Great post. The comment about 'first strike' reminded me of two idiots I shared a house with in Hawera during 1985. There was a lot of hot air at the time about Mt Egmont being renamed Taranaki, with some people claiming it was the thin end of a wedge that was going too far to accommodate Maori wishes, etc, etc.

Being part of metropolitan elite from Auckland [well, mostly Mt Roskill which was hardly elite turf in the 1980s], I kept out of such arguments. One day I discovered one of the other guys in the house was keeping a loaded shotgun under his bed as he expected civil war to break out at any moment. If the Maori came for him in the night, he planned to take as many of them with him as possible.

Knowing better than to argue with a brain-dead drongo armed with a loaded shotgun, I made arrangements to move out ASAP. No great moral to the story, simply pointing out bell-end racists have always been with us [more's the pity]. The net just gives them the chance to mouth-breathe their fuckwitted stupidity at everyone, when it used to restricted to hotel bars.

Living in the UK, Bandcamp is for me the most reliable way of supporting fresh music by Kiwi artists. I just wish there was a way to search exclusively for NZ recordings so I could more easily discover new and emerging performers. [Unless there is such a way and I've been too dim to figure out - which is quite likely. If so, please let me know!]

Re: James Last - when New Order toured NZ in the late 80s, they said Last had expressed interest in covering Blue Monday with his orchestra. Sadly, I don't think this ever came to pass...