Whatever I do it’s right

By Mark Roach, December 29, 2007 @ 5:59 am

Let’s get this out of the way first: I hate lists. I particularly hate lists regarding the highly subjective topic of popular music.

So it was with no small trepidation that I approached this handsome-looking new book by Grant Smithies, the Sunday Star-Times reviewer and recipient of the 2007 Qantas Best Reviewer award.

Soundtrack is published by Craig Potton Publishing, best known for award-winning landscape photography titles. In more recent years the company has diversified its catalogue to include other visual arts, as well as a brief foray into the music world with David Eggleton’s historical overview, Ready To Fly. Relatively poor sales of that title, combined with the miniscule output of New Zealand music books (less than ten non-fiction titles in the last 50 years), suggests that while we may be mad about Kiwi music, we’d much rather listen to it than read about it.

Moreover, where does a coffee table book retailing for $50 fit into a market already overcrowded with periodicals, offering opinions on albums both past and present?

Smithies predicts and answers the question when he says “I’ve never been a fan of those ‘Best New Zealand Single Ever’ lists that crop up from time to time in local music mags,” and adds that the book is “just an excuse for me to get emotional about some records I love”.

This is the book’s raison d’être. It’s Smithies as Fanboy-In-Chief, enthusiastically and eloquently raving about albums he cherishes and thinks you should love too. And he’s not the only obsessive geek in the room, with over 20 other culture vultures—from John Campbell to Karen Walker, Chris Knox to Sam Neill—roped in with their thoughts on why certain Kiwi music has got so under their skins.

There are omissions, of course, and Smithies is upfront that this is a subjective selection, and that space constraints further restrict the number of inclusions.

That’s a fair enough point, although given that Flying Nun albums and related artists account for almost 40 percent of the content, and indie electronica & low-fi another 30 percent, there was perhaps an opportunity to rein-in the bias. There is scant reference to anything from Auckland between 1980-2000 (all that Nun and no Headless Chickens?), no four-to-the-floor rock, jazz, or singer/songwriters of either gender. In this sense Smithies shows himself up as someone of fairly blinkered musical interests. Just like the rest of us.

But then again, this is what Soundtrack is. It is personal, it is opinion, and it should serve to inspire debate. Where it also succeeds, as any good music writing should do, is it will make you haul out some of those records you haven’t listened to in years and enjoy them all over again.

Originally published in Idealog #13, page 80