Music interviews, live performances, behind the scenes, industry issues, profiles, back catalogue, undiscovered, greatest hits, tall tales and true... all from a New Zealand/Aotearoa perspective.
12:19 The Beatles New Zealand Tour 1964 Part 1: The Arrival (9′57″)
This five-part series recalls the times, the people and the music when The Beatles came to New Zealand.
The Beatles New Zealand Tour 1964 is presented by Wayne Mowat, produced by Trevor Reekie and engineered by Jeremy Ansell for Radio New Zealand National.
Archival audio courtesy of Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero.
The Beatles arrive in Wellington on 21 June 1964. 7000 fans turn up at the airport. Ringo names his gift Tiki "Fred". The group make their famous appearance of the balcony of the St George Hotel. Beatlemania erupts.
12:27 Local teen Jawsh 685 is #1 on the iTunes chart (13’28”)
Local teen producer Jawsh 685 speaks to Music 101's Charlotte Ryan about the success of his song 'Laxed (Siren Beat)' and his collaboration with global superstar Jason Derulo.
Jawsh 685 is 17-year-old musician and producer Joshua Stylah from Auckland's Manurewa. You've probably heard his island-infused dance track ‘Laxed (Siren Beat)’, even though you might not know it.
The track's been used in over 30 million TikTok creations in just a few weeks. Celebrities such as Lizzo, Jimmy Fallon and Jessica Alba have all posted their own take on the dance challenge that features the track.
And pop superstar Jason Derulo used the beat on his worldwide smash 'Savage Love', which is currently at the top of the global iTunes chart.
Manurewa High student Jawsh says he only started making music on his computer in February last year, and his chart-topping tune was made in his tiny bedroom.
"I loved it. I loved making it. I made it for people to blast it on sirens and have fun. I've never owned a siren myself."
'Sirens' are the loudspeakers that young music fans wire up to their bikes, before taking to the street and battling to be the loudest.
Initially Jawsh didn't think his music was good enough but just kept at it. His advice: "If you want to do it, just do it."
'Laxed (Siren Beat)' has now had more than 31 million views on YouTube.
Working with Jason Derulo
American pop superstar Jason Derulo initially got in touch with Joshua through his direct messages.
"I was boxing at the time, I was training outside. I picked up my phone, ran inside, dried up and started talking to him. I was like 'Oh my, is it? Oh my'."
The pair had a few conversations about Derulo using his tune, but it didn't lead anywhere. Eventually Joshua's new management team took over.
The two haven't spoken since the song took off, but Jawsh says, "We're on good terms."
'Like a dream'
Jawsh says his mum's proud of him and his siblings are more excited than him about the tune, but personally he's surprised the track's gone so big.
"I never thought I would do radio station interviews," he says.
"When it started getting bigger I didn't think much of it other than it's big and cool. But then we started having teams wanting to sign me up ... There were heaps of people messaging all at once ... like [record] labels.
"I thought they just wanted to say 'congratulations' and I was going to say 'thank you'," but the conversations always went further, leaving him confused.
Initially he left negotiations up to his mum because "[he] didn't know what [he] was doing," but now he's with a management company.
Jawsh doesn't like calling his fans 'fans', but "I like to call them supporters, family".
"It's like a dream. I never saw this coming. I was just doing my usual thing - school, come home, make beats ... and now I'm taking interviews."
Jawsh began playing the guitar in 2008, then moved to the piano and eventually the "digital side of things".
He grew up in South Auckland and is of Samoan-Cook Island descent.
"I haven't been to the islands, I haven't even left New Zealand yet. I've only been to Wellington."
Jawsh thought his music would be big in the islands, like Brisbane-based YouTube star DJ Noiz, because it has "Polynesian vibes" including heavy use of a sax sound.
His plan for this year includes finishing school and "looking forward to ball because it is going to be my first and my last probably".
He hopes to turn his passion for music into a career.
12:46 The Sampler: Neil Young
Nick takes a look at a lost album by the music legend.
Homegrown by Neil Young
In the early 70s, Neil Young helped define the singer-songwriter genre in albums like After The Goldrush and Harvest, spinning his existential pain into songs that seemed to speak to the mood of a generation. But even Neil seemed aware of the dangers of over-sharing, and when this bunch of songs popped out of him in 1974 he hid the tapes away in a bottom drawer where they have pretty much remained as a rumour more than an album, until now.
The sound is a bit like that of his mega-successful and much-loved Harvest from a couple of years earlier. But perhaps this one really ought to have been called Bitter Harvest if not Total Crop Failure. Written and recorded during the breakup of his relationship with Carrie Snodgrass, the mother of his eldest son, it is mostly a set of anguished meditations on failure and regret, which belie the mellow, woodsy sound.
The story goes that Young intended this collection as a follow-up to the brilliantly gloomy On The Beach, but was talked into releasing the previously-shelved Tonight’s The Night instead. The fact that Tonight’s The Night - a drunken wake for a couple of drug casualties - was considered the more accessible option shows how far down the dark path Young was at the time. But I think his advisors were right. Tonight’s The Night, for all its bleakness, had a sense of ragged revelry about it. This, by comparison, just sounds piteous.
Not all of these songs have been entirely unheard these past four-and-a-bit decades. In fact, five of the twelve turned up on subsequent Young records.
As with all of Young’s music from this period, drugs seem to be both a subject and a part of the creative process. A song called ‘We Don’t Smoke It’ has all the lassitude of a stoned blues jam.
And then there’s ‘Florida’, a stoned-sounding monologue by Neil to the excruciating accompaniment of a finger on the edge of a wine glass.
If these tracks are the epitome of self-indulgence, there are at least a couple of previously unheard gems.‘White Lines’ is a good song played simply, with the Band’s Robbie Robertson weaving lovely lead lines around Young’s vocal.
And there’s ‘Vacancy’, a song that almost picks itself up and rocks, and wouldn’t have been at all out of place on Tonight’s The Night.
Having read about this album for years - it is afforded a kind of white whale status in Shakey, Jimmy McDonough’s brilliant biography of Young - I’m glad I’ve finally got to hear it. Yet I’m equally glad I was spared it at the time. Life’s dramas are the stock in trade of the singer-songwriter, but we don’t always need to hear every detail. And even Neil Young seems to have known that.
13:13 RIP Aaron Tokona (37’17”)
Music 101 pay tribute to the late musician, with excerpts from his interviews with Kim Hill and Sam Wicks, Shihad's Tom Larkin reflecting on his legacy, and some of the many pieces of music Aaron was involved in making.
13:46 The Sampler: Phoebe Bridgers
Nick Bollinger reviews the second full-length from the LA musician - Punisher.
Listeners with long memories will recall the scorn that was sometimes heaped on that species known as the singer-songwriter. Lester Bangs, the iconoclastic critic, wrote a piece memorably entitled James Taylor Marked For Death, in which he imagined “breaking off a bottle of Ripple” (“he deserves no better”, he said) “and twisting it into his guts until he expires in a spasm of adenoidal poesy.” Well, Lester is long dead, James Taylor is still with us, and the singer-songwriter species is now into its third or even fourth generation.
Phoebe Bridgers is a 25-year-old Californian and a singer-songwriter by any definition. Since her 2017 debut album Stranger In The Alps, she’s attracted increasing attention, not just for the quality of her writing but also her strong co-operative role in the current singer-songwriter community. Since making Stranger she’s formed, recorded and toured with Boygenius, a kind of singer-songwriter supergroup that also includes Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, and she’s also emerged as a producer, having taken charge of the debut of fellow Californian, Christian Lee Hutson, which I’ll come back to in a little while. But these songs are from Bridgers’ second album of her own, Punisher, which came out late last month. In many ways it is classic singer-songwriter stuff: a measured, melodic voice and the type of confessional lyrics that have always typified the genre. But if it all sounds very nice on the surface - and that niceness was one of the things that always bugged Lester Bangs - you don’t have to dig very deep into this record to find that maybe things aren’t quite so nice after all.
Not everything is as extreme as the distressed sound of the guitar on the opening ‘Garden Song’, but along with the hint in that lyric that she might have knocked off a skinhead and buried him in the garden, it sets the tone for the record as a whole. Where Stranger In The Alps defaulted to a more traditional folkie sound, this new album favours a murkier palette, and it suits a bunch of songs that present some murky narratives. There’s the title track, ‘Punisher’. A punisher, in Bridgers-speak, is the kind of person who talks at you until your eyes glaze over, and aware that she might be biting the hand that feeds her, she’s admitted that this describes her feelings towards a certain kind of fan. Yet in the song, she makes herself the punisher, alternately obsessing over a hero she feels as though she knows, and worrying that she has over-shared.
But if Bridgers ultimately shows her own vulnerability here, putting herself in the fan’s shoes, she’s also got a dark-bordering-on-nasty sense of humour that she gives rein to in more than one of these songs; like the verse in ‘Moon Song’, in which she sings ‘We hate Tears In Heaven/But its sad his baby died’ or the hospital joke in the opening verse of the one she calls ‘Halloween’.
There’s a voice in songs like these that she almost seems to be using against herself, as if she knows that by making herself less likeable the songs will ultimately have more to say. And it’s one of the things that distinguishes Bridgers from less daring artists in this overflowing genre.
Being miserable on the road is a subject that has fuelled songs and even whole albums by singer-songwriters before, but when Bridgers takes it on - in ‘Kyoto’, a song filled with the specific details of a Japanese tour - you get the sense that, at least on one level, she’s just being a brat and she knows it.
So Phoebe Bridgers, as well as being a characterful singer, a crafter of memorable tunes and unusual sounds, and a lyric writer with a sharp pen, has a certain awareness of privilege, which is something most singer-songwriters I can think of have barely acknowledged, let alone sung about. It was the sense of privilege, of being wealthy, white and wimpy, that got Lester Bangs so worked up about James Taylor.
I don’t know if Bangs would have liked Bridgers’ music any more than he liked James’s; for all its dark hues it’s still mostly folky and acoustic-based. But had they ever had the chance to meet, she would have given him a good run for his money when it comes to a violent imagination and a caustic wit, and beaten him hands down when it came to self-critique.
14:04 LIVE at Glastonbury
The legendary festival would normally be taking place this weekend, so to mark the occasion we're playing some live cuts from years past, including Bowie, Blur, R.E.M. and more.
14:31 Texas trio Khruangbin on their new album Mordechai (14′35″)
Charlotte speaks with Texas trio Khruangbin about the global influences on their new album Mordechai.
15:17 Rory Noble on working with Kanye, and his new solo single (11′ 00″)
Charlotte meets the producer from Palmerston North who has worked for Kanye West, and just released a debut single under his own name.
15:41 Introducing: RIPSHIP (5′ 24″)
Auckland psychedelic sci-fi duo RipShip introduce the song 'Lube The Cube' from their debut EP, Greebles.
16:04 The Mixtape: Māni Dunlop (55′21″)
Midday Report presenter and RNZ’s Māori News Director Māni Dunlop flexes her music selection skills in this week's Mixtape. She speaks with Yadana Saw.
Songs played on this show:
12-1 p.m.
The Chills - Heavenly Pop Hit
The Beatles - You Can't Do That
Jawsh 685 - Laxed (Siren Beat)
Sisters Underground - In The Neighbourhood
Neil Young - Try, Mexico, Love Is A Rose, We Don't Smoke It, Florida, White Line, Vacancy
1-2 p.m.
Aaron Tokona - Waiata
Weta - Calling On
Shihad - Pacifier
A Hori Buzz - Glitter In The Gutter
Bongmaster Inc - Brothers and Sisters
Phoebe Bridgers - Garden Song, Kyoto, Punisher, Halloween, Savior Complex
Primal Scream - Movin On Up
2-3 p.m.
Live at Glastonbury:
David Bowie - Golden Years
Grant Lee Buffalo - Fuzzy
R.E.M. - Man On The Moon
Blur - Girls & Boys
Khruangbin - So We Won't Forget, Pelota, Time (You & I)
Bob Dylan - My Own Version Of You
SAULT - Wild Fires
Anderson Pak - Lockdown
3-4 p.m.
The Avalanches - We Will Always Love You (ft Blood Orange)
Keleketla!, Coldcut, Tony Allen - International Love Affair
Leisure - Slipping Away
Rory Noble - Team
Paul Weller - More
Pulp - Babies
RIPSHIP - Lube The Cube
The Nerves - Hanging On The Telephone
Angel Olsen - New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)
Jorja Smith - Rose Rouge
L.A.G.O. feat Sascha Kilgour - E Tama
4-5 p.m.
Fugees - Killing Me Softly
Jennifer Lara - I'm In Love
Erykah Badu - Didn't Cha Know
Ream Daranoi - Fai Yen
Nesian Mystik - Brothaz
Gwen McCrae - Keep the Fire Burning
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/music101/20200627