UHP flashback

Upper Hutt Posse acapella rapping, with DLT doing the beatbox... guessing this is about 1988...

Joint Force talk 95

Joint Force were DLT, Otis, Slave and Mo Delay (Angus McNaughton). This interview is from the NZ music show Frenzy, which screened 11 May 1995, on TV3. Directed by Ross Cunningham, animation by John Pain, voiceover by Kate Stalker.

Sadly, all of Joint Force's releases are currently out of circulation. These days you can catch Slave MCing with Fat Freddys Drop. Otis and his wife run the Lucky Taco food truck.

Joint Force (OJ, DLT, Slave). Photo: Greg Riwai

It's Cassette Store Day!

Some of my cassettes, incl several cassette-only releases

Cassette Store Day is today. It's a spin off from Record Store Day, tho the organisers of that have disassociated themselves from it. Odd. See From Vintage replay, it's cassette store day (Chicago Sun Times)

I bought a cassette deck last year off Trademe for the grand sum of $13, to digitise some old cassettes. That photo above is some of the cassettes I pulled out from storage, mainly mid 1990s releases. Roger Sings The Hits was a handful of Flying Nun bands (JPSE, SJF etc) covering other Nun acts, recorded in one day - September 19, 1991 - at Incubator Studio (now Studio 223) on Symond  St.

It was a limited run of 500 and only available for sale at Flying Nun's 10th anniversary gig at the Powerstation the following night, on Sept 20, 1991.

Then there's BFM's tape of Dad's Tips. And bottom left is a cool post punk Wellington outfit called Neoteric Tribesmen. Above them is the second album from Projector Mix (aka Mike Hodgson later in Pitch Black). That album is getting a digital reissue soon. Yay!

Here's one cassette I digitised, a wicked DLT remix of Teremoana's Four Women song.




Bonus: Letter from Radio With Pictures producer Peter Blake rejecting a video by The Neoteric Tribemen that featured use of the word 'shit'. Source: Up The Punks.

MC OJ and his boots

Photo: Audioculture/Murray Cammick

There's a great piece freshly posted up on Audioculture this week by Gareth Shute, documenting the rise of a couple of AK honky rap boys, MCOJ and Rhythm Slave, loads of awesome photos too. My old band Hallelujah Picassos played with them a bunch of times, they were/are great guys. We even played the Auckland Town Hall with them, on a weird ass bill headlined by Push Push. And I remember we did a support slot alongside Joint Force (OJ, Slave, DLT) for Supergroove, in a basketball stadium in Mt Maunganui. That was a funny gig.

OJ (from Audioculture): "Back then, people always said – you’re just two white middle-class honkies, you can’t rap, it won’t work. We were like – just watch. And that’s how we gained our place in the history of local rap music. There’s some fucking gems in our hip-hop careers, but we never expected that we’d blow up and be huge. We just wanted to have a lot of fun and we definitely succeeded in that respect.”

The post on Audioculture mentions a song we did, called MCOJ and his Boots. I dug it out and uploaded it to Youtube...





LISTEN: Hallelujah Picassos - MCOJ and his boots / Picasso core, both off the 1993 album Drinking With Judas. OJ and Slave did a song called Dr Martens, about OJ's boots, and we did one too. Listen and you will hear OJ's disgust with our song. Sorry, OJ. On the end, OJ and Slave do a lively acapella of Picasso core. Warning - some swears.

Joint Force (OJ, DLT, Slave). Photo: Greg Riwai

BDO 97 mini-documentary

Big Day Out 2014 tickets went on sale on Monday, they sold 10,000 early bird tickets in 45 minutes, then released a further 10,000. Obviously the lineup has attracted some solid interest, which is great news for the promoters. They got the mix of acts right for their audience.

Flashback to late 1996... The local organisers for the Big Day Out announced that the 1997 BDO may well be the last one in Auckland. This may or may not have been done to help sell tickets, but of course, the BDO did came back.

I decided to make a documentary on the so-called 'last' BDO, and borrowed a video camera from work. I shot lots of local bands - Fontanelle (w Mikey Havoc), DLT and the True School (Che Fu, Danny D, Asterix, Slave), Tall Dwarfs, Thorazine Shuffle, Bailter Space etc.

Watch out for BFM folks Gemma Gracewood, Nick D'Angelo, and the voices of Hugh Sundae and Bob Kerrigan, amongst others. And lots of loose unit punters.

Director/camera/editor: Peter McLennan, camera/interviewer: Adrianne Rikihana, radio broadcasts from the BDO courtesy of BFM.