New Zealand Net Radio

Two days after Sleeve Notes took My Aim Is True apart track by track, Power Pop Friday follows the man who produced it out of the studio door. Nick Lowe made Elvis Costello’s first five albums, and around the two of them gathered a small, busy circle who wrote for each other, produced each other and turned up in each other’s videos. So this hour moves through that circle like a family tree. Costello and the Attractions tear through “Pump It Up”. Lowe has his one big hit of his own with “Cruel to Be Kind”, a song that somehow peaked at number twelve in four different countries. Dave Edmunds takes a song Costello handed him and turns it into the biggest hit of his Rockpile years, then does the same favour for one of Lowe’s. Rockpile, the band Lowe and Edmunds shared, get two songs from the only album that carries their name.From there the connections spread outward. Lowe produces the Pretenders’ first single and then walks away, convinced they have no future. Graham Parker’s band turns out to contain half of Lowe’s old one. Costello moves into the producer’s chair for Squeeze, on an album that very nearly had Paul McCartney producing one side, and borrows their singer in return. The Bangles, Wilco and Costello’s own Imposters bring the story into this century. Running underneath all of it is one song, written in 1974 by a pub rock bass player who thought he was being funny. You’ll hear it twice, by two different bands, about half an hour apart, and the second time nobody is joking.Broadcast 13 November 2026

In the summer of 1976 Declan MacManus was a computer operator at a cosmetics factory in west London, with a young family, a stack of songs and a pile of rejection letters. Stiff Records gave him a new first name and six evenings in a tiny Islington studio, and he made the record by calling in sick. His backing band was Clover, a group of Californian country-rockers who went uncredited on the sleeve and had been replaced by the Attractions before the album reached the shops. My Aim Is True came out in July 1977, and a few weeks later the other Elvis was dead. In New Zealand it didn’t reach the charts until March 1978. Now Costello has opened the archive for a five-disc 49th Anniversary Edition. Fifty, he says, felt like a museum piece. It has 104 tracks, more than half of them never released before, including demos from a 1976 tape that singer-songwriter Charlie Dore found again only in 2024.Ken Cheshire is back for his second Sleeve Notes, and this time we’ve given it two hours. The first hour goes through the album side by side: how each of us first heard it, the songs we picked (we picked the same one from Side One, which has never happened before), and what still sounds sharp nearly fifty years on. The second hour opens the box. We hear the country-tinged outtakes he kept off the record, including the song that was once meant to be his debut single, and test whether the new remaster really sounds different. We follow one song from a bedroom tape to the stage, and we finish in San Francisco in 2007, the night Clover finally played the album live, thirty years late. Then it’s desert-island time, and an argument about where this record sits among Costello’s best.Broadcast 11 November 2026

Ten songs is never enough to settle an argument. So at 11, straight after the special, Jim Bricker and Jarrett McCall join Bevan for the Post Match Breakdown. They built this morning's playlist together, and now they have to defend it. Why these ten? Was '80s country a revival or a reaction? And did Nashville ever work out what to do with Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith and k.d. lang?Along the way there are four more songs from the same artists. You'll hear a last-minute stand-in that ended up at number one, a duet a rock and roll legend asked for by name, George Strait heading for Amarillo, and the song that made K.T. Oslin's name. Then there's a lightning round, some homework for newcomers, and one question closer to home: where did '80s country reach you?Broadcast 7 November 2026

In 1975 a Sydney band who couldn’t get booked anywhere took a residency at a hotel in Taylor Square. They ended up running the place and renamed it the Funhouse, after the Stooges. That’s where this week’s New Wave Friday starts, because in Australia new wave didn’t grow out of art schools or record shops. It grew out of the pub. Bands had to win over a room full of drinkers before radio would go near them, and the ones who managed it carried that muscle onto Countdown and into the charts on both sides of the world. We hear Radio Birdman, the Saints’ only British hit, and the Angels’ first single, which stalled at 58 in 1976 and needed twelve years and a live version to reach the top twenty. Our one from home this week is Dragon, who left Auckland for Sydney in 1975 and gave us “April Sun in Cuba”, four times platinum here.The rest of the hour keeps coming back to the same few rooms and the same few producers. One Sydney studio turned out Cold Chisel’s first top ten, the breakthrough single from Flowers (before they became Icehouse), and records by Models and INXS. Midnight Oil and the Church both did better here than at home, which says something about our taste. Then two Melbourne bands from the last few years prove the pubs are still turning out talent. One of them, Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor, has recorded her own take on the Saints song we open with. We close with INXS and “The One Thing”, the opening track of Shabooh Shoobah. If you want the whole story of that album, our upcoming episode in The Music Den’s INXS spotlight series covers it (Youtube).Broadcast 6 November 2026

Jarrett McCall usually brings us records from this decade, or from the 1970s. This Wednesday he goes back fifty-eight years. Over on X he took part in the #1968AlbumsTop20 challenge, and for two hours we’re counting down all twenty of his picks, one song from each album. The famous ones are here (the White Album, Astral Weeks, the Kinks’ Village Green, which came out on the same November day as the Beatles and sold next to nothing), but Jarrett’s taste runs to the sideways and the overlooked. There’s a Los Angeles band who called themselves The United States of America, played no guitars, built their own electronics because they couldn’t afford a Moog, and had their record company balk at a song title about Che Guevara. There’s Fairport Convention before Sandy Denny, recording Joni Mitchell songs before Joni had released a record of her own, and Pink Floyd with a Rick Wright song recorded while Syd Barrett was still in the band, with the producer sitting in on drums. From Brazil there’s Os Mutantes, the teenage heart of Tropicália, making psychedelic pop under a military dictatorship.The second hour turns surprisingly gentle. Laura Nyro appears twice, once singing her own song and once as the writer of the 5th Dimension’s biggest hit of the year, and she’s followed by two more cult favourites: Margo Guryan, who made one album and walked away from it, and the Free Design, a family vocal group from upstate New York whose sunshine harmonies were ignored for thirty years. Frank Zappa turns up twice, as a composer with an orchestra and as the leader of the Mothers, on two records he edited side by side in New York and which ask, on their back covers, whether each is the sequel to the other. And there’s the record that got Arthur Brown and his burning helmet to number one in Britain, held off the top in America only by Hey Jude. For a year that was on fire, it’s remarkable how many of these songs look back: at old photographs, at childhood, at clocks that have stopped.Broadcast 4 November 2026

Two hours of new music, and a good share of it is barely a weekend old. In The Mix opens in Northland's backyard with TEEKS, whose second album Lovers Comet landed on the same Friday as new records from Gretta Ray, Jonah Kagen, MorMor, X Ambassadors and a five-disc box from The Who. From there it's a run through pop's busiest writers' room, where Ashe, Olivia Rodrigo with Chappell Roan, and Gracie Abrams share collaborators; a Texas homecoming from Kacey Musgraves; Lake Street Dive asking about flamingos; and a late-night stretch with MorMor, Sydney duo breathe. and Michael Kiwanuka, whose new album was finished before a serious health scare this year. The second hour gets older and stranger. Bob Dylan live in Fort Collins on 23 May 1976, the night NBC filmed Hard Rain, unheard until now; The Who revisiting 1975 with a 2026 acoustic mix; and The Rolling Stones with Courtney Pine on saxophone. The Monday after Halloween brings werewolves from The Flaming Lips, a ghost story from Taylor Swift and Blondie's Johnny Marr-written "Spectral Eyes", the last recordings of drummer Clem Burke. Newer voices Newport, Keenan Te, King Princess, Mattiel and Fontaines D.C. lead into John Mayer, O.A.R., Kings of Leon and Queens of the Stone Age, before Richard Thompson, nearly sixty years on from Fairport Convention, closes with a song for the people who do the actual work.Broadcast 2 November 2026

Jim Bricker is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best. Last time he brought us Pat Metheny; this time it’s King Crimson, a band that has been rebuilt so many times you could argue it’s several different bands. Robert Fripp is the only member who has been there throughout. Since 1968 he has broken the group up and started it again, with a trio at one point, an octet at another, and a short spell in 1981 under a different name. Each version was louder, stranger or more precise than the last, and every era has fans who will tell you theirs was the real King Crimson. Jim has ranked his five, and the show counts down from five to one. Anyone hoping for 21st Century Schizoid Man should know now that he hasn’t picked anything from 1969.Instead, four of Jim’s five were recorded in front of an audience. He opens at number five with The Sheltering Sky, recorded on the French Riviera in 1982 while Crimson were touring with Roxy Music. Number four is Fracture, which Fripp has called one of the hardest pieces he’s ever played; it was taped on stage in Amsterdam and released on a “studio” album. Number three, Discipline, is the only one cut in a studio, a piece where two guitars weave in and out of each other’s time signatures. At number two, the eight-piece band with three drummers plays Starless in Mexico City. Jim’s number one may surprise people: a live take of the title track from 2000’s The ConstruKction of Light, an album Fripp felt never captured how the music sounded on stage. Fripp has said more than once that this band sounded best live, and Jim’s countdown backs him up.Broadcast 2 November 2026

Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, so Ken and Bevan are spending three hours in the dark with the doors locked and the lights down. The playlist is a cauldron of the genuinely creepy and the gleefully daft: Blue Öyster Cult and Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings, Nina Simone casting spells, Warren Zevon's well-groomed werewolf, Johnny Cash's ghost riders and Bobby "Boris" Pickett's graveyard smash. Along the way they're digging into the crates for ghost stories: Wade Denning's 1975 LP Famous Ghost Stories With Scary Sounds, the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books that frightened a generation of kids, and an announcement from a 1941 American radio horror series to remind us that radio was the original haunted house.Between the songs, the talk turns to the films and TV that kept us up at night, from Universal's monsters and Hitchcock's motel to The Exorcist, Jaws and the Kiwi horror-comedies that only New Zealand could make, with a round of "Name That Scream" for good measure. And in the final hour Bevan tells a story of his own, about a listener who tunes in to the station at exactly 3:07 every morning from a place where nobody should be listening at all.Broadcast 31 October 2026

The Nerves released four songs while they existed. One was “Hanging On The Telephone”, which a cassette, a Tokyo taxi driver and a phone call later became Blondie’s. This week’s Power Pop Friday follows that cassette and everything else that came out of a San Francisco trio who formed in 1974 and were gone by 1978. Third Man has just released The Nerves – Best Collection, built from the band’s original tapes rather than copies of copies, so we start with the source: Jack Lee, Peter Case and Paul Collins in their own harmonies, then Blondie‘s version with its borrowed British phone ring. From there it’s Jack Lee’s songbook. His own recording of “Come Back And Stay” sits beside Paul Young‘s, which went to number one in New Zealand. Suzi Quatro cut another Lee song with the same producer who’d just made Parallel Lines.The second half splits the family. Case and Collins as the Breakaways, whose demos turned up in a box in a garage thirty years on. Case with the Plimsouls and the song that soundtracked Nicolas Cage falling in love in Valley Girl. Collins with the Beat, signed thanks to Eddie Money and managed by Bill Graham. Phil Seymour sings a Lee song that stayed on the shelf until 2017. Real Estate and Peter Bjorn and John show how far the songs have travelled since. From this year, Uni Boys — two songwriters who each sing their own songs, cut live to tape with help from the Lemon Twigs — make the case that the Nerves’ way of doing things is still in good hands. We close on the single the Nerves recorded and never put out.Broadcast 30 October 2026

This week on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Sughosh is back, and he’s brought the most unclassifiable band in British rock with him. Jethro Tull came out of Blackpool’s blues and soul circuit in 1967. They took their name from an 18th-century inventor of farm machinery, because a booking agent liked history. Their leader, Ian Anderson, sold his electric guitar for a flute and performed standing on one leg. Over the next two decades the band went from blues to Baroque jazz, then to prog, to English folk, and finally to a heavy metal Grammy that nobody saw coming, the band included. Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath was their guitarist for a few weeks, and Jimmy Page once nearly ruined one of their most famous solos by waving through the control-room glass. A band like that is never short of stories.Sughosh’s five run in order, from 1969 to 1987. He opens with Bourée, a piece of Bach swung by a blues band, with a bass solo that was unusual in rock at the time. It’s from Stand Up, Tull’s only UK No. 1 album. Then Aqualung, inspired by photographs of homeless men on the Thames Embankment, which was never a single but is one of the band’s best-known songs. Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day was recorded in a French château in 1972 and saved for War Child; Anderson calls it his first climate-change song. Songs from the Wood is 1977’s folk-rock answer to punk, and it was released as a single here in New Zealand. He finishes with Budapest, ten minutes written the morning after Tull’s first show behind the Iron Curtain. Anderson once said that song moves from classical to blues to folk without showing the stitching, and Sughosh’s set does the same thing: it starts with Bach and ends in Hungary.Broadcast 28 October 2026