Bonnie's dad)

Assume correctly that I wasn't involved in the selection.

I don't think I was allowed even to touch it until I was 14 or so.

Then I monopolised it.

The Beatles were liked.

The Byrds were tolerated.

Larry's Rebels were OK (but only because I went to school with Terry Rouse - keyboards)

The La De Das weren't liked at all.

Right!

"On top of the world" went on on repeat...

Which still shows, despite careful restoration and digitalisation.