The band have released two EPs, This is a tree, where is the sun? (2008) and Mandala (2018), and their debut album, Signal Hill, came out last year. Their newly released single, Baby Girl, is a lush musical ballard written and sung by Robert Milne, with backing vocals from the band, accompanied by up-and-coming singer-songwriter, Lara Rose. You may have seen Rose performing with her country-folk duo, Tall Folk.
While Lobo isn’t a teacher as such, he’s justly famous as one of the most giving musical mentors in the city.
You can listen to Baby Girl at the band’s Bandcamp page.
BANDING TOGETHER
Emerge is a new multi-band live show, brought to you by Fortify Events, the same folk who bought you Riff Foundry at the Gasworks Museum the other week.
The show will integrate well-being aspects, with the good people at WEKA and Life Matters joining for the night.
The gig, at Errick's on Friday August 30, starts at 6pm. Playing are IVY, Black-Sale House, Mads Harrop, and Frivolry.
There will also be a mini-market featuring support services and a range of food available, with local food trucks joining the fray.
Tickets: erricks.flicket.co.nz
ROBERT SCOTT: LOCAL HALL OF FAME INTERVIEW
Robert Scott is something of a local music legend. This man was playing music when the early settlers couldn’t sleep at night for the noise of right whales bonking in the harbour. While this might be something of a exaggeration, Scott has been performing/recording and touring for more than four decades, ever since he joined The Clean in 1980.
The famous trio put out multiple albums, toured the world many times and are generally regarded as one of the main catalysts of the so-called "Dunedin Sound".
Even if Scott had been in this one band only, he’d still be a well-known local musician, but he’s been in many other groups including The Weeds, Electric Blood, Mr Big Nose, Pink Plastic Gods and, of course, The Bats, which he formed with Christchurch residents Paul Kean, Malcolm Grant and Kaye Woodward in 1982. The band has produced 11 studio albums, toured overseas and is still going strong with a new album coming out next year. Everyone knows that what happens on tour stays on tour but I had the temerity to ask Scott for a funny or scary story from one of the many overseas tours.
"The Bats were on tour in Europe in the late ’80s and we’d played in Amsterdam, where you could legally purchase small amounts of marijuana. We were in the van driving west but we thought we were still well inside Holland, so some of us had a cheeky smoke. We’d just finished when a French border post suddenly and unexpectedly appeared. Someone quickly swallowed the offending material, but it was too late! One of the border guards got a whiff and they decided to turn us over! The guards tore our van apart for over three hours. They also took us all into separate rooms, where they made us disrobe so they could minutely inspect our crevices for any illegal contraband. They even made some of us jump off tables semi-naked in case something incriminating dropped out from our nether regions! When these humiliating procedures failed to find anything they reluctantly bundled us back in the van but as a final insult some of them even spat on our passports. Maybe the recent Rainbow Warrior incident had something to do with it."
As well as the upcoming Bats album, Scott is also working on a new solo album and he’s also provided some songs for a new Stef Animal video game coming out soon. Appropriately, he plays a virtual busker. Scott struggled for decades to get where he is but his daughter, Brydie, became something of an international pop sensation with the very first song from her very first group. She’d recently moved to London with her partner, Chris Young, and his Auckland group, The Eversons, and the band was going nowhere until they began an online collaboration with a Japanese artist called Orono Noguchi. This new group, Superorganism, suddenly had a huge breakout hit in 2018 with a song called Something for your M.I.N.D and started touring the world. Sadly it wasn’t to last, as Orono found the pressures of fame too much to handle and the group broke up a few years later.
These days Scott and his partner, Dallas, run the successful Pea Sea Art, a gallery and art supply shop, which also hosts life drawing lessons, in the main street of Port Chalmers.
