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Come up to Paekakariki / in the land of the tiki / where you spend all your days at the beach.' It's another Saturday night in 1950s Auckland. Downtown, nightclubs are banning the jive because the exuberant couples disturb the cautious fox-trotters. Over in Freemans Bay, the Maori Community Centre is the 'jazziest, jumpingest place in the city' where sweaty men in zoot suits feed on Maori bread and huge tubs of potatoes. In Blue Smoke, Chris Bourke recovers the lost dawn of New Zealand popular music in the twentieth century. Bourke brings to life the musical worlds of New Zealanders at home (buying sheet music from Beggs, listening to the radio, learning 'the twist') and out on the town (sin...
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A survey and celebration of 50 years of New Zealand popular music. Jammed full of photos, and with a colourful and exuberant text, it is the first book on New Zealand popular music published in 15 years.
Alastair Riddell's band Space Waltz was a short-lived one-album New Zealand rock act who hit gold with a #1 hit single in October 1974 with the song 'Out On The Street' but thereafter failed to achieve anything even close to that feat. While relegated to one-hit-wonder status in the eyes of many, to this day Riddell and Space Waltz epitomize the mid-1970s heyday of glam rock in New Zealand. But in truth their impact went far beyond this. Their generationally divisive nation-wide debut on the hugely popular MOR television talent quest Studio One/New Faces demonstrated the power of mass media exposure – they were instantly signed to a record deal with industry giant EMI – while Riddell's controversial gender-bending image provided a cultural crossroads that greatly impacted the wider youth culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition, while the album's most famous track, 'Out On The Street,' is rightly regarded as New Zealand's glam rock anthem, the wider album demonstrates a compositional and musical depth that goes far beyond glam rock and into the realm of sophisticated progressive rock, ultimately providing an unlikely and highly unique musical amalgam.