WELLINGTON

Rip It Up, Issue 187, 1 February 1993, Page 29

WELLINGTON

New organisation. Sonic Arts Inc is aiming to promote local music and musicians and they have their first meeting at 14 Kensington St on 28 Feb at 2pm .-. '. Courtney Place is turning into the Burbon St of Wellington with the proliferation of bars and more to come .. . Kaminskys has new ownership and are moving back to live music ... the Roots Foundation sound system guys had $4,000 worth of records and CDs nicked after their final gig at the Taki Rua Depot. Keep an eye out for any large quantities of specialist reggae material offered for sale and if your flatmate has just quadrupled their collection, do the decent thing . .'. Kadense, the new smoke/ drink free club in Manners St, has had several successful shows recently including the final show from Slow Serape, Sophie Oakley and Helen Johnson who have an excellent tape out. Sophie has now headed to Europe with the master .. . the Oaks are rumoured to be moving back to R&B possibly with the Little Kings . . . Sonic Youth was moved from Union Hall to the St James after higher than expected advance sales .. .the Lemonheads are still booked into the Union Hall with support the Bilge ■ Festival who played an impressive set before the Muttonbirds at the James Cabaret .. . Active 89FM have a great deal for new subscriber card buyers with . a free ticket to the Lemonheads and one to their Burn Time dance party. Their new programme was designed by the 3 Ds’ David Mitchell . . . the Bilge Festival are currently recording demos at Arthur St including a single for a new video clip . . . the Doodletown Boptet are drummerless with Anthony Donaldson in Auckland and Roger Sellers out of action with RSI ... Bob Cooper Grundy is now working with Skinny La Veal and Slick Nickel as well as continuing solo work .. . Dave Murphy is playing regularly with Marg Layton .... Nick Swan is back in town after six years playing in Dublin . .. the Potatoes have recorded an album at Radio New Zealand and there is a rumour that RNZ will begin recording specifically for airplay on their own stations . . . Nigel Beckford of the Inhalers has a book The Weetbix Emperor and a companion CD The Wyndam 'Range of Shirts credited to his band Sven Olson's Brutal Canadian Love Saga. Readings from the semi-autobiographical satirical book are rumoured for Orientation. Meanwhile the Inhalers are about to record their third album ... local bands Southside of Bombay, Shihad (recorded with Jaz Coleman), Let's Planet, the Warratahs and Darren Watson and the Little Kings of Everything all have albums scheduled for release on Pagan this year ...; sounding harder than Head Like A Hole, the Conventional Toasters have a limited edition tape out called Put The Fun Back In Funerals recorded at Mediate Music and credited to band members Waaarrugh vocals, I'm Insane • guitars, Cyst Pain bass and Slimy Watercress drums . . . Anri Tist Ke (Daniel McLaren, Bryn Tilly and Andrew Foster) are shopping a ten track tape The Zoom Room around labels looking for a deal . . . the former Writhe Studio, home of Bailter Space, is containered up awaiting the call to the northern hemisphere should things fare well for the band .... if you've news for this column call me at Solid Air on 3854332.

JOHN PILLEY

GUNS N ROSES, SKID ROW DEAD FLOWERS Mt Smart Stadium, Feb 6 I'm on another planet, light years away from alternative Auckland. This was the kids, man — and the bodgies, the westies, the out of towners (reportedly half the audience). It was girls in white boots and fringed shoulder bags and boys in black leather pants and AC/ DC T-shirts, it was hot dog stands and Portaloos and, at 5.00 when there was still only about 10,000 people, it was Dead Flowers on the big stage. Some say they were the highlight of the day. They took to the stage like ducks to water with songs that sounded like they were born to be blasted through a giant PA. 'Walking In the Sun' had crunch and strut, as did their version of 'Lola', while 'Lisa' showed the band's messed-up adolescent side. This could be the year of Dead Flowers.

After this, Skid Row sounded like so much amped-up guitar fuzz. These comic book metallers displayed more flair in their hairswinging stage stance than their song hooks. Still, six foot bigmouth Sebastian Bach — the Bruce Forsythe of rock — could always get a job as a stadium rock warm-up MC. ‘ The night was dark and the crowd had swelled to 45,000 by the time Guns n' Roses arrived (literally five seconds before they hit the stage, in a convoy of cars, which pulled up stage-side). Sid Viscious sneering 'My Way' was cut short by Axl exploding onto the runway, a five foot something ball of baggy shorts, flannel shirt, baseball cap and hair, thrusting his pelvis to the strains of 'Welcome To The Jungle' and 'Mr Brownstone'. And strained it was because the sound was faulty. Three or four songs later Axl apologised and said there'd be a five minute break to fix a power problem (the light show was sapping resources). He seemed gracious (it was his 31 st birthday) so imagine how I felt when the lead singer of the biggest rock band on the planet came back and devoted the next five minutes of his show to dissing me! Axl started talking about an article he'd read in ''a rock magazine called Rip It Up" which said he'd pissed on his fans in South America. "I would never piss on my fans,'' he growled, prowling the stage like an angry beast, his voice booming out over 45,000 heads. Then, incredibly, Axl said: " It was written by.someone called DONNA YUZWALK. Well I've got an idea, Donna, I think viiz should walk the FI IC.k out of

here. Here's your fifteen minutes of fame, this one's for you, Donna, 'Double Talkin Jive' Muthafucka!" and the crowd roared its approval. Reeling from the impact of being thus serenaded by Axl Rose, all I can say is I think Guns n'Roses put on a great show considering, the ridiculously huge size of the venue. People have complained that the sound was sub-standard but what do they expect if they're sitting half a mile away from the stage? Events of this magnitude are more about spectacle than music anyway. From where I sat, even a turkey like 'Live And Let Die' ripped (enhanced by welltimed flares that went up like an inferno stage rear). The Appetite material I witnessed was delivered with all the wallop Axl could muster running around singing his guts out while Slash soloed away into the night air. Raunchier material was interspersed with the overblown emotional numbers Axl does so well ('November Rain', 'Civil War'). I couldn't see the drum kit let alone the backing singers, horn section and piano but they did pop up on two giant video screens. Even though the band were tiny blurs of colour standing forty feet apart from each, other, the music stretched all the way to the back of the stadium and onto the streets outside where those who couldn't afford the $52 ticket price were leaning against their cars, guzzling beer and digging the sounds: Aside from Axl's beef with yours truly, the mood of the night was mellow. We got up to leave as Matt Sorum started a long and tedious drum solo but by the time we reached the back of the stadium the band was kicking into that gorgeous ditty 'Sweet Child of Mine'. I know I was leaving early (barely an hour into the set) but Axl asked me to take a walk so that's exactly what I did. DONNA YUZWALK IGGY POP, DISPOSABLE HEROES OF HIPHOPRISY, JPSE Town Hall, January 20 For some reason the people responsible for running town hall gigs have deemed that they should start in the late afternoon or thereabouts, so I missed almost all of JPSE's set. What I heard sounded mostly like, well, JPSE really, a rich, complex sound and some satisfying chord changes but nothing to set the teeth on edge or the hair on fire. Anyway, they had to get their gear offstage quickly, 'cause by the time Disposable Heroes apnparpd thpvpnnp miKt-havpbppn

at least a fifth full. What the overwhelming majority of ticketholders were missing was one of the most memorable entrances ever seen on a New Zealand stage, on a par with the Sugar Cube's acrobatics, and Ice T’s psychotic glare. Jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter and the drummer whose name escapes me but who was very very good saunter onto the stage then pause for a half-minute, then the lights go down and when they come up again the beats are pounding and there's Rono Tse, casting bizzare shadows in a jester's hat, and Michael Franti, leaping along in a manner not unlike that of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, while rapping in perfect time, wrapping long tortuous phrases around the rhythms. The sheer exuberance of the sound and the spectacle is totally infectious, and somehow they've planned the dynamics so that it's possible to hear the live and programmed beats intertwining, Hunter's exquisite guitar patterns expanding, and the samples and sparkthrowing percussion cutting through while still catching every word. There's some speech-mak-ing between the songs but it's intelligent, politely received and served with large helpings of humour, like Franti and Tse running at each other with smashed TV sets during'Television' or tearing up pictures of Bush and ("one motherfucker to go") Bolger at the start of 'California Über Alles'. Music based on joy rather than pain usually sounds cloying and/ or pious but Hiphoprisy make it seem like the easiest thing in the world to enjoy. Iggy Pop's appeal couldn't

be more different. It's still to do with feeling good, but only through becoming bigger, scarier and more violent than your own misery and all the scum who treat you like dirt. Hiphoprisy are all about pleasure and community, but Iggy stands for total abandonment, bliss. The former may be "life affirming" but it's the latter that's impossible to live without. It's for those reasons that it's been so painful to see him put out ten year's worth of mediocre records, and for those reasons that it's so utterly glorious to see him resurrected tonight, playing Stooges material with a punishingly raw, heavy (and muso-wank-free) young four piece band and without a trace of self-parody! It's not like he's pretending to be young: he looks as old as he is because he's throwing himself around, screaming and bleeding (metaphorically and physically) entirely in the present. Recreated history just doesn't come into it. So what else do you want to know? He came on and played 'Down On The Street', 'Loose', 'Dirt(!)', 'Raw Power' and 'TV Eye', then rescued a few inferior 80s hits like 'Real Wild Child' for the benefit of the ignorant, then later played 'Johanna', 'Sick of You', 'Search And Destroy', 'I Wanna Be Your Dog', 'No Fun', 'Lust For Life' and 'Real Cool Time' among other marvels. The voice wasn't the suave croon of most of the recent albums or the rasp of Instinct but rather the alien(ated), metallic sneer of the first two Stooges albums. I don't think there's anything else to say, really. This wasn't something I ever expected

to see; if you missed it you're beyond unfortunate.

MATTHEW HYLAND

THE BATTLEFIELD BAND Live At The Glemroy Auditorium Dunedin For almost a generation the Battlefield Band have been one of the bulwarks of Scottish traditional music. Not traditional in the purist sense or in the precious, studious nature of the Chieftans but in the sense that their Celtic, Gaelic roots provide a basis for their humour, energy and the electric nature of their mayhem.

Keyboard player and founder member Alan Reid summed up the band's philosophy in the phrase "let there be drams" and that struck a chord with a near capacity audience of beards, maidens, fresh faced youths and us degenerates eager for the Celtic ass-kick. And for over two hours the Battlefield delivered a brilliantly paced night of jigs, reels, ballads and the odd thing by Richard Thompson and an encore of 'Six Days On The Road'. If Reid was calling the shots with his dry repartee, keybaord colours and vocals, it was boy wonder John McCusker who hijacked the show. Like a young Stephane Grappelli his work on the fiddle was astounding and then he showed mastery on the keyboards, the accordian, mandolin and even helped out flautist and piper lain MacDonald on the tin whistle. MacDonald was also a revelation with his pipes driving the reels and adding pathos to standout songs about Glasgow like 'Dear Green Place' and 'Hold Back The Tide'.

Last and probably least was token Englishman (how did he get in?) Alistair Russell who complemented Reid's humour with some of his own dry cracks and his acoustic guitar provided a more conventional pop texture in a night dominated by Celtic revelry. The Battlefield left a crowd steaming for more. Brilliantjimmy! GEORGE KAY THE BIG DAY OUT Sydney Showgrounds, Jan 26th Eleven in the morning is frighteningly early to be catching one's first glimpse of Australia's “alternative scene" as it makes its way en masse to an outlying Sydney suburb that seems to consist entirely of large sports stadia. It's possible to discern, however, that while there are far too many shorthaired suntanned boys with faithfully copied Rollins tattoos of various sizes on their backs,

there is a merciful lack of flannel shirt-beard-cut off shorts ensembles. Is it too much to hope for that New Zealand is a couple of months behind Australia and this fashion atrocity will soon disappear from the streets of Auckland, taking its horrible musical sideshow with it?

Anyway, once inside, past the signs warning sternly that the grounds were patrolled by plainclothes police (who were cunningly disguised as big moustachioed men 1 in creased trousers and pastel shirts, carrying walkie-talkies) I thought I'd come to the Easter Show by mistake — there were dodgems, shops, endless foodstalls and, quite sensibly, four stages, so when something got boring (this happened often, you'll be surprised to learn) it was possible to escape.

At about 12.30 the Welcome Mat got things off to a fairly dreary start. They play good natured, melodic guitar pop, a bit like the Hoodoo Gurus, say, or maybe a de-clawed Ratcat. Is landscape gardening not good enough for these people? And why are they everywhere, making their forgettable and forgotten little records in every urban centre in the first place? At least they were swiftly replaced: the indoor Modern Pavilion stage had a strictly formulaic but quite good death metal band called Armoured Angel, while outside in the (infernal) sunshine Swordfish appeared. The latter were probably the strangest phenomenon I encountered all day. They look like Coromandel housetruckers but sound something like Happy Mondays on muscle relaxants; vaguely "modern" sounds — heavily effected samples and guitars — circulating in a preternaturally sleepy way. It all got too idyllic, too comfortably stoned after a while, but it was more than reassuring to find a band whose vision of funkiness revolved around more than aerobic slap-bass workouts. The next big decision was between Hoss — a bit like Guns n' Roses only better, Front End Loader, who admit to admiring lan Astbury and sound like a stripped-down Soundgarden and the Clouds, who inject an awkward anxiety into fundamentally pretty guitar pop and are quite compelling for three or four songs. I went and bought some lunch.

Melody Maker's reviews editor used to insist that the Hummingbirds were the best band in the world (before he switched

his vote to Straitjacket Fits). He must have been on amazing drugs every time he saw them, because in broad sober daylight they sound like the Bats without the interesting basslines: the odd charming melodic twist or lyrical phrase but still basically workman (and woman) like. Great songwriting etc etc so fucking what?

I'd been looking forward to seeing Mudhoney, as I'd missed them in Auckland on the grounds that they'd probably sound like Freak Power, then been told how good they were by various people who usually know what they're talking about. And they were right, they didn't sound like Freak Power, more like a lethargic SMAK (incidentally the bass player also looked like a woefully under-dressed Marty Sauce). Some of this was the fault of the surroundings, a smallish stage opening out onto one of those fields on which grown men chase an inflated bladder, with a grandstand at the far end. Mudhoney's sound, at its best an overload of wonderfully sticky filth, came across under the circumstances as so much ugly grey sludge. Yeah they played 'Touch Me I'm Sick', yeah the crowd loved them, cheering wildly before they'd played a note. Mark

Arm felt obliged to point out that we hadn't heard them yet, we might hate them. At 3.15 the organisers excelled themselves by putting on the three best bands of the afternoon to that point at exactly the same time. Headache were what you'd expect from a band named after a Big Black EP and wearing Cop Shoot Cop and Pussy Galore t-shirts, if you weren't too optimistic. They reproduced the power, focus and anger of their influences (yeah OK pedants, there's nothing remotely focussed about Pussy Galore) without much of the subtlety or irony. Still, it's impossible not to love a band who look and sound so furious. New Zealand doesn't have one.

Fauves, meanwhile, embody the contradictions of their name, which means 'wild beasts' but implies 'art fags'. They're located somewhere at the very outer reaches of pop, playing with difficult, asymmetrical rhythms, surprise tempo changes, maniacal guitar drones and jarring trumpet solos. They remind me vaguely of Teeth or the Wart, the kind of band who are loved passionately by about five people and thoroughly ignored by everyone else. Yes of course that's a compliment.

Everything looks as easy for You Am I as it does difficult for Fauves. They're apparently going to be Australia's next 'crossover' pop sensation and it's easy to see why. They deal in SJ Fitsstyle melodic wash, infused with a scary amount of youthful energy and just enough noise to make the kids feel dangerous (god knows why). Every song, every chord change falls into place without any visible effort, and the singer has an obscene amount of natural stage presence. "Can we have some more crowd hysteria in the monitors please?" he asks, but it's strictly a rhetorical question.

For the next half an hour there's nothing to do but watch Carter USM on the main stage. Or rather to watch their audience. For some reason these affable looking (old) men and their engagingly punky but utterly simplistic little anthems seem to inspire an hysterical devotion: all around me people are singing along, even swaying, arms held aloft. Do they really think this is as good as it gets? Does the phrase 'sheltered life' mean anything to them?

After trying to avoid the Hellmen, Screaming Jets and Tumbleweed (various shades of turgid grunge) for about a half an hour it was time to queue up to attempt to be crushed to death at Nick Cave's feet. Actually both he and Iggy Pop a couple of hours later played almost identical sets to those we saw in Auckland. Perhaps there was a little more conviction on Nick's part this time (although the lighters came out for 'The Ship Song' he was more confident that the horde couldn't actually reach him) and a little less on Iggy's (although he bled more than he did at the Town Hall).

Def FX were described to me as 'a bit like Pop Will Eat Itself' but they weren't, because they didn't play annoying little songs like 'Everybody's Happy bink bink hey nonny nonny', they just smeared dirty guitar noise all over primitive sequenced basslines while a singer wailed unintelligibly to herself. If they're trying to 'break through' they'll probably fail (although hardcore/ techno fans might like them); they're too good for their own good.

Helmet were surprisingly not bad. Their record confirms all the prejudice about noise-based music being all power and no pleasure; the songs have no imagination, texture or dynamics, but live they're so ferocious, so physically overwhelming that it's

impossible to think about these things, all you can do is stand and gasp for air, submit unconditionally or get the hell out. Having to choose between Severed Heads and Beasts of Bourbon (or rather to try and see both at once) was painful; it would have been more so if the Beasts hadn't lost most of their toxicity somewhere along the way. They've mellowed, which is fine, but instead of turning into pure 'Redneck Zombies' country they seem to be trying to play Proper Rock Music. Their failure to be wasted is a terrible waste. Severed Heads, though, were even better than I'd hoped: the world may have caught up with them technologically, but their soul (this is the first and last time I shall ever use this word other than in a derogatory sense) remains inimitable.

Somehow they combine sparkling chord patterns and surfaces with the subtlest nervous spasms, intimations of calamity, in a way that's always totally seductive but never even half-comfortable.

Sonic Youth have, through two major label punk rock (NOT grunge no no no no no!) albums, acquired a large following among the iron-pumping, Rollinsfriendly young males I mentioned earlier. (I know this because I was personally trampled into the ground by them during 'Dirty Boots'). Whether or not these young meatheads actually noticed that their heroes were goading them with a set of gorgeous, slowed down, unmoshable older material and emasculated 'hits' from Goo and Dirty, interspersed with Riot Gurrrl derived sexual-political slogans, is debatable, but by now it didn't seem to matter, and it mattered even less when Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld and sundry ruffians from Mudhoney came onstage for an encore of'l Wanna Be Your Dog'. This was, as you'd expect, a staggering sight and sound, with Nick carrying Iggy around over his shoulder, Blixa looking more otherworldly than ever and holding the song together with a single aching slide guitar note, Kim Gordon rocking like a Cramps escapee and Lee Renaldo destroying every piece of equipment within a half-mile radius. Yet it was also kind of sad, it looked too much like a swansong, a retreat into supergroup humour from a bunch of people who are the closest a lot of people my age got to teen idols but who are now getting old. After all this it was impossi-

ble to appreciate Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy fully, 'cause they're all about energy and agitation, not tiredness, awestruck melancholy and the other feelings that were floating around at the time. But what was interesting and I suppose encouraging was that Hiphoprisy, who'd be-

gun playing on Stage Two as Sonic Youth were finishing, were being paid rapt attention by a few hundred people as I arrived: these people had gladly missed the preceding apocalypse to see them. So maybe there is a future we can admire if not adore; perhaps it just speaks a different language. MATTHEW HYLAND SONICYOUTH Town Hail, February 14 It appears that Sonic Youth are the new consensus band, grotesque though that fact may be. The Town Hall was full to overflowing, mostly with teenagers dropped in by their parents in BMWs (I saw it happen!) from Dumb St, Suburbia, but also with just about anyone else you can imagine up to and including people next to whom Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon look like something other than Sonic Old Curmudgeons. All of which meant that, apart from a few of us huddled at the front in almost prostrate fandom and a solitary stagediver, the Dead C were received with a mixture of grudging tolerance, ignorant boredom and massed drinking at the bar. Of course they looked, quite rightly, to have cared less about few things. They simply ignored the audience straight back and got on with playing a short set every bit as mindblowing as the one at the Venue three and a bit years ago. Bruce Russell didn't do any singing or much "playing" of the guitar (in the hoplessly limited sense of the term in use among most "musicians" and their hapless admirers) this time, he just waved guitars above his head, attacked them with a spanner so brutal looking it demanded the Americanism "wrench", and somehow produced an endless flux of utterly un-guitarlike sounds whose relation to the other components of the music was roughly that of Wallace Stevens' blackbirds to the green light behind them. Meanwhile Robbie Yeats and Michael Merely played rock music. An almost medieval version thereof based on one chord where six will do, spidery inconsistent rhythms and the buildup and subsidence of pure tension it may have been,

but it was rock music nonetheless. I know because to the mixed confusion and merriment of the people around me, I danced my legs down to the proverbial knees.

Sonic Youth played most of the same songs they did in Sydney a few weeks back but they sounded totally different. There they were dreamy, dirgey and brooding (sometimes by turns but quite often all at once) but tonight they were here to play a Rock Show with all that entails, so we heard the songs off Goo and Dirty for what they actually are: better spitting, sneering punk rock (that's something quite different from hardcore) than just about anyone else writes at the moment but a bit anti-climactic from the band that wrote 'Ghost Bitch' and 'Hyperstation'. The good part of all this was that Thurston Moore was once again possessed by the demon that keeps him looking like a teenager while the rest of his band age like human beings, the same one that makes him bang his head like a kid at an Iron Maiden concert while making totally formless drumstick-on-guitar noise on an early live video, that made him leap about ten feet into the air with the first drumbeat when they opened with 'Brother James 'at the Powerstation four years ago. So tonight his hair, guitar and body are flying around the stage; in fact despite all the slickness (somehow they make genuine chaos seem totally under control) the whole band sound and look angrier than they ever have. But I can't help it, call me old fashioned etc etc, didn't anyone else think that far and away the best bits were when they applied this (newfound?) fury to older songs like 'Love Her All The Time' (no-one else has ever sounded like that before or since) and 'Expressway To Your Skull'? The latter ended with Lee creating radiation waves of harmonic feedback, Kim making the entire floor vibrate by standing on her bass, Steve Shelley slicing through these liquid noises with cymbal crashes and Thurston indulging in every known and several unknown forms of what some daily newspaper hack called "immature guitar abuse". Listen again, cretin, this wasn't Nirvana smashing up their Stratocasters, it was a beautifully sculpted, sustained noise that just happened to fulfil a universal urge to DESTROY. Look mom, this jazz-fusion really works!

MATTHEW HYLAND