Hard News by Russell Brown

Full-size version of The Others way timetable (click to embiggen).

"kind of smooth house groove". story checks out. that hi-hat. :ok_hand:

been so digging the Neil Finn things. watching people I know and admire lost in music is a rare treat. great telly.

Magnificent talent all round. Victoria Kelly's glorious orchestration. Finns popping up all over the show on various instruments. Never imagined a backing choir with James Milne, Don McGlashan and Sean Donnelly in it either.

Yeah, it's been a privilege to watch.

I got to know Matthew Bannister very slightly in the mid-00s, when we both shared an office in the English Department at the University of Auckland. Matthew was at that stage working on the manuscript of what would become White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. I was working (not especially productively at that point) on my PhD thesis. No one else really used the room and we ended up talking a good deal about the ideas that were going into his book: the influence of the Velvets on the Dunedin scene, and the influence in turn of Warholian discourses of masculinity and performance on the Velvets. He always had an amazing array of books on music floating around and he'd let me borrow them, so long as I had interesting things to say about them when I returned them. I lent him my copy of Slacker on DVD. Good times.

I last saw him sometime in the late '00s on George Street in Dunedin. He was in town for family reasons; I was attending an academic conference. We found a cheap Vietnamese restaurant and caught up over lunch.

It's great to hear that he and the other Sneakys are making and performing music together again.

Thanks for that link to Murray’s account of covering the Bob Marley tour. The Maori welcome photos are pretty special, and while the gold disc ones as also good they are a little ‘different’ as Murray notes. I scrounged deep and purchased a copy of the print shown on that page from his show in Sydney earlier this year – Bob playing soccer in the park next to the (old) White Heron with Dylan Taite. I think its an iconic Auckland photo, which has always resonated with me. Perhaps I’m a touch biased, as I went through that park many many times en route to the Parnell Pools when growing up (I also had a bike stolen from there once, but so it goes!), and occasionally loitered so to say. Would be nice if it was renamed Bob Marley reserve as a head nod to that moment, but I’m not sure that’ll happen anytime soon. Anyhow, nice to know more of the background.