Welcome to Boiler Room.
As advertising rates plummet, newsrooms chase clickbait and social media continues to fracture and divide, it’s getting hard to find sources you can trust. It’s even harder to find music journalism that matters. Boiler Room is my attempt to change that.
Here, you’ll find the kinds of things that makes my Spidey sense tingle: weird fluctuations in ticket prices, artists who book shows then cancel them, festivals that appear and disappear without warning, and interviews with people I love, cherish and admire – and occasionally some that I don’t.
Basically, this is me…
Not really, but you get the idea.
The stories everyone seems to like.
The biggest story I’ve ever posted here, by a Kid Rock-soundtracked country mile, is this interview with a Woodstock 99 festival-goer: ‘I was harassed non-stop, touched by strangers, groped in crowds'.
Readers also seemed to like my six-part series diving into the backstory of Sky World, the strange, decaying, central-Auckland building that once hosted a Christina Aguilera showcase.
The death of music journalism has been a big focus of Boiler Room. Here’s an introduction to the topic, with plenty of links to follow included: Music journalism is broken. Is this how we fix it?
My account of every single time I went to the Aotearoa Music Awards – including stolen property, drunken gropes, and a photo with Starboy – seemed to get plenty of attention too.
In 2023, a terrible, nasty, awful human terrorised my family and I out of our home by playing the same three songs over, and over, and over again: One man, three songs, six months with a neighbour from hell.
