UTR Presents
The influential 80’s Auckland punk band Blam Blam Blam will be reuniting in March to play a few shows including Selwyn Sounds, Christchurch (Sat Mar 4), Hutt Sounds, Upper Hutt (Sun Mar 3) and opening for Hoodoo Gurus at the Powerstation, Auckland on Th Mar 2. Announced today is an extra date at The Last Place in Hamilton Fri Mar 3.
Thu Mar 2 Auckland, Powerstation
Fri Mar 10 Hamilton, Last Place
Sat Mar 4 Christchurch, Selwyn Sounds
Sun Mar 5 Upper Hutt, Hutt Sounds
Further Reading -
When writer and performance artist Richard Von Sturmer departed his own group, The Plague, in 1978, he left Tim Mahon, Mark Bell, Andrew Snoid and Ian Gilroy to continue as The Whizz Kids. Don McGlashan, the Plague's occasional French Horn player, joined in 1979, just in time for Snoid to depart to join the Swingers and Gilroy for the Crocodiles. The Blams' lineup - Mahon on bass, Bell on guitar, McGlashan unexpectedly on drums - was born.
It was natural enough that three middle-class kids from Aucklands North Shore would form a band. Rather less so that they would use it as a setting for a kind of dissenting commentary on the news of the day.
Yet here it all is, in odd, unexpected tempos: the police framing of Arthur Allan Thomas in Got to Be Guilty, the SIS (Blue Belmonts), stifling conformity (Battleship Grey) and unspecified rural menace (Call for Help).
They were sly, funny songs for a grumpy country, one wanting for confidence (Learning to Like Ourselves Again) and resistant to change, even in the knowledge - ‘There Is No Depression In New Zealand’, co-written by Von Sturmer and McGlashan, was released during the cataclysmic 1981 Springbok Tour - that change was forcing its way in anyway.
But the spirit of the times was also, paradoxically, buoyant and creative - never more so than when the Blams, and their Propeller/Furtive labelmates the Newmatics and the Screaming Mee Mees called themselves the Screaming Blamatic Roadshow and did the country, end-to-end in 1981. It was - yes, perhaps you had to be there - one of the most memorable touring bills ever to climb into a Bedford van and head down State Highway One.
It all happened in remarkably short order. The Blams barely lasted three short years. If they had only left behind the great New Zealand love song Dont Fight It Marsha, Its Bigger Than Both Of Us it would have been enough. But they did much more than that.
