Tag: Music

Concert Review: The Dandy Warhols, Auckland, April 22

The 90s are having a moment. 

There’s something about this year in particular, where every time I turn around I see headlines blaring the 30th anniversary of things I lived through and considered cultural touchstones in my life – the death of Kurt Cobain, OJ Simpson’s freeway chase, the release of Pulp Fiction, the debut of Friends, whathaveyou. Watching elements of your life turn into nostalgia is always strange. 

And then there’s the Dandy Warhols, Portland, Oregon’s psych-pop cult sensations, who hit Auckland on their 30th anniversary tour this week. How is a band I still kind of think of as new-ish turning thirty, for crying out loud? But the Dandys still put on a spirited and rollicking old-school rock show at Auckland’s Powerstation, even if the band is – cough cough – like yours truly entering their 50s now. 

The Warhols never quite ascended to the level of superstars like Pearl Jam or Green Day, but in some ways that’s their strength – they’ve felt free to play around in the murky area between hummable pop nuggets and sprawling psych-jams.

Live or on record, the Dandys have never quite settled on one signature sound – the impossibly catchy stuff of singles like “Bohemian Like You” and “We Used To Be Friends,” the yearning drone of druggy anthems like “You Were The Last High” and “Godless” or the clattering, Velvet Underground-adjacent jam of “I Love You.”  Most of their hits got a workout in Auckland as well as some twisty new gems from their latest album Rockmaker. (The bouncy single “Summer Of Hate” really captures that caught-in-purgatory 2024 vibe well.)

Courtney Taylor-Taylor still has the easy charm of the pin-up frontman, while terrific drummer Brent DeBoer, guitarist Peter Holmström and keyboardist / bass / singer Zia McCabe all clicked with an effortless precision. The show perhaps lacked that spark of unpredictability and closing without an encore sapped the buzz a bit, but at their best the Dandys cooked up a warm singalong atmosphere with the honed skill that comes with having done this for (gasp) 30 years now. 

The Dandys are always married in the popular imagination with another 1990s band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, whom they costarred with as the subjects of one of the great music documentaries, 2003’s DIG! The documentary follows the steady rise of the Dandys and the clattering collapse of the Massacre and its unhinged frontman Anton Newcombe, and it’s a classic time capsule of 1990s alternative rock struggles. 

Both bands started together and hung out a lot, but while the Dandys courted major labels and huge European crowds, Newcombe’s violent eruptions left that band a heap of “what ifs” in music history. 

Rewatching DIG! again, the music scene has changed so much in the more than 20 years since that documentary came out that it’s like watching an alternative universe – no TikTok, no viral fans, just the hard graft of touring, magazine profiles and both bands constantly worrying about “selling out” (a concept which, as Chuck Klosterman has pointed out, has pretty much ceased to exist these days when everyone’s selling themselves in bite-size video pieces). 

Long after DIG! the Warhols are still steadily driving along and while true music superstardom seems reserved for the Taylors and Beyonces of today, their big NZ/Aus tour is sold out and the Powerstation was jammed with appreciative fans Monday night. The Brian Jonestown Massacre are also still going, to this day, with their own fanbase, but carnage still follows them – they recently ended a New Zealand/Australian tour with a massive brawl on stage – the kind of thing that might have seemed edgy in your 20s but seems kinda sad when the band members are all well into middle age, frankly.

With DIG! it kind of felt like the story was that Anton Newcombe was some underappreciated genius and the Warhols too eager to court fame with their chill professionalism. (A failing of DIG! is we’re constantly told about Anton’s genius without really ever seeing evidence of it.) As I watch it now, Anton’s clear mental illness seems starker and his rambling music honestly lacks the snap and charm of the Dandys’ best tunes. Did the Dandys “sell out” and the Massacre get betrayed by corporate frauds? Or did the Dandys knuckle down and do the hard work and the Massacre succumb to its own pretensions? 

At one point in DIG!, Newcombe rants, “I’m here to destroy this fucked up system. I will do it. That’s why I got the job. I said let it be me; I said use my hands. I will use our strength. Let’s fuckin’ burn it to the ground!”

Meanwhile, the Dandys opened up their Auckland show with the still stinging little satire “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth,” where Courtney croons, “I never thought you’d be a junkie because heroin is so passe.” And so we all sang along about heroin. The Dandys gently mock the culture that spawned them, and somehow, they’ve survived. Does anyone care about selling out anymore?

Also in that same song: “You never thought you’d get addicted, just be cooler in an obvious way.” 

Part of us is all still about chasing cool, whether it’s the 1990s or the 2020s. Hey hey hey. 

Concert Review: Shonen Knife, Auckland, March 9, or, finding that happy place

Sometimes I like to listen to depressing songs. Sometimes I like to listen to happy songs.

I’ve got my Cure, my Joy Division, my Depeche Mode and Leonard Cohen. And they’re great when I’m in the mood for it. 

But other times I just want a happy sound – and there’s few more unabashedly happy bands out there in the world than Japan’s Shonen Knife. An all-girl band who marry Ramones thrash-pop with Beach Boys-style wistful harmonies all twisted together with a healthy dose of colourful Osaka charm, they’re a delight to see live. 

Heartbreak? Depression? Shonen Knife don’t do that. They sing about their favourite foods, cute animals, and the silly happy things that, in the end, kind of make this life worth living. And they do it while kicking out some thrashing power chords and rocking with incredible style, dressed in often matching colour-coordinated outfits that seem retro and futuristic at the same time. 

For a band that’s been going for more than 40 years, since the women were all teenagers, Shonen Knife still make a tremendous racket, headbanging hair and all. I’ve been a fan since they broke through a bit in the US in the alternative music-ruled 1990s with celebrity fans like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. They’ve carried on for a pile of albums, rarely altering their sunny, hook-filled sonic approach, and they’re all the better for that. 

Sisters Naoko and Atsuko Yamano have been the core of the band for most of its long run, with excellent drummer Risa Kawano on sticks these days. I’m old and creaky and so I’m kind of out of it with the hip pop music the youth listen to these days, but the appeal of a good cheery song is universal. 

The packed gig at Auckland’s underground Whammy Bar was probably the first time I’d been in a crowded basement club environment since the pre-pandemic era, and it was kind of invigorating to feel that sweaty, borderline uncomfortable shared experience, for a little while. 

Song titles like “Sweet Candy Power,” “Afternoon Tea” and “Banana Chips” give you the overall vibe of a Shonen Knife show. I can’t think of too many rock gigs I’ve been to where the audience is led in an energetic singalong chant of “Candy! Candy!” 

In a fun interview over at my day job RNZ, Naoko said, “I like to make people happy through music and if our audience or listeners get happy through our music, it’s my happiness too.”

Perhaps it’s just my mood in the very stressful vibe the 2020s have proven to have, but sharing a little happiness no longer seems as corny as it might have once to me. 

In a world as askew as this there’s something blissful about celebrating the little things, whether it’s a funny-looking jellyfish, wasabi being hot or one Shonen Knife song whose chorus is simply, “it’s a nice day!”

And you know what, sometimes it is. 

RIP Dick Waterman, keeper of the blues and my favourite columnist

Dick Waterman and Son House. All photos C the estate of Dick Waterman.

Mississippi blues writer, photographer and keeper of the flame Dick Waterman has died, one of the most extraordinary columnists I ever worked with in all my years in journalism. He was 88. 

Dick worked with some of the great blues legends starting in the ‘60s like Mississippi John Hurt and helped “rediscover” the forgotten Son House. He gave many struggling blue legends a second chance at a career and some sort of justice and support. He also photographed and hung out with pretty much EVERYBODY in the music scene at that time – Dylan, Jagger, Bonnie Raitt, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Janis Joplin. 

This picture of Mississippi John Hurt is probably my all-time favourite photo of a musician. C Dick Waterman.

There will and should be some fine obituaries taking in the whole sweep of his career. (Such as this excellent Washington Post one or this fine one in The New York Times) But when I met Dick Waterman, he was a columnist for the weekly newspaper I started working at in 1994, Oxford Town. It was the very beginning of my post-college career and I knew everything and nothing. The editor Chico had hired him and it was one of the best things he’d ever done. 

Almost every week Dick would drop these fascinating columns and stories about his life in music, tales of the legends and the forgotten geniuses, peppered with his gorgeous black and white photos. His columns were candid, backstage stories of what the blues legends were really like, or about his own life. When I was asked to take over as Oxford Town editor, visits from Dick were always a highlight.

Not that it was always smooth – Dick Waterman would turn in his column as late as humanly possible, shuffling into the old-school layout room close to midnight with a sheath of pages, while the pressmen could be heard loudly grumbling in the back. Once he discovered fax machine technology he pushed it even further. I attribute my skill at editing some copy very, very fast to some of his columns.

But he was unfailingly gentle and kind, with a bit of the “distracted professor” vibe around him. His photograph stash was an astonishing treasure trove that he had really just started to understand and promote in the 1990s. At one point he let us use an amazing photo of B.B. King on the back of an Oxford Town t-shirt. 

B.B. King, 1968. C Dick Waterman

I was just a rather self-important and fumbling 25-year-old editor dude at the start of my own weird journalism career but Dick was always good to me, and honestly, it took me a long time to fully understand what an amazing “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” type character he was in the ‘60s music world. I’ve never met Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, but hell, I knew Dick Waterman.  

When I left Oxford Town around 1997 to sow my wild oats back in California, Dick Waterman for some reason singled me out in his column in what is still, coming up on 30 years on, one of the kindest single acts of writing anyone has ever done for me. I include it not to brag, but to show what kind of man Dick Waterman was. 

He wrote about a Mississippi journalism award I won and said, “For the second year in a row, the Best General Interest Column was won by Oxford Town editor Nik Dirga. To appreciate this feat, you have to understand that he doesn’t even think about his own column until the rest of the paper has been completed. Nik has already announced that he is leaving in a few weeks and my sadness at his departure is mixed with the joy of having had the pleasure of working with him.”

“If Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world at the age of 21, I can only hope that I stick around to see what literary accolades will come forth for Nik Dirga. The best part of working with Nik is that he honestly does not know how talented he really is. I am over twice as old as Nik Dirga and he is the best editor with whom I have ever worked. 

“I wish him well in his travels and know that I will be reading his byline out there somewhere.”

He didn’t have to write all that about me, I know now, and I’m sure no Tiger Woods. But he did write it.

I wish you well in your own travels now, Dick, where ever they may take you. 

Mick Jagger. C Dick Waterman

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

It’s Oscar nominations day! Let us share in the joy of headlines that aren’t full of sadness, despair and such and celebrate what was actually a pretty good year for film. In my status as Radio New Zealand Official Academy Awards Correspondent (TM) here’s my take on the nominees and a look at a few New Zealand-linked possible winners:

Oscars 2024: Who will win, who got snubbed, and where NZ is in the mix

Meanwhile, I’ve also got a book review in this week’s issue of the New Zealand Listener magazine on Michel Faber‘s excellent new sprawling look at sound and our relationship to it, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us —

Review: Music-loving novelist Michel Faber on the psychology and sociology behind the sounds that keep us hooked (Paywall)

Year in Review: My top 10 pop culture moments of 2023

It’s a new year, a fresh start, a hope this year is maybe a bit less suck than the last one! I’ve complained enough about the year that was, so instead let me dive back to look at ten musical, cinematic or literary experiences that rocked my world in ’23: 

Go back to those Gold Soundz: I didn’t check out a lot of live music last year, but what I did was superb, led by the old guard showing they can still blast with the best of them. Indie icons Pavement put on a superb reunion show that left me humming the chorus to “Gold Soundz” for weeks, while I finally saw punk/post-punk legends The Damned for the first time on the back of their excellent Darkadelic album, and they melted my face. And my ears. I don’t quite know if my hearing has ever been the same.

Tonight, a blind woman and a monster came to town: I’ve been getting fewer ongoing monthly comic series these days, but one that’s on my must list is Ryan North’s brainy, witty take on Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, which is inventive science-bro action combined with the family heart that is key to the FF. It’s just darned fun, good comics that (so far) don’t have to be part of some sprawling pointless multi-comic company crossover to feel epic. It’s the best the Fantastic Four has been in ages. 

A long long time ago, when I was a little chick: I wrote a whole story recently asking local book lovers for their favourite New Zealand books they read and it reminded me of what an excellent year it was for NZ fiction, led by Eleanor Catton’s wickedly fun satire Birnam Wood and a two-fer by Catherine Chidgey – The Axeman’s Carnival, an amazing novel about a bird who becomes a social media celebrity, and the nearly as good teenage angst thriller Pet. Go team NZ!

You don’t know the first thing about piracy, do you?: There was a lot of great TV in ’23 – Reservation Dogs, that banger final Succession run, Poker Face, and I’m only just now discovering how fantastic The Bear is – but the one that sticks with me the most is Taika Waititi’s unexpected gay pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, which in its NZ-filmed second season truly transformed into a delightfully sweet romance mixed with swashbuckling pirate fun. A gem. 

And in an instant, I know I’ve made a terrible mistake: Daniel Clowes has been blowing my mind since long ago when I first stumbled on an issue of Eightball. His comics are less prolific than they once were but they’re worth the wait, with this year’s graphic novel Monica (art at top of post) quite possibly his masterpiece. A sweeping story of one woman’s exploration of her own mysterious past, it’s a technically dazzling (those colours!), assured and layered work that you’ll keep churning over in your head for days afterwards. It’s not a speed-read like many modern comics, but an experience that might just leave you feeling like the world is a slightly different place when you’re done. 

All my life I’m looking for the magic: Yeah, I know, physical media is dying, bla bla blah, but while I’m definitely a bit more choosy about what I buy in the age of internet abundance, I can’t pass up a good mix, and UK record label Cherry Red constantly is putting out fantastic CD box sets of eclectic punk rock from 1977-1982, power pop from the UK and US and ’80 synthpop that spans my mid-1970s to late-80s sweet spot. Sure, you can find a Spotify playlist, but I enjoy the curated, elegant physicality of these great boxes and the buried treasure they contain. Each set is hours and hours of gems waiting to be rediscovered and if I close my eyes I can almost pretend it’s coming from a cassette mix tape as I drive my old Volkswagen Rabbit around town. 

That monster … will never forgive us: This was the year comic-book movies stumbled and became just as cliched as the Will Smith and Tom Cruise action movies they replaced. But look across the seas to Japan and some of the year’s best blockbusters came from there, with kaiju instead of capes in the terrifically oddball Shin Ultraman and the bizarre Shin Kamen Rider and best of all, the monumental reimagining of the biggest beast of all with Godzilla: Minus One. There were decent superhero moments this year, but not one of them compared to the kinetic thrill of watching Ultraman or Godzilla stomp on buildings with fresh energy. 

Dear Allen, thanks for your letters. I was glad to hear from you: William S. Burroughs was not a decent man. A drug addict, the accidental murderer of his first wife, homosexual in a repressed era, his twisted, tormented writings are decidedly not for everyone. And yet, and yet. This year I found myself once again reading Burroughs’ books like The Soft Machine and turning to his nonfiction writings, particularly his collected letters, because the nonfiction shows so well what went into his far-out fiction. The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 fascinated me because it revealed the real person behind the sneering, sinister king of debauchery Burroughs became. It’s extraordinary to read how human and lonely Burroughs is in these letters, wrestling with unrequited love, addiction and ‘normal’ society, and his determination to find new shadowlands behind the world we live in. A stoic mask soon settled over his public face, but here we learn how he got there.

To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t just about horses, I lost interest: “Barbenheimer” might have been a marketing technique gone viral, but it was a heck of a lot of fun and rewarding to see two very good movies leading the summer box office and showing up the latest dusty, unnecessary franchise-extender Indiana Jones sequels and the like. Barbie was a huge hit, but it was also just subversive enough to charm all but the most cynical, while Oppenheimer was Christopher Nolan’s best movie yet led by a dazzling Cillian Murphy and sequences on the iMAX screen downtown that melted my face nearly as much as a Damned concert. 

The meat goes into the oven: This one’s a bit self-indulgent, but I had a very good year stretching my feature writing muscles this year in my paying gigs, between several book reviews for the NZ Listener magazine and writing for Radio New Zealand about stuff I love like barbecue restaurants, fans of weird movies, used book fairs, film festivals and more. Turn your passions into words, folks, and let’s all have a fine 2024!

The Warmth Of The Sun: Songs To Survive 2023

Look, I’m sorry to harsh the pre-Christmas buzz, but 2023 was pretty lame, right?

My wife went through breast cancer surgery and treatment (she’s doing a lot better, thankfully). Other family members have been battling ill health and the upheaval of change. We lost our family beach house in a cyclone as the climate crisis hit NZ hard. Hell, even our beloved old cat friend Bowie died, and the world seemed to continue its headlong lurch into fascism, internet-fuelled conspiracy-land, ignorance, pointless culture wars and hate. Get in the bin, 2023, I’m done with you.

So, what do you do? For the last several pandemic-tainted years I’ve done up a playlist of songs to survive, because art helps. Music helps, good books help, great movies help. Drawing two issues of my comic book Amoeba Adventures  helped. I don’t think I could survive in a world without some kind of art. 

Back in the days of ornate mixtapes, you could sweat over the proper order of songs for ages, crafting the perfect vibe. This year, I just kind of threw it all in a blender, from Kiwi pop to thrash to old favourites to new artists I literally discovered a week ago. It’s all music. It’s all good, you know? 

Here’s nearly 3 hours, 40+ songs that helped me survive 2023. Shuffle away and listen to it in any order, or let it flow as it is. 

Wherever you are, have an excellent Christmas, and whoever or whatever you believe in, let’s all hope for a little more peace on earth and goodwill to all in the days to come.

Here’s my playlist Songs To Survive 2023:

Peter Gabriel, the man who disappeared … and then came back

I’m a big Peter Gabriel fan – in fact, I’m not sure there’s an artist I’ve ever been quite so obsessed with. From the dusky grandeur of his voice to his rhythmic explorations of world music, I dig him. 

So why was it that I felt so neutral over the promise of his releasing his new album i/o this year – his first proper solo album in a staggering 21 years? I imagined i/o would never live up to that wait. 

Gabriel has been releasing tracks from i/o all year long on social media and, weirdly, I had barely listened to them. It was very un-fanboy-ish. I wanted an album, not a drip-feed of social media content, and I figured I’d just wait for the far-off day that it actually came out and experience it as one big gulp. 

And yeah, I guess I felt a little miffed over him taking two decades to put out a new album of original material – fanboys are proprietary, after all.

In my younger days, I fell in love with his breakthrough smash So, and then dove into the wonders of his solo discography. I listened to So, Security and his several self-titled albums so many times I knew every drum crack, every soaring keyboard line. 

I dug Gabriel so much that I once proposed writing an entire 33 1/3 book about him (yeah, that didn’t happen) and I got interviewed on Radio New Zealand about my nerdy fandom a couple years back. But I also wrote a couple years back in Peter Gabriel, the man who disappeared about his mysterious, sometimes irritating silence on the pop music scene.

He certainly wasn’t a reclusive hermit and did produce a variety of other projects, but still, the last “real” solo album he did was Up, released in September 2002 … 21+ years ago. 

I mark my life by my Gabriel fandom. I picked up So in high school. I bought Us in 1992 as a college student. I got Up just a year or so before my son, who’s now in university, was born. I bought a copy of i/o on its release day (determinedly old-school with a CD, to slot in amongst my other Gabriel albums) and somehow, I’m in my early 50s listening to new music by the same man I’ve dug well over half my life. 

When Gabriel did the cliche of re-recording his old songs and cover tunes with a full orchestra a few years back, I quavered in my devotion. I found the cover albums lifeless and bland and worried i/o would end up equally exhausted-sounding. 

So after all that, I put i/o on, popped on my Bose headphones and settled in for the first new Peter Gabriel album since I was in my early 30s. 

Is it actually any good? 

Fortunately, I have to say, now that it’s finally here, i/o is a dense, rewarding listen, slotting comfortably in the sparse discography of post-So Gabriel. It’s less melancholy than those dreary orchestral albums were, although it’s still the contemplative music of a man who’s now 73 – there’s no ‘Sledgehammer Part 2’ here. 

Yet his voice is in remarkably good form, rich and full, still able to easily hit those high notes he could early in his career almost 50 (!) years ago. It threads the line between light and dark, yet a thread of optimism pulses throughout. That perfectionist Gabriel has even released it in multiple mixes so I’ll spend a while getting to to know it all. 

I will give i/o plenty of my time in the coming weeks – already I love the grand sweep of “Playing For Time,” the slightly spooky thundery “Pantopticom,” the gloriously upbeat title track, the bouncy good cheer of “Olive Tree.” 

And in the end i/o is shaping up as an album about time, its startlingly quick pace as you get older. Since Gabriel’s last album a lot of my other obsessions and music loves have left. Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Sinead, The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan just this week. I have to wonder if Gabriel didn’t mean for i/o to take nearly two decades to come out. But time gets away from you, doesn’t it? 

I give Gabriel time. A lot of time. But I’m already basking in that old long dormant fandom, digging the rise and fall of the sounds that make up i/o. I’m listening. It’s good to hear that voice again. 

Link-blogging away like it was 2009: What other people are writing

…I’m bogged down in a pre-Christmas pile of actual money for my words work, so content here is a little sparse lately, but that doesn’t mean other people I know aren’t writing away!

Way back in the Paleozoic era of blogging, we used to link to each other all the time. These days, with social media becoming a bigger dumpster era fire than ever, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to cut out the middle man again. Here’s what some friends and colleagues have been doing online lately that floats my boat:

* I’ve beavered away on the edges of music journalism for most of my career, and it’s grim times for it at the moment in New Zealand. My mate Chris Schulz has had a far bigger music writing career than I ever did, and he’s rightfully been on a bit of a crusade lately about how arts journalism is dying in Aotearoa. Case in point, when I moved here 15+ years ago there were still several magazines regularly covering NZ music and reviewing it. That’s all gone now. Can the internet save us, or something else? Schulz spoke to RNZ and others recently trying to draw attention to this problem and has been regularly banging the drum for music journalism on his own Substack – all well worth a read!

* I watched the first Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special on the weekend and it was a delightfully silly romp, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate back for a run after an unfortunately kind of dire period for Who. Jodie Whittaker being the first female Doctor should’ve been a groundbreaking moment, but her performance was swamped by a lot of truly terrible writing, insanely convoluted plots and overacting, to the point where I only watched about half her episodes. (I also never want to hear the phrase “fam” again.) I thought about writing about why even though I didn’t grow up with the Doctor, I’ve grown to dig him ever since wonderfully eccentric Christopher Eccleston came along as Doctor Number Nine in 2005. But I realised one of my best pals is not only the biggest Doctor Who fan I know, but quite possibly the biggest Doctor fan in all of New Zealand. Let friend Bob tell you 101 reasons why Doctor Who still rules after all these years. I’m hoping that the excellent-looking Ncuti Gatwa coming up as the Fifteenth (!) Doctor leads to a bold new era for the good doctor. 

* I’ve worked a bit with Asia Martusia King (NZ journalism is a small place, dontcha know) and just have to point out what an utterly terrific essay she wrote for The Spinoff last weekend about quite possibly the most macabre teenage job I’ve ever heard of. I won’t spoil it, but read the first sentence and tell me you don’t want to dive into the rest: “My first corpse was on a soft and honeysuckle Tuesday, a lovely afternoon to die. I did it for four bucks.”

* So New Zealand had an election about six weeks back, and it’s taken that long for coalition negotiations to settle on the new government, which looks to be the most conservative we’ve had in well over 20 years. You’ll find hot takes, angry takes, gloating takes all over the place about that, but I want to single out Susie Ferguson’s fantastic analysis piece at RNZ that zooms in on one Auckland electorate won by a libertarian/centre right third-party candidate, and why it actually proved that America-style bible-thumping theocratic conservatism has yet to really work in New Zealand (which, IMHO, is a very good thing). Go read: The meaning of Tāmaki – the most fascinating election race

Totally metal: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the riff

Growing up, I would never have called myself a metal fan, but I was surrounded by it, and it turns out years later it seeped into my bloodstream, lurking, coated in hair spray and spandex. 

I’m no metalhead, but music of my youth I once dismissed as crude and tacky I frequently find myself head-banging away to, here in the distant future where what’s cool and uncool seems to matter a lot less than it once did. 

I liked either the most amiable of ‘80s pop – Men At Work, Billy Joel, Howard Jones – or proto-goth cool like Depeche Mode, The Cure and Peter Murphy. But you could not grow up in a high school in the 1980s and not be constantly exposed to the metal* – whether it was MTV, the radio, or all the “stoner” kids with Metallica logos sewn on the back of their jean jackets. 

(*Yeah, there’s a million subsets of “heavy metal” from the opaque drone of sunn O))) to the cheery pop of Van Halen, but when I say “metal” here I’m mostly talking about the mainstream hair metal that dominated the day-glo mid-80s.) 

There was no internet, so the world was smaller and a million skittering sub-subcultures didn’t yet exist. Much of the same culture washed over us all. You knew who Bon Jovi was unless you lived in Amish country. So I knew “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” “Welcome To The Jungle,” “Here I Go Again,” because who didn’t? And yeah, the sexist, ridiculous video for Mötley Crüe’s “Girls Girls Girls” in constant rotation on MTV did kind of make me feel funny inside. 

Yet I imagined myself a broody intellectual and I’d never lose face by saying I was a fan of Guns ’N’ Roses or anything like that. I would pretend that I didn’t actually think that first chugging guitar line in Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name” was kind of cool. 

Metal scared me, slightly, because I was told it was scary. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, hulking and slathered in makeup, smashing down the door and yelling “We’re Not Gonna Take It”; Quiet Riot showing a man wrapped in a straitjacket and horrifying mask on the cover of the .45 single for “Cum On Feel The Noize.”

I remember someone smuggling a copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon album into a church youth group, of all places, and woo boy it was terrifying looking, Ozzy all kitted out like an Oliver Reed werewolf and demonic light surrounding him. 

The kids who really, really liked Def Leppard and Poison and Anthrax were the jocks or the stoners, the outcasts or the bullies, and I was somewhere in-between hiding in the shadows with the theatre kids. 

Fast-forward 30+ years or so, though, and I appreciate the glittery excess of all that uncool ‘80s metal more than I ever thought I would. It’s comic-book soundtrack music, with zero self-consciousness. In the recent strange years of pandemics and fascism and the internet imploding, a guy with a bit of makeup and poofy hair yelling about Satan is actually kind of comforting, a familiar old frenemy rather than the apocalypse in leather boots. It’s a chance to exhale and escape, from a real world that’s way madder than any satanic panic. 

So I sometimes crank up Ozzy’s “Crazy Train,” GnR’s “Paradise City,” the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” and I feel the years slip away and get what all the fuss was about. It’s not deep – it doesn’t get the same woozy feelings in me that the same era’s New Order’s “Age Of Consent” or Erasure’s “Victim Of Love” do, but it slices into some little primal part of my ears and makes me smile, a little. I was afraid of these guys? They’re just having a laugh with their guitars and their poses, eh? 

While I’ll always love my Depeche and Coltrane and Bob Dylan and Flying Nun and all the other music I’ve fallen in love with over the years, I get now why you might wear a Metallica logo on your jean jacket. 

The Beatles: ‘Now And Then’ and in the end, the love you make

The other day I woke up, fell out of bed, and listened to a new Beatles song. 

“Now And Then” is being billed as the “last Beatles song,” and with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr now well into their 80s, it probably is the final time we can say that. Resurrected from John Lennon’s demos circa 1977 and mixed with some George Harrison 1990s guitar thanks to some very fancy technology, here we have all four Beatles, two long gone, together again in a Frankenstein miracle of technology and persistence.

But is it any good? We live in a world of boundless hype and unnecessary reboots, constantly perched on the edge of expected disappointment, and yet, “Now And Then” is a beautiful, fragile thing that I can’t quite get out of my head. 

Of course, it’s the Beatles, so the song has been swamped with an avalanche of merchandise, fiery hot takes and analyses just like this one. All the to-do threatens to overwhelm what is at its heart a delicate, sweet little song. 

Like two other Lennon demos “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love” that were revived for the 1995 Beatles Anthology series, it’s Lennon during his domestic hiatus, writing simple, basic lyrics about home and happiness with none of the surrealist whimsy or angry edge that marked his top Beatles works. So it’s flimsy, sure.

And yet, and yet, I can’t listen to it without feeling a swell of emotion. The Beatles ultimately have always made me happy whether it’s the spunky energy of “Love Me Do” or the psychedelic swirl of “I Am The Walrus.” A Beatles song makes me glad to be here in this world, whether it’s a pop song, a sad song or an awfully sappy song (sorry, “Let It Be.”) 

The lonesome piano chords that kick off “Now And Then” give the song an elegiac feel, and Lennon’s ghostly voice is mournfully hushed. It could be a dirge, and I’m sure some folks see it that way, but I look at it as a fond farewell. 

To hear Paul’s 81-year-old voice kicking in to harmonise with Lennon, dead now for more years than he was alive, is to feel the endless pull of time itself. 

Sir Peter Jackson’s video for the song is faintly ridiculous at first, with macabre mixing of young John and George into footage of aged Paul and Ringo, old and young Beatles capering about, but it’s also a little charming and silly, as Beatlemania always was.

 “And if I make it through,” John sings, and you know, in the end, we all hope for that, don’t we? We keep the people that leave us with us, as long as we’re here. Paul has made a love letter to the past, out of the fragments of his dead friends’ leavings, and sure, it’s big business and all, but it’s also the Beatles. I cannot surrender my love of the Beatles to the binary “like/dislike” button and algorithm. I’m simply grateful for whatever we get. 

At the end of Jackson’s video we see those young, gorgeous Beatles on stage taking a bow, then slowly fading from the scene. You’ve got to have a hard heart not to feel something then. One day far too soon for any of us, there will be no more Beatles.

“Now And Then” is raw sentiment and lacking the mad fire of invention that made the Beatles change the world, true, but I kind of love it all the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah.