by W.S. McCallum
A Slow Decline: The Space
Monster Saga
(W.S. McCallum)
It has been just over a year since Space
Monster officially closed, leaving indie music in Wanganui without a regular
venue for visiting acts. Now that the dust has settled, it is worthwhile having
a look back and seeing just what went wrong and what lessons might be drawn
from it.
Space Monster opened on the premises of
Stink Magnetic Recording Company after Dylan Herkes left for Wellington in
2011. For a while, indie music fans in Wanganui found themselves with a surfeit
of choice, with Jack Mitchell-Anyon offering music at Space Monster, right next
door to often competing shows put on by Brandon Sayring at the ARC Theatre in
the old Chinese laundry. It was an unheralded luxury for local music fans:
having two good music venues, side by side, and even being able to hop from one
to the other on the same night and take in several acts over several hours on a
Friday and/or Saturday night or even week nights on occasion. During that
period, Wanganui sometimes had more to offer punters than Wellington could on a
given night in terms of indie music. The days when The Eye of Night offered
indie music shows every few weeks or even months and fans nonetheless felt
themselves lucky had definitely became a thing of the past and it seemed that
things were going upwards and onwards.
The first change came when Brandon
Sayring closed the ARC Theatre and moved to Wellington in 2013, bringing this
golden period for indie music in Wanganui to an end, but there was still Space
Monster, which continued offering shows on a very regular semi-regular basis.
However, from 2013 to 2015, Space
Monster experienced a slow and steady decline owing to a number of factors.
The old attendees who used to turn up at
The Eye of Night and the ARC Theatre tailed off for one reason or another.
There was some natural attrition involved: various people left town, or “grew
up” and stopped attending because they were now in nesting couples mode or
whatever, but there were other factors involved too.
Space Monster seemed to have a rougher
edge than its predecessors: it was more open to all-comers than previous venues
had been. Unlike ARC, for instance, usually there were no locals on duty at the
entrance; the owner, Jack Mitchell-Anyon, tended to be busy handling the desk
and the sound side of things, while one or more of the members of visiting
bands or their followers tended to be left with the job of sizing up punters
and gathering the door charge off them. It was impossible for visiting musos to
know which punters were trouble and who they should turn away, so they seldom
(if ever) did. And some locals learned to sneak in later in the evening, when
they knew there would either be no one manning the front desk or they would be
able to bluff their way in by saying they had paid earlier on.
This open-entry policy had negative
impacts on various levels, mainly to the detriment of those who came to Space
Monster just wanting to enjoy the music and have a good time.
The first impact was in terms of the
variety of music that could be offered there; the audiences, being more
boisterous and larger in numbers than at the venues that had preceded it,
turned out to be more receptive to group acts with a conventional amplified
format. It was noticeable that various “quiet” acts like Tiny Ruins did not
return to Space Monster after their first gig there, and even solo acts with an
established track record of playing there on occasion preferred to play
elsewhere, resulting in Delaney Davidson playing at the Whanganui Musicians’
Club, for instance. One of my salient memories of Space Monster will forever be
Tiny Ruins’ bass player giving various local late-adolescent males in the
audience the stink eye because they simply did not know how to shut up and
appreciate the music they were being offered. Those acts that could hold their
own in the volume department, like The All-Seeing Hand, tended to fare better
at Space Monster.
The second adverse impact of
uncontrolled entry was that thefts were more likely at Space Monster. People
learned to keep a close eye on their belongings there, and notable heists
included the takings box on at least one night (left unwatched by members of a
visiting band assigned door duty), and Jack Mitchell-Anyon’s girlfriend’s purse
on another occasion. Unfortunately, Space Monster was not the sort of place
where you could necessarily leave things lying around and assume they would be
there when you returned.
The third negative impact of Space
Monster’s open-entry policy, was that Space Monster’s attendees had to put up
with the anti-social effects of drunkenness and drug-taking to a far greater extent
than they had at ARC, Stink Magnetic or The Eye of Night. For example, in late
2013, I was physically assaulted by a local junkie who was off his head, and
was left to face him down while a sheepish crowd looked on, with the venue’s
owner nowhere in sight. Nor did any support come when said junkie subsequently
decided to pursue a campaign of harrassment against me, resulting in me filing
a trespass notice against him after he decided to turn up at my house. I was
surprised when the individual in question was not banned from Space Monster,
but then Jack Mitchell-Anyon did have a very hands-off approach to security,
his position being that there was no need for door bouncers as Space Monster
was not that sort of venue, and that if anyone had a problem with it, they
would just have to toughen up to life’s vicissitudes.
Unfortunately, this and other incidents
inside and outside his doors that I experienced, witnessed, and was told about,
were sufficient to lend these words a hollow air. From time to time, local
yokels wanting to stir things up would either come in and cause trouble, or
they would lie in wait outside in order to pick fights with Space Monster
attendees. In spite of Jack Mitchell-Anyon’s claims to the media that there
were never any “fisticuffs” in his venue, there certainly were confrontations
and violent incidents there, although he may have been unaware of this, because
they tended to occur at times when he was not around.
I was told by various people who stopped
going there that they did not feel safe at Space Monster, and there were
reasonable grounds for feeling that way. With its long, dark corridors and
non-existent security, combined with the anti-social behaviour of certain
people fuelled by over-indulgence in booze and/or drugs, and a nonchalant
managerial policy, it could be an unpleasant place to be in at times.
So it was not too surprising that, the
last time I was at Space Monster (Saturday 30 October 2015), things degenerated
badly. Various people who were not regulars turned up that evening and were
getting belligerent even during the show. At one point, one of this bunch
kicked a cardboard beer carton at me with a “whatcha gonna do about it?” look.
I left shortly after the show ended and subsequently heard that, after my departure,
the evening had turned into a brawl and that the Council had decided to shut
the place down.
The violence was just one factor in
Space Monster’s closure. The Wanganui District Council had had Space Monster in
its sights for other reasons for some time. Space Monster did not have a liquor
licence and its attendees’ habit of drinking outside in the streets in
violation of the downtown liquor-free zone was monitored closely by a
Council-owned and police-operated surveillance camera that had been installed
across the street from the front entrance, with numerous police drive-bys and
the occasional drop-in ensuing in the hope of nabbing boozers. Noise control
was also a persistent issue, aggravated by Jack Mitchell-Anyon’s habit of
opening all the windows while bands were playing and even putting a PA speaker
at the front entrance for a while, with a cat-and-mouse game ensuing between
him and Council noise control officers.
Beyond noise and alcohol issues, the WDC
also, more legimitately, took issue over various safety problems posed by Space
Monster’s location; the old Wanganui Chronicle building. It is a dilapidated
building with a rickety interior that is long overdue for renovation. The gigs
were being held in a first-floor room with only one wooden staircase as an
exit. Quite regularly, there were over 100 people crammed into that room, which
is well beyond the numbers allowed by fire and earthquake safety regulations.
Law (and common sense) dictates the need for two exits under such circumstances.
There was a second exit way down the other end of the building, down the back
stairs, but it is safe to say very few people knew about it and it was kept
permanently locked, so it was not a viable escape option in the event of a fire
or earthquake. While Wanganui does not have much of a history of earthquakes,
Space Monster definitely was a fire risk. The building’s old electrical
fittings were a hazard to the extent that I saw wiring in the walls
spontaneously combust on two occasions during gigs and I remember at least one
fire brigade call-out.
So these are the various factors that
brought about Space Monster’s “closure” in late 2015 as a regular venue. If
there are lessons to be drawn for anyone hoping to run a similar venture in
Wanganui or in another of New Zealand’s provincial towns, it would be (a) keep
a watch on who you let in, (b) choose premises that are not a fire hazard or an
earthquake risk, and (c) maintain a low profile to keep the Council and the
police off your back.
© W.S. McCallum 17 November 2016
Bill Direen & The Builders
The Pyramid Club, Wellington
15 October 2016
(W.S. McCallum)
The prevailing theory regarding indie
music in New Zealand, as espoused by National Radio’s indie kids in their Saturday
afternoon shows, is that it was invented around the time Flying Nun released
the double Dunedin EP in 1982, upon which, practically overnight, Dunedin bands
redefined the sound of Kiwi music and the rest, as they say, is history.
Unfortunately, history is only that uncomplicated when seen through the
simplifying prism of the present-day, and the 1980s indie scene was rather more
complex than can be characterised by adopting a Music 101 approach. Setting
aside the in-roads made in Auckland (for example Propeller Records from 1980
onwards), it is often forgotten that the pivotal city in terms of indie music
in New Zealand at that time was in fact Christchurch, not Dunedin. There is now
a whole younger generation of indie music fans who have been raised on the
“Dunedin Sound” archetype to the extent that it is news to many of them that
Flying Nun was actually a Christchurch record label, and that the Flying Nun
roster in the early 1980s featured just as many groups from Christchurch as
from Dunedin, in addition to which, to some of them, it is surprising to the
point of sacrilege to have it pointed out that various of the leading lights of
the so-called “Dunedin Sound”, were not even from Dunedin: the Kilgour Brothers
(The Clean, The Great Unwashed) were from North Canterbury. Chris Knox was from
Invercargill, and so on and so forth...
While Chris Knox (from Invercargill),
was getting started musically and reshaping the music scene in Dunedin in the
mid-to-late seventies, there was another leading light doing the same thing in
Christchurch who would also end up on Flying Nun in the early 1980s: Bill
Direen (born in Palmerston North). For those who were not around at the time,
it can’t be over-emphasised just what a musical wasteland Christchurch was in the
late 1970s. No Internet with things like Spotify or SoundCloud kids; there were
three radio stations that played music that wasn’t for wrinklies: 3ZB (music
for housewives with huge numbers of ads), Radio Avon (high-rotate 70s AOR), and
3ZM (much of a muchness, with slightly more variety in the evenings). Student
radio in the form of Radio U was just getting started at that time, with very
limited airtime, under restricted broadcasting licenses issued on a monthly
basis. And the live music fare on offer in Christchurch consisted of covers
bands playing in beer barns. This is the scene into which Bill Direen stepped
into the late 70s, beginning the slow, difficult process of filling a creative
and cultural void with a series of different bands, the best-known of which is
the Builders.
Whenever I hear them, the songs Bill
Direen wrote in Christchurch in the late 1970s and early 1980s have the ability
to transport me back to the strange world of that city in those days: the
monolithic, condescending establishment; the cold, run-down flats; the boozy,
racist, hostile streets; and the nascent hopes and dreams of a generation
wanting something better, against the odds. With the 60s boom years already
firmly in the past, having been replaced with economic depression, the vibrant
counter-culture of that decade had been sapped dry by co-opting
commercialisation and mainstreaming, leaving us to bear the brunt of the
reactionary wave that passed through New Zealand society whilst Muldoon was
Prime Minister. Yet in spite of that sense of place that they evoke in me, Bill
Direen’s lyrics and music also transcend that milieu: he was a keen student of
the New Zealand literary tradition and soaked up influences from classical and
avant-garde composers, as well as the likes of Boris Vian and the Velvet
Underground. His music was not defined by Christchurch; it is tangibly part of
something bigger and broader.
(W.S. McCallum)
This broader dimension was most
tellingly pointed to on the third stop on his 2016 New Zealand tour, at The
Pyramid Club in Wellington. At the start of his performance, which lasted over
two hours, he made a point of showcasing various songs he wrote whilst living
in Wellington during the late 1980s, referencing life in a flat in Newtown and
giving just as much of a tangible sense of that time and place as his earlier
Christchurch songs had given me when I heard them on Radio U in the early
1980s. But the broader dimension was present in his set too, which included
experimental soundscapes and poetry from Medieval times through to R.A.K.
Mason, and songs Bill Direen wrote in far-off places like Paris.
Bill Direen played a combination of
instruments that evening, starting off on acoustic guitar, switching to
keyboards, and then to electric guitar, and even using a cell phone for
accompaniment at one point. He was backed by two pairs of musicians who
alternated performing with him, enabling shifts in sounds that worked very well
and kept the performance quite varied. Nonetheless, there was still some restlessness
from the audience in the face of the more experimental pieces during the
earlier part of the show, with one old fellow whispering to his wife not to
worry because he would be playing normal songs later on....
(W.S. McCallum)
They weren’t disappointed. Overall, Bill
Direen managed to nicely balance the avant-garde material with hook-driven
indie guitar stuff, providing a fine showcasing of his very large repertoire,
built up over the last 40-or-so years. It was a show that held my attention
throughout, and one that I had eagerly anticipated, as the last time I had seen
him perform live was in Christchurch in 1991. As well as reminding the
initially sceptical audience members that he could sling an electric guitar
with the best of them, his command of the spoken word hit home again and again,
in songs covering the range from confinement in prison walls to confinement in
relations and in big cities, through to observations on street life, the crazy
money-driven society we live in and many, many other topics. It was a verbal tour de force. It says a lot about how
culturally backward New Zealand society is even today, that in the conventional
national pantheon of heroes and icons, Bill Direen does not hold a bigger
place. He himself pointed out this at his show by thanking the owners of The
Pyramid Club, adding that “there are not that many venues that would have us”.
However, the impact, the quality, the length and the breadth of Bill Direen’s
songwriting is such that, while he may be overlooked by the cultural mainstream
in New Zealand, he cannot plausibly be ignored.
© W.S. McCallum 16 October 2016
Tape Wolves, Tigers of the
Sea, Guantanamo Baywatch
Valhalla, Wellington
Wellington 8 October 2016
(W.S. McCallum)
Valhalla, which is a hole-in-the wall
place on Vivian Street that is usually more of a hard rock/heavy metal venue,
was hosting a slightly different crowd that Saturday evening (me included). The
place filled up fairly quickly, with the audience having to step back somewhat
as the opening act was playing in front of the stage. The locale had a good
atmosphere, and the drinks were moderately priced compared to some of
Wellington’s licensed premises...
(W.S. McCallum)
The Tape Wolves, the latest variant/chapter
of the Mysterious Tape Man saga, set the bar high with a raucous, crazy set of
surf rock instrumentals accompanied by flying drumsticks, the occasional animal
noise, and much rock’n’roll machismo, all delivered by three masked hairy men
in tights and capes. For those in the audience who had not seen the band or a
previous incarnation of it before, it was an in-your-frace experience both
visually and musically, with the songs flying out and bouncing off the walls
with merry abandon. They were flying by the seat of their tights in places, but
had sufficient swagger to pull through with great aplomb.
(W.S. McCallum)
Tigers of the Sea, from the Hutt Valley,
had a difficult act to follow but managed to move proceedings on to the next
level. Whilst not as sartorially memorable as the masked, costumed mystery men
who preceded them, from the stage they delivered a well-honed set of songs that
nicely set the scene for the headlining act.
(W.S. McCallum)
Guantanamo Baywatch were formed in
Portland in 2008 and are part of the ongoing revival in late 50s/early 60s
style surf and instrumental rock that has been happening on the West Coast of
the US since the mid-1990s. Their sound was a fascinating blend of old and new,
mixing up their own material with the occasional cover. Back in the days of
grunge in the early 1990s, bands from the North-West tended to avoid this sort
of music, probably for fear of being a stereotyped as an “oldies” band, but
Guantanamo Baywatch transcend such pigeon-holing, having a hybrid sound that
looks back to the past whilst at the same time being of these times. In spite
of one of their guitarists breaking two strings in rapid succession and having
to replace them on-stage whilst being good-naturedly heckled by his bandmates,
they held it all together and delivered a very lively performance that had the
audience jumping.
© W.S. McCallum 16 October 2016
The Others Way Festival,
Auckland
2 September 2016
(W.S. McCallum)
The Others Way 2016 was the second event
of its kind in Auckland, involving ten rooms in several venues on and near
Karangahape Road in Auckland, with over 40 acts performing from 8 pm on a
Friday night through until about 2 am on Saturday morning.
Saying it was full-on is an act of
understatement. With such a large number of acts, the event could easily have
been spread over two or even three nights, and it was clear from the outset
that there was no way anyone except the most attention-deficit afflicted
Millennials hopped up on party pills were going to be able to catch much more
than half of the acts on the festival programme.
Hoping for the best, camera in hand, I
set off to see just how much I could take in before sensory overload forced me
to crash.
The good thing about how The Others Way
was set up is that all of the venues were within easy walking distance of each
other, and various of them were literally just across the road, which made
venue-hopping quite easy, unless you were faced with a full house due to a
particular act being popular with the punters.
The down side was the fleeting
sensations involved in trying to catch so many acts, but it was certainly a
tonic after suffering so long in drab and boring W(h)anganui, where alternative
music has died a slow miserable death in recent years (but more about that
another time).
Nadia Reid (W.S. McCallum)
The first act I saw was Nadia Reid who
is a singer-songwriter, and who was performing to a full house at the Galatos.
Her songs were about relationships and life and its woes, and it was a good
performance, although it felt like the house was too big for her and a more
intimate setting would have served her better.
Voom (W.S. McCallum)
Across the road at The Studio, Voom
cranked up shortly thereafter and offered an uplifting performance. Watching
them, I came to the realisation that they must have been playing for two
decades now, and the length of time they had been together showed in the extent
to which the songs gelled and everything effortlessly fell into place. They apologised
at one point for being crap at social media and not keeping their Facebook page
up to date, but it hardly seemed to matter really given how good their playing
was.
Emily Edrosa (W.S. McCallum)
I ducked out of Voom’s show before they
finished to pop down the road to the Wine Cellar to see Emily Edrosa perform.
Now that Street Chant are winding up after releasing their second album, she
has decided to go solo and plough on regardless of the whims and vicissitudes
of a fickle NZ music industry. She started off solo to perform the first few
songs and then invited her drummer and bass player on to perform the rest of
the set, and it was a spirited performance, with a bit of “screw you” attitude
in evidence in response to the Auckland music scene’s gatekeepers and naysayers
who would probably much prefer that she went away. She has commented on-line
about how the fact that she is not only a woman who knows how to play electric
guitar but also a lesbian has managed to raise a few hackles with insecure males
on the NZ music scene, and I personally hope she continues to get right up
their noses. It amazes me that here we are in the 21st century, and the same
old hermetically-sealed mentalities continue to persist on the rock scene in
this country. You have to be this and that and if you don’t fit this or that
box or demographic then you get consigned to a musical scrapheap of also-rans.
I have run into a fair bit of this attitude myself and sincerely hope this does
not happen to Emily as she is one of the most talented performers on the New
Zealand music scene and she deserves a lot better than being sidelined by a
bunch of second-raters. She certainly won over the audience that night, but
Auckland does have its limitations, and there will probably come a time when
she needs to move on from the small artificial musical bubble of the Auckland
scene in order to find her place in the wider world.
i.e. crazy (W.S. McCallum)
After Emily Edrosa finished her stonking
show, just down the corridor in the Whammy Bar’s Back Room I discovered i.e.
crazy. I know nothing about this woman, but she stopped me in my tracks. Her
act was challenging and captivating, and not for the musically or emotionally
faint-hearted. I could detect a bit of a 4AD influence in her sound, but what
she was doing was definitely her own thing and made quite an impression.
Anthonie Tonnon (W.S. McCallum)
Watching the clock, I had to cut short my
attendance at i.e. crazy’s performance because Anthonie Tonnon was scheduled to
start in a few minutes in the Wine Cellar, just next door. Upon arrival, he was
just finishing setting up his keyboard and launched into his show first on
guitar, then on keyboard, then on both, performing a mix of old and new songs
(at least some of them were new to me). His was the most captivating
performance of the Others Way Festival for me. Unlike most Kiwi performers, he
knows how to interact with the audience, and he did so effortlessly, in stark
contrast to all of the other solo performers I saw that evening, abandoning the
safety of the stage to walk out among the audience while his keyboard kept
playing unaccompanied, and revelling in exotic hand gestures as accompaniment
to his keyboard. There was also some impressive showmanship of an understated
kind, such as his careful application of black tape to hold down two keys on
his keyboard before picking up his guitar and launching into an instrumental
break. Those that managed to get into the Wine Cellar to see Anthonie Tonnon
were very fortunate indeed, as I was told there was quite a queue at the
entrance in the arcade outside, right up until the end of his set.
David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights (W.S.
McCallum)
After that there was a brisk walk along
crowded K Road to get back to The Studio, with a few minutes still to spare
before David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights began their set. David Kilgour is
of course best known for being one of The Clean, but it should not be forgotten
that he has also been a solo performer for around 25 years now, and I had never
actually seen him perform by himself, so I was curious to see what the show
would be like. Strangely, he sounded like he was channelling Neil Young &
Crazy Horse that night. It was a great show, but was not at all what I was
expecting (some tinkling of the ivories perhaps?). The fact that his guitarist
was absent that evening may have had something to do with the different sound,
although perhaps not, as David Kilgour was geared up for action, having brought
along four or five electric guitars.
King Loser (W.S. McCallum)
Leaving early was unfortunately a
necessity, as King Loser were playing at Neck Of The Woods, back up the road.
There was no queue, but the basement venue was packed and sweaty, which is
pretty much how the band sounded too. I had been told via the rock grapevine
that Celia Mancini had been heard publicly sounding off about the other band
members that very day, and there was supposedly even a punch-up between them
just prior to the gig. I’m not David Hartnell and cannot confirm the veracity
of any of this, but there was certainly a pronounced air of tension on stage
and it was fuelling the music with a frenetic, splenetic energy that was really
quite something to behold. If you wanted dirty old rock & roll, King Loser
were undoubtedly the band that really delivered at The Others Way. Celia was
pissed off - she was really angry, and so were the other guys in the band, with
the whole “screw you too” vibe pushing the music higher and higher. There was
also a chilling realisation that the whole thing could collapse right in front
of us, and if it did, it could turn really ugly. What a show!!!
It was at the King Loser gig that I had
my final run-in with the “professional” photographers at The Others Way. They
are an odd bunch, the photographers at Auckland rock events. They are big bulky
guys who look more like sports photographers than anything else and they are
fish out of water at the best of times. At Street Chant’s LP release gig at The
King’s Arms in April, I actually stopped to ask one of them why he had an
enormous telephoto lens on his camera when he was standing all of three metres
away from the band on the stage. He offered some unconvincing explanation about
the light, to which I nodded, but all I could think was “isn’t that what the
flash function on your camera is for?” I was happily snapping away with a
camera that had 5x magnification and, outside of a stadium setting, that’s all
you need; after all, it ain’t Lancaster Park....
Paparazzi (W.S. McCallum)
I bumped into the same guy just before
the festival and he helped me put on my wristband, which was nice of him.
Shortly afterwards, I took the time out to point out a couple of his colleagues
in action, right up front with their pointless, enormous telephoto lenses and
said “sports photographers!” He smiled. I then moved to the side of the stage
and happily snapped away at a better angle that enabled me to capture all of
the members of the band, as opposed to standing front-on with a telephoto lens
and only being able to photograph the blackheads on the lead singer’s nose. He
also smiled and nodded at this.
Various of his colleagues were annoying and
irksome to the punters at various gigs throughout that evening. Their favourite
habit is to stand directly in front of someone or even to edge them out of the
way while they studiously ignore them and snap away. One of them tried this on
me as Anthonie Tonnon was starting up; kneeling directly in front of me with
his bloody great camera and blocking the view with his head just as I was about
to take a photo: I tapped him on the sole of his shoe which threw his
concentration and then pointedly sidled up to him and took photos within his
field of vision: tit for tat.
So imagine my dismay when, after I had
carefully and politely negotiated my way through the jostling crowd to a
vantage point at the side of the stage to get a few furtive snaps of King Loser,
one of these burly photographers pushes his way through the crowd like a hippo
trying to reach a brackish creek for a muddy wallow in the mid-day sun. He then
stands right in front of me, blocking the view, and starts pointing his
big-kahuna camera like he is out shooting wildlife on the bloody Serengeti
Plain. I have a pocket-sized point-and-shoot Panasonic camera: the sort of
thing these so-called “professionals” would laugh at, but I decided it was time
to give him a lesson in its versatility. Wrapping the strap around my wrist to
prevent it from being knocked out of my hand, I extended my arm over his
shoulder, and then lowered it so that my hand holding my little pipsqueak
digital camera was directly in front of his monstrous black telephoto lens, blocking
his view. Then I very carefully adjusted the frame with my index finger at
arm’s length, using the little digital screen on the back of the camera to see
that the shot was framed correctly, and then “snap!”, I had my photo.
I took just the one photo but I think he
got the point.
Should any of you paparazzi happen to be
reading this; shooting rock gigs is different from sports arena events: a
small, lightweight camera is far more useful for crowded, close-quarter work
than those big black monstrosities you guys tote around like photographic
codpieces. And show some manners! Here endeth the lesson.
Salad Boys (W.S. McCallum)
Then it was back to the Whammy Bar to
see the Salad Boys jumping around, quickly followed by the Surf Fiends in the
Whammy Back Room. It was strange transitioning from one room to the next, as
they were coincidentally both playing exactly the same beat and rhythm as I
shifted from one to the other: it was almost like seeing the flipside of a
musical coin, with a common strand of high energy guitar music running through
both.
Surf Fiends (W.S. McCallum)
By now it was past midnight and having
seen nine acts perform, my senses felt like they were on overload. Back in the
days of student Orientation events in the 1980s at the University of
Canterbury, this is how I felt after a solid week’s worth of entertainment
except that, hang on, in this particular case, at The Others Way, only just
over four hours had passed. There was no way I was going to last until 2 am, so
I caught one last act at The Thirsty Dog called Echo Ohs, an Auckland band who
were completely new to me but who provided a refreshing close to a hectic
evening’s proceedings.
Echo Ohs (W.S. McCallum)
© W.S. McCallum 6 September 2016
Web site © Wayne Stuart McCallum 2003-2017