Precariously perched but unfazed. Photo by Stuart Spence. Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence. Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a p

Maths lecturers let loose? Photo by JustPhotos NZ PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING City Recital Hall, May 4 IT WAS PROMISED and it was delivered, close enough to being bathed in blue blue electric blue too. For before the band appeared we did hear a song (by a certain D. Bowie) suggesting we should sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Sit we did, at least until the end of the set when bassist/keyboardist/flugelhornist JFAbraham roused us from our recumbent p

Well, wouldn't you be if you're new here and seen what we've done? CLICK HERE TO LISTEN Cheer yourself up with more playlists like this by me - hundreds of them. Really! - by searching Spotify for yon Bernard Zuel.

MICHAEL WESTON KING Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore (Continental Song City) YOU COULD, JUST ABOUT, get through this album without crying, though death suffuses, grief can’t be removed and answers aren’t readily available. It doesn’t smash you over the head demanding you “feel”, it doesn’t make everything solemn, it doesn’t hide the pleasures of an ascending guitar pattern, a group singalong or a soulful sway, a moment of Roy Orbison with Everly Brothers even. And it does say “I

Close encounters of the first kind - when boy met man. Everyone had a go at, a thought of, a memory from Prince last week, the 10th anniversary of his death – a death sudden, brutal, shockingly without class for a man whose persona, if not his life after all, had always been about that sense of elevation above the norm. He wasn’t nothing and every word written last week – among them a very good piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by George Palathingal – showed that, in one way

Put on your red shoes and ...Public Service Broadcasting, with J. Wilgoose Esq second from left. Photo by Alex Lake. THIS FEELS A LITTLE BIT BAD, something that I rather than J Wilgoose Esq – who admittedly deployed it in a track by his band, but it was a few years ago now and isn’t there a statute of limitations on things like this being brought up by an interviewer? – should be a little embarrassed to bring up. But what the hell, like I said, he used it. For anyone who has

Head down, bottom up, business in front, party down the back. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN Graze on more playlists like this at Spotify simply by chewing on, or choosing, my name.

LET’S NOT MUCK ABOUT with something easy, some palate cleanser, for Ruby Fields – whose real name is Ruby Phillips, but that’s not important right now – but instead take something lifted directly from a song on her new album of lightly caffeinated, regularly punchy, rock-that-hasn’t-forgotten-how-to-do-pop which goes hard on community resilience and renewal, finding a purpose and holding together. Oh yes, and love. What’s it like falling hard for someone so that you would dec

Time is elastic for Ruth Hazleton. Photo by Dave Wayman A FEW DAYS out from a gig that still has the whiff of rule-breaking about it, how the hell are you Ruth Hazleton? “I’m well, bordering on a bit bonkers,” she says as her partner, Bill, another musician in the house, passes her a morning coffee. “But, you know, that’s not unusual.” Indeed, it would be unusual if Hazleton, a substantial figure in local music for decades now, wasn’t a bit bonkers. How does a musician, a fol

Pop's Cassandra?. Steve Gilpin as captured by Stuart Spence. Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence. Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by