January 2012
6 posts
WatchI’m back in my room with a slight headache, a stained salmon shirt, and sand all through the carpet from a late night skinny dip, rounding off one of the best weekends of my life.
Time to take the suit to the dry cleaners and start thinking about releasing this album. In the meantime - here’s a taster: this is a song called Skinny Jeans.
I got around to making a soundcloud. http://soundcloud.com/tonoandthefinancecompany
Golden Dawn with the Finance Company this Friday
I’ve talked before about how the Golden Dawn is a good place to toughen yourself up as a performer. Well with the Beirut shows coming up next week, a new album coming out and a new member in the wonderful Mimsy Cable, I decided it was time to take the full band to the fiery forge that is the Tavern of Power.
We’ll be playing a set this Friday at The Golden Dawn, for only five bucks....
December 2011
3 posts
New Year Party in Dunedin Tomorrow Night
I’m used to organising gigs by the seat of my pants in Dunedin, but this may be the craziest thing I’ve ever attempted.
At 1pm today my plans for New Years in the Auckland region changed due to weather. In that time, I’ve convinced a temporary bar to open tomorrow night, and three of my favourite songwriters to play music.
Now I just need to convince people to go… and...
November 2011
1 post
This song, “Songwriters Kill Trees,”...
October 2011
4 posts
Our Roundhead session, with Lisa Crawley and Graham Panther is going to be playing this Saturday. You can listen out for it on at the following times. There should be new a Youtube video going up too.
95bFM 11.00am
Radio NZ 4.00pm
Here are the dogs, You have reached them You have a poem in your pocket What will you feed them?
- This is the best chorus for a song about self righteous poverty that I never managed to write.
Poetic justice for stealing the first two lines from Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
I reckon I’ll keep trying to finish it.
The first demo I have of Twenty Three, which until...
September 2011
4 posts
When I went to Melbourne as a bright eyed thing a couple of years ago, I was intimidated by the cool places people went to, and how well everyone dressed. But after a couple of years in Auckland, I was surprised to find Melbourne seemed relatively homely and relaxed.
I love how in Melbourne, there seems to be no divide between sports fan and music fan. The bars with gigs often look like old man...
I’m going to Australia today. I managed to pack everything I need into one laptop bag. Boom.
I don’t have an iPod, android or even a sim card phone, and my trusty G4 iBook is too old to travel (6 years and still going!) so I’m not sure if I’ll be very active on twitter or here over the next five days. It also means anyone wanting to call or text will be out of luck.
I...
I’ve been looking at the stuff I wrote...
August 2011
4 posts
He (one of Jung’s dream mentors) said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or birds in the air, and added, ‘If you should see people in the room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.’
Carl Jung - Confrontation with the Unconscious
About a year ago I was...
Panther and the Zoo Album and Tour
For about nine months I’ve been playing in a band called Panther and the Zoo.
It’s been one the most reviving things that could have happened to me as a musician. When I started learning the songs, I realised that playing a good song in a band gives me the same excitement that I get playing a song I’ve written. It’s also given me a lot more confidence that I am, in fact,...
Blade Runner theme dress up gig in distopic...
This evening I got caught up in the process of writing an event page for our gig next Saturday at Lucha Lounge.
What could have been a simple who-what-when-where became a rant about why I love post-recession Newmarket, and then, logically, evolved into an invitation to a Blade Runner themed dress up party.
...
July 2011
6 posts
On Saturday night, packing my bags and drinking the last of Tex Houston’s home brewed Pale Ale (with the label - ‘Honest honky juice - cleaner than Kilgour’), it seemed fitting that the snow was coming in. I felt like it was snowing in my head, and I’d have to sleep for a very long time. We’d had nine straight days of blue sky and dry, cold sun, and on almost all of...
Speaking of Brown, here’s one of my...
I'm really much better talking about the weather
Last night I was reading through the lyrics booklet of Bon Iver’s new record (great record, but why oh why did he print his lyrics?), and I fell asleep on my folded up futon in an awkward position. As I slept, one of the loudest rolls of thunder I’d ever heard cracked above me, and commandeered my dreams. I dreamed about the relationship we equate between lightning and inspiration....
WatchI’ve put Off the Cuff up here for ease of viewing. As it turns out, Daniel can write almost as well as he can direct, and his take on the sessions nails it for me.
Check out Off The Cuff’s website - www.offthecuffsessions.com
There’s going to be some great new stuff coming up on that site in future, sounds like Daniel’s been working furiously.
Off The Cuff
At a friends place in Ponsonby to use the internet last night (mine isn’t working at the moment), I had a good chance to watch Off The Cuff 03 - both parts, on a decent computer, and with good sound. Daniel has done an exquisite job on this. It captures so much about what Dunedin is like in winter, without ever showing Dunedin itself. Ruddy red faces from the cold and the whiskey, a lack of...
June 2011
6 posts
Busload of faith to get by
I had an email from a friend the other day. He’s a very good musician, but he has only written a few songs without a collaborator on the lyrics. He told me he’d been trying to write songs for years but was paralyzed at every turn by the lyrics. That he’d been tearing up pages and pages of refill and not being able to get past the initial lines. He asked me if he was being too...
I’m playing a solo set at the Golden Dawn Tavern of Power tomorrow night - Friday the 10th June.
When I last played there I thought that would be the only time I tried it. In between me and the people who had come to watch me, within touching distance, were a couple of girls loudly talking about their day. They didn’t move the entire set, even when I politely invited them to chat...
The Eversons - I'm a Conservative
I’ve been completely bowled over by the Eversons EP today. I watched them last night, and I was impressed that, for a band that rules sonically, the stories still come through clearly, thanks to great use of space, and clear, direct lyrics. I feel like I’ve been waiting for local music like this.
In particular, I’ve been trying to work out what it is I like about...
It feels good to talk about writing. So maybe I’ll do a little more.
One issue that has been on my mind lately is choosing names in songs or stories.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine convinced me that if you use names in a story, you should use the names of people you know. Of course, if you’re writing a song about someone and don’t want them to know it, you’re...
How I write lyrics
I’ve been working on a new song today, and I think it’s a good example of the way a lyric can come together through connected images.
I’ve written a lot of songs about Auckland lately, but I don’t think I’ve ever set one successfully in Dunedin. I suspect it’s because I’m too prone to try to glamourise Dunedin - make it sound romantic and intelligent, the...
The Finance Company and I will be playing tonight (Friday the 3rd June) at Wine Cellar, with Great North and Steph Dickinson.
Great North released one of my favourite records of last year, and Hayden is a ridiculously prolific writer. The rumour is he has already written a second album that is even closer to a Bruce Springsteen than the last. All that while writing for one of the country’s...
May 2011
4 posts
When I was a kid I was always being told that in the future people’s jobs would be taken over by robots. But that was in factories - places I never intended to work, and even though as we entered the future I saw factories disappear, they just went to other parts of the world where people costed less.
But now as I’m watching magazines, record stores, the NZPA, and bookstores shutdown,...
Off The Cuff has put up Tuesday Evening from our session - http://vimeo.com/23902745
It’s bloody good! Some brilliant facial hair close ups in particular - I don’t think I’ve ever looked that closely at the hair around Stu’s neck, or Bugs’ mouth. Reeooww…
If you’re in Auckland, you should pop down to St Kevin’s arcade tomorrow night (Thursday).
I’m playing a show supporting Matt Ledingham, and I’ll be joined by the wonderful Mimsy Cable and Jessie Cass on sha nah nahs.
Arcade gigs are beautiful, the beer is cheap, and it’s donation entry, so it sounds like a great night out to me.
Homebrew have some serious fans. Since they put up the Marion Bates video, it’s had more views than anything we’ve put up on youtube. I find Homebrew really heartening - it’s proof that if you say things people can really relate to in your songs, people will want to hear them. Chris Graham’s video is an absolute triumph, and the screening of it capped off an anarchic,...
April 2011
2 posts
Homebrew just happened to bump into me playing outside a real estate agent’s the other night, and they posted this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8ibPKtVnOk
March 2011
3 posts
Also!
My favourite power couple, Eddie from Dictaphone Blues and Lisa Crawley are going to be singing some back up vocals tomorrow. See you at St Kevins arcade at 7!
The Wayfarers - Lectures by Wade Davis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brB9IwLha4o
I’ve just finished listening to these lectures on Radio New Zealand over the last few weeks. They’re wonderful. Intricate, beautiful explorations of endangered cultures, their complexities and the functions they serve. It makes an absolute knock out case that indigenous cultures are neither failed attempts at modernity, nor static and...
18th of March at St Kevins Arcade
It’s going to be a real pleasure to play St Kevin’s Arcade next Friday, the 18th of March. I’ve seen some awesome gigs there and I’m real exciting about playing.
I’ll be joined by Djeisan Suskov, of the wonderful band Cool Rainbows, who I think have an album coming out very soon.
It’s $5 coopers, it’s donation entry, and it should be just a really pretty...
February 2011
4 posts
Gigs on Thursday, Saturday.
I’m playing two solo shows this week - the first is a show on Thursday at The Wine Cellar supporting a new band called Model Train Wreck. It’s Chris from The Sprouts’ new band – The Sprouts were an ultra clever pop band around Wellington a couple of years ago, so I’m looking forward to seeing Chris’ new project.
The other is a show at the Golden Dawn Tavern of Power...
Marion Bates Realty
Okay, first I’ll get to the point. We have a new song to listen to slash download at our extravagant new website - www.tonoandthefinancecompany.com Almost exactly a year ago, I had to move out of my Grey Lynn flat. It was a nice flat - no stainless steel kitchen top, but it was homely and cluttered, with a record player and wooden floors and a patio to get bitten by mosquitos on, and busy...
Foothulls
We’re playing a show with the band on Saturday at a festival called The Foothills. It’s going to be a really awesome day. Heaps of bands, and only $15 including a sausage sizzle.
It’s at 54 Shaw Road Oratia, and run by David Parker (who recorded the xmas compilation last year). Here’s the running times.
4.10 Glass Owls 4.40 Luckless 5.10 Hold Dear 5.40 Mali Mali 6.10...
Look, a blog..
http://slycycle.com/
Well if it isn’t me whinging somewhere else on the internet…
January 2011
1 post
I’m playing my first show for the new year on February 4, at Wine Cellar opening for Melbourne based Lloyd Bosch, along with Toad. Jolly good! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=193494970663908
December 2010
3 posts
Hello Wellington! Come and see us tonight at Mighty Mighty. Set times are;
9.15 – Timothy Blackman
10 – Tono and the Finance Company
11 – Terror of the Deep
$10 entry. I know there’s a bit on tonight so if you’re going to two gigs, let us know and we can do half price.
We has an amazing show last night, this new line up is a winner!
A Very Little Christmas is THIS Wednesday
If you haven’t already, you should really download the A Very Little Christmas compilation from www.littlemonsterstudio.co.nz. We have a song on it. It’s had over 2000 downloads, it’s really quite incredible.
Just as incredible will be the release show this Wednesday at Wine Cellar / Whammy bar. I’m really excited about this show, the line up has a good portion of my...