Anyone who’s grown up in Lower Hutt, especially around the council chambers will be familiar with Plishke’s austere, post-holocaustal modernity. The Bunker style Library, which resembles an ice cream factory or an enormous fridge; the soul-less clock towered council chambers; the stark, mater-of-fact-ness of the town hall and the Agricultural
Reading Stead’s new collection, I was reminded of another of his poems: Sonnet. Today the water is so still, so clear, looking down through the window of my mask it seemed for a moment possible to fall through fifteen, twenty feet of crystal nothing in which the small fish, fork-tailed
This article will be published shortly in the Groove guide. To promote the tour, i’m reeasing the full version here: Sweet Mother’s kitchen Picking up from The Comfort of Strangers Beth Orton’s new album Sugaring Season shows another bold departure, taking traditional folk instrumentation into some unfamiliar territory, shifting from
The evening kicked off with Aucklander Lydia Cole. Her diminutive frame and barely there song constructs created a package that centred on the rejected world of a 22 year old girl drowning in the backwash from the sea of love. However, her voice showed a restrained power and professionalism beyond
Hey Hey, My My, My Neil Young will never die! Yeah, I know it’s a cliché’ but still pretty true. And this is a night for cliché’s. Wearing scruffy jeans, an Aboriginal flag T-shirt and a work shirt, he kicks off with God Defend New Zealand (Neil always starts with
freshthinking 