Speaker by Various Artists

The last time James Brown was in town, it was 1977. After a few near misses he finally returns here, to the St James, a suitably funky venue for a very funky guy. After a fine warmup set from longstanding club act Ardijah, Mister Brown's current band, the Soul Generals made their entrance, dressed in sharp sky-blue suits. Onstage were two drummers, two bass players, two guitarists, 3-piece horn section, a percussionist and 3 backing singers, introduced by Mister Brown's MC Danny Ray as the Bittersweets. Then Danny Ray started the build up for Mister Browns entrance ... "Are you ready for the Godfather of soul, Mister Dynamite, the hardest working man in show business?" And so on.

Finally, Mister Brown makes his entrance, casually strolling onstage. What follows is a greatest hits package, which is exactly what you want from a legend like Brown. Even though some of his hits were presented in shortened form, like Please Please Please (including his famous 'stage exit with cape' routine), there was still plenty of funk in evidence. When Brown took things down a notch, like on It's a Man's World, he showed that he still has a hugely soulful voice, giving the song some real grit. He pulled a few dance moves - no splits but hey, the guy's 70! He even threw in a few mic stand tricks, just to show he's still got it.

The crowd was very, very white-bread - very few kids, very few brown faces. Maybe the high ticket prices put some off going. Still, that didn't make me think twice about buying a ticket.

Some commentators suggested Brown seemed more like a cameo in his own band, letting them take extended solos, and noted that he even passed the mic to one "of his hair-tossing female proteges take centre-stage for an overlong bracket while he conducted the band or held his place behind the keyboards." The cool thing was, even when he wasn't on the mic, he was always in control of the band, via his hand gestures. They followed his lead very closely. And as for the female protege, well she's Ms Tomi Rae, aka the current Mrs James Brown. She is also the woman Brown is currently up on charges for assaulting back in late January. The couple had previously announced their separation, placing an ad in Variety in July 2003 noting it was a "mutual show business decision" to "go their separate ways." The accompanying photo is the couple and their three year old son at DisneyWorld posing with Goofy. Ms Tomi Rae is 33, and looks like a sultry Vamperella character.

Yet there she is on stage, singing a love song to Brown, and clearly they are still a couple; Brown takes her hand and leads her offstage at the end off the show. At a press conference in Melbourne, after his Auckland show, Brown was faced with a question on the domestic violence charge, much to the disapproval of the Brown camp, who had asked for no questions on this (check the mugshot). Brown, who was sitting next to Tomi Rae, asked the journo straight back if she was married.

"You're not? Well then you wouldn't know what I'm talking about anyway," he said. "Ask all the married couples -- they know. You get up on the wrong side of the bed and everything, but we're doing fine." Go figure. Yes, James Brown the legend came to town. He may not have been like the records of 30 years ago, but back then he had Bootsy Collins, Jabo Starks, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker playing alongside him - some of the funkiest players on the planet. You got the spectacle, you got the soul, you got the funk - what else is there?

Public Enemy's Chuck D caught James Brown late last year, in Atlanta. "When Mr. Brown took the stage the ATL immediately roared for their Georgia son. The very first cut was Make It Funky signifying that James and the Soul Generals were gonna pull some joints out the bag. Highlights included JB doing two microphone stand tricks that left the crowd stunned as if MIKE JORDAN threw it. Bursts of dance energy came at the crowd and wowed them. At 70 he moved, grooved, and cold sweated us to death... This was JAMES BROWN in his 70s doing it like he did it in the 1970s. No doubt. The double drummers even played high speed funk thru the finale of SEX MACHINE when the venue cut the power, as it’s known to do. The point is that it was more turbo energy than cats twice his age using multimedia crutches."

Bummed you missed it?

Peter McLennan blogs about stuff at Weapons of Mass Distraction

The following is a transcript of the last broadcast interview Michael King gave before his untimely passing. It aired March 25, 2004, on 95bFM. The interview was conducted by Simon Pound and transcribed by Matt Nippert.

Simon Pound: It must have been a hard time of late with Janet Frame's death, but perhaps there's some consolation your biography helped cement her place in the New Zealand imagination.

Michael King: Well I'd like to think it had that effect. At least it means Janet got the degree of recognition and appreciation that she deserved before she died. Because if Janet had died 30 or 40 years ago she'd always be known as that crazy old woman who was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and wrote some funny books. It's really only been in the last 10 years that her reputation has consolidated and been fully recognized in New Zealand.

SP: And it must have been quite a wonderful occasion to receive the Prime Minister's Award for services to the arts in her company.

MK: In her company, and in the company of Hone Tuwhare, it was marvellous. They were the other two winners, and they were two writers who are a generation ahead of me, and who I absolutely revere and respect. It was wonderful, yes.

SP: You've said that the reason you write books for a general audience, rather than academics, is that you feel people need to hear the stories and you need to get the widest access possible.

MK: Yes, I still think that's a scholarly function, because my books, I hope, are written in a scholarly way. The point I've always made is that I'm writing for a general audience, rather than just for an audience of academics or fellow historians.

SP: The best thing history can provide, I guess which is a sense of context for New Zealand readers.

MK: I hope so, and indeed in current affairs or history, like the seabed and foreshore debate, only make sense in the context of history, so you need that background.

SP: That's one other things that you've been known for over the years, taking a sociological viewpoint and examining what it means to be Pakeha in New Zealand. What do you think, now, today, what it means to be a New Zealander in general, and a Pakeha specifically?

MK: A huge change has taken place in my lifetime. When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British. That of course has changed. I doubt if you'd find anybody now who would see the New Zealand identity in that way. So what's happened is that since that time we've become conscious of the fact we've got two major cultural streams. The Maori or indigenous one, and the other one that I chose to call Pakeha, and I've got no problem with that particular name. I'm astonished that some people do.

SP: By that you mean all other immigrants, not just a purely white term?

MK: No, no, no. Pakeha can have two meanings in its Maori usage. It can refer to people who came in origin from Europe, but it's also used in the sense of Maori and non-Maori. So that anything in New Zealand that is not specifically Maori would, in the Maori language, be identified as Pakeha. So I would use that word now for mainstream New Zealand culture. And I would regard it, as I've said in other forums and at other times, I don't regard it anymore as an imported culture or tauiwi, foreign, culture. I regard Pakeha culture now as a second indigenous culture. Although it has its origins in Europe, it's vastly changed in the 150 years or so that Pakeha have been in New Zealand. It's changed in interaction with Maori culture and in interaction with the land. Most New Zealand Pakeha people now when they go back to their countries of origin, they may feel some sense of affinity there - but they don't think that it's home.

SP: In saying that, identity is still emerging, it's still coming together. It's a very positive tone, your book, it seems to be saying "look there are troubles, but we're all in this together and we're not doing that bad a job." Do you think [that with] the divisiveness stirred up by the Orewa speech, we do need to appreciate the fact we're all together in this?

MK: Yes, of course we do. I also think you can't measure the seriousness of the problem by the intensity of the rhetoric. It's less than a decade ago when there was a huge argument going on over the National Government's fiscal envelope proposal, when they were saying they would restrict Waitangi Treaty settlements to a total of a billion dollars. That caused an uproar at hui up and down the country, it caused Sir Charles Bennett to say that he would advise Maori not to fight for New Zealand again. And yes, it was one of those issues that was talked through and eventually laid to rest as I'm sure this one will be. I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

This interview transcript has also been posted on Fighting Talk

You can easily identify the men of Destiny New Zealand in a crowd. They look staunch. Like staunch pastors. Men with short-back-and-sides haircuts exist only at the hippie fringe of the party (an offshoot of Brian Tamaki's Destiny Church) - it seems the majority have shaved heads. They wear suits, or tidy casual clothes beneath bomber jackets. They scowl.

This weekend they gathered for a conference at Auckland's Rydges Hotel. The large banner that hung over the lobby elevators read something like, "Dad - if you're not raising your children, someone else is." Someone like drugs, I guess. Or Playstation. Or their mother. Coincidentally enough, I was at the hotel to meet a friend whose parents have recently split up.

By another coincidence, at the same time at Waipuna Hotel the Maxim Institute was also holding a conference - 'Political correctness: the end of an error?' The Maxim Institute is a lobby group, not a political party. A highly active lobby group (in fact, if you're interested, someone from the institute will be speaking to the Manukau City Council that he does not believe in the existence of a supernatural being with whom he can talk, which also rules out Gandalfthis afternoon in support of their draft Brothel Control Bylaw). If you pay close attention to the letters pages in your favourite publication you'll probably spot missives sent using their online letter-writing device (the name Steve Taylor is a dead giveaway). Maxim shares with Destiny a fondness for - as the conservative Christian euphemism goes - 'family values'. As Destiny says on its website, "New Zealand is a Christian nation ... currently being lead by a government that has forsaken our Godly heritage."

Some of the scheduled speakers at the Maxim Institute's conference were controversial; in a letter to this weekend's Sunday Star Times two Victoria University academics outed Frank Ellis (10.45am: The journey from Communism's 'Enemy of the People' to PC's 'Hate Criminal') and Peter Wood (1.55pm: Weta Nationalism: how diversity threatens New Zealand's identity) as "part of the right-wing circus travelling the world preaching their extreme dogmas". They said Ellis participated in the 2000 American Renaissance Conference alongside Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and anti-immigrant National Front members (he's in this photo, bottom row, second from right). Nice. The dinner speaker was Leighton Smith (6.30pm: The media, the rule of law and political correctness).

Thanks to the recent Christchurch Cathedral incident, we know that neither the PM nor the National leader are religious. Helen Clark is an agnostic and Dr Brash told North & South that he does not believe in the existence of a supernatural being with whom he can talk, which also rules out Gandalf. Overtly religious parties haven't done spectacularly well in the MMP era. Before the 1996 election the Christian Coalition looked promising (or threatening, one could say) but narrowly failed to fulfill their potential, taking 4.3% of the party vote. The coalition disbanded and Christian Heritage only managed half that total three years later. By 2002 they were skipping school with other 1% losers like Outdoor Recreation and the Alliance. But 2002 was the year of United Future, United being Peter Dunne and Future New Zealand being the former Christian Democrats. United Future were briefly scandalous when it was discovered Kelly Chal wasn't a citizen and she was forced to stand down after 17 days in Parliament (to the surprise of her pastor, Brian Tamaki of Destiny Church). Since then they've held the line on conservative and played down the Christian.

Currently National are at 49% in the polls, Labour are sitting on 39%, and the smaller parties are clustered around 1 or 2%. It'd be a reasonable bet that as we approach next year's election the smaller parties, buoyed by increased funding and participation in televised leaders' debates, will leech votes off the larger ones. But what will happen with the Christian vote? The Christian Coalition and United Future have proved that a conservative Christian voter base does exist, even if it's not always inclined to move as one. United Future will shine on through 2005 thanks to Peter Dunne, their crazy diamond (never mind the 5% threshold, in Ohariu-Belmont diamonds are forever), but they may face competition for the party vote from Destiny, who are aiming for 10%. A friend's wise mother once suggested to me that putting your kids through Catholic schooling is the best way to extinguish any holiness in them. I had 11 years of it - now I score 'under 25 - need help' in the morality test Christians promoting The Passion of the Christ hand out at Village on Queen St. I'm not likely to be swayed by Maxim's arguments. Neither am I Destiny's constituency. But they have one.

Patrick Crewdson is a contributor to Fighting Talk.

In sport it's back to business as usual in England.

"Tiger" Tim Henman makes a second-round tournament exit, the rugby world champions are beaten by France to finish a disappointing third in the Six Nations, while a glamour football side, Arsenal, is marching away with the Premiership title. Oh, and the 150th University boat race, an excuse for the well-off to break open the champers, is won by a bunch of toffs. (The only blip in this formula is the English cricketers, who are 2-0 up against the Windies. But we all know what would happen if they were playing for The Ashes...)

Unfortunately it is also business as usual in the terror stakes.

A week ago I wrote a column saying how there seemed to be an undercurrent of fear in England since the Madrid bombing, but binned it fearing I was misreading the situation. Scary statements by Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, (it would be "miraculous" if a suicide bomber did not get through) and Britain's top cop, Sir John Stevens, (Al Qaeda cells are operating in the UK) made ME feel uneasy but I wasn't sure if anyone bothered to take such warnings seriously.

After all, people here have lived through IRA bomb scares for years and the older generation still remembers World War II. Also, there have been several periods of high alert in London recently. In February last year, troops were deployed around Heathrow apparently to prevent any attempt to shoot down a departing jet. Since New Year‚s, several flights to the US and Saudi Arabia have been cancelled due to security concerns.

It seems this week I was proved right.

A poll in the News Of The World says over half of Britons are more concerned about their safety following 9/11 and the Madrid bombing. People have considered changing annual holidays (58%), visiting tourist attractions (53%), shopping in city centres (46%) and their daily trek to work (38%). (Another interesting statistic, an overwhelming 73% of respondents said police should be able to shoot suicide bombers on sight.)

The Spectator's political man Peter Oborne says "in Westminster there is an air of expectation" - the place is now patrolled by machinegun-toting cops - and people's habits are starting to change. One media couple, he says, no longer travel together by Tube in case they leave their children orphaned, while a "well-known political correspondent" is driving rather than taking the train to work. Add to that list a Kiwi weblog writer, who now bikes to work half the time.

Headlines in The Sunday Times made chilling reading this week, too. The lower front page declared: "PM told dirty bomb defence catastrophic‚" and "Al-Qaeda leader says: Heathrow our target". In the latter story, it turns out Osama bin Laden said British PM Tony Blair was al-Qaeda's top enemy. He ordered a "devastating attack" on London's main airport soon after the 9/11 attacks. Assuming the terror chief is still alive, he certainly seems the type to hold a grudge and act on it when he gets the chance. Terrifying.

Some in the right-wing press are trying to maintain calm and ensure the high street shop tills are still ringing. In The Sun, sister paper to the News Of The World, deputy political editor George Pascoe-Watson says a terror strike is a chilling possibility "but we must never change our way of life". Otherwise we hand victory to the terrorists without a single bomb going off, he says.

I favour Oborne‚s view. The headline "Tony Blair and George Bush have made Osama bin Laden's task a lot easier" rings true and looks at the wider issue, rather than the narrow view of the economy. Oborne highlights Blair's five-year-old Good Friday agreement as his administration's greatest achievement. "Its key was the belated recognition that terrorism cannot be defeated by military means," he writes. Controversial, perhaps, in our post-September 11 world, but who can argue that the world is safer after the invasion of Iraq and last week's assassination (by Israel, an ally in the war on terror) of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin?

While deploying armed police, troops and tanks can be reassuring to residents of Western cities (read: voters), it seems to me that Bush and Blair are not dealing with the root causes of terror effectively.

Like moths drawn to a light, Iraq has become a beacon for those wanting to pursue jihad against the Western infidels. Bin Laden used the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islamic holy sites Mecca and Medina, to justify his attacks (America announced its withdrawal of troops from the Arab country last April). So what did our leaders think would happen when foreign troops invaded Iraq on the flimsy (and possibly false) pretext of weapons of mass destruction?

And what was Israel thinking? Apparently it doesn't want to withdraw from the Gaza Strip like it did Lebanon, with its tail between its legs. Okay. But not only did the missile strike on a crippled man in a wheelchair provoke international outrage, it handed Sheikh Yassin the martyrdom he'd been publicly praying for. You can imagine disaffected Palestinians - frustrated over years of occupation, a massive security wall and land grabs by settlers across a line agreed more than 40 years ago - will be lining up to join Hamas after this.

The Spanish weren't happy with the way their government was dealing with the war on terrorism - so they voted them out. And Spanish Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's showed he will be no poodle by quickly stating the Iraq war was based on lies and suggesting Bush and Blair "do some reflection and self-criticism". Hardliners in America and Britain wrote the Spanish off as spineless appeasers, columnist Ann Coulter calling it a "surrender to terrorism". Do you think the hardliners are worried? Will the Anglo-American governments also pay for the war? There are still a lot of questions to answer on that point.

The first test, of course, is in America - where only 51.3% of the voting-age population exercised their democratic right in 2000. Will enough people care? Will the record-high oil prices get people stomping down to the election booths? And will John Kerry, labelled "Bush-lite" by American political dissident Noam Chomsky, seem credible to a public which is, generally speaking, more concerned about its own circumstances than the effect of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed overseas?

It's hard to say. It would be a bold commentator to call a result this early - and we saw what a difference a week made in Spanish politics. Only time will tell. However I get the feeling it will take regime change in America and Britain before the West stops fanning the flames of Arab hatred with its policies and starts tackling this problem adequately.

What's worse than the current race debate? No race debate. Which is exactly what will become of whatever it is that we're supposedly having now if Don Brash ever gets onto the 9th. If the red team seem a little double-jointed in their policy statements lately, and a little bit to the right of what your granddad recalls from the old days, one day of the blue alternative will have you longing - begging - gagging - for just a few closed schools.

These will look like glory days.

When in the early 90s Roger Douglas advised would-be reformers to:

define your objectives clearly and move towards them in quantum leaps [because] opponents' fire is much less accurate when directed at a moving target

… it would appear that Don had his ears on.

He does not want a debate. From the outset, it was the last thing he wanted. Let others debate. It's the perfect smoke screen, and it's been the same strategy for political tyrants in this country for most of my lifetime, and probably beyond. I'm sure many readers can recall all-too-painfully the "debate" around sport and politics, a.k.a. the '81 Springbok tour. After it was all over, it almost paled in comparison to the devastating economic situation that had been developing at the same time behind the bike helmets, bats and batons.

When Roger Douglas started his quantum leaps to free market weirdness, there was also plenty of debate, just not with him. He was far too busy deregulating things.

Trouble is, I told Russell I wasn't going to write about politics unless it had some impact on our cultural lives. At the time, I guess I was thinking culture with a capital C, as in Art, but what the hell, we all know the distinction's bogus. Still, a promise is a promise, so let's get to the point.

The point is that I was going to review Richard Nunns and (the lamentably departed) Hirini Melbourne's album te hekenga-a-rangi, featuring Aroha Yates Smith. The connection is that in all honesty it's hard to think of anyone who's done more to articulate the musical voice of tangata whenua than Nunns and Melbourne, let alone use such a voice to contribute to the broader musical and cultural interpretation of these islands.

It is not that Nunns and Melbourne have dissolved cultural differences. On the contrary. What I love about these pieces is the way they emphasise, entrench, and celebrate cultural specifics.

There is a degree of precision in the whole project that makes a mockery of the cheapening expressions that get bandied about like, "creative industries", or "intellectual property". For example, one of the epochs in which we live is the age of hip hop, in which to be authentically Aotearoan in front of a mainstream audience, Aotearoan artists are obliged (or compelled) to emulate one of the most commodity-driven and Americanised genres the world has ever known.

It's a cruel irony that sorely warrants further discussion (and me not usually one for genre bagging). Partly as a result of the endless commodity drive in popular music, the repetition of proven success formulas has itself been elevated to an art form, complete with its own vocabulary and champions, including me. Either that, or it has largely displaced artistic originality, holus bolus.

As you probably know, Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns spent some years researching traditional Maori instruments. They worked with carvers (of wood and stone) and weavers and produced instruments that hadn't been seen outside of museum cases in living memory. In some cases, even then, only in fragments. Lots of them: wind, percussion, stringed. Then they learned to play them, a remarkable feat in its own right, considering that for many of them, performance was a lost art.

And they composed for them. I used to have this brilliant flat with Tim Gummer, and one of the many memorable aspects was my exposure to the record company he ran with Keith Hill from our living room: Rattle Records. Nunns and Melbourne's first album Te Ku Te Whe was our best seller, eventually going gold. Astoundingly, they laid down the whole thing in less than two days.

The story of the two musicians is well told in a documentary (directed by Keith Hill) that comes on a DVD bundled into the more recent album te hekenga-a-rangi. Among other things, they tell how learning the new-old instruments not only revealed old sounds, but old voices, and that revealing old voices also revealed old words.

They tell how mortal humans are not the only audiences for these lexical sounds, but also that marae have appreciated the iteration of them at graves and burial sites, where these musical, lyrical voices have been silent - in some cases for hundreds of years - and sorely in need of korero.

And yes, you too will find this music will communicate with parts you never knew existed, by means of timbres, orchestrations and arrangements you never thought possible. Well, I didn't anyway. Flax. The music of weaving flax. It's not what you're thinking.

I can't describe it. The work of Melbourne and Nunns sounds like nothing else. Some of it is so small, so delicate you could break it just by turning up the volume. Some of it, so large it hardly fits in the house.

A hybrid of masterful playing techniques is deployed on re-discovered, re-invented instruments, captured with contemporary recording gear and subtle, tricky studio techniques. A delay on Aroha Yates-Smith's hypnotic vocal, set right at the back of the mix, is then placed several beats in advance of the live signal.

Dr Yates-Smith - As Melbourne says in the doco - was invited into the studio both for her voice and for her authoritative knowledge of femininity in pre-European Aotearoa, gleaned in large part from her researches on female Maori gods. "It needed the female voice" he says, but seems uncomfortable, as though his words somehow reduce her knowledge to her sex, and her voice to that part of her which sings. He gesticulates, and tries again. "It needed Ö the Ö female Ö aah Övoice!"

This can be a tricky concept for some Pakeha and Western academics to get their heads around, because it implies that there's a fundamental, insuperable difference between males and females, and that's an uncomfortable allowance for people who live with their heads up the Lacan.

Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward to the rest of us, who live in a world which, no matter how constructed or even prefabricated it may be, confronts us daily with blinding, profound, essential difference.

Again, that's what this musical entity is so good at. Doing things that nobody else has done (within living memory at least), and that few people could do, even if they tried. This music, on these instruments, made by this carver, performed by these artists, using their techniques, right there.

I also heard Hine pu te hue for string quartet and taonga puoro on Concert FM the other day, composed by Gillian Whitehead and performed by Nunns alongside the New Zealand String Quartet.

The funny thing about composing for taonga puoro is that currently, it has a concert-grade talent pool of one: Richard Nunns (although new musicians and instrument makers and carvers are developing through various wananga).

While the politicians and the N.I.M.B.Y.s squabble, it is immensely affirming to hear artists banging, blowing, bowing, scraping and twanging out their cultural differences in an organised and productive manner. There's tension and conflict alright: musical tension, aesthetic conflict.

Anyway, Whitehead's score gives both Nunns and the NZSQ plenty of room to improvise, but also includes many passages in which the composer has fun throwing the two culturally specific musical forms at each other in atonal collisions reaching violent crescendos. It's a very, very good thing. I had to pull over and listen to it while watching skaters and petanquers at Victoria Park. Could've been nasty otherwise. Bit distracted.

I have to say I've been more impressed by Concert FM in the last couple of years than in the past. I'm sure it still has an infuriating preoccupation with European men from the 18th and 19th centuries, but some of what I've heard has completely slain me, and much of the contemporary stuff seems to be locally composed.

Well, it'll all be over before you can quote Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society" if Brash has anything to do with it.

Anyway, that's me for the time being. We're well up the duff round at our place, so I'll be focussing on getting work out of the way and then hunkering down in the domus for a while. "Do the whole mammal thing" was how the midwife put it (I don't think she was talking about Discovery Channel either). The one exception to periodic domestication might be the rock'n'roll high school rendition of Donizetti's "Elixir of Love." Haven't found any reviews yet, but the hype's working on me.

Anyway, thanks to all who sent responses to my four little publicaddress.net pieces this year. I appreciate it. And thanks to Russell for having me. Appreciate that too. I'll be back after parenthood arrives. Aaiiee!!!