winter 2002. standing on the second floor of the xchange. a double story wood board tavern with history. at the top of the parnell rise. a hard mid-winter breeze rattling the ancient sash window. white light. shattering. sharp shop window glass. red light exploding. everywhere. on slick wet seal. salon kingsadore. in the burning orange alcove. back beyond the bar. and stairway. the beat. car wheels on grafton bridge. guitar talking the deep peace of late summer. as the students. drawn in. by happy hour. and habit. creep closer.
late 2002. Cafe 223. Symonds Street. Matt’s foot pedal has expired. The group’s edgy for sound. They start feeling out a piece, drummerless, coming in one by one. The jazz often hinted at. Jazz in spirit not sound. Free. Instinctual. A side of the group as yet unrecorded.
mid 2003. sleevenote for Salon Kingsadore – Flaming Morrocone EP.
There’s two Aucklands. The Auckland that boxes you up, and breathes your air, and the Auckland where the grip loosens, where the city breaks its stride. The city of the harbour and the islands. Volcanic rock walls. Flowers in the grass. The winter domain. Breath burning off in the chill cool air. Rain slicked streets. Sharp metal glaze sheen. Back street dak dealers. Coffee jitters. Watching itself. Watching itself. Watching itself.
I hear the Salon Kingsadore in all those dangerous spaces. Intricate. Crystalline. Blue Note on the main trunk line. Newton Gully. Cafe high. Southern breeze. North Shore eyes. Halfway up the Parnell rise. Latin sway and whisky sour. Ingmar Bergman happy hour.
20 September 2003. The Odeon Lounge on the corner of Symonds Street, New North Rd, and Mount Eden Rd. The deep blue veins of Auckland. Traffic is light. The Warriors are in the prelims playing Canberra in Sydney tonight. A game we will win by a single drop goal in the last ten minutes. Salon Kingsadore have the stage (and a piece of the floor) in one of Auckland’s finest sounding venues – the funerary chapel, as was, of one of the city’s oldest funeral directors’. Their second show here after a packed night last December. Step outside breathe some air – skunk – a city drug - like E and P and all the burn faster fuelling the night. Grown in concrete and wire and second hand light in a new hinterland. I’m listening to Prussian marching music in a red sports car on the Tararua Plain. Watching the car lights cut up the night. The crowd’s thinner than last time. The set fatter. Ten songs full of wiggy psych wash, jazz, classic guitar pop, blues and salsa. Ski Jump. Baja 68. The Empire.
28 December 2003. The final mix of the album, titled simply, Salon Kingsadore, is in the deck. Nine songs. All instrumental. No words needed. An album of sweeping guitar vistas and neat tight urban moves both. A new kind of road music for a new millennium. For short trips. Billy’s Rhodes spilling out the car’s windows. Hayden’s bass taunt, economic, soulful. Matt’s marching band snap. John’s classic pop instincts. Marco spiraling out the gaps. Key track Harrison had December’s Staple gasping for adjectives. Those who heard them at the Grey Lynn Festival and the Pulp party in late November heard them in their ideal environment. Wide open spaces.
20 January 2004. Vinnie Caprice has the sound up loud. He’s excited. bFM are playing Ski Jump. A standout song from the album. He’s just crested K Road, stereo cranked, drum and handclap intro building, bass stepping up, now he’s rolling down New Zealand’s main street. An onshore Waitemata breeze cooling high summer and flapping the green leaves of the footpath trees like banners in the bright summer light. Maraca guitar talking, lotsa shimmer and shuffle, and spiraling melody, flaring like Antonio Carlos Jobim with a wah wah pedal.
07 March 2004. John quits the group.
Motel9 writes to the NZ Music Forum. “Last night I watched my friend’s band play at the Ambassador in Point Chevalier (Auckland)…After the band had set up, tuned their guitars and were just about to start, a bar person came up and told them they couldn’t play…it was time to close….No warning…No “you have only got X minutes left” No “sorry but could you just play a couple of songs…”I looked around and saw the pub packed with friends and acquaintances spending up over the bar . I saw the disrespectful way the band was being treated…and I got to thinking, dear readers…
Musicians have an obligation to a venue to be professional and to bring in the punters to spend money at the bar….but what about a venue’s obligations???? … Even when a band fulfils their part of the bargain, why is it that some pub owners and bar staff treat bands like shit?...Why do people in bands bend over and take it???? What is all this ‘I’m so grateful to have a gig’ bullshit??
Musicians…Wake Up…You make money for these pubs…would anyone (except the overflow from the public lounge) actually go and drink at the Kings Arms (for example) if there were never any bands playing there??? Come on…let’s face it…the place is actually a shithole (not the people…the place...). I have been told that both the Kings Arms and the Dogs Bollix are now charging bands for the use of the P.A. system….Why hasn’t there been an uproar from musicians?? Why hasn’t anyone told them to get fucked??...Are you going to pay a pub just so you can get all your mates in there drinking their overpriced piss??? Think about who gets paid during a show…The pub owner(s) through alcohol sales…the bar staff…the sound engineers….who is last in the payment food chain?......The musicians….Why are people even there in the first place???..... The musicians…Who are a bunch of mugs???....... yep…The musicians…..WHY???I fear it’s some kind of “paying your dues “mentality on the part of the musicians. They think that although things are a bit shitty now, soon they’re gonna ‘make it’….Bollocks. This is all part of the Capitalist illusion perpetuated by the media….”There’s room on top for you.. You’ve just got to work hard and be competitive…you’re gonna be a star”… Sorry folks, but this is exactly the mentalitythat keeps the working class divided and in a state of suspended animation. You may have a really cool band and a hip haircut, But this means you too…Music is not about getting your video on C4, it’s not about getting a ‘really good’ review in Real Groovy, it’s not about competing with other bands, and it’s definitely not about taking shit from sleazy bars/ barmen (Ambassador) that you are bringing in the dollars for….It’s about human communication…the sooner we all realise this the better it will be for everyone…Peace.P.S. I’d like to suggest that all venues treating bands like shit and/or charging bands for the use of their P.A.s are blacklisted by musicians until they change their attitude/ policy.
12 March 2004. Response from SydB.
“Motel9 is not telling the whole truth. The show at The Ambassador was a party not a public show so there never was payment involved. The woman in charge apologised more than once to the group (who did in the end play) for which she was subjected to abuse and threatening behaviour from Howell, despite objections from some band members. The incident was regretted,and Howell has since left the group (who will carry on.) The band don’t condone that treatment of women. The rest of the email is drivel. Communication (something Howell is not good at) is about playing live and getting a group’s work out to listeners. It has nothing to do with class. Howell is himself a former Otago Boys High student (a top Dunedin school) and a university graduate who teaches English in the city. A middle class professional in other words. Do not judge the group from his perspective. They have an excellent debut album about to come out and welcome anyone who supports them.
29 April 2004. It’s starting to come – the opinion, the play – Andy Welch’s richly coloured Kiwiana video of Romanced on C4’s Homegrown. The strongest music show on TV. Clarke Gayford scatting out. “Wiggy psych wash, jazz, classic guitar pop, blues, and salsa.” Good notices in Rip It Up, Metro, New Zealand Musician, Sunday Star Times, and The New Zealand Herald. The Greg Hodgson cover - two intersecting strings of shrinking coloured beads on black. No picture of the group to distract. Just Salon Kingsadore and the songs in small white letters – simple, but there’s an otherworldliness about it. Like the music. I’d seen Marco every week the previous year with a new album, often a new sound, in his hand. American jazz, latin, Italian soundtracks, and its all in there in the songs. Sometimes just a phrase, sometimes, the whole conversation. The group’s slimmed to a quartet now John has gone. They’ve been writing a new set (four songs so far) and the sound is freer. There’s more of Marco’s Latin jazz air. The pulse beat rhythm behind. The best bits. Matt leaves the drumstool in May for his OE in London. So there’ll be a new drummer. Then those long delayed live shows.
27 July 2004. Excited. A little drunk. Salon Kingsadore are playing their first show after a period of reconstruction. It’s a low key outing for new drummer Chris Dawson, and Marco, Billy, and Hayden in the top bar of The Rising Sun Tavern on K Rd. A bar with lots of rock history. Tonight it’s hosting the first birthday party for Staple magazine. The best of the current crop of “street” magazines.
We get there just on nine and find SK in the shadows out to the side of the stage about to go on. The young twenties crowds’ are hanging back by the bar in a subdued knot unable it seems to shake the chill wet winter. No such hesitation for the group. They’re straight into Acapulco Gold, a wiry angular strummer. Then some new songs and four tracks from the album – Faces and Places, Baja 68, Romanced, and The Lost Chord. The sound’s hard and robust. A huge change from the fragile orchestra of old. The psychedelic edge is still there only now its being scrubbed out like a Latin David Kilgour playing Point That Thing. Stunning.
They look like a gang like all great groups. Only this lot are riding a huge wave of impatient sound. Put some music on, some wag yells, when they finish. How could they have missed that? Two nights later they’ll play Eden’s up the road to an amped crowd, and get an encore.
3 September 2004. They build and build and build. A packed and wired Rakinos climbing higher and higher with them, peaking on a gilded plateau of scorching Latin guitar, garage soul organ, melodic driving bass, and crisp sparse beat. There’s been a line out the door half the night the room’s so jammed. The bouncer letting them in only as someone leaves. They’re there as much as habit as for the group the swarming chattering mass crammed into the bar and its balcony high over High Street stepping up the crystal staircase. E and P and the thin white line. The air crackling.
December 2004. Eastern Europe. Mid-winter. No one listening. Far as we can see. And Stu and I see can everything. From outside a bar off Planet Hollywood. Big pints. A slick coating of rain on the square. The new Salon Kingsadore. That nutty P bitch we quite like jacked this one up. The one who took opinion from departing punters at Rakinos. The band balked. Yak and I wondered. Two hundred bucks. Three hundred if you add in arch conservative Mayor John Banks asking for it to be turned down.
September 2006. Has it really been that long? Nearly two years?
late 2002. Cafe 223. Symonds Street. Matt’s foot pedal has expired. The group’s edgy for sound. They start feeling out a piece, drummerless, coming in one by one. The jazz often hinted at. Jazz in spirit not sound. Free. Instinctual. A side of the group as yet unrecorded.
mid 2003. sleevenote for Salon Kingsadore – Flaming Morrocone EP.
There’s two Aucklands. The Auckland that boxes you up, and breathes your air, and the Auckland where the grip loosens, where the city breaks its stride. The city of the harbour and the islands. Volcanic rock walls. Flowers in the grass. The winter domain. Breath burning off in the chill cool air. Rain slicked streets. Sharp metal glaze sheen. Back street dak dealers. Coffee jitters. Watching itself. Watching itself. Watching itself.
I hear the Salon Kingsadore in all those dangerous spaces. Intricate. Crystalline. Blue Note on the main trunk line. Newton Gully. Cafe high. Southern breeze. North Shore eyes. Halfway up the Parnell rise. Latin sway and whisky sour. Ingmar Bergman happy hour.
20 September 2003. The Odeon Lounge on the corner of Symonds Street, New North Rd, and Mount Eden Rd. The deep blue veins of Auckland. Traffic is light. The Warriors are in the prelims playing Canberra in Sydney tonight. A game we will win by a single drop goal in the last ten minutes. Salon Kingsadore have the stage (and a piece of the floor) in one of Auckland’s finest sounding venues – the funerary chapel, as was, of one of the city’s oldest funeral directors’. Their second show here after a packed night last December. Step outside breathe some air – skunk – a city drug - like E and P and all the burn faster fuelling the night. Grown in concrete and wire and second hand light in a new hinterland. I’m listening to Prussian marching music in a red sports car on the Tararua Plain. Watching the car lights cut up the night. The crowd’s thinner than last time. The set fatter. Ten songs full of wiggy psych wash, jazz, classic guitar pop, blues and salsa. Ski Jump. Baja 68. The Empire.
28 December 2003. The final mix of the album, titled simply, Salon Kingsadore, is in the deck. Nine songs. All instrumental. No words needed. An album of sweeping guitar vistas and neat tight urban moves both. A new kind of road music for a new millennium. For short trips. Billy’s Rhodes spilling out the car’s windows. Hayden’s bass taunt, economic, soulful. Matt’s marching band snap. John’s classic pop instincts. Marco spiraling out the gaps. Key track Harrison had December’s Staple gasping for adjectives. Those who heard them at the Grey Lynn Festival and the Pulp party in late November heard them in their ideal environment. Wide open spaces.
20 January 2004. Vinnie Caprice has the sound up loud. He’s excited. bFM are playing Ski Jump. A standout song from the album. He’s just crested K Road, stereo cranked, drum and handclap intro building, bass stepping up, now he’s rolling down New Zealand’s main street. An onshore Waitemata breeze cooling high summer and flapping the green leaves of the footpath trees like banners in the bright summer light. Maraca guitar talking, lotsa shimmer and shuffle, and spiraling melody, flaring like Antonio Carlos Jobim with a wah wah pedal.
07 March 2004. John quits the group.
Motel9 writes to the NZ Music Forum. “Last night I watched my friend’s band play at the Ambassador in Point Chevalier (Auckland)…After the band had set up, tuned their guitars and were just about to start, a bar person came up and told them they couldn’t play…it was time to close….No warning…No “you have only got X minutes left” No “sorry but could you just play a couple of songs…”I looked around and saw the pub packed with friends and acquaintances spending up over the bar . I saw the disrespectful way the band was being treated…and I got to thinking, dear readers…
Musicians have an obligation to a venue to be professional and to bring in the punters to spend money at the bar….but what about a venue’s obligations???? … Even when a band fulfils their part of the bargain, why is it that some pub owners and bar staff treat bands like shit?...Why do people in bands bend over and take it???? What is all this ‘I’m so grateful to have a gig’ bullshit??
Musicians…Wake Up…You make money for these pubs…would anyone (except the overflow from the public lounge) actually go and drink at the Kings Arms (for example) if there were never any bands playing there??? Come on…let’s face it…the place is actually a shithole (not the people…the place...). I have been told that both the Kings Arms and the Dogs Bollix are now charging bands for the use of the P.A. system….Why hasn’t there been an uproar from musicians?? Why hasn’t anyone told them to get fucked??...Are you going to pay a pub just so you can get all your mates in there drinking their overpriced piss??? Think about who gets paid during a show…The pub owner(s) through alcohol sales…the bar staff…the sound engineers….who is last in the payment food chain?......The musicians….Why are people even there in the first place???..... The musicians…Who are a bunch of mugs???....... yep…The musicians…..WHY???I fear it’s some kind of “paying your dues “mentality on the part of the musicians. They think that although things are a bit shitty now, soon they’re gonna ‘make it’….Bollocks. This is all part of the Capitalist illusion perpetuated by the media….”There’s room on top for you.. You’ve just got to work hard and be competitive…you’re gonna be a star”… Sorry folks, but this is exactly the mentalitythat keeps the working class divided and in a state of suspended animation. You may have a really cool band and a hip haircut, But this means you too…Music is not about getting your video on C4, it’s not about getting a ‘really good’ review in Real Groovy, it’s not about competing with other bands, and it’s definitely not about taking shit from sleazy bars/ barmen (Ambassador) that you are bringing in the dollars for….It’s about human communication…the sooner we all realise this the better it will be for everyone…Peace.P.S. I’d like to suggest that all venues treating bands like shit and/or charging bands for the use of their P.A.s are blacklisted by musicians until they change their attitude/ policy.
12 March 2004. Response from SydB.
“Motel9 is not telling the whole truth. The show at The Ambassador was a party not a public show so there never was payment involved. The woman in charge apologised more than once to the group (who did in the end play) for which she was subjected to abuse and threatening behaviour from Howell, despite objections from some band members. The incident was regretted,and Howell has since left the group (who will carry on.) The band don’t condone that treatment of women. The rest of the email is drivel. Communication (something Howell is not good at) is about playing live and getting a group’s work out to listeners. It has nothing to do with class. Howell is himself a former Otago Boys High student (a top Dunedin school) and a university graduate who teaches English in the city. A middle class professional in other words. Do not judge the group from his perspective. They have an excellent debut album about to come out and welcome anyone who supports them.
29 April 2004. It’s starting to come – the opinion, the play – Andy Welch’s richly coloured Kiwiana video of Romanced on C4’s Homegrown. The strongest music show on TV. Clarke Gayford scatting out. “Wiggy psych wash, jazz, classic guitar pop, blues, and salsa.” Good notices in Rip It Up, Metro, New Zealand Musician, Sunday Star Times, and The New Zealand Herald. The Greg Hodgson cover - two intersecting strings of shrinking coloured beads on black. No picture of the group to distract. Just Salon Kingsadore and the songs in small white letters – simple, but there’s an otherworldliness about it. Like the music. I’d seen Marco every week the previous year with a new album, often a new sound, in his hand. American jazz, latin, Italian soundtracks, and its all in there in the songs. Sometimes just a phrase, sometimes, the whole conversation. The group’s slimmed to a quartet now John has gone. They’ve been writing a new set (four songs so far) and the sound is freer. There’s more of Marco’s Latin jazz air. The pulse beat rhythm behind. The best bits. Matt leaves the drumstool in May for his OE in London. So there’ll be a new drummer. Then those long delayed live shows.
27 July 2004. Excited. A little drunk. Salon Kingsadore are playing their first show after a period of reconstruction. It’s a low key outing for new drummer Chris Dawson, and Marco, Billy, and Hayden in the top bar of The Rising Sun Tavern on K Rd. A bar with lots of rock history. Tonight it’s hosting the first birthday party for Staple magazine. The best of the current crop of “street” magazines.
We get there just on nine and find SK in the shadows out to the side of the stage about to go on. The young twenties crowds’ are hanging back by the bar in a subdued knot unable it seems to shake the chill wet winter. No such hesitation for the group. They’re straight into Acapulco Gold, a wiry angular strummer. Then some new songs and four tracks from the album – Faces and Places, Baja 68, Romanced, and The Lost Chord. The sound’s hard and robust. A huge change from the fragile orchestra of old. The psychedelic edge is still there only now its being scrubbed out like a Latin David Kilgour playing Point That Thing. Stunning.
They look like a gang like all great groups. Only this lot are riding a huge wave of impatient sound. Put some music on, some wag yells, when they finish. How could they have missed that? Two nights later they’ll play Eden’s up the road to an amped crowd, and get an encore.
3 September 2004. They build and build and build. A packed and wired Rakinos climbing higher and higher with them, peaking on a gilded plateau of scorching Latin guitar, garage soul organ, melodic driving bass, and crisp sparse beat. There’s been a line out the door half the night the room’s so jammed. The bouncer letting them in only as someone leaves. They’re there as much as habit as for the group the swarming chattering mass crammed into the bar and its balcony high over High Street stepping up the crystal staircase. E and P and the thin white line. The air crackling.
December 2004. Eastern Europe. Mid-winter. No one listening. Far as we can see. And Stu and I see can everything. From outside a bar off Planet Hollywood. Big pints. A slick coating of rain on the square. The new Salon Kingsadore. That nutty P bitch we quite like jacked this one up. The one who took opinion from departing punters at Rakinos. The band balked. Yak and I wondered. Two hundred bucks. Three hundred if you add in arch conservative Mayor John Banks asking for it to be turned down.
September 2006. Has it really been that long? Nearly two years?
