Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Peter Gutteridge in the Ureweras

Peter Gutteridge died yesterday morning. When I read the news, I remembered listening to this track bleed out of the tiny speakers of a cheap bopblaster in a cheap car sliding and skidding through the gravel roads of the Ureweras.

Our car's stereo had long since lost its voice, so we'd bought the bopblaster in Wairoa, and loaded it with the first EP by Snapper, the obsessively noisy band Gutteridge formed after tiring of the overly decorous music that had become associated with his native Dunedin.

As the journey through the mountains to Rotorua went on, I became convinced that Snapper's layers of corrugated feedback had become as essential to our progress as the engine and wheels of our little car. I played their cassette over and over.

In this fascinating article Aussie Wes Holland describes a journey to Dunedin in search of Gutteridge.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time."
Aldous Huxley

1:06 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Roast beef and potatoes are infinitely preferable to heroin. I love meat and potatoes. The answer is that the 95
man lived better. No question.

Huxley said some brilliant things, wrote some good books, but he also
said some very very stupid things
such as the above quote.

12:55 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

done heroin richard?

7:55 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Of course I have or how would I know potato and roast beef is infinitely superior?


How did he die?


Suicide?


Effect of drugs? Kidney failure?

11:32 pm  

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