– and in fact it was just two days later I got the fateful phone call. The
problem sewer is a wrinkle the new owner is probably unaware of as yet, but
I guess if you’ve got $1.29m to spend on a property, another $10,000
to upgrade the sewers isn’t going to make a lot of difference.
I’m taking for granted that my gently collapsing vintage weatherboard
is going to be demolished as soon as the settlement period has elapsed. I
should make the effort to watch it go down if I can find out precisely when
that might be (it’ll only take a few minutes) – and presuming
that it’s not demolished too early in the day.
You’ve probably noticed that builders love the early part of the day.
Next door to my shit-stirring neighbours over the back fence, a new house
is going up. It once belonged to ‘Giovanni’ whom I never met,
but whose long-term smoker’s cough used to put the fear of God into
me every morning. That is until one day the coughing stopped and the wreckers
arrived and there was a big hole where his bungalow-style house used to be.
Then the builders arrived, very early of course, and now a two-storey mansion
is being erected in its place.
And in the way of builders, they’ve all disappeared by lunchtime. I
sometimes wonder if there are there other building sites that they roll up
to after lunch, or do they just go to the TAB or to the pub for the rest of
the day?
I suppose there’s the same curiosity about musicians’ lives. ‘Musicians
stay up all night, therefore they wake up after lunchtime and carry on their
out-of-synch lives without a care’, is a pretty common assumption.
Well, that still might be true of younger musicians, but as I get older I
find that the pull of our planet’s diurnal rhythms becoming irresistible.
Anyway, I would describe myself as a ‘morning’ person by nature,
and by the time the evening comes around I’m nearly incapable of coherent
thought, let alone action, unless that action involves a remote control. Or
unless we’ve got a gig, at which time I can still rely on my body producing
enough adrenaline to clear my head and provide the requisite energy.
Stemming from my recent reunion with a variation on my first band, The Chants,
I’ve had cause to review my origins in the music biz. The Chants got
back together in Christchurch in 2007 with what could be described as the
original line-up, and in February of this year we played a couple of nights
at Al’s Bar in Christchurch with a slightly streamlined version of the
band featuring Tim Piper on guitar.
There was interest from a couple of quarters locally in putting a doco together
about The Chants, (or Chants R&B as they evolved into), and thankfully
it was decided the interested parties should pool their resources rather than
compete.
There’s been quite a lot of material unearthed in the process, mostly
in the form of photos, but also some much rarer film footage has resurfaced.
Aspiring Director, Fred Goldring, shot quite a bit of footage at and around
the Stagedoor, The Chants’ cellar residency for a couple of years, which
had become the centre of the Mod Universe in Christchurch.
Jeff Smith, one of the doco makers, sent me a low-res copy recently. There’s
no sound track and it’s unedited, raw footage, but nevertheless it makes
a fascinating document of the times. One thing you notice immediately is the
comparative formality of the times. I think I observed the same thing with
some of the old footage on the Small Faces and I suppose it follows, seeing
as we Antipodeans so closely followed the fashions from the UK.
Sometimes the energy for these kinds of enterprises diminishes once the subjects
scatter and return to their post-celebrity lives, but e-mails are still to-and-fro’ing
across the ‘dutch’ and there’s every chance (hah!) it will
be completed and shown on NZ TV at the very least – actually, if it’s
half good, I suspect it will get world-wide distribution on cable.
I was at a party the other night, where the Kiwis outnumbered the Aussie four
to one. Inevitably there was a discussion about accents. I’ve been living
here for quite some time and I rarely lapse into Kiwi-speak, but I do choose
to pronounce some words in the NZ (or BBC English) way. For instance, words
such as ‘chants’, I choose to pronounce as ‘chahnts’.
Same with ‘dance’ and ‘prance’. And ‘lather’.‘Castle’
I much prefer as ‘cahstle’. Consistent with this approach
I’ve elected to go with the local Doncahster, but I cannot come at
the local pronunciation of Reservoir as Reservore – although, if
I was inexplicably conversing with some local riff-raff of the tattooed and
pierced variety, I might swallow my snobbery and mutter ‘Reservore’.
For some reason, my elective exceptions to the local code are not pegged
as being a reversion to my Kiwi origins – rather the utterances of a genial
but otherwise inherently snobby bastard, temporarily, at least, from the genteel
suburb of Camberwell. And I wouldn’t have it any other way..