Believe it or not this is a Fluxus artwork that I obtained at considerable cost (from an anonymous source) which captures the moment, literally, at which Françoise Hardy and Nick Drake met in June 1970 in Paris. This anonymous source, realising the import of an event where two extremely gifted but shy people were about to say absolutely nothing to each other, had the presence of mind to surreptiously harvest the air in the room, heavy with awkwardness, via a half empty bottle of beer and only release that air into this frame by an elaborate sealed injection method (it was innovative for the time). It is rumoured that Jean-Luc Godard once owned the piece but I am sceptical. In the absence of an inscribed title I call it “The silent love-child of Françoise Hardy and Nick Drake”.
The arcane pleasures of obscurity and forgetting. When Temple IV was released in 1996 Joel promptly sent me ten publicity posters done on very nice parchment type paper. I thought they were so nice that I dare not touch them so left them in the mailing tube for nearly 30 years by which time I was beginning to think they had never existed and if they did not it was a pity since in my imagination they had come out very well. I found them last week… Similarly, while recently rifling through what one could only very optimistically be called “the archives” rather than the sad wreckage of a person with a hoarding disorder I chanced upon a copy of a small magazine produced by our young group of lecturers and students at Lincoln University in 1995 and 1996 called JWB which stood for the Journal of Wild Being. I had completely forgotten I had written this text in late 1994 just as I was starting to record the album. I have always liked The Residents “Theory of Obscurity” which dictates that you should not release an album until you have forgotten you recorded it. I will try to stick to that henceforth. I forgot to say vinyl is finally out on May 31. Buy or die. Then forget you bought it until years later when you buy a copy on ebay/trademe and then discover you have two copies. So rewarding, trust me, I have done it with many albums by others like Marquee Moon…
In late 1994 I was in New York trying to get the South Island down on 4-track in an apartment on East 13th Street. A few months later my friends Jessica and Bill Meyer from Chicago were touring the South Island getting the experience down in thoughts and images while I house sat their apartment. Jessica took this photograph when they visited the Catlins on the south east coast of Otago. Unbeknownst to them both I had photographed the same dead ancestor in the mid-1980s (and I visited it again to pay my respects in 1996) so it became the logical emblem for a scene. Jessica’s print fitted the Compact Disc format perfectly. Different times.
Proof that life inevitably comes to imitate art. Top: Hand screened cover for second Pin Group 45 7” Jim/Coat made in 1981 and designed by Ronnie van Hout when the fruit concerned was still called a “Chinese Gooseberry” by many kiwis. Bottom: Zespri Vita Kiwifruit Rubyred released for my lunch in 2024.
My first guitar. On the back of the photograph it is stamped Kodak Jan ‘71. I think this is Christmas Day 1970 in that case and the guitar was a Christmas present from my mother as was the towelling shirt and the denim shorts with the cotton rope belt. We got the guitar from the trade-in section of Sedley Wells Music Store. It was around $30. I had no idea how to play it. I just decided this was for me. I can see now that it was a nameless Japanese Gibson E-335 copy and was basically just whatever the Matsumoto Company was turning out that week. I was obviously going for looks rather than playability as I had to return it within a year and trade it for a six-string guitar, an exotically named “Marinucci,” also straight off the Matsumoto conveyor belt. I fared no better playing that really and more or less gave up because I thought you had to learn to play proper chords and read music and I was not wired for that. Things changed a little later on when punk happened and I fumbled along to the Saints I’m Stranded LP until I could hold down a tune of sorts (I played on another Marinucci on all the Pin Group records). I still play in trashy guitars for the most part…
In the garden on that day behind me and to my left were gladioli, roses, dahlias and a large hydrangea bush. The house is gone. And the garden thanks to the earthquakes but I can still smell those roses.
Poem for Francesca Woodman on her birthday (followed by a short public service announcement)
The definitive gaze
That empties the magazine
With diaphanous bullets
The presentation of self
In photographic life
In the beginning
There was Francescagram
Apertures and occlusions
In equal measure
(Please see the Julia Margaret Cameron/Francesca Woodman exhibition at either the National Portrait Gallery in London on now till June 30 or Institut Valencià d’Art Modern July 11 to 20 October)
These endless farewells are hard to take. This is my Aunt Bobbie posing tolerantly while I take a photo of what is supposed to be her showing off her first car in July 1972 (rather than an accidental conceptual art piece of telephone pole with car and woman and footpath on very hot day). I was 13, Bobbie was 31, and she had just got her driver’s license. She was so terrified of driving on these frantically busy roads that she sold the car within two years. She died last Sunday at the age of 83 never having been in a car accident. Child free and unmarried throughout her life she was my slightly crabby but ultimately biddable big “sister” and my auxilliary Mum. I am desolate.
Hamish Kilgour, I said some weeks back I am not done thinking about you. Accordingly I will say some words meant to go between me and you on your birthday. I will quote Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. I will also quote your folk hero Emmett Grogan. And in all probability… I will cry. Sunday March 17th Pūmanawa Gallery, Arts Centre, Ōtautahi Christchurch. The 70 capacity event is sold out but will be streaming on youtube from 13:00 to 16:00 hours Aotearoa New Zealand time. Others too will honour your memory that day.
Thank you very much Laura Snapes, Deputy Music Editor at the Guardian, for pitching this to Pitchfork before the great transformation. I am humbled. I look forward to Temple Four enjoying a brief renaissance but this time on vinyl thanks to Kranky Records Ltd. I also look forward to a complimentary lifelong subscription to GQ and brunch with Anna Wintour. Your shades are no match for my B & L Baloramas, Anna. /reviews/albums/roy-montgomery-temple-iv/
