Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Bill Direen - Live at the Gladstone, Christchurch (1984)

Our man Bill Direen was recently selected as University of Auckland/Creative New Zealand writer-in-residence at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Devonport from July this year. In honour of this award, here is a tasty little bootleg live recording of the man alone, from a 1984 solo performance in Christchurch. It's approx. one half Builders/Bilders/Bilderine/Soluble Fish songs, with a Doors(!) song, a couple of blues classics (Leadbelly's 'Red Cross Sto' and Ma Rainey's 'See See Rider [Easy Rider]'), and 'Mack the Knife' as murder ballad.

This intimate recording is taken from an old audience cassette, and as such is filled with stops and starts, crowd noises, pops and clicks (tho' it still sounds great, no worries).


I Drink
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

9 comments:

  1. Just got a link here for ANOTHER live recording -- here is The Builders, Live at Cosgroves in Wellington, 1982. Lineup is Bill Direen - guitar/ vocals, Campbell McLay - bass, Malcolm Grant - drums.

    This link is only up very briefly! Til 29 Apr 10. Get it here now:

    https://www.yousendit.com/download/bFFPSkhkRkVvQnV4dnc9PQ

    ReplyDelete

  2. i would love to hear that other Direen live show as well, if you could repost.

    ReplyDelete

  3. Sorry Narlus, that second set is not mine to repost. That one was only up for a limited download!

    ReplyDelete

  4. hey there, for some reason live @ gladstone doesn't unzip properly. extracts only 1 of 2 files and then error msg on second. tried a couple of programs and d/l-ed file a 2nd time just in case. no joy.

    ReplyDelete

  5. @Sarah: I will have a look -- haven't had anyone else have issue with this...

    ReplyDelete

  6. Ha, that's actually a photo from a gig Bill and I did in Hamilton after driving up Highway 1 drinking a bottle of tequila! We stopped off at one of the forests and found those branches with which we made those two tripods.

    Bill & I as well as Stevie McCabe are scheduled to do some old and new songs at Devonport Art Depot next Wed. 20 Oct.

    ReplyDelete

  7. Excellent, thanks Stuart! I actually stole this photo from the back of the CoNCH3 album cover, I think it was. Come down to Dunedin and play!

    ReplyDelete

  8. second track won't open from zip-file, like sarah said! - can you please re-post?

    ReplyDelete

  9. Hi Charles Hodgson and Sarah -- You two seem to be the only ones with this problem, but I have re-zipped it and replaced the file with the newly re-archived file. Enjoy!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)