48 HOURS

Rip It Up, Issue 160, 1 November 1990, Page 20

48 HOURS

Two Nights Live io Auckland

Friday night in Auckland and you'd rather be some place else, anywhere but here in this spaced out city over-run by cars and closed by midnight. Drive around the 'burbs any weeknight after ten and the only blazing lights you'll see are behind the stained glass windows of the local church. Auckland's like that. Despite a veneer of sophisitication, it's a city of simple tastes: work in office, play sport, eat, drive Honda to video shop, fuck, sleep. That's life in

Auckland, with a bit of sunbathing and boating thrown in for summer. If you're happier in the dark, alone in a crowd after midnight, you're in the wrong city, baby.

You're thinking of Paris, the jazz cellars, cafes and clubs open till two in the morning and the Seine to stroll home by at dawn. Or London and romantic number Fifteen bus rides back to your Canning Town council flat. Or New York, 1984, Area at midnight, delis at 4am, nobody even leaving the house till eleven. Not like this dumb town, right? Well, yes and no. Last weekend RlU determined to go out TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW to hear live music and collide with living people at a variety of joints and dives and, we can honestly report, we were still at it at 4pm on Sunday afternoon. Maybe we just struck lucky, but it seems that Auckland live is a happening thing if you know where to look for it. (and don't mind walking vast distances when you run out of taxi fare). So, Friday night, 1 Opm, the Powerstation, for a double bill featuring Rumblefish and Push Push. Two sides of the hot metal spectrum in this city, and two fine examples of the sort of creative acts languishing on our doorstep. Sydney should be so luckywe breed 'em here, more and better. But the Powerstation is a cavernous place and tonight it was pretty empty, which gives it a forlorn feel and doesn't help the bands. We stood upstairs and peered down at the stage, nicely curtained at the back to resemble some mid-west pool hall. Rumblefish tarted it up, pulling out all stops, pulling off their shirts, colliding into each other, rolling around on the ground, you name it, buttheir experimentation suffered from a bad mix. Nice torsos though. Push Push, we later heard, suffered from bad audience vibes, perhaps

because their regular fan club was saving themselves forthe underage gig on Sunday. Push Push are glamorous and on a good night they can really work up the crowd but we did n't stay to find out. I couldn't see them through the dry ice and the lime green lasers were hurting my eyes and we had another place to go. The Twelve Tribes of Israel reggae band were playing at their

warehouse space in Surrey Crescent, Grey Lynn, with an American rasta singeras special guest so at 11.30 we set off forthe other side of town. We didn'thave enough money for a taxi so we walked along Great North Road and up and down Kingsland, past dinky little wooden villas. Not much further, lied my friend while my suede boots got wrecked on grass verges. Finally we emerged in the open plains of Grey Lynn, past the legendary Grey Lynn Foodtown (which on Saturdays is more like an alternative night club than a supermarket). There is music

everywhere in Auckland, even out here in the carpark, four kids sitting around a beat box with a few cans of beer. And just around the corner, we can hear the beat, the Twelve Tribes place, lit up on a dark street with people standing around outside, leaning against cars, enjoying the mild night air. Tonight's occasion is the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. Inside it's pleasantly crowded, the Twelve Tribes band take up the stage area left, sending out a mellow reggae groove with fourfemale vocalists up front swaying and bending and singing with a lot of rhythm and soul. All the band are wearing red, as are all the rasta people in the audience. "One night I'll get the colour right,"

whispers my friend, who is wearing a green lurex waistcoat. We're certainly in a very different grooveto the Power Station. The crowd is lit with a pale yellow light, women squeeze past carrying

babies, people stand alone and sway to the band, the mood is benign. This is not the sort of place where you elbow people out of the way to get to the bar. You can buy beer and food, jam yourself in a corner and watch the band or move out back to the dimly lit courtyard and sit and talk. Mostly Rasta people with one or two lone alternative boys watching the band with rapt expressions, as if overwhelmed with the privilege of being here. Then the guest Rasta

from America takes the stage like a bit of a star, we figure, in his flashy red leather outfit. He has fierce eyes, he looks like Lee Scratch Perry's

wayward son. This isn't the best version of the band, they rotate

members all the time and some

singers are better than others. By about 2am we're getting tired and we're facing a very long hike home way over the other side of town so we head off.

Auckland at this hour of the night is

like your very own private night club. Cleared of people, deadly still, quiet as a beach at midnight. We wake up paranoid Grey Lynn guard dogs, we even set off a porch light by walking past on the footpath. Freaky! Around the Kingsland flyover we take a breather on a grassy hill, just out of range of the urine soaked, graffitti scrawled underpass. We could be the only people alive in the city. No cars, no sound, except some dim electrical buzzing from a main buried nearby. It's not exactly the same as walking home beside the Seine, but there is a certain grim urban glamour in desolation, and there's a full moon in the sky.

Saturday night, after hardly any sleep, it's action stations again. Tonight I've got an itinerary. A barbeque party, then the serious stuff. The Gluepot, in fact, home away from home for all local music lovers. We arrive at ten, in time to catch the latter part of Chris Knox's solo set. Last time I saw him was as a photograph in an American rock

magazine, immortalised as the crown gnome of alternative New Zealand pop. Tonight he looks exactly like the picture, wearing garish yellow board shorts with a white guitar around his neck and lyrics on the mike stand. Just think, American alternative music fans would queue for hours to see this vision, he's written up in magazines from Boston and New York and here he is singing for his supper in our backyard. I think the crowd, such as it is, appreciates this, because most of them are sitting to attention in chairs at the foot of the stage in that straightbacked, tea cosy and parka wearing, eyes to the fore posture peculiarto serious Dunedin music fans.

Then the Hallelujah Picassos, who have been around for a while but I've never seen them. I know lead singer Roland from DKD cafe, and I'm pleased to see that he really can sing, he's got a giant raspy voice and his body is positively convulsed with attitude. I really like the Picassos'afro-caribbean primal reggae screech, we could be anywhere in the world (a feeling I like). The Gluepot might be half empty but this is a treat, value for

money etc and we didn't even stay forthe Francis Sect (a young Auckland band with an album out). Celebrity barman Bevin from the Headless Chickens tells me about a party but we're not idle pleasure seekers tonight, we have a mission, we want to check out Scruff's Place in the Imperial Arcade, downtown. This is the arcade where the Christain Scientists used to hang out, but there's still a porno book shop and—sign o'the times—a Japanese grocery store. All closed now of course (this is Auckland not New York, come on!). Upstairs we enter what looks and feels and sounds like a genuine rock club and about time too. Auckland desperately needs a rock club like Sydneys' Springfields, somewhere familiar where bands can test an audience and people can just hang out and get some semblance of a scene going. As with so many scenes in this town, there's no regular place for people to hang out and waste time, gawk at each other, exchange ideas, whatever. You know the