Wine people have a ritual called a vertical tasting: you pour the same wine from one vintage after another and taste your way through the years. This Saturday morning the Melochronometer decided to try it with music. The digital readout never quite settled, but ticked over a year at a time, from 1988 to 1997, like a cellar-door ledger. What a decade to taste. It opened with New Zealand plugging into the wider internet through a 9.6-kilobit line out of Waikato University, and with a grey Nintendo Game Boy that came with Tetris in the box. The first text message ever sent, in December 1992, said simply “Merry Christmas”. In 1995 Microsoft launched Windows 95 to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”. Two years later a small London publisher printed a first hardback run of just five hundred copies of a book about a boy wizard. Down here, a song from Auckland with a trumpet hook and a Chevy Impala in the story went to number one in New Zealand. Then it crossed the Tasman and did it all over again. By 1997 about four hundred thousand of us were online.
The records hold the real flavour, as always. This ten-glass flight has a hard-rock single that opens with a famous speech, and a piano man counting headlines back to the year he was born. There’s a harmonica band whose song had to wait six years and a Hollywood comedy to be heard. We’ve got a tribute to a 1950s film star with a tabla player barely out of his teens, and a songwriter whose producer told her the song wasn’t finished. A violinist better known for Vivaldi turns up on a rock record. Two jazz guitarists split one stereo picture straight down the middle. A Scottish singer covers the very first single she ever bought. A Cincinnati couple make an album in an upstairs bedroom after their label folds. And a twenty-year-old from Christchurch sings her vocal in her pyjamas. One guitarist turns up on two of the records, and one Grammy night claims three of the artists. But that’s what the show is for. Ten years, ten songs, one from each vintage, and poured in order.
Ten From Then is on NZ Net Radio on Friday mornings at 10, with special editions on selected Saturdays. Catch up at https://www.nznetradio.net.nz/tenfromthen
Tracklist
- Living Colour — Cult of Personality — Vivid (2023 Remaster)
- Billy Joel — We Didn't Start The Fire — Greatest Hits (Vol. III)
- Blues Traveler — But Anyway — Blues Traveler
- Siouxsie And The Banshees — Kiss Them For Me — Superstition (Expanded Edition)
- Shawn Colvin — Round Of Blues — Fat City
- Robert Plant — Calling to You — Fate of Nations
- John Scofield, Pat Metheny — The Red One — I Can See Your House From Here
- Annie Lennox — No More 'I Love You's' — Medusa
- Over The Rhine — All I Need Is Everything — Good Dog Bad Dog
- Bic Runga — Bursting Through — Drive
