A tribute to Kiwi musical talent | Stuff.co.nz

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Taite Prize: Forget sales, forget radio play, forget TV shows. The Taite Music Prize, announced this week, is the real judge of New Zealand?s musical talent.

Where is?Dylan Taite now, when we need him so badly? When our TVs are awash with crap karaoke shows such as American Idol, The X Factor and New Zealand's Got Talent. When every primetime TV music segment is a fawning puff piece by a young reporter on a record company junket. When rock'n'roll has suddenly gone all pinot noir on us, with our biggest bands endlessly touring provincial wineries, whacking out the hits to middle-class crowds sitting around on picnic blankets, eulogising the notes of cherry, clove and plum in last year's vintage.

The late music journalist passed away a decade ago, and I still miss his acerbic wit, which was as sharp as a whittled stick. Taite would have had a field day analysing the contemporary music scene, assuming there was still a broadcaster brave enough to screen his work. I can picture him now, holding court inside the old TV3 elevator before a backdrop of peeling gig posters, a dyspeptic punk philosopher, railing against the latest audio abomination while a hand-held camera lurches in and out.

Born in Liverpool and breast-fed on loud guitars, Dylan Taite became the nation's foremost TV music reporter during the 1970s despite a rumpled personal style and a PhD in sarcasm, the latter fetchingly displayed in his sign-off line, "See ya; wouldn't wanna be ya!".

Under the excellent stage name of Jet Rink, Taite was the former drummer with 60s British beat band The Merseymen, and began his local journalistic career as a proofreader at the Waikato Times. Talent, perseverance and luck rapidly shunted him up through the ranks, and within no time he was a regular fixture in our living rooms on the evening news, taking the piss out of Marilyn Manson at Grafton Cemetery, playing soccer with Bob Marley between spliffs, or trying to extract a civil sentence from Lou Reed inside a local pharmacy.

Not everyone warmed to Taite's ageing hipster shtick, but many cherished him as a beacon of wilful weirdness and forthright opinion during a period when local TV seemed to be becoming more bland and timid with every passing month. It felt like a true original had been lost when he died in 2003 after a short illness, but his name lives on in the annual Taite Music Prize, whose latest winner will be announced on Wednesday.

The award was established to champion the finest full-length release by a New Zealand artist or group in any given year. With the final short-list whittled down from around 80 nominated albums, this year's finalists are Aaradhna's Treble & Reverb, Collapsing Cities' Strangers Again, Home Brew's Home Brew, Lawrence Arabia's The Sparrow, @Peace's @Peace, Opossom's Electric Hawaii and SJD's Elastic Wasteland.

"The award is there to acknowledge originality, creativity and musicianship, rather than commercial success," says Dylan Pellett, business development manager at Independent Music New Zealand, which hosts the event.

"The Taite could conceivably be won by an album that had sold five copies because it's independent of radio play or sales figures, and open to every genre."

The winner of the inaugural 2010 award was James "Lawrence Arabia" Milne's Chant Darling, followed in 2011 by The Liberation Of Ladi 6 by Christchurch hip-hop artist Karoline Tamati. Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson took out the Taite for the band's self-titled debut album last year. Each winning act receives a $10,000 cash prize, supplied by PPNZ Music Licensing, and - from this year onwards - a substantial whack of free studio time, supplied by Red Bull.

Pellet says the awards were named in honour of Dylan Taite because he was so highly respected, here and overseas. "He was a bit like New Zealand's answer to John Peel in that he didn't care how much a record sold or what genre it was. If he loved it, he'd try to convince others to give it a listen. He was an enthusiastic champion of music he believed in, so naming this award after him was a good fit. The timing seemed right, too; these sorts of awards - celebrating?artists rather than sales - are becoming more common around the world, with things like the Mercury Prize in the UK, the Polaris Prize in Canada, The Australian Music Prize and the Scottish Album of the Year. Of course, we have other music awards here in New Zealand as well, but they have a few issues I'm not keen to comment on here."

One presumes he's talking about the New Zealand Music Awards, aka the Tuis. An increasingly slick affair, conferred annually by the Recording Industry Association of NZ, the Tuis are perceived as hopelessly compromised by many industry insiders due to heavy-handed corporate sponsorship and a preponderance of mainstream chart juggernauts taking out the top awards, regardless of artistic merit.

"No comment," says Pellet, diplomatically. "The two awards do different things, and they're both valuable in their own way. To select the winner for the Taite, we hand-pick 10 judges each year, all of them passionate music fans with a wide variety of different professional backgrounds and personal tastes. And to keep the connection with Dylan Taite strong, we invite his son, John, to join the judging panel as our permanent ?11th man'."

Which is more of a commitment than you might imagine. John Taite lives in New York, where he's vice president of Branded Entertainment at BBC America, overseeing programming content delivered to 80 million American homes. He's so busy, hooking up a phone call is like trying to organise an audience with the Pope. So I bashed him off an email, asking what he thought of this award in his father's name.

"The family are very happy that this award is keeping Dylan's spirit alive for future music lovers," he replied a few days later. "Dylan always loved giving the conventional a good kicking, and when it comes to music, and life in general, I think that's worth celebrating. The Taite Music Prize is designed to reward those curious souls brave enough to take musical risks. Their experimentation gives others the confidence to try something new. That was what Dad stood for. Dylan was always focused on talent. He had an uncanny knack of picking trends before they were cool and jumping on the next interesting thing, and whether that talent was destined for popular success didn't really interest him so much."

One thing that's important to note, says John, is that his father wasn't simply a reporter; his enthusiasms actually influenced the direction of the New Zealand music scene. "What people around the world were barely exposed to, Kiwis watched on the 6 o'clock news while eating their dinner! We were brought up watching items about Bob Marley, The Sex Pistols and Darcy Clay, and saw The White Stripes interviewed when they were still playing in pubs. Rather subversively, Dylan brought the underground into the mainstream for us and made talent more important than million-dollar marketing campaigns."

Sadly, John Taite couldn't attend this year's panel due to other commitments. I, however, had no such excuse, and so I flew up to the big smoke a few weeks back and took my place alongside a motley crew of writers, editors, broadcasters and record label wastrels at the judging bench.

I'd love to tell you who won, but I'm sworn to secrecy until after this Wednesday's public announcement. I can confirm that there was a good deal of cursing and cajoling, and aspersions were cast upon one another's parentage, hearing and taste levels.

We drank an ocean of wine and beer, ate a mountain of little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and debated until our throats gave out. There were voices raised and threats of physical violence. We eventually settled on a winner, and that winner will be announced this Wednesday before an invited audience at Galatos Live in Auckland.

"We have a new trophy this year, and it's sitting on my desk right now," says Pellet.

"It's a big T-shape, cast out of metal, and weighs about 7kg. You can imagine it sitting proudly on the winner's monitor desk, or maybe propping open the door of their rehearsal room. It was made by a welder who's been in the same Christchurch workshop for 30 years, and it somehow came through the earthquakes unscathed. He was keen to do it because he met Dylan Taite back in the day, and is also a huge rock fan himself. If you call into his workshop, you have to smack on this big metal bell to get his attention because he's playing bands like Can really f...ing loudly! We knew straight away we'd found the right guy."

- ? Fairfax NZ News

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Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/8528215/A-tribute-to-Kiwi-musical-talent

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