I thought that after he moved to Hawke's Bay last year I'd stop writing about Graham Clark. Yeah right.

Graham is probably the person who has cropped up most in this column over the past couple of years. That's because he does a lot of stuff. The stuff last year mainly involved Graham taking his band Brilleaux over to tour in Europe for a third time and writing a definitive (so far) book about the Tauranga music scene.

That was called ‘The Right Note – An Insight Into Tauranga's Historic Music Scene' and if you're a music fan and want to explore the breadth of interesting things lurking in local music history, I'd strongly suggest you get hold of a copy.

It's a huge tome, filled with surprising stories.

And it's the book thing again that brings me back to Graham – he's written another.

Actually, that's not quite accurate. He's written about half a book and has acted as editor, researcher and general compiler for the other half. And, with his love of multiple titles still obviously undimmed, it is called ‘Thanks for the Clap! The Extraordinary Life and Times of New Zealand's Wildman of Country Music Ritchie Pickett'.

So, for anyone who's eyeing the clock, waiting for an important engagement and rushing through this column, I'll give you the main takeaway first.

The Lowdown

Singer-songwriter Ritchie Pickett died in 2011. He lived here for several years and was probably Tauranga's most well-known musician – possibly its most successful and definitely its most outrageous.

The book is being launched locally at the end of this month at No.1 The Strand, headquarters of The Weekend Sun itself, at 2pm on Sunday, June 25.

All of us at the newspaper are delighted to help support this unique Tauranga event.

There will be music from Tauranga musos who knew and played with Ritchie. In fact, Graham promises performances of the greatest number of Ritchie songs since Ritchie himself was gigging. Entry is free and it should be a whole bunch of fun.

Okay. So put that on your calendars and I'll get back to ‘Thanks for the Clap!' next week after I've actually read the thing.

It is impressively weighty, clocking in at a few pages short of 400.

In the meantime, all you really busy folk head off to that appointment and I'll let the rest of you know what Graham's been doing recently, or at least what he's got lined up for Brilleaux. They recently played a sold-out Hurricane Party along with Swamp Thing at Easter's Jazz festival. Now they have big plans for a ways down the track...

Next Year

As the sun rises on 2018 a special band of United Kingdom musicians is arriving on our shores ready to tour the country. Brilleaux will be with them for the whole of January, traversing the North Island from Russell to Upper Hutt. This is the Rock Steady Tour featuring current and past members of bands such as Bad Company, Foreigner, Humble Pie, and the Paul Rodgers band.

Specifically – because I know there are some of you who'll want to Google them – they are guitarist Dave ‘Bucket' Colwell (Bad Company, Humble Pie, Sampson), Rick Wills on bass (Foreigner, Bad Company, Small Faces, Peter Frampton, David Gilmour, Roxy Music) and Ronan Kavanagh on vocals (Jeff Beck, Simply Red, Brian May). As you can tell from those credits, these guys have been around!

They were to have a British drummer, but he got called to tour Japan with his band, so Kiwi drummer Gordon Joll (Hello Sailor, Herbs) will be joining them.

It sounds like a blast and a great score for Brilleaux, which will follow the tour with a Twilight Concert in Katikati and are again looking at the UK, having been invited to play at The Vicar's Picnic festival in Kent next July. There's also the possibility of a NZ support slot for a prestigious British band in October. Onwards and upwards.

watusi@thesun.co.nz