The future for record stores

While my friends in New Zealand were still at school, I was making apprentice wages, spending almost all of it on records. Our small town didn’t have a record store as such, but the local department store stocked the latest pop records. At the time, LPs were pressed at a factory in Wellington owned by His Master’s Voice (HMV). My copy of ‘Please Please Me’ (The Beatles), for example, was issued by Parlophone in Mono….

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New Year rolling relentlessly along

My friend Joy sent one of Jacquie Lawson’s life-affirming animated cards for New Year, a positive message delivered as a calendar, pages flipping to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. It was a northern hemisphere theme, but the message was universal – the wonders of nature. As for last week’s flippant item about fluffy news, the opening days of 2023 delivered anything but. At New Year drinks, assembled guests inevitably began talking about the bad…

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Cat up a tree time of year

Here’s a heart-warming story, filed this morning by our intrepid reporter, Abigail Featherweight, on location at Jumpinup Downs, WA. (Video shows a fire truck pulled up next to a very tall tree where a shirtless fireman in the basket of a cherry picker is rescuing a cat, which, having not only got stuck at the top of the tree, gave birth there to seven kittens). Morning show host Gavin Brighteeth: Hi Abbey – tell us…

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