Love Shack getting together at city club
Covers band rewinds to ’80s ‘time of excess’
"We’ve got the ability to really get in there and crack it. There’s some great Bowie stuff, some Prince, just some really cool tunes." Cam Crawford
Eighties cover band Love Shack are playing at the Whanganui Musicians Club this month, and they’ll be bringing the songs of P, Devo, Blondie and The B52s with them.
Keys player Cam Crawford said the six musicians who made up the band had a long background in New Zealand touring, recording and session circles.
‘We all work as musicians in and around the Wellington scene,” Crawford said.
“Rob Joass [lead guitar] just said one day ‘I want to get some people together, put on an ’80s show, and play some great music’.
“The rest of us were like ‘yep, let’s do it’.
“That was at the end of last year, but we’ve all known each other for quite a while and we’ve cross pollinated on a number of projects.”
Crawford, who is also a member of funk/soul band Blue River Baby, said Love Shack tackled songs that most other covers outfits “wouldn’t go near”, such as Peter Gabriel’s hit Sledgehammer.
“We’ve got the ability to really get in there and crack it.
“There’s some great Bowie stuff, some Prince, just some really cool tunes.”
The ’80s was “a time of excess”,
Crawford said, complete with music that didn’t sound like anything that had come before.
“Production values were huge, and a lot of money was spent on studios and sounds.
“The appeal of the ’80s is definitely intergenerational as well. We played a gig the other night on the Ka¯piti Coast and there were people in their 60s and 70s dancing alongside 13- and 14-year-olds with their parents.
That intergenerational quality also filtered into modern music, Crawford said.
“It’s interesting, you listen to the likes of The Weeknd and other new stuff that’s coming out, and you can kind of think ‘that sound’s a bit like A-ha, Take on Me’.
“The music that’s big now is definitely drawing on some of that production and those licks and hooks from the ’80s.
“There was a lot of good ear candy around at that time and, musically speaking, that’s why it still stands up today.”
Crawford said his favourite ’80s band was Crowded House, a band he would soon be working for as part of their production team.
“I also remember Guns N’ Roses coming out and thinking ‘wow, what the hell is this?’.
“There was also a lot of hair metal, which was kind of funny at the time. You can put Bon Jovi in there, and Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again.
“At the time there was such a pushback, and people were saying things like ‘these guys are evil’, but really they were just wearing eyeliner and dressing up.”
A lot of debating and laughs had gone into choosing the Love Shack setlist, Crawford said.
“It’s been cool for someone like me, who spent a little bit of time in the ’ 80s, to actually revisit these tunes and break them down as a musician.
“If I have to wear a wig and some shoulder pads, I’m doing it.”
● Love Shack play the Whanganui Musicians Club on Saturday, March
13. Tickets are $25 on the door ($10 for a child under 16 with parent or guardian) or $20 through Eventfinda.
Darrell Grace was remembered by his daughter Celia as a modest, decent man with empathy for the less well-off. Whanganui folk will remember him as an ardent and outspoken conservationist.
Darrell died aged 98 on February 20 at Jane Winstone Retirement Village. He moved there in 2012 after wife Anne died.
A dentist by trade, Darrell had many passionate interests. He was a tramper, canoeist, fencer, reader of history and politics, conservationist, gardener and skier.
He had been a competitive swimmer and fencer, but later in life said people should divert less of their energy towards sport and more to care of the environment.
Darrell worked as a dentist in Whanganui from the early 1950s until retiring at the age of 72 in 1994.
He was one of four children in his Invercargill family, and went to the Marist Brothers’ School. He was good at swimming, and in his final year at Marist, he and two friends cycled the South Island on gravel roads.
After leaving school, he joined the Ist Southland Regiment. Then, in 1943, he joined the navy and became a signalman in the Royal Navy East Indies Fleet.
He returned to New Zealand in
1945 and spent five years training at the Otago Dental School. At that time, dentists used foot drills and it was tiring work.
While at university, he joined a tramping club and a fencing group, and was university foil champion for three years.
He worked in Wellington for a year before moving to Whanganui and setting up a dental practice. He met and married Anne Keating, and the couple had three children — Anne-maree, John and Celia.
His first foray into campaigning was in the 1950s, when a road was planned for one of his favourite walking places, Lake Hauroko.
“Gee, did I get angry about this road. I knew it would destroy the bush, and I realised then that man would destroy anything beautiful if they can make money out of it,” he said in an interview with the Chronicle.
In Whanganui, Darrell joined the tramping club and went on many long trips. He was also a member of a ski club, drama group, fencing group, canoe club and the Returned and Services Association.
He became a board member, then the president and chairman of Whanganui Regional Museum and was one of eight who undertook a fiveweek expedition to the Chatham Islands to look for taiko in 1969-70.
After he left the museum board, Darrell threw himself into conservation work — Forest & Bird, Native Forest Action Council, Maruia Society, Wanganui Environmental Society, Wanganui Environmental Forum, Taranaki/whanganui Conservation Board and campaigns to save rivers and lakes from development.
One of those was a campaign against a proposal to dam the Whanganui River at
Parikino; another was against native trees being felled and turned into pulp on the West Coast.
During this time, he was a prolific writer of letters to the Chronicle, and in 1998, he won Forest & Bird’s top annual award, the “Old Blue”.
He was watching and cheering as the Department of Conservation was formed in 1987, and the Resource Management Act became law in 1991.
Never short of an opinion, he told the Chronicle in 1998 that environmentalists don’t feature in honours lists because Governments don’t like them.
“Yet we’re doing the Government’s work for it . . . we’re trying to save this country from falling to pieces,” he said.
"I realised then that man would destroy anything beautiful if they can make money out of it." Darrell Grace
It’s been years since I’ve played a cassette tape, loaded a floppy disc or dialled a rotary phone. Ditto running with a Walkman, playing a VHS tape or loading camera film.
Technology is not the only thing changing rapidly. So is our understanding of people and of history.
There are a lot of things we said and did when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s that we don’t say and do any more.
It’s not okay to call someone with Down Syndrome the “R” word.
It’s not okay to call black people the “N” word.
It’s not okay to use racial and ethnic slurs, denigrate women, or mock people with disabilities.
We’ve learned not to celebrate slavery or slave owners.
We used to call this progress. We used to say we were learning to respect the dignity of every human, not just the dignity of people who look, act, and worship (or don’t) like us.
Thanks to the immediacy of social media and culture wars spreading like a malignancy across the map, some people are calling moves towards decency “cancel culture”.
“Do you know what cancel culture means?” I ask my 17-yearold. She says yes, that some Youtubers she used to follow aren’t on the channel any more, thanks to past bad behaviour. They were discovered to have used racist and anti-semitic language. Some wore blackface. These fallen smallscreen stars have lost millions of dollars in promotional money.
I’ve been thinking about socalled cancel culture in light of news earlier this week that six Dr Seuss books won’t be published any more because of racist and insensitive imagery.
In And to Think That I
Saw It on Mulberry Street, an Asian person wears a pointycone hat while holding chopsticks. Two African men in bare feet with hair tied above their heads wear grass skirts in If I Ran the Zoo.
The announcement that the books would cease publication immediately drew fire from those who called it another example of “cancel culture”. I wonder how many people engage in serious thought before typing or saying their newly beloved, unoriginal phrase.
For one thing, it’s not as if some outside agency or government started banning Dr Seuss books. The business charged with protecting and preserving his legacy, Dr Seuss Enterprises, decided to shelve the dirty halfdozen.
“Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr Seuss Enterprises’ catalogue represents and supports all communities and families,” it said.
Books shape how children see the world. It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking an Asian or African child should look to an outdated caricature as a truthful representation of their culture.
Besides, plenty of Dr Seuss books do not contain these kinds of stereotyped images. It’s not like the Seuss folks are erasing his entire collection.
Businesses often make decisions to change and pull products without being implicated in cancel culture. The original recipe for Coca-cola contained cocaine. The drink was advertised as medicine.
Early versions of diet sodas contained saccharin, which many companies stopped using after the artificial sweetener was linked to cancer in lab rats in the 1970s.
In a complete turnabout, recent studies indicate saccharin can kill human cancer cells.
The only constant in life — including in science, medicine and history — is change. And people protesting change.
Consider those whose cultures are or were in danger of being cancelled:
Six million Jews died during the Holocaust.
More than 2000 Ma¯ ori people were said to have died during the Land Wars of the 1800s, and Ma¯ ori were forbidden from speaking their language in schools for much of the 20th century.
The world has been on high alert against terrorism committed in the name of Islam since the 9-11 terror attacks in America.
Yet New Zealand’s deadliest mass shooting happened when an Australian white supremacist opened fire on two Christchurch mosques nearly two years ago.
The man, now convicted of murder, killed 51 people and injured 40 others.
In America, where right-wing politicians have sought to ban Muslims from entering the country, security officials reported zero jihadist attacks on US soil in 2020.
A report out late last year found white supremacist groups were responsible for nearly 70 per cent of terrorist plots and attacks.
The contrast is stark. On one hand are perceived injustices of removing books with racist images, monuments to colonialism, flags representing slavery, or for imposing financial penalties on people who speak ill of, or mock others because of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or abilities.
On the other hand, are historic and present-day instances of racism and other -isms that can lead the unhinged among us to commit violent acts.
I’m not saying you can’t criticise someone’s work if it’s not up to scratch. I’m not saying we must always bite our tongues and still our fingers lest we offend.
I am saying there’s nothing precious or over-the-top with holding ourselves and other people to account when we persist in using words, images or actions hurtful to other humans.
When you know better, you do better. If you make a mistake, apologise — not to avoid consequences, but because you understand you’ve harmed someone.
It’s only cancel culture when you don’t like the change.
Auckland will exit alert level 3 restrictions this weekend, but health officials have given a stern reminder to those earlier ordered to isolate that they must continue to do so.
The earlier failure by people who had been exposed to other Covid-positive community members or locations to isolate drew out the length of the current community outbreak and thrust the country back into tough alert level restrictions.
Keen to avoid a second occurrence, director general of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield told a national press conference any person contacted by the Ministry of Health and advised they were a “close plus” or a “casual plus” contact must do three things.
Those three things were: to stay at home, report for and undergo medical testing for Covid, and accept they must continue to isolate until they hear otherwise from a medical officer of health.
Bloomfield said he discussed with the Solicitor-general yesterday whether medical officers had legal powers under Section 70 of the Health Act they could use to convince people to obey isolation requests. But he also said he was “confident” people would do what they were asked.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said most of the alert level restrictions requirements were “very well understood” by the population.
She said she “does not believe” people had intentionally broken isolation restrictions in relation to the latest lockdown.
“The most important principles for our Covid management have been sticking together and not turning on each other,” Ardern said.
Bloomfield said the South Auckland community had shown great leadership during the Valentine’s Day cluster, and those who broke isolation requirements did not do so intentionally.
There were still 10 people that health teams didn’t have results for from the original Cityfitness location of interest.
Eight of those people had had a test. Two hadn’t, but those were from the visit on February 20 — before the person with Covid became symptomatic.
Ardern said they were still trying hard to find the two people from the February 20 gym visit.
“They will be found,” Bloomfield said.
Meanwhile, more than 550,000 New Zealanders unlikely to accept a Covid-19 vaccination say that’s because they’d rather wait and see if others get any side effects.
The Health Ministry has released full results of polling on attitudes to the vaccine rollout, after an Official Information Act request from the Herald, having earlier publicised only top-line findings.
Polling was done in September and December 2020, and a report after the December polling shows:
■ An estimated 555,100 adults who said they’d be unlikely to be vaccinated gave a main reason as, “I’d rather wait and see if others who have taken it suffer any side effects” — indicating this large group could be eventually convinced of vaccine safety.
■ People who chose “I don’t trust any vaccine” were more likely than average to live in the upper
North Island (excluding Auckland) — 72 per cent live in the North Island, with 25 per cent in Auckland, 28 per cent in the upper North Island (excluding Auckland), 20 per cent in the lower North Island and 28 per cent in the South Island.
■ 45 per cent of respondents were caregivers for at least one child, and, of that group, 40 per cent said “if an approved Covid-19 vaccine becomes available for younger children” they would have it given to a child or children for whom they were the caregiver. Another 24 per cent were unsure, with 33 per cent unlikely to do so.