Rare As Hen's Teeth
I like to go hunting for records in garage sales. Mostly I find crappy James Last, Roger Whittaker or My Fair Lady albums but there is the occasional gem. The best two finds have been the Toy Love album and The Gordons Future Shock EP. 50 cents each! However, there are a number of records that haven't seen release that I still desperately hang-out for, hoping that they will be sitting right behind that Genesis or Neil Diamond LP - records by say, Bored Games, Marie and the Atom or Sam Hunt's 70s outing with Mammal. So, I was thrilled when my neighbour Craig said he had some records I could borrow for Counting The Beat. Amongst them were some treasures such as the Dunedin Double EP and the second Gordons album. I didn't even know that one existed!
This episode of Counting The Beat features some of those rare and out of print records. There are songs from Bored Games (I have added a clip of the song to the blog video page), Bill Direen (a brilliant video for the song here), The Pterodactyls, Bird Nest Roys, The Gordons and the inexplicably overlooked The Stones. There really is no reason for this music to be so inaccessible - the record companies just need to loosen up a bit and make it available for purchase as digital downloads - the artwork could become limited edition t-shirts. Russell Brown of Public Address has recently written an insightful post about this too.
In the mean-time the internet serves the fans of out-of-print music reasonably well. Check out the fantastic Kiwitapes for extensive amounts of downloadable rare NZ music and The Punk Archives for downloads of a number of 1980s kiwi punk 7" singles.
Download the Counting The Beat - Rare As Hen's Teeth podcast
