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

2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. 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!

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