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Neil Finn: 'It's kind of a magic thing and it draws you forward'
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
It's fun to be part of a band that's still evolving, Crowded house frontman Neil Finn told Charlotte Ryan in June.
The band now features three Finn family members. Its latest album, the psychedelia-tinged Gravity Stairs, is about keeping on keeping on, Finn said.
The album takes its name from the nickname for an actual staircase Finn regularly climbs while on family holidays in Greece."It's a particularly heavy staircase that we've struggled up many times with suitcases and it just always feels like it's got double gravity on it … We imagine that it opens up into the underworld and they're trying to pull you down.
"Quite often I'm ascending the stairs, coming up from dinner, and I hear the sound of bouzoukis… It's kind of a magic thing and it draws you forward."
To Finn, the idea of a staircase with its own gravitational pull represents the struggle to be creative and also to find something like enlightenment, he said.
"It's [about] the mechanics of living, which involve every day getting out of bed and actually having the will to push on through."
Herbie Hancock: 'What I am is a human being. What I do is play music'
Photo: Live Nation NZ
Sixty years ago, jazz giant Herbie Hancock's life was changed for ever when he got wind Miles Davis was looking for him.
Already a pianist making waves on the jazz scene, and with hit albums to his name, the chance to play in a Davis group was the big time in the early 1960s when the jazz trumpeter was at the peak of his commercial and artistic success.
Davis' gruff countenance hid a warmer man in private, Hancock told RNZ's Jim Mora.
"He gave us nothing but love all the time. He'd tell us some funny stories about Charlie Parker or Dizzy [Gillespie] or some other people. And it was great, great to be around him."
Mark Knopfler: Just delighted to make people happy
Former Dire Straits frontman talked to Charlotte Ryan about the thrill of collaboration and the "buzz" of a Knopfler song becoming the theme for his hometown football team, Newcastle.
Mark Knopfler Photo: Cambridge Jones
The new version of Knopfler's 1983 rock track 'Going Home' was recorded as a fundraiser for teenage cancer treatment and featured guitar-playing from 60 of Knopfler's famous friends.
Knopfler talked about feeling lucky for his connection with the other musicians who worked on One Deep River, his 10th solo album.
"The feeling between everybody, it's just so nice, so pleasant. Everybody was in mourning at the end of the session so I think that we'll be looking forward to next time, if we can organise that after I write some more songs."
Teddy Swims: 'My pain was necessary'
Teddy Swims Photo: Supplied
American soul singer Teddy Swims may have blown up on the charts, but he knows New Zealand loved him first.
His breakout song, 'Lose Control', was number 1 on the radio here for 11 weeks and reached the top 10 across Europe, the US and UK, taking with it his debut album I've Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1).
It's a bittersweet success, given the album was written during a relationship breakdown, Swims told RNZ's Charlotte Ryan.
"It wasn't until after the album came out, and all these things started coming to fruition, I ... started hearing my album from a whole new standpoint.
"Like somehow my heart knew this the whole time, and it was trying to tell me this and I wasn't listening to myself, even though I was writing songs about what I needed to do."
Benee is soaking it up in LA
Benee Photo: LULA CUCCHIARA
It's been quite a ride since Benee released her break-out single 'Soaked' in 2019 and followed it with the international smash 'Superlonely'.
Now the Grey Lynn-raised singer-songwriter is based in LA and is loving Californian life, she told RNZ's Jesse Mulligan in July.
"LA is beautiful. I'm sitting in my car right now. I have been at a session so I'm going to go back to that after this.
The City of Angels is buzzing with creativity, she said.
"It's like there's never a dull moment. And there's never something that you don't see here, which can be a blessing and a curse.
"But I'm a sponge and I'm just like, absorbing all these weird juices. So, it's pretty awesome."
Public Enemy legend Chuck D on 2024's wild ride
American rapper Chuck D Photo: Krijn van Noordwijk
In the late '80s, legendary hip-hop group Public Enemy blasted onto the world stage with fierce anthems like 'Fight the Power'.
Before an Auckland show in October, founding member Chuck D chatted to Music 101 about illustration, the future of hip-hop and the power of Pilates.
"Public Enemy songs are like training for a decathlon - they're high pitched, they're punkish. We have a mantra that either you do the songs or the songs do you, so you have to be in top shape to go about it," he said.
Alongside music, Chuck D is a "prolific illustrator".
"Being able to come up with something that makes somebody say, Damn. that took me to another place, that jarred me.
"To me, I think that's always the meaning of art. I would always like to try to do art that love it or hate it. It strikes an emotion."
Rick Astley: 'I'm still flabbergasted by Rickrolling'
I Photo: Alex Lake
"Don't sweat it. It's actually nothing to do with you," Rick Astley's then-teenage daughter told her middle-aged dad when a meme known as 'Rickrolling' made him internet famous.
Astley was baffled. More than 20 years since it was released, millions of people online were being inadvertently directed to the music video for his 1987 hit 'Never Gonna Give You Up'.
"I said 'how do you mean it's nothing to do with me? I'm the guy in the video and it's my song?' She said 'yeah but it's the internet. It's about everyone, it's not about you'," Astley told RNZ's Nine to Noon in November.
Playing live, he is happy to "provide" old favourites for audience members who have come just to hear them, but is happy that UK crowds make his newer songs sound anthemic, too.
"They know every word and they almost treat them like they're just part of the same thing. That's pretty mind-boggling after all these years."
Ladyhawke on trauma in the music industry: 'It nearly ended me and my career'
Phillipa Brown was soaring in popularity as an international singer and songwriter under the stage name Ladyhawke, but the toll of her career has left her with deep scars and nearly destroyed her life as a musician.
A shy and introverted drummer from Wairarapa, Brown couldn't wait to leave the city to quench her burning passion to do music, something that was her "solace from everything".
But making her first record, self-titled Ladyhawke (2008), left her feeling so broken that she almost didn't come back for a second, she told the RNZ podcast It's Personal in October.
"I found myself fighting and I always felt like the baddie, like 'oh I'm difficult because I don't want to do these things'.
"I felt like nobody listened to me. It was so hard, and then my only sort of like escape was partying and drinking, like honestly, I just disappeared into that world."
Why Delaney Davidson might have just made his last album
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Award-winning musician Delaney Davidson talked to Charlotte Ryan about his 10th - and he says possibly final - studio album Out of My Head, in March.
He pondered whether the album format was now obsolete.
"I realised the album format is something we're all so used to, and I'm not sure why we're hanging onto it so hardcore.
"The whole idea for me of an album, I'm like, so many people aren't even thinking that way, they just release singles, they put out their work as they're making it, which seems so much more natural."
Alison Moyet: 'You understand as you get older, there's no one coming to rescue you'
Alison Moyet Photo: MAIRO CINQUETTI
Alison Moyet has always had an uneasy relationship with fame, she says.
It's been 40 years since the British singer-songwriter began her solo career with the multi-platinum Alf album from which three huge world-wide hits 'Love Resurrection', 'Invisible' and 'All Cried Out' came.
Prior to going solo Moyet had already had major hits, 'Only You' 'Don't Go' and 'Situation', as the lead singer of Synth pop band Yazoo.
But despite her career soaring in the early 80s, she disliked the show biz scene, she told RNZ's Sunday Morning.
After making a faux pas at a party with Elvis Costello, she realised she wasn't cut out for small talk, she said.
"I just thought: Alison, you are not meant for this world. You are not meant to be around anyone you admire like that. Just stay away."