Not talkin' 'bout religion, no - not talkin' 'bout fashion, no

Thursday music corner: The Dynamic Hepnotics were an Australian soul band formed by "Continental" Robert Susz in Sydney in 1979. Although the band released only one album, 1985's Take You Higher, they achieved considerable chart success with their most memorable single, Soul Kind of Feeling. Written by Susz and appearing as the final track on Take You Higher, the exuberant soul single reached number five in the Australian pop charts in 1984, driven in particular by Susz's dramatic falsetto vocals, and popularised further by numerous appearances in the soap Neighbours. The song charted even higher in New Zealand, reaching number three in March 1985. 

The band had one other Australian charting single, Gotta Be Wrong (Way to Love), which reached number 20 later in 1984. The band split in 1986, but reunited for two music festival shows in 2015.   

Dynamic Hepnotics - Soul Kind of Feeling (1984)

See also:
Music: Hoodoo Gurus - I Want You Back (1984)

Music: Eurogliders - Heaven (Must Be There) (1984)

Music: Pseudo Echo - A Beat For You (1984)

Precolonial maritime New Zealand

That record, since December 1642 when Abel Tasman first sighted 'Clyppygen Hoeck', to December 1840, when colonisation began, had the records of 1758 vessels arriving on the [New Zealand] coast.

They came, first to explore, then to exploit, little schooners and brigs out of the infant seaport of Port Jackson, the whaling barques out of the ancient port of London, the full-riggers from the whaling ports of Maine and Massachusetts, from Lisbon, Copenhagen, Le Havre, Bremen and Hobart Town. Sealers and whalers, spar ships and flax traders, sandalwood schooners on their way home from Fiji, ships laden with tortoise shell and coconut oil from Tahiti, and ships of war from Trincomalee and Toulon.

New Zealand, and many of its precolonial seaports, enjoyed a trade by sea that was truly international, and today, as one sails up the harbours of Akaroa, Port Underwood, Hokianga or the Bay of Islands, with only an occasional fisherman or pleasure boat in sight, it is difficult to imagine those waters thronged with barques, brigs and schooners flying the flags of many nations, of whaleboats, in countless numbers, trafficking between ships and from ship to shore.

They came in their hundreds, seeking grog and girls, pork and potatoes, and the natural products the coast had to offer: oil to light the lamps of Europe and America; whalebone to corset their women; sealskins to robe the Manchus of China or to appear on the streets of London as 'beaver hats'; flax to provide canvas, rope and cordage for their ships; and solid kauri spars for masts and yards. Whatever they sought, they came by sea, stayed a while and went on, about their seafaring business. A few were left behind, seamen from America, France, Australia, England, Scotland and Ireland, ship deserters of many nations, living with their Maori wives and laying the foundations of what was to become a multiracial society.

To some perhaps, the most significant maritime activity of these years will be seen as that occurring in 1840, the arrival in Port Nicholson of the chartered ships of the New Zealand Company, carrying between them close on 2000 intending settlers, to be landed haphazardly on the beach at Petone in the rude collection of tents, shacks and whares they proudly called 'Britannia'.

- Rear-Admiral John O'Connell Ross,* New Zealand Maritime History to 1840: People, Ships, Trade & Settlement, Wellington, 2024, p.146-7.

(* Ross was Royal New Zealand Navy Chief of Naval Staff, 1965-69)

See also:
History: The itinerant life of a tramp steamer, 11 December 2021

History: The lifeblood of a young colony, 12 June 2009

History: Tales to tell back on shore, 21 January 2009

Like two Christophers in the snow

Thursday music corner: Ocean Colour Scene are a rock band formed in Birmingham in 1989, consisting at the outset of Simon Fowler, Steve Cradock, Damon Minchella and Oscar Harrison. They first attained wider fame after being invited to tour as support to Paul Weller in 1993 and Oasis in 1995. The band achieved success as part of the Britpop boom, including scoring three top-five UK albums from 1996 to 1999. Moseley Shoals, the most successful of their albums, went triple platinum in the UK, and its successor, Marchin' Already, topped the UK album charts. Ocean Colour Scene have released 10 studio albums between 1992 and 2013, and scored 17 UK top 40 singles between 1996 and 2007. Six of the band's singles also reached the Irish top 40. 

Travellers Tune was the second single (after Hundred Mile High City) from the band's third album, Marchin' Already. Released in 1997, it peaked at number five in the UK singles chart, and number 30 in Ireland. American soul singer P.P. Arnold, another frequent Paul Weller collaborator, provides guest vocals. 

Ocean Colour Scene - Travellers Tune (1997)

See also:
Music: Ocean Colour Scene - You've Got It Bad (1996)

Music: Paul Weller -  The Weaver (w/ Steve Cradock, 1993)

Music: P.P. Arnold - The First Cut is the Deepest (1967)

The measure of Pope John Paul II

[Pope John Paul II] was a hard man to measure. Sternly authoritarian he nevertheless abandoned the use of the Royal plural in his encyclicals and allocutions: he was the first pope to write not as 'we' but in his own persona, as Karol Wojtyla. He was also a passionate believer in religious liberty, and at Vatican II played a key role in the transformation of Catholic teaching in that area. Often seen as dismissive of other faiths, he had an intense interest in Judaism, born out of a lifelong friendship with a Jewish boy from Krakow: he was the first Pope to visit the Roman Synagogue, and in 1993 he established formal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. His openness to other religions extended to the non-Abrahamic traditions. In October 1986 at Assisi he initiated acts of worship involving not only Muslims, but Hindus, the Dali Lama and assorted Shamans. When praying by the Ganges at the scene of Gandhi's cremation he became so absorbed that his entourage lost patience and literally shook him back into his schedule. The uncompromising defender of profoundly unpopular teaching on matters such as birth-control, he was nevertheless the most populist pope in history, an unstoppable tarmac-kisser, hand-shaker, granny-blesser, baby-embracer. Convinced of his own immediate authority over and responsibility for every Catholic in the world, he went to the people, showing himself, asserting his authority, coaxing, scolding, joking, weeping, and trailing exhausted local hierarchies in his wake [...]

John Paul II's pontificate, the longest since Pius IX and the second longest in history, will also be judged one of the most momentous, in which a pope not only once more reasserted papal control of the Church, and thereby sought to call a halt to the decentralising initiated as a result of the Second Vatican Council, but in which the Pope, long since a marginal figure in the world of realpolitik, once more played a major role in world history, and the downfall of Soviet Communism. John Paul's own contradictions defied easy categorisations. Passionately committed to the freedom and integrity of the human person, he was the twentieth century's most effective ambassador for such freedoms, setting his own country on a path to liberation and thereby helping trigger the collapse of the Soviet empire. Two of his major encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio, celebrate the ability of the free human mind to grasp fundamental truth and to discern the will of God which is also the fulfilment of human nature. Yet under his rule, the last quarter of the twentieth century saw a revived authoritarianism in the Catholic Church, in which, in the judgement of many, theological exploration was needlessly outlawed or prematurely constrained. Passionately committed to reconciliation with the Orthodox, his pontificate saw an expansion of Catholicism within the former Soviet Union which outraged Orthodox leaders and hardened the ancient suspicions he so painfully and sincerely laboured to dispel. This Polish pope did more than any single individual in the whole history of Christianity to reconcile Jews and Christians and to remove the ancient stain of anti-Semitism from the Christian imagination: his visits to the Roman synagogue and above all to the Holy Land in 2000, and his repeated expressions of penitence for Christian anti-Semitism, were imaginative gestures whose full implications and consequences have yet to appear. Yet he canonised Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who voluntarily took the place of a married man in a Nazi concentration camp death cell, but who had edited an anti-Semitic paper between the Wars. Wojtyla also canonized Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a Carmelite nun and died because she was a Jew in Auschwitz in 1942. The Pope saw Stein as a reconciling figure. Jews saw her as an emblem of proselytisation and, as in the case of Kolbe, an attempt to annex the Shoah for Catholicism. Wojtyla was not deflected from his purpose, and despite protests both canonizations went ahead.

- Eamon Duffy, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, Yale, 2006, pp.377 & 382-3.

From Mt Kaukau

 

Iona Tower

 

Songs discussed in Bob Dylan's The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

Bobby Bare - Detroit City 1963

Elvis Costello - Pump It Up 1978

Perry Como - Without a Song 1951

Jimmy Wages - Take Me From this Garden of Evil 1956

Webb Pierce - There Stands the Glass 1953

Billy Joe Shaver - Willy the Wandering Gypsy & Me 1973

Little Richard - Tutti Frutti 1955

Elvis Presley - Money Honey 1956

The Who - My Generation 1965

Harry McLintock - Jesse James 1928

Ricky Nelson - Poor Little Fool 1958

Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard - Pancho & Lefty 1983

Jackson Browne - The Pretender 1976

Bobby Darin - Mack the Knife 1959

Bing Crosby - Whiffenpoof Song 1947

Eddy Arnold - You Don't Know Me 1956

The Temptations - Ball of Confusion 1970

Johnnie & Jack - Poison Love 1950

Bobby Darin - Beyond the Sea 1958

Willie Nelson - On the Road Again 1980

Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes - If You Don't Know Me By Now 1972

Johnnie Ray - The Little White Cloud That Cried 1951

Marty Robbins - El Paso 1959

Alvin Youngblood Hart - Nelly Was a Lady 2004

Johnnie Taylor - Cheaper to Keep Her 1973

Ray Charles - I Got a Woman 1954

The Fugs - CIA Man 1967

Vic Damone - On the Street Where You Live 1956

The Grateful Dead - Truckin’ 1970

Osborne Brothers - Ruby Are You Mad? 1956

Johnny Paycheck - Old Violin 1986

Domenico Modugno - Volare 1958

The Clash - London Calling 1979

Hank Williams with his Drifting Cowboys - Your Cheatin’ Heart 1953

Roy Orbison - Blue Bayou 1963

Allman Brothers - Midnight Rider 1970

Carl Perkins - Blue Suede Shoes 1956

The Platters - My Prayer 1956

Warren Zevon - Dirty Life & Times 2003

John Trudell - Doesn't Hurt Anymore 2001

Little Walter - Key to the Highway 1958

Mose Allison - Everybody Cryin’ Mercy 1968

Edwin Starr - War 1970

Johnny Cash & the Tennessee Two - Big River 1957

Sonny Burgess - Feel So Good 1957/58

Dean Martin - Blue Moon 1964

Cher - Gypsies Tramps & Thieves 1971

Uncle Dave Macon - Keep My Skillet Good & Greasy 1924

Tommy Edwards - It's All In The Game 1958

Ernie K-Doe - A Certain Girl 1961

Waylon Jennings - I've Always Been Crazy 1978

Eagles - Witchy Woman 1972

Jimmy Reed - Big Boss Man 1960

Little Richard - Long Tall Sally 1956

Charlie Poole - Old & Only in the Way 1928

Santana - Black Magic Woman 1970

Jimmy Webb - By the Time I Get To Phoenix 1996

Rosemary Clooney - Come On-A My House 1951

Johnny Cash - Don't Take Your Guns to Town 1958

Judy Garland - Come Rain or Come Shine 1956

Nina Simone - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood 1964

Frank Sinatra - Strangers in the Night 1966

Elvis Presley - Viva Las Vegas 1964

The Drifters - Saturday Night at the Movies 1964

Pete Seeger - Waist Deep in the Big Muddy 1967

Dion - Where or When 1959

Sex & Agriculture

Thursday music corner: Dance Exponents, founded by vocalist Jordan Luck and guitarist Brian Jones, were the original 1980s incarnation of the truncated Exponents that took the New Zealand music charts by storm in the 1990s. Formed in 1981 and relocating from Timaru to Christchurch, the Dance Exponents released three successful albums: Prayers Be Answered (1983), Expectations (1985) and Amplifier (1986) and had nine New Zealand top 40 singles; the first, 1982's Victoria, being their most popular. 

As the Exponents the band went on to greater success in the 1990s, including three top ten albums and ten more top 40 singles. They attained their peak popularity thanks to the Something Beginning with C album from 1992, which featured twin New Zealand number three-charting singles in 1991, Why Does Love Do This To Me and Who Loves Who The Most.

Sex & Agriculture was a non-album Dance Exponents single from 1984, which followed up the barroom stomper I'll Say Goodbye (Even Though I'm Blue).

Dance Exponents - Sex & Agriculture (1984) 

See also:

Music: Dance Exponents - Airway Spies (1982)

Music: Exponents - Sink Like A Stone (1992)

Music: Jordan Luck Band - Under The Mercury Moon (2017)