Posts by Russell Brown
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Guess I'd better do my turn …
Back in 1990, some friends and I had a couple of parties at a large squatted house in Brixton. The first one was pretty good, the second one was legendary.
The team, including the present owners of Wellington's Café Astoria (one of whom lived in the house, with the other living next door in a legitimate tenancy), divided up tasks in advance. I hired a PA, turntables and mixer from some dodgy company, borrowed a van and picked them up on the Saturday afternoon. We set them up in the large front room and established a DJ roster.
As people started to arrive, there were some I recognised - Richard Driver, Karyn Hay, former Mockers drummer and NME sub-editor Brendon Fitzgerald, future Loaded founder James Brown - and a hell of a lot of people I'd never seen in my life, including a group of crusties who had a dance and then headed for the back yard to make a fire (because making fire is what crusties do). The house continued to fill up.
At a certain point, I walked MD, who was mildly pregnant with our firstborn, around to the minicab place. On the walk back I briefly thought I was going to be relieved of my Nike Air Jordans by some local youths.
I arrived back shortly before the first significant disturbance took place, on the upstairs landing. I got up there just in time to cop a splatter of blood as an Irishman had his nose punched sideways across his face. Using the natural talent for mediation that has made New Zealand such a force for good in the world we prevented any further fisticuffs and negotiated a truce between the two warring groups. Just to bed in the pact, I knocked up a spliff, with our best African grass oil smeared in the papers for good measure, for consumption by all concerned. That shut them up.
We found ourselves patiently remonstrating with various other revellers in what was by now a raging party. The LSD, paradoxically, seemed to be helping us retain an even temper as hosts. Kathy calmly disarmed one of the would-be combatants from the earlier incident as he tried to bend a kitchen fork around his fist in the kitchen. I only got snippy once, with an out-of-it crusty who was trying to drag a foam rubber mattress onto the bonfire in the back yard. He dropped the mattress but seemed to struggle with my point about burning a foam rubber mattress being a completely fucking stupid thing to do.
I was standing by the door when a man made to leave with a heavy, expensive-looking wrought-iron chair in each hand. I made to block his exit and demanded to know what he thought he was doing. He responded in a tone of hurt and indignation:
"Do your friends have chairs like these?" he demanded.
Well, no, they didn't.
"I've bought these this afternoon and now I'm taking them home."
I couldn't prove that wasn't the case, so I apologised, stepped aside and let the man leave with his chairs.
Eventually, people started to trail out the door. A chatty little black geezer, who'd been regaling me with commentary for much of the evening, bid us farewell, congratulated me on a great party and promised he'd be back next weekend. No, I explained, he wouldn't. Because there wouldn't be a party next weekend.
It got to a lazy dawn, when there was one final twist. The Irishman had come back, armed with, of all things, a rubber mallet, just as some of his former foes were leaving. It looked like being a serious bore, but Kathy's girlfriend marched outside, dispossessed the man of his mallet and told them all to piss off home.
We settled down to lying on the floor of the front room listening to the sweetest music in the world (__Put on Your Best Dress__, a compilation of the work of the great rocksteady producer Sonia Pottinger) over the PA system. It was, eventually, time for everyone to to go home or to bed. There were still several unconscious crusties littering the back yard, but the girls decided to simply lock the back door and let them fend for themselves.
Later on, the neighbours over the back fence came around to report that their expensive wrought-iron chairs were missing and to ask if anyone knew anything. The girls explained that clearly, they had been taken by gatecrashers, but they'd see what they could do, which appeared to be bugger-all. But happily, a couple of days later, some people turned up at the door with all the chairs. They'd been left with them and thought it best to bring them back. Stuart, a gentle and gullible man, was nominated to return them under cover of darkness. The neighbours were bountifully grateful and doubtless thought well of New Zealanders from that day on.
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In the tradition of 'Farting Preacher', and recommended by my 12 year-old son ...
And if you're hard enough, Part Two, LOTR: The Toot Hours:
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All sorts turned up including Max Cryer with English softcore kiddie photographer David Hamilton in tow. As the Submissions kicked in Shayne Carter (at least I think it was Shayne) decided to have a go at Mr Hamilton, and was joined by a queue of fuelled up Aucklanders who decided to pass their views on Hamilton's "art" and he beat a hasty retreat.
That's so weird. I recall we sort-of crashed a daytime party in Parnell (David Blyth's place?) in 1985 and Shayne got into a big argument with one of Hamilton's friends about the dubious merits of his work. I recall half-heartedly trying to stop Shayne but being quite amused by it. The other thing I recall is being invited back to a lady's place afterwards and it all going quite merrily until her boyfriend came home, and I had to very quietly let myself out. I guess the classic would have been climbing out the window, but it was nine floors up at Brooklyn.
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Does anybody else ever catch the British reality show Booze Britain late on Friday nights on Sky 1? Should I be ashamed for finding its' apparently limitless fare of petty crime, falling over, and sick and munted punters weirdly compelling? And would the roving camera find anything different in New Zealand?
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A small but satisfying soiree with friends? Or a ripsnorting barn-burner packed with people you never saw again? A forthright fortieth, tasty 21st or the night it all went horribly wrong? In the latest episode of our occasional Stories series, we want to hear about the most legendary parties you've held or attended.
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For Tze Ming. See also part 2:
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See also:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
McMillan clouts his way to a a record ton.Part 8
Gillespie is a legend - and victory! -
Crowdshots of the way we were ...
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while we're at it, does anyone know if its possible to set PAsys up to show the most recent post rather than the first? Could this be done RB?
Just click "last post" for any thread from the home page (or the Publ;ic Address Cafe page) - that's what I do. I'm not a big fan of threads that run in reverse chronological order - they make you read arguments backwards.
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On the subject of Geekstuff, Russell, what of Chumby?
Funny you should ask. They've recently asked everyone with a prototype Chumby to update it over the air. The update was smooth (my son did it) and it makes the Chumby work a lot better, the touchscreen especially.
There are new widgets too. One of the more interesting lets you pull down a stream of pictures from your Flickr account., and there are a couple of little drawing apps that don't work very well. Also, newsfeeds, more webcams, and that 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' animated clip. There's also a "music" button on the touchscreen that's not operational yet.
I suspect the production Chumbys will will have hardware video decoding, which mine doesn't, and they will definitely allow the user to group widgets and define their running time. (At the moment, every widget loaded runs for 30sec in cycle, which means you have to dump all the others so you can see all of 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us'.)
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