Chatterbox: Pop your top for rock'n'roll

You know the old cry: "What is this filth and why must we keep flinging it at our children?"

The latest answer is, it's the new video by the usually mild-mannered Auckland band Garageland, which has been deemed too explicit for some of our music television shows. Nipples and erotic dancing apparently (no, not the band themselves). Think Showgirls, without the irony, and in black and white.

The strip-club clip for Who the Hell Do You Think You Are? was directed by Myles Van Urk, possibly the most rock'n'roll man about town (the bit between Ponsonby Rd and High St, anyway). He says in a statement (prepared we suspect just so it would end up in a column like this) he wanted to make a video that was "beautiful, simple, hedonistic, ironic, potent and most importantly rock'n'roll."

"It was never a question of, 'Eek, let's put some [breasts] in here and make the video really edgy and controversial.'" Oh, right.

Garageland's manager, Campbell Smith, observes, "I don't see what all the fuss is about, given that 50 per cent of the audience has breasts. The other 50 per cent knows what they look like."

(Well, Madonna's anyway).

Anyway, good luck with getting the edited version screened - and we'll leave the punchline to Van Urk and his contention that "perhaps it's naive to consider the music video one of the last free mediums where art and commerce don't collide." Pardon? We here thought music videos were exactly the point where art and commerce not only collide, but end up lap dancing with each other. With help from New Zealand On Air.

A TICKET FOR THE GOOD BIT PLEASE:

How to really enjoy Pearl Harbor:

1) When you buy your ticket ask what time the movie actually starts after all the advertisements and trailers.

2) Add 90 minutes to that time.

3) Take your seat just before that time but be considerate and be sure not to wake anybody who has been there since the beginning.

4) Spend the next 40 minutes watching the spectacular attack and ensuing dogfight.

5) Leave when you want - the scene when Jon Voight's Franklin D. Roosevelt gets out of his wheelchair is a very good cue.

OLD GIRLS' CLUB:

First it was a reunion show and now comes the news of a When The Cats Away revival. Members of the original lineup of the popular late-80s covers band-cum-pop revue, Debbie Harwood, Annie Crummer, Margaret Urlich, and Kim Willoughby will be joined by Sharon O'Neill on a national tour in September. They're spending this weekend in an Auckland studio rerecording O'Neill's 1980 hit, Asian Paradise, to kick off the nostalgiafest.

FAN OF THE WEEK:

In our review of Radiohead's new album Amnesiac - straight in at number one in the New Zealand charts this week - we flippantly mused that maybe the best songs off it and its predecessor, Kid A, could be combined into one great album. "Answers on a postcard please," we jokingly suggested. There's always one, isn't there? Ross Murray, of Eden Tce, sent us his ideal tracklisting on an appropriately arty postcard compiled "after intense scrutiny and rigorous aural examination."

For what it's worth, here's his suggested running order:

1. Everything In Its Right Place

2. Pyramid Song

3. The National Anthem

4. How to Disappear Completely

5. You and Whose Army?

6. Knives Out

7. I Might Be Wrong

8. Kid A

9. Idioteque

10. Morning Bell

11. Like Spinning Plates

12. Motion Picture Soundtrack.


We'll be sending Mr Murray a little something from the Radiohead product pile care of EMI for his troubles. This "competition" is now closed.

BURNING QUESTION:

What is that song with the throaty vocal, grand guitar line and loping bass behind the Telecom Xtra telly ads? It's Life's What You Make It from 80s English art-pop band Talk Talk, originally off their finest album, The Colour of Spring, but also available on compilation album Natural History.