LIVE music is in the air at the weekend, with two internationally acclaimed musicians and an Auckland blues-rocker performing.
Midge Marsden, the good reverend godfather of the blues in New Zealand, plays at the GBS Bar (The Prospect) in Howick on Friday night, following hot on the heels from the rocking sell-out for Hello Sailor’s Dave McArtney and Graham Brazier.
Tony Painting is a slick and classy guitarist, who earlier this year featured in a Times article about a gig he was staging and playing in tribute to the late-great Texas Tornado, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Painting, who lives in Howick, has a hot new CD out.
He’ll be telling all and playing his fingers off and singing on She’ll Be Right on Howick Village Radio on Saturday from 3-4pm.
On the same show is Walter Hacon, an ex-pat Englishman who has amazing tales and music journeys to recall.
He popped into New Zealand in 1979 playing on a Stiff Records tour, it’s Auckland gig being Mainstreet.
Hacon was in the band that formed Wreckless Eric, famous for the desperate love song of the punk era, (I Go The) Whole Wide World.
He met his future wife here and the rest, as he says, “is history”.
He’s had an interesting musical career, which has seen him rub shoulders and play with some of the UK’s outstanding musicians from the socially revolutionary punk era to now.
There’s an impressive back catalogue of recordings and compositions, and a large collection of new songs that are up to the international class he’s always delivered.
He wrote Broken Doll, a song that was recorded by Sir Cliff Richard.
And to illustrate more of Hacon’s diverse abilities, he co-wrote with his renowned playwright mother Josephine Geneva Hacon a brilliant stage musical about the greatest of the early cinematic leads, comedian Charlie Chaplin.
It has been staged in Britain and New Zealand but needs to get an airing more often.
As is constant in rock ‘n’ roll, the paths of Hacon and Marsden crossed at Mainstreet, the 1970-80s venue at the top of Queen Street in downtown Auckland that eventually self-destructed, not before some important gigs in Kiwi music history played out on its perspiration-drenched boards.
One such night was when Marsden was on stage with his amigo Stevie Ray Vaughan (rounding his connection to Tony Painting) and Wilko Johnson, the suited British punk-blues guitarist who would’ve been chums with Hacon.
