Wednesday, August 29, 2007

PR for Bill (and dodgy friends)

After wowing old fans and winning new converts on his northern tour a couple of months back, Bill Direen is making a flying visit to Auckland to play a short notice gig next Saturday night in the intimate surroundings of the PR Bar on the corner of Ponsonby and K Rds.

Rumour has it that a new version of Direen's legendary band The Bilders (or The Builders, or Die Bilders: he could never make his mind up how to spell it) will accompany him on several tracks.

Besides knocking out a few tunes, Bill will be launching the second issue of Percutio, the stylish journal he co-founded last year (the first issue is online here) in a heroic bid to bridge the gap between the literary worlds of New Zealand and his adopted Europe. (According to the blurb on Bill's website, Percutio #2 will include 'fearless work by fearless writers': I guess that's comrade Taylor and the rest of the anti-boxing crowd out of the picture, then?)

In case all that wasn't enough, Bill will be preceded on stage by the latest incarnation of Dead Men Rising, the 'last-minute-put-together boogie band' which stormed to obscurity with an unlistenable EP last year and a short appearance at the Kings Arms a couple of months ago. The latest line-up includes Brett Cross and Brian 'Wild Dog' King on guitars, the recently repatriated Michael Arnold on keyboard-guitar, Powertool Records head honcho Andrew 'git in your soul' Maitai (see intimate photograph below) on drums, and yours truly on shout. Our set will include the first ever free noise version of Auden's 'Spain 1937'. See you about eight o'clock, after I've sobered the others up.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

andrew maitai looks like an evil bastard! is he evil?

3:45 pm  
Blogger maps said...

Yes.

5:13 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

NO!!!

9:34 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

"Man Alone" is great book. It starts clumsily - but then it gets really fascinating. I read it only recently - after having it recommended when I was at school by my teacher Mr Caldwell in about 1965. I remember him always saying hat books open side doors onto the corridors of one's life (metaphor of that ilk or kind) and I agreed with him then. One cant live forever; life is short but one can enter other lives via books and so on.... for some reason he also talked a lot about Aristotle;s theory of Drama -which I found interesting - and Forster's of the novel...but he would often say something to the effect - that people commit suicide when they have no hope. I often wonder what happened to him and my other teachers.

I just realised as I typed that that I recall him saying (to the effect): "It's great book, Man Alone, but no one can do that..it is beyond human capacity.." and that was perhaps the connection to suicide! I just (now as I type) realised this; and that - at the time I didn't know that Mulgan had committed suicide just after the war.

This just came to me!

10:01 pm  

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