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Vinyl Vault – “NZ Music”

By Audio, Music and Vinyl
Weird Culture - Weird Custom (1986)

Weird Culture – Weird Custom: National Student Radio com­pil­a­tion LP (1986)

Weird Culture – Weird Custom (1986) was, as far as I know, the first record release co-ordinated by the entire New Zealand stu­dent radio net­work. There were twelve tracks on the album, two chosen by each of the six mem­ber sta­tions.  Radio Active selec­ted the two  to rep­res­ent Wellington: cow-punk combo the Crawbilly Creeps with “A Day in Lucky Gulch” and feminist-folkies Putty in Her Hands gave us “NZ Music” which became an instant favor­ite and was oft-requested for a long time afterwards.

Putty in Her Hands were a duo con­sist­ing of Charlotte Yates and Christine Jeffs. Yates con­tin­ues to write and record, con­tinu­ing to release solo records and also put­ting togeth­er the acclaimed com­pil­a­tions of NZ poetry set to music, Baxter (2000),  Tuwhare (2008) and Ihimaera (2011).

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Feeling upbeat

By Audio, Cinema and Radio

I just got in from a blustery jour­ney to Radio New Zealand to appear on (what we used to call) the Concert Programme to talk about this year’s Film Festival. Concert FM has an excel­lent daily magazine show called Upbeat, hos­ted by Eva Radich, and I sus­pect this is the first time that Merle Haggard has been played on that earn­est station.

[audio:http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/upbt/upbt-20110712–1242-dan_slevin-048.mp3|titles=Dan Slevin reviews films show­ing at this year’s NZ International Film Festival. (14?13?)]

For radio nerds like me this was a very enjoy­able vis­it. The Concert FM booth is just like the old ZM one I worked at in the late 80s, very manu­al, faders and CD play­ers, etc. The Nine to Noon booth at Radio New Zealand National is for voice only and Kathryn Ryan has an oper­at­or in anoth­er room push­ing all the play­back but­tons. I want the Concert stu­dio in my own home. Swoon.

Back to the vinyl vault - Z.Z. Hill

By Audio, Music and Vinyl

The first of my vinyl memor­ies posts caused a tiny flurry of excite­ment so I thought I’d make it a weekly affair – as I go through the col­lec­tion decid­ing what to keep and what to flip. (Spoiler Alert: All of it!)

Back in 1983 I was lov­ing music – pretty much all of it – but I was going through a pretty enthu­si­ast­ic Northern soul phase. Thanks to a series of Kent/Modern com­pil­a­tions put out by British enthu­si­asts I was hear­ing all sorts of stir­ring stuff. I even thought for a while I might try and col­lect the whole set.

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Vinyl memories

By Audio, Music and Vinyl

I’ve been cart­ing around boxes of vinyl records from flat to flat and house to house since I was a kid. Lots of my records were bought from the plen­ti­ful record stores around the East End of London where I grew up and there­fore car­ried half way around the world when we emig­rated to New Zealand in 1986.

Recently I found myself think­ing that it might be time to finally flick these things on – they take up space on shelves and the turntable nev­er gets used. I’ve become used to lying on the couch lazily choos­ing music from my entire col­lec­tion using an iPhone as a remote con­trol. Yup, I thought – time to de-clutter a bit. But me being me, I could­n’t just take them off to a record store or thrift shop – I had to give them one last listen first.

Big mis­take. They actu­ally soun­ded quite good and I found all those memor­ies flood­ing back – flip­ping through record bins in High Street record shops, or queuing up out­side before they opened to get a highly prized new release. Stuff I haven’t done for a long time.

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“At the Movies”

By Asides, Audio and Cinema

Lynn Freeman’s Arts on Sunday show returned from the Summer break yes­ter­day but film cor­res­pond­ent Simon Morris was giv­en an extra week off (some­thing to with Matinée Idle I suspect).

Because of that, I was asked to fill in and spent a pleas­ant half an hour chat­ting with Lynn about what’s been hap­pen­ing over the last couple of months (plus at the end anoth­er little ride on my anti-film; pro-digital hobbyhorse):

[audio:http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/art/art-20110130–1306-Dan_Slevin_reviews_summer_movies-048.mp3]

More radio

By Audio and Literature

Our Kind of Traitor coverYesterday morn­ing I was lucky enough to be invited to Radio New Zealand once again, this time to review the new John le Carré nov­el, Our Kind of Traitor.

It’s a ter­rif­ic nov­el, up there with le Carré’s best, and I had about four minutes (and a bit) to per­suade Kathryn.

Listen here or down­load from the link below:

[audio:http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20101027–1040-Book_Review_-_Our_Kind_of_Traitor-048.mp3]

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