Reminiscing the long weekend

Hello again y'all! Hope you've recovered from the pleasures of Easter...

And what a splendid Easter it was: the sun came out and showed off Tauranga at its best. With music, street performers, a kid's park, and food and drink, The Strand was a great place to be for the weekend.

Blues singer Coco Davis.

Of course there was all sorts of other stuff happening too – and one event that struck me, because I accidentally got caught in it, was the opening of the new Kmart in Bethlehem.

And all I can say to people who like to shop in the Bethlehem shopping centre now is... good luck.

I'd forgotten that it was opening this weekend.

And, even worse, I was in a hurry. And all I needed was a bunch of grapes. A quick zoom into Countdown, grab the grapes, all good.

Well, that was the plan.

Countdown was, naturally enough given the essential panic-buying people need to do to prepare for supermarkets actually being closed for a day, packed. I didn't even go in. Forget it, I thought, I'll get the grapes somewhere else.

But then I tried to get out of the shopping centre.

Twenty-five minutes later...

For months now the roads within the Bethlehem shopping centre have been in a continual state of flux, torn up one minute, rebuilt the next. It's been a baffling process but everyone assumed the eventual final design would make sense. Sadly, if that's the case, it's hard to spot.

The most used (and useful) exit has now been gratuitously blocked leaving only one exit on the town-side of the centre, an exit so inconvenient cars turning right (which is 90 per cent of them) are advised to turn left, drive a couple of hundred yards to a roundabout, turn round and come back again!

Some people have even suggested that for this peculiar road system to exist Kmart must have insisted every car drives past its front door to get out of the centre. That would have been stupid, unnecessary and inconvenient which, coincidentally, exactly describes the new layout. My sympathies to the good people of Bethlehem.

But enough of such woes. Whether you had too much shopping or too much jazz, let's shake off the over-abundance of music that Easter brings, take a breath, and get ready for more.

Singing the blues

Because there's a very good and interesting blues singer coming to the Tauranga Art Gallery next Thursday, April 7, and you should think about putting her on your calendar.

I'm a bit torn as to what to say because, as I've opined before, I reckon anyone thinking of going to most shows these days will check them out online, making things I say here somewhat irrelevant. So the temptation is to just supply a pile of links and leave you to it. I'll do that at the end.

Because I'm a bit biased on this one. It's American-born, Auckland-based blues singer Coco Davis who's coming to town, and I think she's just wonderful. She also happens to sing the sort of early weird gut-bucket blues that I love. The first time I caught her live was at an Arts Festival show here, Sam Shepard's surrealist cowboy operetta ‘The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill', which was a joy to behold. She also sings with one of my favourite Kiwi blues outfits, one that plays blues so strange and obscure that most people wonder if it's really blues, Tom Rodwell's group Storehouse (who have played here at the Jazz Festival a couple of times).

Tom actually produced and plays guitar on the album this show is promoting – in fashionable Auckland style it's an LP – ‘Old Haunts', and its old-timey oddness reminds one of Tom Waits as much as anything else, some songs taken with surprising distortion and unusual horns, some, like her take on the classic ‘See See Rider', delicate and haunting. Anyway, I think she's brilliant. Best place to make up your mind, an all-you-can-eat-link, is www.coco-davis.com. You can hear songs in the ‘store'. Things kick off at 7.30pm on Thursday and cost $25 ($20 for Gallery Friends).

watusi@thesun.co.nz

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