With the upcoming visit of one of popular music’s greats, David Byrne, and with another excellent WOMAD on the horizon, it seems as good a time as ever to look at the fraught nature of world music, writes BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

BATS Theatre
January 21-31 | Reviewed by Helen Sims

The Altruists throws an unlikely group together – a social worker, a rent boy, a ‘for rent’ activist, a soap opera actress and a lesbian activist who is organisationally challenged. A contrived and convoluted plot throws them together to resolve a moral conundrum. Will the more altruistically inclined be seduced into selfishness? What is more altruistic – the good of the greater group or the protection of the vulnerable individual? The play reveals that the seemingly altruistic can be just as self serving as the obviously selfish.

JAMES ROBINSON discerns the highs from the lows at Big Day Out 2009.

THE Big Day Out, whether you want to admit it or not, is the premiere New Zealand music festival. For now at least. It is our lifeline to feeling that we get at least a taste of the big international festivals that we lust after in glossy and vacuous music magazines. It’s all that we’ve got really. We’re stuck with it.

Worshipped internationally, inconspicuous locally, Campbell Kneale, formally Birchville Cat Motel, talks new work with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

BATS Theatre
January 10-17 | Reviewed by Melody Nixon

Becoming the Courtesan is a feisty piece from drama school duo Jamie Burgess and Karen Anslow. The singing pair have poured immense amounts of time and effort into this comedic tragedy, which began as a NASDA (Christchurch’s National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Arts) music assignment ten years ago. Anslow’s self-constructed role is daring, Burgess’ convincingly maudlin, and the play is held together with a good dose of wit as well as some gorgeous singing and all round talent.

Photography by Grahame Sydney
Penguin, NZ$115 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

WHEN I recently reviewed Roger Donaldson’s book, All Dogs Shot, I commented that some photography books seem to get published because of the person and not the work. White Silence falls into that camp and while Donaldson’s photographs definitely have merit I’m not so certain about this book. I’m not really sure of its purpose beyond an expensive souvenir of Grahame Sydney’s time in Antarctica.

Dispatched from Australia, STUART LYNCH reports on Melbourne’s live music scene.

SITUATED on iconic Smith Street, Yah Yah’s is Collingwood’s newest venue and drinking hole. The high-ceiling/low lighting combination created a suitably sleazy rock ambiance for this eclectic line-up, and the idea of a free gig at this time of year seemed a godsend to the frugally-minded locals who made the effort.

San Francisco Bathhouse
January 7 | Reviewed by James Robinson

WATCHING a band on the ascendance is a curious thing. When you’re pulled in by a band with only an album or two under their belt, you’re riding a fine line. There’s not the cache of favourites to draw on; never more than at the start of a career does a band need a shit-hot live show. There’s no free pass, no store of crowd sentiment for a band they’ve been following for a while.

Edited by Stu Bagby
AUP, $27.95 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming

I REMEMBER, last year, spontaneously reciting James K Baxter’s ‘On the Death of her Body’ to a group of East Porirua boys who were drinking at the next table at Havana. It’s a gorgeous poem about that most classic and inexhaustible of themes – sex versus death – and it’s always lodged with me. Its music, its grandness, its sense of feeling your limbs and pulsings most keenly when you’re whistling at the edge of infinity – I guess I’d had a few beers by that point, but some openness in these kids at the next table made it easy to move from small talk to reciting Baxter at 2am. After stumbling on the first stanza and having to start all over again, I managed to speak the whole poem aloud, with all my might, with my eyes closed, and when I finished, and looked up, the boys were totally rapt. Their eyes were wet. I’m not kidding. It was a goddam moment. And if sex is the way to get people to listen to poetry, well, hallelujah, so be it.

Ahead of shows in Auckland and Wellington, Stereolab’s Tim Gane chats to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM via email.

Robert Scott’s vulnerable voice, beautifully crafted pop songs, thematically dark subjects remain intact within The Bats’ latest album, The Guilty Office, writes BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM trawls the local music calendar to bring us the month’s best gigs. This January: The Fleet Foxes, Dodos w/ The Ruby Suns, Metronomy w/ The Teenagers, Throwing Muses, Gypsy Fever Summer Tour, Spiritualized, Girl Talk, Stereolab w/ Bachelorette.

ALEXANDER BISLEY and AMY BROWN don’t have the hubris to suggest they read anywhere near enough of the contenders for best books of 2008 released in New Zealand. They can happily recommend ten crackers though.

For The Lumière Reader, Music Editor BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM, and contributors GEOFF STAHL, JAMES ROBINSON and ALEXANDER BISLEY review the year in albums, singles, and memorable gigs.