Great albums are like buses – you wait and wait for one to come and then two arrive almost at once.
I regularly have little get-togethers of musicians here at the Watusi Country Club.

It gives me a chance to catch up on the latest news, and I take it as an opportunity to play whatever new albums have arrived and get a little feedback. I know my opinions sometimes verge on the radical so it's good to canvass a collective.
Advertising agencies would call this a focus group; we call it cocktail hour. Last week I put on the new album by Grant Haua, his debut solo release called
Knucklehead.
Now don't think for a minute that these gatherings are restrained sober events where we all sit round hunched in front of the stereo, poring over every note. Often the conversation is so animated and the company so convivial that an entire disc will play without anyone paying the slightest attention. Whole albums are dismissed in seconds as someone waves their drink in the direction of the CD player and yells 'boring!”
But a strange thing happened when we were listening to Knucklehead. At first it made the usual lack of impact. Somebody briefly asked what it was and looked at the cover; the banter continued unabated. But by about the fourth track a hush had slowly fallen on the ensemble. We listened in total silence, with only the gentle clinking of ice in glasses to accompany the music, a wild mix of extraordinarily complex acoustic guitar and effortlessly soulful vocals.
'Is that Derrin playing the second guitar?” somebody asked. There was a brief discussion. Maybe there were three guitars. Whoever it was they were incredibly in synch, perfectly meshing something solid in the bass with fast and furious rhythms and explosive lead lines that seemed to pop out of nowhere.
A brief scramble ensued as everyone tried to look through the booklet at once… and discovered what I knew already: Knucklehead is Grant playing solo, live in the studio, no overdubs, every song but one a first take.
Funny thing is, everyone had seen Grant play on numerous occasions. They know the amount of sound he can put out with just an acoustic guitar and his voice. I go and see him every chance I can.
But all of us sat there – and the group included some pretty impressive players in their own right – and none of us could work out what the hell Grant was actually doing. How do you play that? How do you play it and sing at the same time? How do you get that attack while playing so fast and so smooth? Does he use his fingers or a pick? For the next half hour nobody talked about anything but Grant's guitar playing, except to break in and marvel at how good his voice sounded.
A couple of weeks ago I raved about Darren Watson's brilliant new CD St Hilda's Faithless Boy. I hazarded that it would be a shoo-in for the New Zealand Blues Award, should such a thing actually exist. Well, damnit, it now has some serious competition.
Grant has been kicking round the Tauranga scene for a few years now. He made an album about a decade ago with his band at the time, Moss, which was a very impressive combination of blues, rock and soul, highlighting his songwriting skills, electric guitar and voice.
Since then he has played with various outfits but also performed solo, acoustic. Knucklehead is a record of that solo side, beautifully recorded at Welcome Bay's Colourfield Studio, with only his guitar and voice and a little backing blues harp on two tracks courtesy of Mike Butler.
It is astounding. All the songs are original, from the amiable straight-ahead blues of 'On My Tail” to the heartbreaking 'Song For Speedy”, from 'Bad Man”, where Grant sounds like he's channelling a Mississippi bluesman over a rock ‘n' roll groove to the title track with its nimbly picked slide guitar.
Add to this a cover picture that deserves to become iconic and you have an album which, if it came from America, cult collectors would hunt the world to hear. Yes, it's that good. You can get it from Tracs on Devonport Road. And I highly recommend you do.