Page nine

Mr. Errors and I had a talk about my column on his blog.  Actually, he did most of the talking and I listened (he certainly has a high opinion of his opinions).  He has suggested that I am taking too long to read each paper from 1912 and therefore I am not producing articles for his blog regularly enough.  He suggested that I just focus on one or two things.  Then he told me what those things were going to be: anything I could find on page nine of the Evening Post.

I went and looked at page nine.  It is the page that features stories for women and advertising (mainly for women).  I protested.  He insisted.  I asked for an explanation.  He said that I needed to broaden my horizons.  I protested quite vigorously that having been born in 1860, killed by a tram on a Wellington street in 1929 and suddenly resurrected in 2012 to write a column for blog meant my experiences were already quite broad.  He relented a little and said I could also review popular music in New Zealand every week because, “I know how much you like music”.  Yes, I said, I like music, but what is on the top of the pops now is certainly not music.  He looked at me quite grimly and said: “only female artists.  You can only review female artists on the top twenty.”  Then he smiled and said,

“If I created you… it’s easy enough for me to uncreate you.”

I went and looked at page nine.

***

Good lord.  Imported human hair?  Washable hair pads?  Quite a startling beginning to my attempts to understand women.

Aside from a piece about how to wear a scarf (there are a bewildering number of ways), and how to manage your servants, there is this little piece on children.

Now, Mr. Errors has two daughters, one aged five and half, and the other one and a half.  They are rather unruly examples of their sex, but charming in their way.  As I am a bachelor of 152 years it is perhaps not my place to comment on child-rearing, but it is my distinct impression that Mr. Errors is being reared by his daughters and not the other way round.  I had thought this was due to natural flaws in his character, and these certainly abound, but perhaps it is to do with the number of toys his children have and that devilish box they call a TV.  Surely all these moving pictures and jarring sounds are leading to a gross over stimulation.  Much better, the writer of this article suggests, that the infant simply look at the world around them.

Indeed. 

Mr. Errors has a garden.  The principle purpose of which seems to be for him to complain about.  Perhaps he should let his children roam more in it.  This would certainly stop them barging into my room at all hours and asking if they can play the drums on my head.  Impertinent.

Let him alone while he is good.  Splendid.

Finally, this young New Zealand lady has had a popular song in this country recently.  I draw your attention to it because Mr. Errors has recently taken up lawn bowls.

Her name is Anna.  She has an “h” at the end but I cannot bring myself to do this to a perfectly good name.  She appears to have a tattoo, and like wearing shoes called stilettos.  Lawn bowling, like everything else in the world, seems to have changed.

Mr. Errors assures me that if you “click” on the picture it will display the “video”.  I have seen this “video” and it is hard to decide which is more appalling: the antics of youth or the antics of the elderly.

In New Zealand we like Joy Division

We really, really do.  I knew that before I started listening to New Zealand bands from 1982.  You can tell by looking at this from Wikipedia:

In New Zealand Joy Division had five top ten hits, including back to back number ones.  You might say they were popular in the UK, but they didn’t fare that well in the mainstream charts.  In Wellington there is the Ian Curtis Wall which has been around for about thirty years.  Over the last few years it has been painted over and redone a few times in some kind of tagging battle between punks and the council.  Here is the latest version.

Personally I feel like it should be turned into a sculpture, and the words bolted on in bronze or something.

For a long time I didn’t get the Joy Division thing, and then I heard Les Bains Douches and realised how intense and fantastic they really were.  The crucial difference being that Les Bains is a live album, and that their studio albums sound dead.

The other way you can tell the Joy Division were big in New Zealand is by listening to some of the bands that were around in New Zealand in 1982.

 This song by Danse Macabre reached number 15 on the New Zealand charts.  Their song Conditioner was played on the John Peel show.  Cruelly this was a stepping stone to nowhere.  New Zealand bands don’t “make it”.  The exceptions prove the rule.

Even more obscure than Danse Macabre is Wellington based Beat Rhythm Fashion.  I love this song despite it’s determindly downbeat sound (or, perhaps, because of that).

The Bolton Street Cemetery features a lot in the video, and at around 3:18 it’s nice to see the band members enjoying a bit of sun up at the Mount Vic memorial, one of Wellington’s uglier memorials (nice view, shame about the desecration of a Maori cemetery to create it).  You get the sense while you are watching this video that it was very important to these young men to show no emotion in their video.

There was a film made by Chris Knox about the Wellington Scene in 1980.  The dude in it saying, “Sex? Sects? Oh, sects” is from Beat Rhythm Fashion.  In 1980 BRF seem to have been punks, but Joy Division obviously changed things.  According to the excellent Mysterex site the Chris Knox film was filmed at 246 the Terrace in Wellington, where BRF and many others lived.

Here is the  first part of the film.

The people in this film are fascinating.  Anarchists always seem gloriously unaware that their sophisticated musical instruments powered by a complex infrastructure that brings electricity to their homes is a product of civilisation.  The kind of thing that anarchy tends to destroy.  They also seem to constantly rail against being labelled while walking around labelling others and wearing clothes that clearly define themselves as a group.  Part of the routine is using the accent and vocabulary of another culture.  When the angry young woman claims she was beaten up by some “niggers” there is an awkward pause because (a) it’s a nasty racist word, and (b) nobody ever uses that word in New Zealand – it has no meaning.

Nice scene with an officer of the law in the second clip.  I had forgotten that they used to wear those pith helmets.  Not much to see here.  The whiff of police brutality is far off.  In fact, the police officer almost seems to be more like a rock journalist carefully taking down names and asking what instruments they play.  The audio is unclear but I hope he asked the band about their musical influences as well.

Apparently the woman in red playing the bass at the end of the second clip is Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson’s wife.

Part of the Wellington scene a little later was a band called Riot III who managed the impossible: they had a top twenty hit with a punk protest song called 1981, and again got onto the charts with a punk EP called Subversive Radical (in January of 1982 which is how I found out about them at all).  They did this with no airplay.  Actually the lack of airplay was something they were pretty hacked off about at the time.  1981 was of course about 1981, and got noticed even by The Listener:

There is a great story on NZHistory  (read it, it’s cool) about how Riot III blockaded Avalon Studios in Lower Hutt and blasted them with music to try and get their video played (a video that the head of programming had called passe).  At the end of the story on the NZHistory site is the still hacked off Void (the lead singer of Riot III) who has left a comment on the article.  If you want to know more about Riot III and the Wellington scene I recommend this article.  It talks about the film that Chris Knox made. Riot III lived at 212 the Terrace.