Exhibit M 22 February 1990. The 1990 Grammy Awards, recognising the musical output of 1989. Young MC and Kris Kristofferson present the Grammy for Best New Artist. “This year, the nominees for Best New Artist are making all kinds of music,” the bespectacled author of Keep It In Your Pants says. “And each one of [...]
I’m used to people getting to my website through unusual googles, but every now and then something comes along that manages to surprise me. And indeed recently someone got to my website by searching for hotel california lyrics about the hutt valley. Now, at first glance, this would suggest a hilarious radio-station parody of the [...]
Poi E has recently reentered the charts, thanks to its inclusion in Taika Waititi’s rather good film Boy, and his new video for the song. But I’m rather fond of the original video. In fact, I’d say that the video for the Patea Maori Club’s 1984 number one single is almost as famous as the [...]
I came across Wikipedia’s list of songs that have been in the #1 spot in the New Zealand pop charts for over eight weeks continuously. These are the songs that everyone loved and loved so much that they just kept buying them more and more and playing them more and more. Figuring this says something [...]
In April 2006, the Cribs were my new favourite band. I’d stumbled across the Jarman brothers’ Yorkshirian blend of pop, rock and punk and decided I rather liked it. I became completely obsessed with the band and went on a mission to obtain as many of their recordings as I could. I kept it a [...]
A few weeks ago I was at Hamilton Airport, waiting for my flight to Anywhere But Hamilton (a popular destination). I’d checked in and was waiting in the departure lounge, when I became aware of a vaguely familiar sounding song quietly playing on the airport’s PA. I moved to a table directly under a speaker [...]
I have angst over mix-tapes but I blame Nick Hornby which means it’s not a massive problem. See, Nick Hornby helped romanticise the mixtape in his novel “High Fidelity”. Exhibit A, the closing words from the film adaptation of the book: The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do [...]
I went dancin’ last night at the Atomic evening at the San Francisco Bath House. Atomic is centred around music from the 1980s, but certainly not what has come to be considered ’80s Music. That is to say, it’s not about those “retro” “classics” like “Come on Eileen” or “Venus” or “Karma Chameleon” or “I’m [...]
Last.fm is a cool web service that takes a feed from your music player (like iTunes) and figures out what you’re listening to and makes lists and graphs and shares it with your friends. The only problem is, I listen to most music on my iPod, which isn’t hooked up to Last.fm, so it gets [...]
Simon at The Opinionated Diner posted this old Peter Urlich music video, from a time in 1989 when Urlich was being pop/funk act called B Cup: The song isn’t really worth listening to, but I found myself strangely drawn to the non-Urlich visuals in the video: shots of downtown Auckland, people drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, [...]