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Pop CultureAugust 23, 2017

Why are we inducting so few artists into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame?

7.-Salmonella-Dub-2003

The NZ Music Hall of Fame currently inducts two local artists a year, but is it really enough? Hussein Moses talks to Peter Grattan who’s petitioning for a total overhaul of the system to give New Zealand musicians the recognition he feels they deserve.

Salmonella Dub made headlines recently when they turned down an offer to be inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame after clashing with award organisers. The band were approached about receiving this year’s Legacy Award at the New Zealand Music Awards in November, but after being told that they could choose an artist to perform at the ceremony, organisers said that their selection – Wellington post-punk act Beat Rhythm Fashion – would be too obscure for TV audiences.

Andrew Penman, frontman for Salmonella Dub, issued a statement about the dispute, saying that they were a young band and not yet deserving of the award anyway. “We feel it would be more fitting to be invited into the NZ music industry’s award ceremony in 2043 when we celebrate our 50th birthday.”

The group would’ve been one of two artists to get inducted into the ranks of the Hall of Fame this year. Since it formed back in 2007 by Recorded Music NZ and APRA, 20 local artists have made the Hall of Fame, including last year’s winners Moana Maniapoto and Bic Runga.

But is inducting two artists a year really enough? Peter Grattan doesn’t think so. He’s petitioning for a total overhaul of the system that would see 20 Kiwi artists inducted each year, a far cry from how things are done now.

Grattan is known for producing Radio With Pictures in the 1970s and Shazam! in the ‘80s, and has also worked for the BBC and as the head of entertainment for TVNZ. He’s also played with Peter Posa, an artist he very much wants to see get some recognition from the industry. Alongside the bump in numbers, he’s also proposed that a primetime TV award show be created to induct all the nominees each year – think something along the lines of how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame works – as well as our very own museum for New Zealand music to help people discover and rediscover the best we have on offer.

Peter Grattan and Peter Posa in 2012 (photo: supplied)

You first envisioned a New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 1990 and tried again in 2002. What was the reaction to your idea at the time?

The Nelson City Council weren’t interested. We were going to do it down there with the idea of turning Nelson into the City of Song. They said ‘no, we’ve got the [World of] Wearable Arts, why would we want the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame?’ Of course, a year later they lost the Wearable Arts to Wellington. They could’ve had a Hall of Fame museum down there.

The Hall of Fame was eventually set up in 2007, but you argue that inducting two artists a year isn’t nearly enough. You’re proposing that we boost that number to 20 Kiwi artists a year over the next 10 years to make up for lost time. Can you explain some of your thinking there?

They only induct two people a year, which is kind of pointless because in 100 years time, everybody up until 1990 might be in, but it’s going to be 2120 or something. You’ve got to get these people inducted in their lifetime. They deserve to be honoured in their lifetime. They need to be honoured while they can still get on the stage and perform a song.

There’s this thing about how New Zealand Music Month is May. Well, every month should be New Zealand Music Month. Maybe what they should do at the beginning of every month is induct somebody, then come May they have a TV show and they induct all of those people from the previous 12 months. So 12 people go in and then it starts again.

Why do you think something like this hasn’t happened yet?

I just put it down to apathy and complacency. I think as Kiwis, everything is so cruisy that no one really bothers. A lot of the people that love New Zealand music love it anyway, whether those people are in the Hall of Fame or not. But we’re getting a lot new New Zealanders now too, who really need to know our heritage and history of music; and the best way is to have something like a Hall of Fame where they can go and rediscover people.

Who are some of the artists at the top of your list that you think need to be inducted right now?

Split Enz aren’t in it. There’s no logic to it. If you go right back to the first record ever pressed in New Zealand – it was called ‘Blue Smoke’ by Ruru Karaitiana and Pixie Williams – they should be in because they’re pioneers. Tex Morton was a pioneer of country music.

Then you get people like Peter Posa and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, John Rowles, Sharon O’Neill, Mi-Sex, Larry’s Rebels – there are so many. The organisers seem to look at some of these people and think they’re not hip or cool enough to go in. It’s great seeing Moana Maniapoto in there. She’s very deserving but earlier than her there were people like Dinah Lee and Annie Crummer.

Peter Grattan and Peter Posa in 1970 (photo: supplied)

The idea for the primetime TV award show sounds similar to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a way. How does it tie in with the formation of a music museum?

Te Whare Waiata O Aotearoa – basically a New Zealand music House of Song. It could be in Christchurch or Whangarei or Dunedin; somewhere where people could go and see the displays and the Split Enz uniforms and the guitars of Dave Dobbyn’s like they do in Cleveland with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Salmonella Dub recently turned down the Hall of Fame after a clash with organisers over who would perform at the award ceremony. What did you think of that situation?

I have to admit, I’ve been away from New Zealand since 1992 so I’m a little ignorant of some of the great bands that have come up over the last 25 years. I guess if back in 2007 they had been inducting people at 10 a year, and there’d been a TV show, it would be a solid thing. But there’s really only 20 people in it. If there’s 120, it has a different perception. If they’re being inducted alongside people like Split Enz and Sharon O’Neill and Billy T James and Prince Tui Teka and some of the other great acts, they would probably feel more happy about being in there.

What’s been happening is [the TV industry] has been doing these singing shows, which are basically copies of American Idol and all that. They’re hugely expensive and they’ve spent millions of dollars producing these shows. Then those singers don’t go anywhere; they win the show, but there’s no opportunity for them to compete overseas and play overseas.

To me, it’s wasted money. It’d be better to do a massive TV special for Salmonella Dub and then use that to break them around the world. I would like TVNZ to sit down and help Recorded Music NZ and APRA and say ‘let’s find sponsors and let’s do this properly for New Zealand musicians’.

What do you plan to do with the petition?

Well, I started a Facebook page about six years ago and there’s about 3000 people on it. I probably should’ve started the petition six years ago and we might have 50,000 or 60,000 names now. But I started it this week and I think it’s starting to gather momentum. That great thing that was at Auckland Museum [Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa], was incredible. I think they got a few hundred thousand visitors. If all of those people had signed the petition, we’d be well on the way to getting it happening.

You can find the petition for “A credible NZ Music Hall of Fame” here.


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Pop CultureAugust 23, 2017

Decline and Fall is the closest thing we’ll get to Downton Abbey in 2017

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Sam Brooks watches the new Eva Longoria vehicle Decline and Fall and finds a show more British than a pint of lager and a packet of crisps. 

Decline and Fall is maybe the most British show I’ve ever watched.

How British is it? First of all, it’s based on a 1928 satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh (the most British name ever, other than Evelyn Waugh’s son, who is called Auberon Alexander Waugh). The novel is very critical of British society in the 1920s, and makes fun of it in the most British, prim and proper way possible. According to the bastion of journalistic knowledge known as Wikipedia, there was an Author’s Note at the start that said that IT WAS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.

That’s how British it is. It has to tell you it’s funny. That’s what you’re dealing with when you watch Decline and Fall. It might sound like a slog, and if you’re not into a certain kind of British humour where the men are wacky and chinless and the wordplay is dictionary-based, then this might not be for you. But if you want to see some people be prim and proper at each other, and fail at being prim and proper and then fall entirely from society while doing it, this is the show.

Decline and Fall revolves around the travails of Peter Pennyfeather – yet another British name – after he gets kicked out of Oxford for indecent exposure. Jack Whitehall, a man with the kind of cheeks that you just want to pinch and eyes bluer than the aforementioned pinched cheeks, plays Pennyfeather and for someone who strikes such a tense balance between relatable and hateable in his stand-up, he’s surprisingly likeable here.

It helps that Pennyfeather is a victim of his circumstances, and also the victim of some genuinely terrible people, and his jerk-y nature is dulled into a more lost hipster vibe. Whitehall also has one of those English accents that sounds like a warm cup of tea, with just a dash of milk and sugar in it. Always comforting, never overwhelming. It helps.

The other star of the show is Eva Longoria, playing the widowed Margot Beste-Chetwynde, pronounced Beast-Cheating, which is genuinely funny. Yes, the Eva Longoria who was better than you remember her being on Desperate Housewives is on this show, which is the closest thing to Downton Abbey you’re likely to find in 2017.

She takes a while to appear (about half an hour and eight seconds into the first episode, by my incredibly scientific measure) but once she does she’s a breath of fresh air. Pennyfeather quickly falls in love with Margot, perhaps because she’s the only person with a chin within fifty miles, and the bulk of the story follows what happens after that pretty stupid action.

Longoria is the clear highlight of the series, which is mostly populated with a menagerie of British actors who you’ve definitely seen in something – probably Harry Potter – but can’t quite remember their names or who they’ve played. She plays Margot with an affable amorality (but I am sad to report no silly accent) that is intentionally jarring in this context.

Margot is at odds with the world around her, and Longoria does this with a one-foot-in-one-foot-out approach; there’s no way she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but the appearance that she doesn’t is enough to sell it. Also, the same knack she had for a one-liner in Desperate Housewives helps her here. There’s a scene where she has to audition some performers that ranks among the best of her career, and it’s where her spikiness feels liveliest against the relative softness of the other performers.

But other than Longoria, this is as British as shepherd’s pie/black pudding/your choice of disgusting dish. This is a show where the first episode takes place in a boarding school, a character says ‘mama’ with that insane emphasis on the second ma, and people are hypocritical as hell. The funniest scene in the whole series revolves around what to order for dinner, which sounds like shade, but it is genuinely funny. If your idea of the height of comedy was Maggie Smith saying “What is a weekend.” on Downton Abbey (and realistically, that is the funniest thing to be said on British TV outside of Absolutely Fabulous), then Decline and Fall is the show for you.

It’s also pleasant as hell. Sometimes all you want from your TV is Jack Whitehall saying lovely things to Eva Longoria while wearing a nice hat, you don’t want people decapitating other people on Game of Thrones, or I assume that’s what happens on that show. There’s a character on this show called Lady Circumference, for christ’s sake. Relax, and let yourself be enveloped in the warm, slightly suffocating humour of a pre-World War II England.


Make yourself a nice cup of English Breakfast and tuck into Decline and Fall, available on Lightbox below:

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