New Zealand Net Radio

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

Fifty years ago this week, a small London label that had been going for barely two months released a two-and-a-half-minute single by a band called the Damned. "New Rose" came out on 22 October 1976. It's generally counted as the first record by a British punk band, it didn't chart, and it was on Stiff Records. Stiff had started that summer with £400 borrowed from the singer in Dr. Feelgood. Its first release, Nick Lowe's "So It Goes," cost £45 to make. Over the next decade the label gave us Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Madness, Kirsty MacColl and the Pogues, and it lost a fair few of them along the way. This week's New Wave Friday is Stiff's hour. We start in 1976 with the Damned and with the Saints, whose "(I'm) Stranded" came out in Brisbane a month earlier and on their own label, so they beat the British to it. We also pay a visit to Propeller in Auckland, another label that started on $400 and a hunch.
There's a running story in the middle of the hour. Kirsty MacColl's first single went to number two on the radio airplay chart in 1979, but nobody could buy it because the distributors were on strike. Four years later Tracey Ullman took the same song to number two, and the high note everyone remembers on that record is Kirsty's. We also stop for two singers who died on the same day last month: Pete Byrne of Naked Eyes, whose Bacharach cover went to number two in New Zealand while it stalled at 59 in Britain, and Catherine Ringer of Les Rita Mitsouko, the voice of French new wave. The hour finishes with a Damned record from this year, Nick Lowe still going strong at 77, and a Stiff number one that spent two weeks stuck behind the Village People.
Broadcast 23 October 2026

Two weeks ago, when Jarrett McCall counted down his favourite songs of 2015, one of them came from a four-track EP on a tiny London label, sung by a woman most of our listeners had never heard of. Laura Groves grew up in Shipley, near Bradford, with a radio mast across the road, and she has spent her career trying to bottle the feeling of watching its red light at night. She started out as Blue Roses, making hushed folk for XL Recordings at twenty-one, then reinvented herself in London with electric pianos, eighties synths and a voice that cuts straight through them. She produces most of it herself, releases it slowly, and has picked up admirers including Sampha, Bat for Lashes and the Cocteau Twins' own label, Bella Union. This week I've asked Jarrett back to make the case for her properly.
He's brought five songs, and he's built them with real care: one from every record she has released under her own name. There's the night-drive synth of Inky Sea, from her first solo EP in 2013, and the piano ballad Friday (on a Friday, naturally), from the same 2015 EP that gave us Dream Story. There's Any Day Now from her 2023 album Radio Red, and Deep Blue, a Juno-106 confession from last year's Yes EP. His No. 1 comes from A Private Road, the 2020 record she made almost entirely alone. I won't tell you its title yet, except to say that after an hour of songs set after dark, it's exactly right.
Broadcast 21 October 2026

Ken Cheshire is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best this week, and he's brought one of the oddest success stories in American pop. Three Dog Night had three lead singers and four musicians who rarely got the credit they deserved. They almost never wrote their own hits. For about five years, few bands in America sold more records. Danny Hutton, Cory Wells and Chuck Negron came together in Los Angeles in 1967. Brian Wilson briefly tried to produce them, and they took their name from a cold-weather saying about how many dogs you'd need to keep warm. Their real talent was finding songs. They took the work of writers like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro and Hoyt Axton and turned it into twenty-one Top 40 hits, three of them number ones. The critics mostly sneered, and the radio didn't care.
Ken's five follow the band from their 1968 debut to their best-selling album. He opens with One, the Nilsson song written to the rhythm of a busy signal, which Chuck Negron talked the record company into releasing as a single. Next comes Easy to Be Hard, borrowed from the musical Hair, and then Mama Told Me (Not to Come), the Randy Newman song Cory Wells spent three albums persuading the others to record, which became their first number one. Danny Hutton gets his turn on Liar, a Russ Ballard song that had flopped for Argent, sung with an echo the band found in the studio bathroom. To finish, Ken skips the 1972 hit Black and White and goes for Midnight Runaway, the heavy closing track by a writer almost nobody has heard of. All three voices get a turn, and Chuck Negron, who died in February, sings the first song and the last. The show airs eleven years, almost to the day, after we lost Cory Wells, so it doubles as a quiet tribute. And with Danny Hutton, the last of the three singers, telling his side of the story to Rolling Stone just this week, we'll be weaving in a few of his tales along the way, from Harry Nilsson knocking on his hotel door to say thanks, to a last song for Brian Wilson.
Broadcast 19 October 2026

Last week Armando Venditti of The Music Den took us through the first half of his ten essential ABBA tracks, and it was the ABBA most people never owned on a single: B-sides, a live encore, an Agnetha ballad and a hit that only Mexico noticed. This week he finishes the job with the top five, and there’s nowhere left to hide, because every one of them was a hit. What makes it interesting is the order. The song most people would put at number one sits at number five. Dancing Queen was ABBA’s only American chart-topper and a number one here and in Britain, and it was recorded more than a year before anyone heard it, under the working title Boogaloo. Above it is Super Trouper, written in a rush as the last song for the album, about a singer on stage holding on to one face in a crowd of twenty thousand. Then comes Björn’s big moment at the microphone, Does Your Mother Know, which began life as a rock’n’roll track with two heavy-metal guitar solos before ABBA polished it into a dance-floor stomper. A rock-and-prog man like Armando was always going to have something to say about that.
At number two is Knowing Me, Knowing You, a break-up song so convincing it’s easy to forget ABBA recorded it in 1976, years before either couple in the band split. Benny has counted it among their five best recordings, and it’s one of two tracks this week from Arrival, which turned fifty last Sunday. As for number one, we’ll let Armando reveal it on air. All we’ll say is that it comes from Voulez-Vous, the album critics like to dismiss as ABBA’s disco record. It only made it out in Britain because of a compromise between the band and their label. A television panel that included Johnny Rotten confidently predicted it would flop. And in 2022, more than forty years later, a new generation found it all on their own. Taken together, the five songs turn out to be a Friday night out, from the lights going down on the dance floor to the walk home afterwards, which is fitting, because that’s exactly when we’re on air.
This is the documentary about the 1979 tour that Armando mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzMf6ztbdtg
Broadcast 16 October 2026