Parisian Friday Non-studio Recordings by the Bilders Paris

Collaboration Parisian Friday is a selection of live and accidental recordings of Bill Direen and Nik le killer (Nikola Kapetanovic) performed in Paris in 2009 -2010. These songs formed the basis of their performance set in Europe. The CD launch also roped in Hamish Kilgour who was, by good luck, touring with The Clean in Europe at the time. Happy accident is a theme in this album. Most of the recordings were chance events, capturing performances and songs that would not otherwise have been preserved. Luckily also, when he heard the songs, Powertool boss Andrew Maitai was adamant that the quality of the music more than compensates for the medium-fi sound quality. There is quite a literary tinge to the song list: a musical setting of a Lewis Carroll poem, a setting of a poem by Anglo-American poet W.H.Auden (released with permission of the Auden estate), and many translations of French songs into English or of Bill Direen’s own songs into French! There are songs by famous people such as Aristide Bruant and Bertolt Brecht, and many are about simple people caught up in a cycle of poverty. The Brecht song German Miserere is one example. We can’t do better than to take a quote from Bill’s interview in Deep South, the Otago University online literary magazine, which has published some of these translations: ‘I liked [Das Deutsche Miserere] because it tells about war from the point of view of the simple soldier. My grandfather was in Egypt and the Somme during WWI for nearly four years, and my father was nearly five years in WWII, and they must have felt at times as this (German) soldier feels — freezing to death, hungry, lost, far from home, and full of doubt about the reasons for the war and about the wisdom of their ‘superiors’ — war turns people into waste. We find hints of this in the NZ play by Once on Chunuk Bair by Maurice Shadbolt , for example. ‘As for writing a new translation, that really came about from necessity. The initial idea was to perform the song in German for European audiences, adapting the Hans Eisler score for acoustic and electric guitar/s. I took a vinyl recording from my collection as speech model, in which Hilmar Thate sings the 1943 song (‘Das deutsche Miserere’) in a spare, hard manner, ‘with the head more than the heart’ (but not forgetting the heart). However, singing in German proved difficult, I could imitate Thate, but wanted to do an interpretation not an imitation. So I decided to write a new translation into English. Having studied Brecht, I would keep his theories in mind. ‘I started with a rough translation, checking up on difficult expressions with German speakers and dictionaries, then looked at existing translations (always a good idea). It was very interesting to see the different emphasis (of meaning) which different translations into English and into French gave the lyrics. It took a few weeks (time is a composer and writer too!) and I felt at ease with the result. I (and French musician Niko) have tried to perform it in the "distanced" Brechtian of the Berliner Ensemble of the Brecht epoch, though evidently the ‘anti-folk’ electric format and NZ garage-pop approach have brought something new to the song. The recording on the album Parisian Friday is a ‘live‘ version performed for the first time at Paris art gallery Galerie Impaire at the opening of 'Art Brut from New Zealand' (curated by kiwi Stuart Shepherd), in 2009.' --- Bill Direen