Sakura - A Blast from the Past

When yodeling was Queen.

Nothing New Under The Sun

One of our local supermarkets has an irritating television advert playing at the moment.  It consists of people converting vegetables and then playing them in a poor rendition of a NZ classic pop song.

While boring at least the idea had a degree of novelty, or at least so I thought, until I discovered this CBS news item.



Vienna's Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world and they even have their own website.  This is not a novelty act. They are committed to " the further exploration and refinement of performable vegetable music is a central part of the orchestra's aesthetic quest".

I never had aspirations to play the courgette.  Classical pianoforte training followed by a misspent youth playing in rock bands  was music enough for my ears.

The New Zealand advertisement and its orchestral clone can be seen in the clip below.

Related articles

• Austria's Vegetable Orchestra (theworld.org)
• The Vegetable Orchestra (lostateminor.com)

Supermarket Blues

I have come to the realisation that matching the relative prices of boxes of tissues in the supermarket could become an excessively boring activity.

It is now several weeks since I was gainfully employed in Singapore and it will be a few weeks more before I test the waters of the NZ job market.

My day is spent making purchases of the domestic variety.  I have noticed, as I did today, that most of the shoppers  are greying at the temples and seem to know all the lyrics of the sixties music which is piped around the supermarket's sound system.

The fact that I too knew every word of the songs was  rather sobering. One white headed orthodontically-impaired spinster was tunelessly gumming to Little Eva's Let's Do The Locomotion (video) although clearly in her case it was a dream too far.

Even the food demonstrators are become wary of me as I circle with the homing instinct of a Great White around their pizza stand. The urge to refill my toothpick with some dainty morsel is a primary motivation.




The origins of the modern supermarket are not wdiely known.  In 1916 one Clarence Saunders opened the Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis.

He provided astonished shoppers with baskets and sent them through the store to pick what they needed.  Pior to this self-serve revolution such activity was a task reserved for store clerks.

According to another source on the web, the invention of the car ignition switch also had a direct impact on the growth of supermarkets.

"Previously, housewives had to limit their shopping to store within walking distance; it was too difficult and dangerous to turn the starter crank to get the car started. But once their was an easy way to start the car, housewives were set to travel miles to get a bargain".

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Origin of the Supermarket (neatorama.com)

Something Hairy

I have discovered something else that Fort Canning is famous for - rock concerts.

How do I know this?

For the past two hours a US Band, Firehouse, have been conducting sound checks and rehearsing for their concert tomorrow night. 

There is nothing more repetitive than a band conducting sound checks, clucking into the microphone and repeating the numbers "1, 2" with a tongue click, ad nauseam.  I should know, I once played in such bands and had hair of a similar length.

Firehouse is not a new band.  It, like many others that visit Singapore, has been around for some time and was at the height of its popularity in the 1990's.

Even the 1970's Australian Group Air Supply put aside their zimmer frames to visit the Republic on an annual basis.

The 'Hairy Ones' a.k.a. Firehouse perform live tomorrow night so I am not anticipating too much sleep.

Another Sixties Icon Passes On

Crispian St. Peters, a British pop singer of the ’60s best known for his buoyant hit “Pied Piper” and his soulful version of “You Were on My Mind,” has died at his home in Swanley, Kent, England. He was 71.

Just Four Years Old

I learn to play drums like this at age 13.  This little guy at 4 years old is just fantastic and look how much he is enjoying himself.

The Quest For Pop Immortality

This is a band called The Quests who had their first hit, an instrumental called 'Shanty' in 1964.  As with many bands at that time they started playing cover versions of The Shadows (video below).

The name of the band was derived from the school magazine of the Queenstown Secondary Technical School, located in a part of Singapore where I now live.

They were joined for a while by an Ex-British serviceman Keith Locke on lead vocals.  I still enjoy their musicianship although the songs are nearly fifty years old.

Beatles To Bowie

As a 'child of the sixties' I am interested to learn that the National Portrait Gallery in London is featuring an exhibition of the decade.
A very good online gallery can be seen here.

Boozy Basoonists

"The charge M'Lud is that on August 31st, the accused was drunk in charge of his instrument"

An unlikely scenario? Perhaps not, according to the revelation this week that binge drinking amongst members of Britain's leading orchestras is a serious problem. Reportedly things have got so bad that there was "an incident in which a percussionist had fallen off the back of a high stage while drunk".

Now I know that in a recession the arts are almost amongst the first to suffer but up until now I thought it was only rock bands that took to the stage inebriated.

For some reason it appears that brass players drink more than other sections of the orchestra. Having tried to master the trombone as a teenager I can understand the frustrations endured by this section of the orchestra but it didn't turn me into a raging alcoholic.

There has no doubt been a corresponding rise in sales in strong mints wherever British orchestras are located. A bass player with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (a fitting title, in the context of this story) tells of a fellow musician who attempted to mask his habit with this confectionery and whose playing got "worse and worse".

To the best of my knowledge this affliction has yet to strike Singapore's classical music scene. I shall however be listening carefully for the sounds of Mozart on Speed.