Mr Carter has hit the road in part to support the vinyl release of his last album which came out very early this year. I had ordered a copy of said LP from Flying Out, and was still waiting for it to be shipped when this gig happened. Carter is a bit of an NZ music legend nowadays having fronted several seminal local band from the late 70's onward, mostly Board Games, Doublehappys, Straightjacket Fits and Dimmer. I had seen Shayne last year at an excellent gig he did with another NZ legend, Don McGlashan.
The support act for this gig was Christchurch's Les Baxters, whom I had also seen recently supporting The Terminals. Dave, from Galaxy Records is in this band and I had a chat with him and some of the band just before they went on. I like their sounds, slightly weird, slightly industrial, slightly Techno, with one member playing a theremin can you believe. I think about half the audience showed some appreciation of their set but I definitely look forward to hearing their record when they get it out.
Carter hit the stage with his three piece band, counting himself, and proceeded to play a mostly rock type set of his music, as opposed to last years gig with Don which was more esoteric. Because I am actually not greatly familiar with a lot of his music, I didn't really know a lot of what he played but I certainly enjoyed what I heard, the man is vastly experienced and a great musician, played some mean guitar. He did a couple of songs on the Keys off his latest record that impressed even though it was quite different from his older material and then got back into the more rock stuff. It was a really good show even though I hardly knew any of the music, but for the encore he let rip on an old Doublehappys song that I knew especially from the recent Counting The Beat Podcast that I had been listening to , and they wrapped it all up with a blistering version of the first Dimmer single "Crystalator" a brilliant instrumental track that I knew but didn't know it was a Dimmer track, it was a fantastic finish to a fabulous show. The video below is of the aforementioned song live in 2009.
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