Inspirational Guitar Movie Moments - a list.

Guitars probably look pretty much alike to the average person. Pointy bit, sticky bit, chunk you strap on and strum. But in the world of the apprentice guitar-nerd, the simple shape, colour and features of every guitar evoke stories, memories, emotions and a thirst for more knowledge. A lot like my other passion for racing bicycles.

A bunch of emotive moments from movies have been coming back to me lately, as the Lonely Planet band have been rehearsing and performing for the summer season. I've been having these "that's just like the scene in ..." deja vu feelings. All of these movies make me want to leave this keyboard this instant and pick up the Strat instead - no other instrument is as evocative for me.

Rules of the list are that it can't be a movie or show that is actually about a real band. Thought I'd get to 10, but stalled at #8. All debate duly welcomed!

1. Wayne's World (1992) - "It will be mine - oh yes - it will be mine"


An iconic moment in this much-loved movie. The best guitar playing is undoubtedly Cassandra's band, but Wayne's attainment of the white Fender Stratocaster (which he refers to as Excalibur) in his local music shop is a triumph.

I have come to realise that as a wannabe guitarist you very much need to have one good "May I help you?" riff in your fingers to have ready when you are sifting through your local guitar store and require some assistance. Stumbling over an open G just is not rock. Wayne of course is the master.

The other two required riffs (just in case you were wondering) are the "I've just turned my amp on" riff at rehearsal (call this your signature chord, ideally timid people will jump when you hit it); and the "sound check riff", a longer arrangement which is the rock equivalent of a dog urinating to mark its patch on stage. Lenny Kravitz serves me well at this time, but I will admit deep jealousy at my Slabotomy friends Vivek and Ian's sound-check virtuosity.

Since this is the internet, I'm duty bound to bootleg the video of the "May I help you" moment:




2. This is Spinal Tap (1984)


Nigel Tufnel is my hero - and in 2011 (11/11/11) it is proposed to hold the first global Nigel Tufnel day. Responsible with a simple slip of the apostrophe for the infamous 18 inch stonehenge, he explains why when I see a Gibson or Epiphone Flying V guitar, a strange voice in my head goes "yeah, I could do that..."

I should probably aspire to a more respectable V-playing hero like Albert King.

Anyway, Spinal Tap as a shocking spoof of everything bad in rock music is actually a wonderful taste of what joy you can experience on stage, with a guitar strapped on and your amp turned to 11. Well, 5 actually, or Ian gets on my case.

3. Back to the Future (1985) - "whatever you do Marty..."

Episode 1 - Marty goes up to Doc Browns laboratory, and finding him not at home proceeds to do what every teenager who has ever watched this movie wants him to do, urges him to do - plug that guitar in, and turn it up. You know exactly what is coming, and it still takes your breath away, crummy 1980s special effects and all.

The guitar is a weird one, you don't really see it much - sort of a futuristic thing you'd expect to be lying around a mad inventor's laboratory. But it's not the guitar, it's the moment - clearly it's Marty's "I am plugged in" rehearsal opening chord.

4. Back to the future (1985) - Johnny B Goode

"Alright guys, this is a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes and try to keep up." Like some kind of incantation, Marty's words haunted me for years - what did that gibberish mean? Sounded very cool though, and seemed to work for the band. A famous Chuck Berry song, Johnny B Goode was not written until 3 years after the scene in the movie was set, which adds some humour to the moment.

I'm pretty sure it is a Gibson ES335 he is playing. So that explains my deep irrational yearnings for one, either in red or BB King black.

With luck the bootlegged video is still available for you to view on Vimeo.

marty mcfly - johnny b. goode from etsw on Vimeo.

5. Crossroads (1986)

A great scene from a terribly cheesy movie about a kid (a karate kid no less ;-) who drops out from the Julliard music school and goes on the road, ultimately acting out that great old country song The Devil Went down to Georgia in a battle with Satan's own guitarist - who just happens to be Steve Vai. Who is quite probably the right guy for that role.

Ry Cooder played all the guitar for Ralph Macchio in the movie - I won't linger in the guitar pseud's corner for long (because there are plenty of weird looking guys there already) but needless to say the music easily overcomes the plot, and I am always a sucker for a bit of redemption. With a Fender Telecaster you say? With the blues? I'll have an extra helping thankyou. And if I find myself in the same situation at some stage, I'll be looking around for Travis to help me out.

If you have the patience, the final duel scene can be viewed here:

6. The Blues Brothers (1980) - Ray's Music Exchange

I've written about this before, and of course, I own that very guitar in the picture. There is so much great guitar and bass playing in the movie, and yet it is in the background to the two main characters Jake and Elwood. I like the way Mad Guitar Murphy, Steve Cropper and Donald Duck Dunn are away from the limelight but drive this movie all the way home.

Doubtless a trained psychologist would observe that standing in the background being super-competent is akin to my own approach to life, which occasionally I have learned to overcome, ironically recently with the Lonely Planet band.

7. Oh Brother Where art Thou? (2000)

Hmm - the blues again. Guitars again. Wikipedia does a good summary of the circumstances in which a fictional character is crafted from the real bluesman and the legend of Robert Johnson cutting a deal with the devil (seeing a pattern yet anyone?):

"In the 2000 movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? there is a character named Tommy Johnson (played by Chris Thomas King) who sold his soul to the devil to play guitar. He plays accompaniment for the Soggy Bottom Boys (a band consisting of the film's three main protagonists plus Johnson) on "Man of Constant Sorrow".

The character of Tommy Johnson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is reminiscent of the real Tommy Johnson, who used to talk about how "he sold his soul to the devil" at a crossroads in return for making up songs and playing the guitar. The character plays a number of songs by blues musician Skip James. The character was not based on the better-known bluesman Robert Johnson, as some have speculated."

99% of the music in the movie is bluegrass or country, but a couple of soulful moments are captured when Tommy gets to play his guitar. A solid reminder that the beauty is in the simplicity of life - so few notes, so few words, so much meaning. Another thing for me to aspire to I suspect, as a master of too many words and too many things.

8. School of Rock (2003)


This movie ticks all the boxes - humour, music and good old redemption again. How exactly Jack Black manages to make all those instruments work without alerting the entire school district with the noise is a practical detail I am prepared to ignore.

My favourite scene is where the kids start to jam for the first time - Zach on the Flying V guitar, and Lawrence on keys. I recall the joy of the first time I played an electric guitar, fresh from 18 months ago when Rich Durnall handed over his vintage Strat and said "try this". I have observed the same wondrous look in many people's eyes since - the capacity to make so much noise from just a little strum!

To see Noah actually play in a real-life school of rock right here in Melbourne through 555 Music is a weird bit of life imitating art. And long may life imitate art, I say.

Lonely Planet band plays the Evelyn, December 9, 2010

Lonely Planet Band at the Espy, Winter 2010

Huge night raising money for Child Aid, a Planet Wheeler foundation supported project working on child literacy in rural areas in Guatemala. Great crowd, great music, and a wonderful event.

Lonely Planet's rock collective Slabotomy followed three great bands - Tony Jackson's Speed Orange; Ryan Sweeney's Roostar; and a trio of bluesmen with Travis Winters at the helm.

Here's the first photos in - shot by renaissance man Jamie Supple. I apologise in advance for curating a sub-set that include far too many of me ;-)



These artfully lit shots are from Mark Broadhead and his magic Nikon.

Lonely Planet Espy Gig June 10th, 2010

Let’s fill the Gershwin Room!

Every year the LP Band gig at the Espy’s Gershwin Room gets bigger and bigger. In June, we’ll need your help to make this the best event ever.

This time, we are supporting Child Aid in Guatemala – a Planet Wheeler supported project recommended by LP authors Lucas Vidgin and Danny Palmerlee. They give rural Guatemalan children access to books, build community libraries, train teachers, organize literacy programs and get kids back into school.

We are honoured this year to share the stage with some astonishingly talented musicians in the Lonely Planet community:

Speed Orange, fronted by Tony Jackson (also legendary producer of many LPTV soundtracks)






Roostar, fronted by Ryan Sweeney (he played the Espy only this week in fact)




Travis Winters, full time dad and bluesman – watch what he can do with a brutalized Telecaster at our open mike night!



Slabotomy will take the stage around 9pm with two ambitious sets of rock/pop/jazz/fusion. We’re proud to introduce several new musicians alongside the long-timers this time around.

You can also help out by Tweeting and Facebooking an invitation. Or, for the old-school, just tell all your friends! It’s a great cause, and we couldn’t be more excited. Let’s make this a night to remember.

P.S. Thanks to David and Will at R+R Communications in NZ for the awesome poster design

How big is the Internet?

About this big:

Great moments in a Rock Education - Scot Halpin leaps out of the crowd to drum for the Who in 1973

A great story - told well here on Wikipedia. Keith Moon, having taken enough drugs mixed with alcohol to fuel a lifetime of TAC adverts, collapses on his drums a second time and is carried off-stage 2/3 of the way through the Who's set at the Cow Palace on their USA tour in 1972.

Pete Townsend asks the crowd "can anyone play the drums?" and one guy steps up to help out. The rest is rock history.



Thanks Juliette_B for today's rock lessons!

Great moments in a Rock Education - Led Zeppelin in Sydney

In the new world of iPads and eBooks, it is my dream that I will be able to consume brilliant books like When Giants Walked the Earth while accessing matching embedded video and audio content on every page. This would be the video I would wish for if they had actually mentioned their 1972 tour to Australia, when they played in Sydney!



An additional take on the story can be had here on ABC's 7:30 news piece featuring Ted Harvey's exhibition of his 36 year old concert photos rediscovered in 2008.

Facebook - building up the Walled Garden where AOL left off?

As some would know, I recently dived back into the seething biomass known as Facebook. I'd abandoned the service (committing 'Facebookicide') in 2008, after being stalked by one too many lesbians from Queensland to be their latest collected trophy-friend (me, a trophy?). Sorry, I already have a lesbian friend and she's very real thankyou.

From where I sat, it appeared to be a massive online home for the bewildered.

Lured back into the water in 2010 by online community Siren Venessa P and the Lonely Planet strategic thinkers, I am amazed to see how it has grown. So much so, that my initial conclusion is that we are now dealing with a serious platform leap from college dorm to a new core of the internet - and another prime example of the tension between different perspectives on the web as a democratic platform, versus a closed, proprietary commercial network.

There has always been someone who attempted to dominate the shabby collection of servers, wires and users we call the internet. Its not surprising - human history is peppered with rising and falling empires, and this new digital land grab is much the same. If you'll pardon the quality of the research, here' s my potted view of the history of that race between the open and closed camps. As always, Wikipedia is a better historian than I'll ever be, so many links go to them!

ARPAnet (1958 - 1988): apparently originally inspired in the Cold War period (in particular Sputnik's shock factor in the technology race), this loose confederation of military and academic servers and connections was the seed of the internet and the classic 'closed' network.

Minitel (1982): ultimately nearly 25m French people were connected to Minitel, a governmental postal/telecom collaboration to supply citizens with access via a terminal to information directories, booking services, message boards, stock prices and chat services. The network was tightly managed and closed to anything not endorsed by the state - a position the owners far too long into the life of the internet as it developed in the 1990s. That said, the announcement it would be finally killed off in 2009 was met with public outcry - and still 1m banking transactions a month are done on the historic terminals.

AOL (1983): the first major money making walled garden on the internet in the English speaking world, founded on online games and communities (including popularising chat on the internet with ICQ), rising to 30m users over the next 20 years then famously blowing it all in a merger with Time Warner in 2001. Who could forget the rain-storm of direct marketed CD-ROMs that came in fancy tins and packages tempting you onto their network? And once you were in, they had you under their control. Most AOL users right through the 1990s thought AOL was the internet, holus-bolus.

The actual Internet (1988): the year the military and the commercial networkers joined up, including emerging private sector networks Compuserve, UUNet, PSINet, CERFNET, and Usenet. Still a bunch of list servers, technical people and a minimum number of tools to connect people without IT degrees or an interest in ham radio.

World Wide Web (1991): with the term coined by CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, this was a layer on top of the internet that enabled sharing of resources beyond the list and text heavy document and email platform. It was classicly 'open' - anarchic in some ways with the emphasis on interconnection to make the world a better place through sharing.

The web caused a boom in browser software (and with Netscape Navigator in 1994 the beginning of the get rich quick internet startup decade), the lens you needed to see everything that was out there, no matter who or where it was served. Unless perhaps you live in China or the new Australia.

MSN (1995): Microsoft famously 'got the web' in the mid-90s, and MSN was their attempt at a walled garden, which basically proved they did not get the web at all. Their ongoing efforts to keep people within their domain included Hotmail, Messenger, MSN Explorer, and to some extent Internet Explorer as a non-standard browser. MSN has around 10m members today (note: fact to be checked), and has morphed into Windows Live as Microsoft's attempt to stay relevant to a generation of users that prefer to Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Broadband WWW (c2005): without doubt the expansion of high speed wiring to the many nodes of the internet changed the game, and saw the emergence of traditional media players showing video, images and enabling collaboration and sharing in ways that dialup constrained.

Mobile WWW (c2008): 3G wireless in wide supply and a new generation of intelligent phone handsets once again changed the nature of the internet, initially slowing some things down but causing simplification and refocus about what it meant to be connected 24 x 7 x 365. Without doubt the earlier incarnations of the wireless web contributed to the acceleration of internet users to an estimated 1.6b in 2009.

Facebook (September 2006): starting small and purposeful, this College white pages site has emerged as a global player, with enough functionality and interconnectivity to keep an 'internet' user within it's 4 walls for hours a day. On its way to a self-professed 1 billion members by 2012, it already has 400m members across the world and 200m highly active contributors.

Remember it took the internet 2 decades to get 1b members!

The combination of Facebook's fast-growing community plus hardwiring to platforms like iTunes and news media (via Facebook Connect) is further enhancing the rush back to a new type of walled garden. My beloved iPhone is a simple example - Facebook actually wraps an unbranded Safari browser for links external to Facebook, and I am rarely more than 1 button away from my news stream.

At the same time, people are searching, chatting, messaging, piping in their Twitter streams, their Youtube favourites, their Amazon book reviews and their Flickr photo collections. And spending on average 6.5 hours a day connected to the site. Soon there will be word processing, spreadsheets and proper search, and your homepage on Firefox or Chrome will be http://www.facebook.com.
Advertisers on TV and the web are starting to end their 30 second commercials with 'See us on Facebook' rather than making us remember their torturous www.thenextbigthing.com URL or go to a site generation Y probably can't even use because of its overdesigned 1990s based navigation and complexity. Businesses are starting to consider internal Facebook networks to replace Microsoft's 20 year old Outlook email and messaging, and a growing number of tools like Yammer are emerging to fill the gaps.

Now, the traditional website concept is unlikely to go away, and no doubt history will show that something succeeds Facebook. But for many people, Facebook will be the new AOL - you can check out, but you can never leave.

Call me a hippy, but I think I liked the Tim Berners-Lee vision better.

The Best Things in Life - being 8 years old and jamming with the Lonely Planet Band

Open Mike night, February 2010. 28 degrees on the rooftop of Lonely Planet in Melbourne looking back over the city.

Ian, Trav, Josh, Vivek, me on Cream's Sunshine. Awesome photo by Steve McInnes

Then this happens:





A memory that will be with that boy for the rest of his life.

More photos from the LP crew here on Flickr.

More video from Lucy Birchley on Youtube:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2xBBTpoF4
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCdDERnqLoI
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6eH6JU6zs
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpbY-Y-n34U

Superbowl of Advertising

Forget the football (Vikings knocked out anyway), here's the adverts:

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foursquare.com - the enemy of Authentic

We've just got back in from a great afternoon gig by Nick Thorpe and the new wave/ country/ rock Prayerbabies at the Union Hotel in Brunswick. I am Melbourne hot, but still burning enough to unleash 'mental of Middle Park' on the world being created and enhanced by the socially transmitted disease foursquare.com. And their ilk (you know who you are).

As I surveyed the rocking, family-heavy crowd having a fine time in a small pub in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, a recent tweet from @venessapaech ("I'll say it, foursquare is just plain silly") popped back into my brain and I couldn't help but consider how suckingk it would be to impose a yelping foursquare dot com culture on this treasure.

It's time we made some 'no foursquare' stickers with the slash through their logo, before it's too late.
Foursquare (for those who have been asleep for the last 6 months) is a 'social network' that enables you to show off to your friends as to how cool you are, gather repeat visitor badges and perhaps even become the 'mayor' of the nearest coffee shop, with resulting retail discounts for you and all your friends. It reminds me of a digital strain of herpes in some ways.

I did not want your store loyalty card in exchange for my email address in 2001, and I don't want your gimmicky digital equivalent in 2010.

Naturally it's got all the vulture capitalist buzzwords du jour - cloud, lbs (not leg before stumps, location based services), social network, platform... (blogger feellinnnnggggg slleeeeeeeepppyyyyy...). And naturally it's worth more than the GDP of New Zealand.

It is about creating a world like Friends, the TV show, on your iPhone. And we know how real that was.

During the week I listened to an impassioned plea for the avoidance of temptation to join the current zombie economy, a great term describing the massive brainwashing people are getting this century into thinking that if you don't have a 50" flat screen Sony TV, XBOX, surround sound, $10,000 on your credit card, an iPhone 3GS, 2,000 Facebook friends, the new Commodore and a 6 figure mortgage, you are not actually living.

Fortunately the equal and opposite force of the zombie economy is a desperate rush for authenticity. As things get more fake, buying local produce, riding a bike (not a hipster fixie though) or going to live music becomes a life-enhancing thing. As it was for us this afternoon with the Prayerbabies.

I didn't need my dog food online in 2000, I don't need dozens of facebook friends, and I don't need to know where you all are this afternoon drinking your free Pabst Red Label that you got for checking in 10 times already this year. That ain't real.

Now I think about it, the whole lbsn idea (location based social network, I made that up by the way, can I have some vulture capital now please?) was quite possibly founded on the Australian Kath and Kim social principle of 'Loogamoi, loogamoi', and it comes to mind they missed a real chance to launch loogamoi.com, an LBS plotting your movements around Fountaingate shopping centre. Instead some upstarts with a product called Fastmall beat them to it.

Make no mistake, I'm not an utter misanthrope - I was absolutely thrilled to run into Travis, Jason and Mel, there with kids in tow, but the thrill was in the coincidence and the spontaneity.

As luck would have it, the only foursquare action at the Union was the dancing going on (average age 4, main dance move, the square). Long may that be so.

iPad - Add to Dictionary? Yes please.

Wonder how many people saw this dialog box today?

New Zealand backroads - Kihikihi to Lake Taupo

X marks the spot on a pirate's map. Luckily Google maps have both X's and Y's, as it makes finding and navigating New Zealand's last remaining back-road treasures a lot easier. Here's one of my favourites to try the next time you have to get South from Auckland and want to avoid traffic, plus see some of the kiwi heartland.


View Larger Map

We traveled this route a few days into 2010, keen to avoid State Highway 1 on the well-worn track from Hamilton to Taupo. The road condition is brilliant, through the rolling hill country of the South Waikato region. State Highway 1 reported delays in some small towns of up to half an hour. Avoid!

Lots of personal memories for me motoring this way - starting with an early Split Enz concert at the Te Awamutu race-course, playing to a few hundred people in the sun on a Saturday afternoon.

A few kilometres South-east of Kihikihi keep an eye out for the ghost filled Orakau battle site, the scene of one of the last desperate battles in NZ's war for land and resources in the 1860s. From memory the road runs right through the middle of it. Hmmm.


View Larger Map

The drive also kindles memories of visiting farming family friends in the Owairaka Valley, hiking in the Pureora Forest, and learning of the destruction of lowland podocarp forests while on a University environmental geography camp to Barryville. Stopping to stand on top of the Waipapa hydro dam listening to the hum of the turbines, and laughing over what tourists (and now our 8 year old) think of a name like Whakamaru pronounced with an F.

But you don't need to have grown up in this area to enjoy the drive. The road is beautifully engineered, you'll need your wits about you if you're pushing on as the lanes are narrow. There's a seriously winding bit going down to river level at Waipapa and climbing out the other side. Brilliant on a motorcycle, likely to be spew inducing on a weak stomach in the back seat I'm afraid.

Watch out for cyclists - they're smart to take this route to Taupo if they can hack the climbs. Te Awamutu has bred some world class cyclists trained on this countryside. There's a store at Wharepapa South for a break.

The turnoff at Owairaka Valley Road 10km out from Kihikihi is going to give your GPS-brained TomTom sat nav device the heebies and you should steadfastly ignore its demand you stick to the main road, and turn right. It'll forgive your defiance when you rejoin the highway further along.

And of course, if you have the time, take a few side roads along the way.

The Best Things in Life - Them Crooked Vultures perform in Melbourne

The photo is technically rubbish I know. Standing behind 1,000 people at Melbourne's Festival Hall, most of whom seemed to be 6 feet tall, glaring lights, greenish cast, and only an iPhone to hand ... Mark_LP would be horrified. But the memory is locked away in vivid 3-D Blueray.

Being thumped in the chest for 90 minutes by John Paul Jones' bass (who clearly got in on Robert Johnson's contract with you know who - he looks 30!); entranced by the speed of Dave Grohl's man-possessed percussion; and jaw-dropped at the antics and vocals of Josh Homme. Did I ever imagine you could climb on the bass drum and whack cymbals while playing lead guitar?

Invited along as part of my musical education by Rich Durnall, I thank my lucky stars for the chance to see what amounts to one of the all-time greatest rock bands. The live act exceeded the 2009 CD's quality several times over, no mean feat. I came away with swirling metaphors of having 3 of the greatest geniuses in any one field of endeavour not only in the same room, but working together to create something few will hope to match. None came.

Supporting the superstars was Alain Johannes, no mean guitarist and musician in his own right. Interesting to see the contrast between 'great' and 'super-nova brilliant' on the same stage though.

Half way through the night I was plotting to just come home, quietly pack the guitars away in a cupboard and retire quietly to less creative pastimes.

By the time we'd got back to the car, the chance to be just a 1% part of the emotional crash-cart that outstanding rock music can be convinced me to at least strum a few power chords in the morning. And as luck would have it, thanks to these little beauties, I could hear them.

Them Crooked Vultures live 10/10. Rich Durnall, teacher 10/10 . Hearos musician's ear protection 10/10.

Bikes I love: Benotto Modelo 3000 c1980

Between 2004 and 2007, the gang at R+R in Wellington NZ undertook a variety of vintage racing bike renovation projects.

The full story of the history of this Benotto will be told by Robbo at some stage, but needless to say it is a beautiful thing. To be accurate, they are beautiful things. In the end two bikes were completed - when in true Murphy's Law sense, after a year of searching the globe 2 came up in succession on eBay - one in Minnesota and one in California.

Robbo's intent was to rebuild a bike dear to him from the early 1980s in Europe - with his original Campagnolo 50th anniversary groupset, one of the few that must have actually ever been raced (as opposed to locked away in a cupboard to admire from time to time).

Having taken so much guidance on what was authentic on my restoration of a 1979 Bianchi, we knew the result with the Benotto would be spectacular. After securing the bikes back to NZ (most of the parts from which were set aside, as they'd been modified over the intervening decades), the hunt was on for NOS (new old stock) components to fill the gaps.

One of the most interesting was the Benotto handlebar tape. I took up cycling later in the 1980s when this horrible stuff had been surpassed by gaudy padded cork tapes, and never had to endure gripping the cold slippery, hard as nails stuff.

Some evil petrochemicals must lurk in the recipe for this tape as the package arrived in the mail with the colour unfaded after 25 years on the shelf.

New decals were prepared by Photoshop guru Brent Backhouse from scratch, the frame painted by the late Ross Bee (after much debate on the precise colour - Dave was pretty sure Ross had some left over in his garage from a respray of the original bike!) and suitable rims obtained for the hubs. A missing front hub from the 50th anniversary set took 9 months to find on the web.

All in all, I suspect Signor Giacinto Benotto would be as proud of the result as he is showing the world the Benotto 3000 Tour of Italy special edition on this advertisement. Bella!

Tintin Coincidences - #2 in a series

This one from Flight 714, where Tintin, Captain Haddock and the Professor hitch a ride with eccentric millionaire technologist Laszlo Carreidas from Djakarta to Sydney.

Our CEO at Lonely Planet is Matt Goldberg, New Yorker, and a true champion of the telephone as a communication device.

Wellington's Cafe L'Affare Turns 20 in 2010

One of the institutions that led Wellington NZ into being the coffee snob capital of the country is Cafe L'Affare. We were there this week on our last day of our annual kiwi Christmas holiday, sitting at a table that has been part of the place since early days - including a massive amount of graffiti - and we noticed this wonderful bit of coffee art carved simply into the surface.

It is hard to believe they are turning 20 this year - but among our friends we can put together an oral history of their various phases (even back to the original days with Askew's design store taking up half the space), the people and events that have made it world-class for food and coffee.

In my R+R days we spent many an hour noodling ideas at the tall table in the window, or out the back by the coffee machine retail area. I hope I'm ordering a petit pain, Caesar with chicken and extra anchovies, with a latte to follow, in 20 years from now.