They call it the search to find ‘the greatest guitarist in New Zealand who never played’ and this year it could be you. The New Zealand Air Guitar championships are back for the ninth year running and next month will see the start of the competition in venues in Auckland, Christchurch, New Plymouth and Leigh. More dates are to be announced but now might be a good time to dust...

Adele Hunter-Higgins

Bear Cat are the brainchild of Jocee Tuck and regular Real Groove writer Dan Trevarthen, and have just released their debut album Xiong Mao. To celebrate they're having an album release party at Cassette #9, with support from Cool Rainbows (who donated the swoonsome Southern Summer Sun to our Awesome Feeling III compilation) and the hotly-tipped Great North. Bear Cat made...

MP3: From the Bleachers 02/09

Duncan Greive

A regular weekly podcast featuring Troy Ferguson, Duncan Greive and Charlotte Ryan talking about a music related issue on Charlotte's Morning Glory show on 95bFM, Wednesdays from 11.30am. Pretty inflammatory week on From the Bleachers, as we talked about digital and physical pricing, the dominance of iTunes and alternatives which have sprung up like the recently launched...

Trailer: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Duncan Greive

Can we just agree that The Ballad of Gay Tony is the best videogame title ever? The final installment of the sumptuous saga that is Grand Theft Auto IV pulls out all the stops, and having played an hour or so and shot a these wild weapons, I can vouch for how ridiculously overblown this one is gonna be. Rockstar have just released the first trailer, soundtracked by Eric Prydz's...

Duncan Greive

Deadline got in the way of an FTI column last week, but I'm gonna run this when the music's ready, man, and right now there's a few good pieces around. I'll get the most interesting/least exciting out of the way first. I read about this on my fave economics blog, which says something about who it appeals to, but Coldplay have decided to thank their fans by releasing a live album...

Phil Reed

In my infinite paranoia I managed to send out two copies of An Emerald City's monumental debut album Circa Scaria, and we're running the first to arrive – Gavin Bertram's – in the May issue of the magazine. That left the other – Phil Reed's – without a home, until Reuben Bonner, An Emerald City's guitar genius and all round good guy sent through the rising maelstrom that is the...

Duncan Greive

So I've arrived in Liverpool, a little tired after Optimo but otherwise accounted for, and hit the Hard Days Night hotel, Beatles-themed and a little weird, a stone's throw from a little bar called the Cavern.So why is the hotel so weird? It's hard to put a finger on, apart from the inexplicable abandonment of the song's apostrophe for the hotel name... It's not the kind of...

Optimo Espacio and Doing it Right

Duncan Greive

Prior to arriving I'd been informed that JD Twitch and JG Wilkes (the DJ duo who share their collective name with the club and are its founding members) would not be playing. This had the potential to be disastrous, but they'd tagged in some pretty phenomenal replacements in Jackmaster (with a name like that it was always going to work) and Desmond and the Tutus. I whiled the...

Where Were The Spiders?

For a short period it looked as though David Bowie would be convinced to reprise his Ziggy Stardust persona for April’s Coachella Festival. The organisers offered Bowie an unspecified (read fucking huge) amount to perform his untouchable 1972 album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. However almost as soon as the rumour arose it was shot down by...

Love Isn't Easy

It’s long been rumoured that the surviving members of ABBA hate each other’s guts. But the female members, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, recently refuted that claim. Lyngstad told the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet that while the two competed, it was all healthy. Meanwhile, Faltskog stated that, “No, we didn’t fight. But we have to live [through] a whole lot of such misinterpretations.”...

A Dub In The Life

If you’ve heard either of the Easy Star Allstars’ previous efforts you’ll be salivating at the prospect of them versioning The Beatles’ Sergeant Peppers album. The New York Easy Star label has previously put together stellar line-ups to recreate Dark Side Of The Moon and OK Computer inna dub style. But it looks like they’ll outdo themselves with The Beatles excursion, bringing...

I Am Not A Prisoner

The death in January of great British actor Patrick McGoohan stirred up a few stories. McGoohan’s role as Number Six in the classic TV spy psycho drama The Prisoner was never reprised for the big screen. A possible reason for this emerged in light of his passing; he allegedly lost the rights playing poker with associates in Vegas. With a reasonable three-of-a-kind hand he was...

Water Torture

Amongst the sanctioned torture techniques recently proscribed by President Obama was the use of repetitive loud music. US military used the technique of pumping painfully loud (bad) rock music into the cells of prisoners in an often successful attempt to break them psychologically. Amongst the favoured music was AC/DC, Metallica, Limp Bizkit and Drowning Pool. While some...

Surf's Up

One thing leapt out at us from the mass of ‘Best Of 2008’ lists. The influential Manchester specialist music website Boomkat had Auckland band Surf City’s self-titled EP at number 69 of their top 100 albums of the last year. Notwithstanding the pedantic fact that it’s clearly not an album, that’s pretty good going, especially when you see who ranked beneath them. Boomkat gush...