Bruce Bisset: Let's sing out for our musos

There are hundreds of acts who have created a cultural landscape be it through music, poetry, dance, comedy or wilder confabulations to give us Kiwis something more than rugby to attend. Photo / Thinkstock

Spending time with old friends is precious, especially if, as with me, there are few who really qualify and it's often decades between meetings.

And as we head into our senior years there's increasingly the chance each such get-together will be the last.

Yes, I've reached the age when people I've known well enough to lark about with are dropping dead with frightening regularity, especially in the music and entertainment scene.

The rigours of that lifestyle exact a heavy cull of premature deaths; the Keith Richards' of the world are rare.

Which is, by the by, why I was only a brief bright spark in that world back in the 70s and 80s; had I kept on, I don't doubt I would have been dead by now and I wanted a family.

So it was with a mix of pleasure and introspection that I spent time this week with an old mate with whom I did a hundred gigs back when, singer/songwriter and bluesman extraordinaire Ralph Bennett-Eades.

Now, Ralph's one of those unsung musos most people never hear of because he's never had a popular hit; he just does what he does because it is, and always has been, his calling.

That's not to say he lacks talent. Far from it.

Anyone spending their life living off the proceeds of their art without fanfare in New Zealand probably has more talent in their little finger than a dozen manufactured instant popstars combined.

And he does.

As do many others I can think of too many, sadly, already deceased who persist not-so-quietly in putting their music out to whoever cares to listen.

Not because they expect fame or fortune but because it's who they are and what they love.

One nice thing about performance art is working with kindred spirits with whom you can fall into step and have fun, regardless of the passage of time.

About 29 years in our case - but it seemed no time at all.

Still, it was bitter-sweet, for in the interim Ralph's liver has decided to misbehave.

Yet rather than "lie in a room and wait for people to visit", as he put it, he's chosen to take to the road anew by rejoining the Gypsy Fair for the summer.

Point is, apart from troubadours like Ralph there are hundreds of acts who have created a cultural landscape be it through music, poetry, dance, comedy or wilder confabulations to give us Kiwis something more than rugby to attend.

Yet while Iceland may have given outlandish singer Bjork her own island to mark her cultural contribution, we have only a fledgling Hall of Fame that is not robust enough to properly remember our entertainers not even those who were "stars".

From Peter Posa to Th' Dudes, the La De Das to Suzanne Prentice, there's a long and star-spangled list of hard-working musicians who have played the background music to our lives, yet for whom there is no special place amongst our national treasures.

Now domiciled in the US, drummer Peter Grattan - responsible for producing the iconic Radio With Pictures music television show - is campaigning hard to give our homegrown talent the memorial structure they deserve.

Else in a few years' time, no-one will remember who sang the songs we sang along to in our youth.

And that lack will mark us poorly as a nation.

As for Ralph, I expect he'll shrug and smile and strum out another tune; but it would be nice to imagine there'd be a corner in such a Hall to record voices like his, too.

Travel well, brother.

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.